These are some random thoughts and questions that I am trying to bring together into a coherent paragraph that writers, editors, teachers, parents... everyone, really, can use to think critically about picture books. These thoughts might look like a poem but that's not my intent. I've got it laid out this way to give space to my thoughts.
A picture book.
Any picture book.
Set in what is currently called the United States of America.
Every time, every book,
I think about how it starts,
And where it starts,
And when it starts,
and what the answers to those questions tell me.
In the Arbuthnot lecture I gave,
I was critical of Sophie Blackall's book about a lighthouse.
Remember?
It centers a white family on what I see as the homeland of Indigenous people.
People love that book.
No... some people love that book.
It won the big award.
But it--and most books about people in what is currently known as the United States--leave out Inconvenient Facts.
People say "but that [those Inconvenient Facts] is not what that book is about."
That is a Convenient Defense.
It lets them collude with a narrative they don't want to disrupt.
I want to disrupt that narrative.
Do you?