ABSTRACT
In David Almond’s Clay (2005) and Bone Music (2021), the protagonists seek meaningful experiences revolving around nature, art, and their peers. Davie and Stephen in Clay, and Sylvia and Gabriel in Bone Music experience epiphanic forms of thinging – or thinking with, through and about things – in their process of growing up. The characters’ life courses are intensely shaped by creating cultural artefacts from natural resources. In Clay, Davie and Stephen sculpt a figure with clay from a pond by the quarry, and in Bone Music, Sylvia and Gabriel create a flute from the hollow bone of a dead buzzard found in the forest. By examining these intricate social encounters and the meaningfully crafted things as described in Clay and Bone Music, Almond’s portrayal of social and material minds can be explored via a cognitive lens. Intertwining cognitive narratology with children’s literature studies, age studies, and philosophy of mind, this chapter shows that Almond’s evocations of social and material minds in Clay and Bone Music form striking examples of how influential that human relationships and material objects are in the coming-of-age process.
