ABSTRACT
Coyote by starlight hush of wind the owl's shadow voice, the campfire embers glowing inner universe by firelight smoke curls weaving faint the voices, coyote voices faint the pain and smell of pitch, fire. Children like Manuel can sometimes show that what is often dismissed as in need of identification, naming, intervention and eventual transformation by the institution may become understood in a totally different way. The children can bring about the transformation and renewal of the centre, providing that centre can remain vulnerable and open to their arrival—provided, that is, that those at the centre are able and willing to read their arrival more generously than the institutionalized discourses of marginality and normality have often allowed. The possibility of creating a world that is different from the world as taken for-granted-as-normal is the work of the imagination. The possibility that things might be otherwise than they seem can be apprehended only in the imagination, and the strategies for resistance and for unnaming, reshaping.
