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Women in Horror Month: Mother Goose On The Loose

Mother Goose telling tales, from the frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires.

The dark mystery behind the tales and rhymes that today we attribute to Mother Goose is something most people don’t notice now, because taken for granted that they were written for children in the nursery– and who today would entertain the littlest of us with violence and nightmares? Her image first appears in Perrault’s Histories, published in 1697, as an old woman telling stories to children, but her name and role as storyteller already existed in France. In Halls of Fame, Olive Beaupre Miller writes that John Newbery, the first publisher to concentrate on children’s books, was the first to publish an edition of Mother Goose rhymes in 1786,  and that in the preface, the editor writes that the rhymes  “are of great antiquity… some as old as the time of the ancient Druids”.  Miller was writing in 1921, and she wrote to educate small children, but recent research bears this out.

Apparently Americans’ puritan tastes led to “refinement” of the rhymes, although overseas, children were purchasing chapbooks of Mother Goose rhymes and fairytales in unexpurgated form. Gillian Avery notes that originally, few of them were written for children at all, but were “wrenched” out of adult contexts by children, and were “ruthless” and “often violent” until adult writers and illustrators toned down the content to what modern audiences recognize as Mother Goose rhymes today (to the objections of those who prefer the violent, political, and sexual nature of some of the originals). Samuel Goodrich, who later became the popular American children’s author, Peter Parley, was sheltered from these rhymes and tales until the age of ten, and outraged by them when he finally encountered them. Avery quotes Goodrich as saying,

“Little Red Riding Hood, Puss In Boots, Jack the Giant Killer, and some of the other tales of horror,[are] commonly put into the hands of youth, as if for the express purpose of reconciling them to vice and crime. Some children, no doubt, have a ready appetite for these monstrosities, but to others, they are revolting; until by repetition and familiarity, the taste is sufficiently degraded to relish them.”

Goodrich made a career of writing nonfiction and realistic, moral fiction for children, in a mostly successful effort to drive works of imagination and fantasy underground (for several decades, at least), and once the rhymes emerged, there continued to be censors who criticized and edited them (Geoffery Handley Taylor’s 1952 catalogue of the dangers in nursery rhymes is notable) but as this story shows, in the end, especially in the age of the Internet, you can’t keep Mother Goose down.

Sources not available online:

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children And Their Books, 1621-1922. London: The Bodley Head, 1994.

Miller, Olive Beaupre.  “The Interesting History of Old Mother Goose”. Halls of Fame. Chicago: The Book House For Children, 1953.

 

Posted on February 18, 2016 by , Reply

Halloween Is Coming! Bring on the Poetry!

I have heard so many people say “I hate poetry”! To quote Erasure “It doesn’t have to be like that”. There are AWESOME poems out there to make you sit up and take notice– words brought to life on the page, spoken or sometimes sung to you, or by you, or with someone else. Some are long, others short. Some will rhyme, and others don’t. Maybe you’ll find one to scare you, or make you laugh, or inspire you to create something of your own. Here are a few of my favorites. Some I’ve shared with my kids, and others they haven’t yet grown into. But with poetry alive in our home, they’ll get to experience them here (and maybe at school– you don’t have to hate it just because you learned it at school) and I hope you will take a chance on a few of them, too.

 

The Bat by Theodore Roethke

I first remember reading this poem in Cricket magazine when I was about nine years old. It was accompanied by a terrifying black and white pencil illustration. I’ve never forgotten it. I can still picture that page in my head and it still creeps me out.

 

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

One of the great things about this poem is that most of the words don’t make any sense. So when someone complains to you that it makes no sense, you can tell them it’s really not supposed to. It evokes a intense visual response– with a line like “the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame”, how could it not? And it’s fantastic to read aloud, especially with someone else. In spite of, or maybe because of, the complete nonsense of the vocabulary, my son could recite it (and did, with glee) when he was four years old.

 

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Edwin Morgan.

I had a hard time finding the text of this online, and when I did, I was surprised at how it looked (I didn’t like how it was presented, so there is no link). I first encountered this in a book of children’s poetry meant for reading aloud, called A Foot in the Mouth (edited by Paul Janeczko and illustrated by Chris Raschka), and I remembered it as looking different in terms of spacing and placement of words on the page. When I looked back, it was amazing to see what a difference page design made in my ability to read and enjoy this poem, so go find the book. It is a relatively new one. The Song of the Loch Ness Monster is a “sound poem”, meant to be read out loud, but you will spend a lot of time tripping over your tongue as you attempt to do so. Again, complete (if enjoyable) nonsense, but any adult who attempts to read it to a child is guaranteed to cause giggles. Luckily, Morgan recorded it (link) so you can hear the way the poem is intended to sound, and it does sound very much like the song one might expect from this watery cryptid.

