Storytelling Starters ~ Draw Me A Story
This Wednesday I made my trip to the Story Museum in Oxford. And if you ask what a Story Museum is for, an unbeatable answer was provided by the late-lamented Terry Pratchett. ‘Asking why the world needs a story museum is like asking a fish what water is for.’
My visit was to attend the launch of a book – the new second edition of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. This is a wonderful tome. First published in 1984 it has now been refreshed and brought up to date by Daniel Hahn. Danny as he’s normally known had got me to redo the entry on Storytelling for this new edition. Hence my invitation to the launch. I enjoyed it. There were lovely people to meet – the good people who run the Story Museum where the party was held, people who do interesting jobs at Oxford University Press who publish the Companion, and, marvellously, Mari Prichard who co-produced the original edition with her late husband, Humphrey Carpenter. Mari is Welsh and, in true Welsh style, we found we knew lots of places and people in common.
Draw Me A Story
Fascinating too was to get a sneak preview of Draw Me A Story. This is the Story Museum’s new exhibition which is due to open on Monday.
So there on the walls were original works by illustrators the world knows and loves – Quentin Blake, Emily Gravett, Korky Paul, Mini Grey, Nick Sharratt and others. With their quirky humour and distinctiveness of styles, looking at them put me in mind of my strong belief in making time for children to draw and paint their stories.
Draw Me A Story also put me in mind of my neighbour in London. She’s a well-known ceramicist and a pretty good painter too and when her children were young, I well remember her telling me that whenever they showed her a painting or drawing they’d made, she’d never just say, ‘Oh well done, darling.’
She felt that was a way of not really paying attention. Specific comments were what she’d make. ‘I like the way you’ve done that line.’ Or ‘Those colours look good next to each other.’
Children drawing
I’ve always tried to follow suit by showing attentive appreciation of drawings or paintings children produce. To my mind, painting and drawing brings out the distinctive ways in which children see things. It’s another form of visualisation.
Hence the three little drawings that form my illustrations this week. They come from letters I received after a storytelling day way back in 1995. The school was St Cuthbert Mayne in Hemel Hempstead and I enjoyed the letters so much, they joined the collection I keep of such things.
The three drawings here refer to a story I’d told in which a young boy, Tiki-Pu, receives the help he needs to become a good painter. How he obtains that help infuriates the awful Wang who runs the painting school where Tiki-Pu has fetched up. So enraged is Wang, he eventually explodes with rage.
And that’s it for this week except to say that searching out this week’s illustrations has started me thinking about a series of Blogs focussing on some of the things children say about stories and storytelling in that collection of letters in my file boxes.
Tags: Danny Hahn, illustrators, Oxford Story Museum, The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature