Home » Posts tagged "Maurice Sendak" (Page 3)

Pictures That Storm Inside My Head: Outside Over There

I’m stealing the title of this post from a poem that appears in a book of the same name to discuss Outside Over There, and there’s a reason for that.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the movie Labyrinth. In it, Jennifer Connelly has to enter the realm of the Goblin King (David Bowie) to save her brother (the movie will be discussed as part of the next Parental Advisory podcast).The movie is, in part, inspired by the works of Maurice Sendak, and, in particular, his 1981 book Outside Over There. The plot of Outside Over There is very similar– in it, 9 year old Ida’s baby sister is stolen by goblins, and Ida must journey into “outside over there” to find and rescue her.

Sendak said in an interview that Outside Over There is the last of three books created to acknowledge the inner world of children, which is often chaotic and feels out of control (I’m paraphrasing radically here). The other two books are Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen. Of the three Outside Over There is, I think, the most unsettling and the most fascinating.

In Where The Wild Things Are, Max’s anger and imagination can’t be contained within mere physical walls. His escape allows him to get his out of control feelings out, to calm down and return home, a place where he can count on coming back home, to soup that is “still hot”. While it’s not a comfortable book for a lot of people, it has a comforting resolution. That isn’t the case in Outside Over There.

Ida’s parents are absent– her father is literally out to sea, and her mother is mentally unavailable. This leaves Ida with unwanted responsibility for her sister. While Ida is, in the words of my son, “busily doing something else”, goblins steal her sister away, leaving an ice baby. And Ida, at first, doesn’t notice. As her anger rises, there’s a storm out the window with a ship astray at sea.

This is the nightmare of so many parents– that their child might be stolen away. And it’s unsettling to certain children that their parents might be absent, even if they’re there; that they could be kidnapped themselves; that their sibling could go missing on their watch; that, like “Ida mad”, they could hold that terrible storm inside.

Ida goes on a journey to find her sister, but she is lost. She’s going in the wrong direction, still unable to see her sister in the goblin world of “outside over there”. When finally she turns around and finds the goblins, they are all babies, and, like the Pied Piper she must charm them away with music into the churning water to reveal which one is her sister. Like Max, she takes control, and finds her way back home. In the illustrations the goblin babies are fascinating and disturbing. Those are the pictures my daughter turns to again and again.

But unlike Max, Ida does not return to the comfort of a mother who nourishes him even when she’s not present. Instead, she comes home to a letter from her father telling her to take care of her mother and sister. Her storm has passed, but she doesn’t get to be a child again.

Outside Over There contains feelings both frightening and glad, ambiguous wording, and illustrations that create the impression of a strangely wrought and unpredictable fairly tale. When I talk about it with my daughter it’s in a very nonlinear fashion. We examine the illustrations, we talk about what some words and phrases mean, we skip around and come up with more answers than questions. For her this is fascinating, but not really recognizable as a traditional story. My son, an older brother who is often “busily doing something else” or doesn’t necessarily want his sister on top of him all the time, wants nothing to do with it. Ida’s anger, expressed so visibly and vividly, is unsettling to him.

Not that long ago I wrote about R.L. Stine’s comments on writing horror for children. Stine (to paraphrase) said that scary stories for children need to be over-the-top fantastic, funny, and sometimes gross, so that kids don’t think the stories could possibly be real. I would say that’s the kind of thing my Monster Kid likes- the Scooby Doo school of horror. Outside Over There is not that kind of story. It taps into something deep inside children, something that speaks to certain children and can really be unsettling to others, and certainly to adults (especially those looking for deeper meaning). It definitely wasn’t written with the same purpose in mind as the Goosebumps books. But both somehow fall into the wider category of scary books for kids.

If you are librarian or parent reading this, whether or not you’d classify this gorgeously illustrated and idiosyncratic Caldecott Honor winner as a scary book for kids doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you understand the kind of effect it may have on a reader, and plan to take time to talk about it when you put it in a child’s hands, if that child needs it. In my classes on children’s literature, I learned about many Sendak books: Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and Chicken Soup With Rice… but not once (and I’ve taken multiple classes) was this book ever mentioned. And really, I think it should be.

