This essay was commissioned by the BBC for a reading broadcast in Great Britain in January, 1995. The complete texts, and/or more information about several stories referred to in the text, are available through this site at the following links: My Country and the Way to America by Huong Nguyen, The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford, and Make the Morning by James Lindbloom. The “I” in the radio essay below is William Rubel, co-editor of Stone Soup.
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After three days or four days out the ocean, the boat have a hole and the water coming. Everybody was cry and scary. The boat was rocking and raining. The people they felling down the ocean. The captain in the boat. He jump down the ocean and he help everybody to get on the boat. Then he was tired and he can’t swim no more. He dead under ocean. His wife was sad and lonely. Everybody they are wet. Me and my younger sister we are under boat. And we didn’t get drop down the ocean. My sister she said we are lucky. The people they take care of the lady because that lady she is very lonely and sad.
We stay in the ocean for a month and two days. The last day we saw a people dead on the water. We saw money and the wood, the shoe, the paper, the clothes, the pants. And everybody was scary.
Stone Soup is an international magazine written by English-speaking children up to age 13. While the magazine is based in the United States, and most of the writing is by American children, we consistently publish writing by children from throughout the Anglophone world — Nigeria, Zambia, India, England, New Zealand. From the first, twenty-two years ago, when my colleague Gerry and I started Stone Soup, along with a group of fellow university students, we thought of it as a literary magazine by children, a place where how children say what they say would be nearly as important as what they say. Every literary magazine has its own bias, and ours is for the kind of writing that exists on the borderland between fiction and nonfiction. We look for fiction based on observations of life that are so accurate that one wonders if the story is true, and nonfiction in which the style is so elegant, and even innovative, that the work could just as well be a story.
I opened with an excerpt from a non-fiction piece called My Country and the Way to America. It was written by Huong Nguyen, an eleven-year-old Vietnamese boy; we published the story in 1985. It is an example of the kind of treasure we have published over the years: a story of an historic event — the exodus of refugees from Vietnam in overcrowded fishing boats written from the perspective of a child in an English that can, without exaggeration, be described as extraordinary.
Then he was tired and he can’t swim no more. He dead under ocean.
Stone Soup is also a magazine of the arts. We draw on child artists from all over the world to illustrate the magazine: Russia, Bangladesh, Japan, Malawi. Over the years our interest in children’s art has grown. In addition to publishing children’s art, we have built one of the finest collections of children’s art in the United States with over 1000 works from 40 countries, and also operate an after-school art school with 150 children enrolled each week.
Our organization, the Children’s Art Foundation, is an integrated project consisting of the magazine, our museum program and our art school. While the Children’s Art Foundation is nonprofit, technically a charity, we operate like a business. We have never received grants or donations. In fact, we believe that grants are often more of a problem for organizations than not. We have always wanted to be free to do what we want. And the only way to be really free is to earn one’s own money and not have to beg. We support our projects from magazine subscriptions and from tuition from our art school.
Children’s art, in the sense of naïve art by children, was discovered in the first decades of this century. Children’s art was championed as a great discovery by some of the greatest masters: Paul Klee, Matisse, Picasso. The modern art movement discovered children’s art at the same time it discovered the traditional arts of Africa. The interest in naïve children’s art spilled over into an interest in naïve children’s writing.
In Britain and in the United States in the early 1920s naïve writing by children achieved bestseller status: The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford in England and The Story of Opal by Opal Whitely in the United States. We see ourselves as directly linked to the artists and writers who, in the first part of the century, recognized in children’s creative work hints of the courage to solve creative problems in personal and original ways that they were looking for in their own artistic lives. We are trying through our magazine, our art school, and our organization to encourage children to draw and write about their lives with discipline, but also with the freedom of the naïve artist.
Then he was tired and he can’t swim no more. He dead under ocean.
The twenties was a period of great tumult in American education. Educational reform took hold in the schools. And educational reform took hold of child art education, both in the graphic arts and in writing. Art education based on nineteenth-century models was thrown out for good.
Children were, henceforth, officially freed to be creative. They were no longer to be forced to draw cubes and busts, or copy the works of the masters. They were to be taught “creative writing.”
Perhaps, at first, it all worked out for the best. Freed from what had become a stultifying regimen, but still living with and being taught by adults trained in the older methods, children blossomed. But over time, the oddest thing happened. Freedom brought slavery. The fight against an official orthodoxy brought orthodoxy by default. Children’s creative works became creative in name only. Children were no longer taught to copy the masters in school, but they taught themselves how to copy the work of corporate artists, like those of the Disney studio.
Year by year, little by little, hardly noticeable at first, but now seventy years later unavoidably obvious, the children had, for all practical purposes, become dumb. The gift of Western art and literature — mimesis — was lost. The subject of American children’s art and writing ceased to be life. Children became, and this is what they are now, whether writing stories or drawing pictures, students of the commercial arts. Their drawings are based on drawings they have seen in books and these drawings refer to themselves rather than to the external world. Their stories ceased to be based on their life, how children had observed people behaving and talking, for example, and became remote set pieces — highly stylized fiction lacking virtually all connection with real people and real experiences.
