I chose to write, teach, and study children’s literature because I love the stories.

Equally, I find this body of texts a revealing portal into both society and human nature. Without a doubt, children’s literature is a shared cultural experience. The books we read as children give us our literary apprenticeship and a language to communicate with and relate to one another. Indeed, the very characters become part of our shared psyche. Don’t believe me? Just think about the all the ways Cinderella infiltrates popular culture . . . and your ideas about yourself and the world. One critic, Feroza Jussawalla, goes so far as to propose that “the canon of children's literature shapes the Western imagination.”

If we accept what celebrated Canadian author Thomas King insists is true—“The truth about stories is, that’s all we are”—it all begins to make more sense. [By the way, Frances Hodgson Burnett preceded this postmodern thought when she had Sara Crewe make the same proclamation almost a century earlier in A Little Princess: “Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”] We can begin to understand that children’s literature is a crucible through which society distills and then disseminates its ideology about childhood. Not simply a literary enterprise, children’s literature is also a consumer product, a tool of education and socialization, and a source of pleasure. We are forced to recognize its immense, stealthy power when we see children’s literature as an artistic medium that reflects society’s images of childhood and also contributes to real children’s conceptualizations of themselves as children and human beings. What could be more fascinating?

The founder of the International Board on Books for Young People and the International Youth Library, Jella Lepman, did her groundbreaking work in the aftermath of World War II. She, like myself and many others, believed that children’s books could “set the world right again” and, in the face of gross human atrocity, “show the grown-ups the way to go.” Decades later, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson lauded Lepman, her position and her work, noting that children’s books can “inspire people to fight racism and xenophobia throughout the world and secure all human rights for all.” It may sound unlikely, but I believe it too. And stranger things have happened…

In addition to the literary and aesthetic pleasure children’s books give me and countless others, these texts are powerful political agents. This belief is the foundation of my doctoral research on contemporary, English-language South Asian children’s novels. I hope to bring this rich and overlooked body of literature into mainstream Canadian educational institutions. My dissertation argues that many children’s novels by South Asian authors portray childhood and adolescence optimistically as a state in which social justice, multiculturalism, female empowerment and positive identity development can be successfully achieved. In so doing, they empower child readers to understand the world in a positive way and provide role models upon which child readers can shape their behaviour. This research has recently taken me away from UFV to the far corners of the world: to England to undertake my PhD with noted children’s literature expert Dr. Kimberley Reynolds; to Germany to fulfill a fellowship at the International Youth Library; to India (twice!) to see what publishers, authors and academics are doing and saying about these stories.

But now I’m happy to be back at UFV. I look forward to sharing with you not only the surprises and excitement in children’s literature, but also the skills and understanding you need to utilize both academic and creative writing effectively as powerful tools of communication.

Keep an eye open for my forthcoming children’s novel, Black Dog, Dream Dog, next year from Tradewind Books.