Author: Mechanical Dolphin

>Patricia Wrightson, Part 4: Shadows of Time

Mechanical Dolphin

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Patricia Wrightson’s Shadows of Time (1994) is a strange and powerful novel. It recounts the journey of an Aboriginal boy and English colonist girl who, by the gift of spirits, ‘travel in a timeless dimension’ – drifting without ageing or changing through Australian history. En route they are chased as devils, encounter various supernatural creatures and even come across a mysterious stone figure who may be the protagonist of the earlier Wirrun books. Although Wrightson had to some extent ‘let go’ of indigenous subject matter by this period, Shadows unmistakeably revisits some of the themes of her earlier novels.

Mark Macleod links Shadows to the Australian bicentenary of 1988. ‘That itself was a problematic anniversary. Indigenous Australians had already renamed Australia Day (26 January, the day when Captain Phillip took possession of the country in the name of the English king) ‘Survival Day’. And as the Bicentenary approached non-Indigenous Australians were increasingly asking ‘What is there to celebrate?’

The timeless quality of the children’s journey in Shadows, ‘given the privileges of water – to flow wherever is natural’, allows for a meditation on Australian history and, thereby, on Wrightson’s concept of culture.

As Mark Macleod explained in our recent interview:

‘In Shadows of Time, Wrightson invents a spirit character that seems very like those she borrowed from Indigenous culture in earlier works, but is in fact her own. For a writer who speaks repeatedly of borrowing only the equivalent of European ‘fairies’ and being careful not to touch the spirits of creation mythology, and who speaks of her terror of misrepresenting the spirits she does borrow, this is almost a defiant move, coming as it does after she has acknowledged that time has overtaken her whole project. The novel is therefore a coda to her major work, reasserting the mutability of cultures and her right as an artist to let her imagination flow where it will. Her readers and Wrightson herself might have changed their views over time – but not entirely.’

As time continues to flow, and Wrightson becomes a posthumous figure to be considered primarily through her legacy, there are challenges ahead for those who wish to preserve her work and circulate it for a new generation.

Mark Macleod comments, ‘I think we are still vaguely embarrassed or guilty about the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of Indigenous people.’

But it is precisely the encounter with Wrightson’s texts which dispels that idea, while at the same time forcing us to consider the complex and uncomfortable connections between storytelling and the legacy of colonialism.

A fantasy writer ‘cannot restore the original context for mythic stories, but she can create new contexts – as living cultures themselves do constantly. The fantasist can use all the resources available to the contemporary novelist to fill gaps within and around the story, and at the same time can alert the reader to some of what was lost.’ – Brian Attebery

Brian Attebery makes a distinction between a fantasy writer like Wrightson and any self-appointed white spokesperson for Aboriginal people: ‘Her job, as a writer, is to work out in fictional form her own relationship with Australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape. Her strategy has been to bring in Wirrun and other characters to share the task, going where she cannot go. These fictional collaborators remind readers that we need to invite other collaborators, fictional and real, to help us extend the quest for understanding beyond the boundaries of the text itself.’

Attebery’s comments raise so many questions worthy of debate. That fantasy writer ‘alerting the reader to some of what was lost’ sounds like those white 1930s poets busy writing on behalf of the Aboriginal culture they perceived to be dying, which leads us back to asking: Who set Wrightson the task of ‘working out in fictional form her own relationship with Australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape’? And what do we make of the notion of a ‘fictional collaborator’?

These are questions to which there’s no final answer, but they are thrown up by the challenge of Patricia Wrightson’s legacy today – which forms the basis of our final instalment, next time on Books and Adventures.

You can go to the fifth and final part of this feature by clicking here.