Unfortunately, Americans find it very hard to be objective about children’s creative works. It is axiomatic that all children are creative and everything they make is creative. After all, if children aren’t creative, then who is? And so it follows that an adult’s role is to stand back and let the child’s creativity unfold. It never ceases to amaze Gerry and me to read teacher’s notes on manuscripts sent to us for consideration. “How creative” with a smily face written by the teacher on a page of doggerel or on a drawing of a daisy flower under a sun with sun glasses.
As twenty-year-old university students we were idealists. Driven by enthusiasm, but without qualifications of any kind, we worked in a Saturday morning art program that our university sponsored for community children. We taught art and writing classes. Some of the work the children made was interesting. Most was not. So we decided that something should be done. Children needed better models. And if we drew from the whole country we figured that we could get enough good material to publish a magazine. Over time we would, through our magazine, set a new standard of creative work towards which children could strive. And that is what we actually did.
In, perhaps, a typically American fashion, none of us involved in starting the magazine had any formal education of any kind in any subject that bore any relation to a literary magazine by children. We didn’t have any business experience, either. But we did have an idea. And we had four thousand dollars. We started the magazine in our dorm rooms. We went to the university library and looked up the names and addresses of schools and libraries out of telephone books and reference books. That is how we made the list for our first direct mail solicitation. Amazingly, 1,000 letters brought back 100 subscriptions! Of course, once we had 100 subscriptions, we couldn’t stop!
American children write best when they write about events that mean something to them — and those events, it turned out, often revolve around tragedy — the death of a pet or a grandparent or, as in the case of the Navajo child from whose work I will now read, trouble with her brother. The narrator, Marlene, and her grandmother have driven in a pickup truck into Gallup, New Mexico, looking for Frank, the narrator’s brother. No alcohol is permitted in the adjacent Navajo reservation and so Gallup is notorious for its strip of bars and violence. They arrive just in time to see Frank surrounded being beaten with bats. Cars passing on the road slow down to view the fight. Grandmother goes into the bar to call the police and the ambulance.
I heard the shrilling police sirens and saw the flashing lights as two blue vans arrived. The big policemen, I thought they looked like Paul Bunyans, rushed over to where the boys were fighting. They shouted, “Stop fighting!” but they kept on hitting Frank. The policeman grabbed some of these boys from behind and held them tight. Then they put handcuffs on them. The boys were wiggling around trying to get away. Frank just fell on the ground. He was laying on the ground covering his head with his hands. He was moaning. One policeman went over to check on Frank. He said, “Are you all right?” Frank didn’t answer so he said, “The ambulance will be here in a few minutes.”
Finally, the ambulance came and the men dressed in white took a stretcher out and ran over to Frank. Grandmother and I walked over to Frank as one of the police vans drove away with those boys. The men turned Frank over and began checking his heart, and to see if he had any broken bones. I really felt scared when we saw the blood around Frank’s mouth and the front of his shirt. They checked Frank’s mouth. All seven front teeth were missing. One of the men looked around on the ground and he found all seven teeth. He put them in a small plastic bag . . .
Children don’t see their parents sitting around spending hours writing. If they see their parents doing anything for an extended period on a regular basis it’s watching television. A few forms aside, and some writing at work, perhaps, we live in an oral culture. Long expository writing is done by professionals. Need a report? Your business hires a professional. Need to write a grant? Hire a professional. In our own lives, if it is really important, we pick up the phone. Children intuitively understand that writing is for school children and professionals, and not for just regular people like their parents.
While in many ways American culture may be described as an oral culture, it is by no means a story-telling culture. It is our belief, therefore, and this is borne out by the manuscripts sent to us, that, at least in the United States, children need to become engaged with writing by becoming engaged in writing about their lives. It occurred to me the other day when I was reading Granta that Granta is like Stone Soup for adults. Some fiction. Some nonfiction. It’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. Gerry and I believe that school children should be encouraged to write about their lives. They should be encouraged to write quantity. We should encourage prolixity. That way, perhaps, a few children might grow up into adults who, in addition to becoming form filler-outers and shopping list maintainers, might also keep writing, and thinking.
I am an optimist. I think the United States has seen the future of a nation of adults who, though literate, are illiterate and is backing away from it. Stone Soup was something of an anomaly when we started but now it is not: the zeitgeist has changed and we are noticing that children’s writing is getting better each year; little by little the writing is getting more complex, more articulate, better written. In the strange way that things work out we now find ourselves at the center rather the outside. Works from Stone Soup are excerpted in all the new creative writing textbooks as the writing curriculum has shifted from writing about haunted houses and the mystery of the missing diamond to writing about the world we live in.
I close with a work you can think of as a found poem. James Lindbloom told this story to his mother in 1975 when he was four years old.
Make the Morning
I want make it be dark.
I want it way, way, way dark.
I gonna get bigger, bigger
and the whole world gonna shine
and I gonna be the sun
and there be lines on me
not any head, not any bottom.
I be a face
and I be the dark
and I be the light
and I be the shining
and I be the sun
and shine the people
and they say, there’s the sun max,
make the big bird,
and he’s gonna ride in the train,
and he’s gonna hold a little tiny baby,
he plays and frays,
and wash his face,
and plays trucks and gacks,
and the whole world is proud,
me writing good stories.
I didn’t make it up,
it come from the sun.