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Kirsten, 2 comments

Linkity Links: Monster Kids, Scary Stories, Fifty Shades, and Maurice Sendak

First, I’ve learned about a couple of cool Kickstarter projects. We received an email telling us about a documentary about “Monster Kids”- the kids who grew up on classic creature features and horror movies and became the next generation of artists, moviemakers, writers, and actors. From Rose Fox at Genreville, I learned about Nightmare Magazine, soon to be presented by Creeping Hemlock Press, and edited by John Joseph Adams. The lineup for the first issue is impressive- it includes original short stories by Sarah Langan and Jonathan Maberry, among others. Both of these projects are still in need of funding, so if you’re intrigued I encourage you to check them out.

Not that long ago, I wrote about an excellent reason to read the classics– Harry Clarke’s illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination At the time, I had seen them only in an article from io9, but now, those who would like a full scale experience (and don’t have the book) can go here to the book design blog 50watts.com and see how disturbing they really are when they fill the entire screen.

And, over at Agnostic, Maybe, Andy Woodworth discusses why the Brevard County Library System’s quandary over Fifty Shades of Grey should lead to pairing Banned Books Week with “National Update Your Collection and Challenge Material Policies Because You Probably Need To (No, Seriously, Do It)” week. Apparently the Fond du Lac Library in Wisconsin declined to purchase it as well, but at least they made the decision, based on their selection policy, BEFORE purchasing the book. Not that the average person who wants to check out Fifty Shades of Grey will care whether the reason it’s not there is because of selection policy or because of censorship, but librarians are going to have to take a position, because it affects them now, on a practical level. It’s going to be an interesting Banned Books Week this year, no matter what.

Finally, Maurice Sendak and his impact on children and children’s literature (and me) can’t be summed up in a couple of paragraphs here. When I went to Amazon.com to look at children’s bestsellers, up at the top was Higgelty Piggelty Pop! I was a little surprised, since I don’t think of it as being as well known as many of his others. It’s an odd little book, with a lot of story devoted to eating (and being eaten, by a lion). This afternoon one of my kids said “I don’t care” in response to something, and the other said “Well, you’ll be eaten by a lion”. They were referring to Sendak’s Pierre, in which a little boy who only responds to his parents with “I don’t care” is, in fact, eaten by a lion. And then there are the Wild Things, who scream to Max “Oh please don’t go! We’ll eat you up, we love you so!” And so I was glad to have this article come my way. It does an excellent job of expressing why Sendak’s nightmares and bizarre fantasies are so powerful for so many. And maybe also why he wrote so much about being eaten.

And that’s all for now! Whew!

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Kirsten, Reply

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

It wasn’t just because I learned of the death of the great illustrator and author Maurice Sendak yesterday that I was thinking of Where the Wild Things Are. I have a little boy who sometimes acts very much like Max in his wolf suit, and even runs around at home in a dragon costume. Yesterday afternoon at the park he really was a Wild Thing, and when we got home I sent him to his room. Eventually, he came out, ate dinner, and hugged me. All Wild Things need to know that they’ll be fed and loved.

I had it off the shelf this morning, because I volunteered to be a guest reader in his classroom this afternoon, and my daughter asked me to read it. We read it through and then went back and looked at the pictures, which tell the story more than anything else. We read “That night a forest grew in Max’s room…” and we turned the pages, looking at the room as the walls fell away to the forest and the night sky. When I read this book to children, I always ask them if they think his room really became a forest. She said yes. For children aged 4, 5, and 6, much of the time this is a real journey. Sometimes it’s a scary one, and sometimes it’s liberating, and sometimes a little of both. In the safety of storyhour when you tell kids to roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth, it can be fun to get carried away (not for everyone, some kids are truly frightened). It’s one I love to read out loud. It’s a story that’s so much a part of the inner being and outside actions of so many kids.

Here’s a snippet I found online, courtesy of FridayReads, that expresses so well the way kids engage with Where the Wild Things Are. When most of us think of books, even picture books, we think of reading- the written word, or, if we’re reading out loud, the verbal experience. Sendak’s work can’t be fully appreciated with just a reading, though, or even through the incredible artwork that tells so much of the story wordlessly. For some kids, it’s an immersive, emotional book- something they live, not just something they read, as with the child in this story Sendak shared with Terry Gross at NPR:

Sendakquote