By Frank Boles
On Tuesday September 19, Roderick McGillis delivered the
annual David and Eunice Sutherland Burgess Endowed Lecture to a large group of
students, faculty, and other guests. A distinguished senior scholar of
children’s literature Dr. McGillis presented a fascinating history of the
development of children’s literature as an academic discipline, and ended his
presentation by sharing one of his many stories; something he is justly famous
for.
When Doctor McGillis began his career children’s literature
was not taken very seriously. Books for children were considered nothing more
than brightly illustrated and cleverly written teaching tools. The point of
children’s literature was simply to educate children, with words and
illustration having no real importance other than to keep the child’s interest.
“Real literature,” the books English professors read, discussed, argued over,
and eventually taught to their students, was written by adults for adults.
Over his long career Dr. McGillis struggled to help create
professional organizations dedicated to children’s works, a professional
discourse about children’s books, and to make those organizations and that
discourse a recognized and accepted part of literary study. His presentation
talked about the development of these goals, and contained more than a little
concern that even today children’s literature is still dismissed by some
“serious” academics as beneath their concern. But today those who dismiss
children’s literature as a mere trifle are in the minority.
It was a presentation that captured the development and
change of a field by one of the individuals deeply responsible for that
development and change, offering insight not only into what happened, but more
importantly why it happened.
But Doctor McGillis is also a well-known story teller, who
proved the acclaim he has received for his ability in the field with a
wonderful tale to end the evening. I cannot do the story justice, so let me
simply say it was about his relationship with his grandmother, Grandma Burchill,
how she claimed to him she was always up first in their house because she
awoken by “the crack of dawn,” and that someday, when she died and no longer
could beat him into the kitchen, she would be sure that he too knew the secret
of hearing it. True to her word, the morning after she died, at first light,
“Roddie” heard the crack.
Is the story true? As
Professor McGillis reflects here,
https://www.scribd.com/document/56737932/The-Myth-of-Freedom it is a story he first heard someone else
tell, over twenty years ago. He retells it placed in his own childhood home,
with his own Grandmother, as it would have happened for him.
So, is it true?
Ernest Hemingway once wrote: ““You make something from things that have
happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all
those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is
truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it
immortality.”
Professor McGillis story about the crack of dawn I think
would pass Hemingway’s test as something “truer than anything true.”