 

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

Okay, The Highwayman is a really long one and it is found sometimes in high school English textbooks. And it does have some challenging vocabulary, and it does take place well into the past. But it’s also a tremendous ghost story with tragedy and romance. I was sold on it after Loreena McKennit recorded it to unearthly music on her album Book of Secrets. Here’s a video illustrating the song. It was also the inspiration for a racy romance novel called The Landlord’s Black-Eyed Daughter, but that’s neither here nor there.

 

Little Orphant Annie by James Whitcomb Riley

Yes, absolutely, I have recommended this poem more than once. It is delightful and scary, and Riley’s true love for all children shines here. This is another to read aloud, and it too is fairly simple to remember if you do it enough. Riley wrote in dialect but he used simple language, and he sure knew how to tell a story. Sadly, there isn’t a good in-print copy of this poem (Joel Schick’s The Gobble-uns’ll Git You Ef You Don’t Watch Out is out of print), but if you whisper it around a campfire, you won’t really need one. Anne Hills put the poem to music in this video. It appears on her 2007 album Ef You Don’t Watch Out. It does not look like it’s easily available through Amazon but she does have a MySpace page– here is a link to the song there. (I’m psyched that she has recorded an entire album of Riley’s poems. Indiana fourth grade teachers, take note.)

 

The Tyger by William Blake

I first encountered this poem in the 1975 edition of Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? by Kenneth Koch. I might have been five or six at the time, and I read it over and over. It does have a companion poem, The Lamb, but The Tyger was the one I read again and again. The vision of the tyger “burning bright/through the forests of the night” is powerful, a spark for the imagination to illuminate the darkness (Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ first YA vampire novel, In The Forests Of The Night, clearly referenced this). This could be a really frightening read-aloud for some kids, so step with care… but hey, it’s Halloween soon.

 

The Hearse Song by Anonymous

Also known as “The worms crawl in”. Yes, it is completely gross and morbid, and I am not the world’s biggest fan of this one. But kids seem to love it. It is rooted in folklore and the oral tradition, and a version can be found in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark.

 

Check one (or more) of these out as a Halloween treat. Tell me if you like it. And if you have other suggestions, let me know!

 

 

Posted on September 25, 2012 by , Reply

Searching for Frankenstein: Finding Scary Stories At The Library

It’s that time of year. It seems like school has just started, and fall, at least here in the Midwest where we FINALLY got some rain, doesn’t seem like it can possibly be coming our way. The Monster Kid’s plotting for his Halloween birthday party has gotten to the invitation stage, and we’re just two weeks from all those “31 Days of Halloween” promotions. The schools in my district are ignoring the fact that Halloween is just around the corner, but they may be the only ones in our community actually succeeding at it.

And with the spooky season looming just ahead, librarians, parents, kids, and even teachers (at least teachers in other school districts) are seeking out scary books for kids (or not so scary books, as the case may be) for storytelling programs (sometimes even storytelling festivals), lesson plans, party ideas, monster stories, chills and thrills, and just plain old fun. Most people don’t have the collection a library has of picture books, chapter books, poetry, cookbooks, monster guides, Halloween tales, scary stories for around the campfire (or a flashlight, if you’re inside) fall crafts, and lesson ideas. So, off to the library we go!

A lot of kids only have access to their school library for information on various topics. So I visited a school library to find out a little about how kids search for (and hopefully find) scary books there. Let me first explain that most school libraries are part of a “specials” rotation (assuming there are “specials” teachers in the school) So kids from each classroom cycle through for half an hour (or maybe an hour) usually once a week. On the other days, the kids will have art, music, and gym. Sometimes this is that class’ only access to the library for that week (depending on the school culture). Often that time has to include a short lesson or story and the kids’ search for books followed by checkout. It’s a lot to handle in half an hour to an hour once a week, especially if you are a solo librarian (hopefully there are volunteers backing you up) with thirty kids to help and check out. Assisting each child individually and keeping order is nearly impossible. So you want to make the kids as independent as they can be in trying to find the books they want (with the side benefit that they will develop the skill to  find them on their own).

