The Environmental Imagination and Children’s Literature
Atwater Symposium in Children’s Literature
Friday, March 5 8.00 p.m.
Saturday, March 6 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
2010
Presented by the University of Trinity College
What makes the imagination in children’s books “environmental”? What do climatologists and botanists, children’s writers and artists, and the playing child have in common? Examining the stuff of which children’s books are made — words and pictures — some of the world’s leading children’s writers and experts on literature will look at the way children’s books create and critique the environment and environmental issues. Why is wilderness as necessary in writing as in the natural world? How do miniature characters change a child’s sense of environment? What happens when fantasy takes on the climate? What do “affluence, effluents, dancing cows, and forty-two pounds of edible fungus” have to do with the child’s relationship to the natural world?
Five children’s writers and two professors of literature and environmental studies will explore the theme of the environmental imagination in children’s books. Academics and university students, writers and illustrators, teachers, librarians, publishers and editors — anyone eager to think hard about children’s lit. is invited to this fest of thinking readers and writers. Interested high school students are also welcome.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE will feature renowned children’s authors from Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.: David Almond, M.T. Anderson, Susan Cooper, Sarah Ellis and Tim Wynne-Jones. They will be joined by Professor Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University and Professor Marguerite Holloway, professor of environmental issues and science journalism at the Journalism School, Columbia University.
The audience will have the opportunity to hear all participants speak, and a panel of all participants at the close of the symposium will be open to questions from the audience.
Carroll Bishop, M.A. Dept. of English, University of Toronto, and daughter of Richard and Florence Atwater, authors of the 1938 Newbery Award winning Mr Popper’s Penguins, has made this symposium possible through her generous donation to Trinity College, University of Toronto.
The symposium is organized by Professor Deirdre Baker, who teaches children’s literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and is a Fellow of Trinity College, and Susan Perren, former director of Development and Alumni Affairs at Trinity College.
