Contains Cannibalism and Barry Manilow
This was my “trigger warning” for our Becoming a Reader class this week in which we rounded off our work on traditional tales with a rendition of The Story of the Grandmother – and the meeting at the...
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Return to…
A return to Garner country is demanded. I will confess here what Mat already knows: I dream of Ludchurch and spend a lot of sleep time in Thursbitch. It is unfulfilled business, I guess, that takes me...
View ArticleManuscripts: a brief thought on autoethnography
I’ve been given Christopher de Hamel’s beauty of a book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts for Christmas, and today I sat in bed listening to de Hamel and Andrew Marr enthusing about the more...
View ArticleLight
I am intrigued by Oyvind Torseter’s The Hole, a charming but puzzling book by the same author as “My Father’s Arms are a Boat.” The Hole gets a good exposition here on Brain Pickings from the prolific...
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Difficult Spiritual Experience and Landscape
One of the reasons I suspect beautiful waterfalls and so on are attractive when people (including me) talk about spirituality is that they exalt but do not challenge. The Great Bell Chant by Thich Nhat...
View ArticleBoneland and Thursbitch
As I come away from Twitter I am aware I have started a hare around “favourite” works by Alan Garner. Now, Mat raised a tricky question about “good books” and children’s books in his MA session in...
View ArticleWho is the Reader?
I have been reminded today (yesterday as I end this) a couple of times of the ways in which I read and the things I read before I discovered Tolkien. I met Superman, the Fantastic Four in comics, I...
View ArticleWhat gives me pleasure in reading?
This post, as I begin it, is an instant “Save Draft,” since it will take a lot of unpicking. Even as I write I see the CLIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway list is out with Tidy, Wolves of Currumpaw and Wild...
View ArticleMemory, Narrative and a Reader
First off, note the title, gentle reader: I am going to avoid the notion of “the Reader.” I simply don’t know what those words mean, although I can see they are a convention for “anyone who picks words...
View ArticleCome and Join the Dance
This weekend I will be doing something – I am so nervous I can’t really talk it up, although the event itself will be marvellous – at the Oxford Reading Spree about reading in the EYFS. I could...
View ArticlePartnership, Obedience and Trust
I think the Oxford Reading Spree went well. There were notable stars, of course, and followed some way behind by a man looking like a grizzled version of Basil Brush, rabble-rousing rather than really...
View ArticleBiblioparakolouthesis
This is a quick post, prompted by the observation of people’s behaviour on Twitter – no, not the self-righteous “I’m right because I know everything” stuff about phonics or why Early Years has it wrong...
View ArticleLists and Canons
As I write the title I am aware of the ways both “lists” and “canon” (or at any rate “cannon”) have military connections. There is also a certain sense of struggle or battle when meeting the kind of...
View ArticleGreen Thoughts: time and space in Thursbitch and Boneland
It is interesting to speculate on the role of a complex author such as Alan Garner and whether he can be counted a “green writer” – or whether that kind of nomenclature is at all useful. He is not...
View ArticleThe kettle for his tea boiled over
I haven’t been able to source the story in which Oscar Wilde is reported as having once said that ” the Bible begins with a man and woman naked in a garden and ends with startling revelations,” but it...
View ArticleFrom Alderley to Arkudah
When William Mayne’s Vendale appears in Earthfasts it is largely a recognisable place, a Dales market town, but with features from the Lakes, the high Pennines: it is a composite of a number of places....
View ArticleSusan Cooper
Here, to start us off, is Susan Cooper at Pembroke College last week. I really can’t better it – how could I? – and it was so well put together it would be hard to take any one thing and say “this (and...
View ArticleStranger Visitors
Five years ago we lost Maurice Sendak, or at least we lost his continuing ability to create. It was an amazing, richly endowed talent. In this post from BrainPickings, for instance, we are presented...
View ArticleCreating Relationships with Place through Story
This is Garner’s own line, and I come back again and again to the talk it comes from. I am not going to debate his method or dispute with him about this. I do wonder, however, about whether there is a...
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Dancing above the hollow place
Enso will do to start me off on a brief visit to the spirituality represented in Le Guin’s first three Earthsea stories. And let me start with three sources, rather than end with references: Paul Reps...
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