An awesome catalog system can be a huge help with this. Gone are the days where you had to teach kids how to find subject, title, and author cards using the arcane subject organization system developed by the Library of Congress. The online catalog is a miracle. I have personally automated a school library and the difference is incredible. It’s not that the LC system isn’t still used, but we now have this amazing tool called the keyword search, which allows people to search using whatever word they think of. The great thing is that something will probably come up that will be related to your topic. The problem is that lots of things will come up that aren’t related to your topic but that have the word or phrase you used in them, someplace in the catalog field.

So let’s say the very busy (and awesome) school librarian is having many demands made on her at once and a kid asks “Where are the scary books”?  And the librarian says “Go type in the word ‘scary’ into the search box for the catalog’. 25 books come up, including a book of poetry about scary animals and  a science book on scary insects. Only five results show on the first screen before you have to click on “next” to see the next five results.

Let me ask you something. When you do a Google search, how many times do you go past the first page or results? Most people don’t. And it’s more than likely that  most kids won’t go past that first screen either. Getting the librarian’s attention a second time may be difficult(thirty kids all clamoring for attention…), so that child might leave without a scary book.

I decided to check my public library’s catalog. When I did a keyword search using “scary” I got 510 results. That’s way too many to be helpful! Then I saw that the list was for ALL the books (and media) in the entire library that came up under the keyword scary. I had to click on a subject heading, Children’s Literature, to refine my search. That was slightly better but still too many to be helpful. My first page gave me 20 results, including one book by Norman Bridwell (author of the Clifford books),  Strawberry Shortcake’s Spooky Night, a Geronimo Stilton book, and a YA title. Okay, “scary” is a pretty nonspecific term. It’s probably likely that the keyword search results would be all over the place. But it is kind of discouraging. I tried some other keywords. “Halloween” brought up completely different results, with the exception of the Bridwell book, and I think all of them would be more satisfying to a kid that what I found when I looked up “scary”. And this is interesting– there were 765 books in the overall collection that came up, and 367 of those were in the children’s collection (chances are a fair amount of them were by R.L. Stine, and many of the books found under “children’s literature” also seemed to be YA titles, but still–  there were not only more relevant results, but from a larger pool of books!

Now, my own kid loves monsters. So I did a search for “monster”.  Wow! 1139 books, 373 of which were in the children’s collection. Many of these were R.L. Stine and YA books, but once again, the first page of results was almost completely different. Still, that is a heck of a lot of books, and as I said, most people won’t go past the first page of results. So I got more specific and did a search for “Halloween monster”.  What a difference. This brought up only 31 books in the entire catalog, 14 of which were children’s titles. That’s a REALLY narrow pool of results. Because I did the earlier searches on “Halloween” and “monster”  I know there are lots of books on each topic– and I’m curious as to why there’s not more overlap. The children’s department in my library has tried to make it easy to find Halloween books (which will also have monsters) by grouping books related to individual holidays together, but obviously there has to be overlap as well as stuff they’ve missed. But that’s a start. What if I want to find a book on a specific monster, though? The Monster Kid is all into those Universal movie monsters, so I decided to search for “Frankenstein”. Would you believe there are 144 titles devoted to Frankenstein in some way, and just 20 in the children’s section?  Four of those were YA titles, and four were graphic novels. But interestingly, the Frankenstein book my son has checked out and sitting in his bedroom upstairs, titled Frankenstein, a Crestwood House book by Ian Thorne, did not show up at all.

So, “look it up in the catalog” is an okay place to start, and it can simplify things if you are searching a small collection or have time and patience to scroll through results and try different keywords (or maybe not, if the first three results that pop up in the school catalog in a search for “monster” are about monster trucks). But simple keyword searches can be tricky– either overwhelming you with information, providing you with a list of titles that doesn’t suit your needs, or even leaving out something you KNOW ought to be there, because you’ve seen it there before. You might find the books in places you won’t expect sometimes (who knew a five year old would have such a desperate need for Halloween cookbooks?) but you might never find them at all, without help.

If your keyword search doesn’t seem to be taking you where you need to go, and you can’t figure out how to successfully narrow your results, don’t be afraid. Ask the librarian. That’s why she, or he, is there… to help find those places where the book you need, or one like it, may be.

Have a bewitching time searching, and finding, what you are looking for, for this coming holiday season!

Posted on September 12, 2012 by , Reply
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