ABSTRACT
Our most memorable experiences occur when we leave our routines for places that attract us. Then, a need to name this kingdom of discovered space can spring into narrative. Like the circle of a fl ashlight on the printed page under the covers, this private spot illuminates and circumscribes peak moments. “The pursuit of reading,” Virginia Woolf wrote in The Common Reader (1925/1984), “is carried on by private people” (p. 1). Yet, talking about stories as portable solitudes is what teachers must do. My curiosity about how narratives portray attachment to place evolved in 1998 when students in “Earth-Centered Children in the Virtual Age”, a seminar at the University of Michigan Residential College, helped me organize a conference and exhibition on remembered forts and hideouts. From picture books to novels, literature is replete with such meaning-laden sites. Classics like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s (1911/1962) The Secret Garden and E. B. White’s (1952) Charlotte’s Web both centre on idyllic environments. Fantasies engendered by a locked garden or barnyard helped shape both writers’ core identities. Common insights children have in such locales are often the source of inspiration for works of art. Huck and Jim’s raft in Mark Twain’s (1884/1925) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Faith Ringgold’s (1991) Tar Beach, for example, access this theme in widely varied artistic and literary contexts. Both specify an offbeat turf from which to watch a thunderstorm or the Brooklyn Bridge. These uncramped shoals encourage a boy and a girl to refl ect on the violence of racism and the simplicity of shared being. Yet, the cultural realities behind how emergent identity is represented deserve careful critical analysis. The geography of where the young hang out, experiment, and imagine a future leads us to consider how childhood spaces have been shaped historically and rhetorically and how the nature inside children’s minds is being colonized as a last frontier.