>Patricia Wrightson, Part 3: Outsiders and Indigenization

Mechanical Dolphin

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Patricia Wrightson was born in 1921 and grew up between the two World Wars of the 20th century. Publisher Mark Macleod points to her childhood in the 1930s as setting the context for her relationship to indigenous culture. The interwar years saw Australia disillusioned by the sacrifices of the First World War and turning away from ‘Old Europe’ towards the cultures of its own continent: ‘This was the Australia that Patricia Wrightson grew up in: with some sense of loss of its connection with Europe, and some sense of impending loss of its Indigenous culture and the need to ‘save’ it.
‘The devastating loss of young Australian lives in a war that had no geographical imperative for us, but was wholly motivated by the political connection with the UK, and the resulting destruction of European society on a massive scale produced a turning-away from Europe by many Australian artists. It seemed to many that European culture was moribund … So writers and visual artists particularly began to look to Indigenous Australian sources of energy for the imagination … The artists – having been brought up with the general belief that Indigenous Australian culture was dying – thought they were preserving it.’
John Murray locates Wrightson’s work within a tradition of literary ‘indigenization’ – fiction that seeks to bring European-descended inhabitants of countries like Australia ‘into imaginative contact with the lands in which most of them were born but in which, by comparison with their indigenous peoples, they are aliens.’ To Murray, Wirrun himself becomes an explicitly indigenizing figure, unifying Australia: by the final book of the trilogy, he has taken on heroic responsibilities to the entire spiritual and material ecology of the continent, from spirits to the white urban population and the animal kingdom besides.
Mark Macleod told me: ‘It is possible to read Patricia Wrightson’s emphasis on ‘folk’ as a romantic reverence for simplicity or innocence. This comes dangerously close to the racist construction of indigenous cultures generally as childlike … We understand now that we can kill the thing we love, but it is too easy to approach this difficult and complex issue ahistorically and condemn it out of hand.’
An alternative, Mark suggests, is to look at the overlapping experiences of outsiderness between indigenous Australians and other groups. He points to the poet Les Murray’s early interest in Indigenous subject matter in the 1960s and 70s: ‘With his Scots heritage and his upbringing in rural Australia, he sees a natural empathy between the marginalising of Celtic Australians, non-Anglo migrants and Indigenous Australians. They have all been colonised by the English.’
Brian Attebery, writing on Wirrun in 2005, chimes with this perspective when he discusses George, a white ‘Inlander’ who helps Wirrun at the climax of the first book by distracting other white Australians who threaten to interfere with our hero’s plans. George, a farmer of harsh and isolated country, is an outsider in the mainstream society of white Australian ‘Happy Folk’, figures who feature only in the margins of the Wirrun books.
Attebery suggests that the Australian continent is the real protagonist of The Song of Wirrun, and all the other characters are defined by their relationship to the land – a sliding scale from the ignorant, superficial Happy Folk with their air conditioning and service stations, graduating through the Inlanders to the Aboriginal People, heroes like Wirrun, and finally the spirits whose actions trigger Wirrun’s quest.
Mark Macleod writes, ‘The reality is that there are Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and they need to find ways to coexist. Their histories and mythologies are different; their values often seem diametrically opposed. [Wrightson’s] project to try and create a pan-Australian imagery therefore rests finally on the idea that all they really have in common is the land.’

 

‘There is a sense of loss by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. But what they all have in common is the land. Wrightson says repeatedly throughout her career that her books must not be read as ‘good vs. evil’ stories. The real issue is ecology: the rightful place of all beings.’ – Mark Macleod

Seen in this light, George the Inlander is an outsider, too – like Les Murray’s Celts. Although he’s not directly allied with Wirrun on his quest, he obliquely helps by keeping other white Australians away. He does this, tellingly, by taking on a number of roles which satirise relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, pretending to be first an anthropologist, then the producer of a hippyish Aboriginal ‘happening’, and finally a snake collector who has hired Wirrun and company to collect poisonous reptiles.

Mark Macleod suggests that for Wrightson, the key figure was always that of the outsider, be that the artist in Australian society, or the child in the adult world. In their different ways, George and Wirrun, and Wrightson herself, are all outsider figures.

Wirrun was Wrightson’s first indigenous main character. As Macleod points out, ‘He is a city boy, who travels to the central Australian desert and reconnects with the Dreaming. He is marginalised in his own culture.’ Brian Attebery takes this further by pointing to the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children who were taken from their families and raised in homes or adopted by white families. The white-educated Wirrun is likely either a member of the Stolen Generation, or a child of that generation – although this is not confirmed explicitly by Wrightson’s text.

Mark continues: ‘By the mid-70s, when the Wirrun books started to appear, Indigenous Australian voices were becoming a powerful political and cultural force … So Wrightson’s desire to alert non-Indigenous Australians to the need for a new vision was becoming increasingly irrelevant … She did realise it, and from the mid-80s she lets go of the Indigenous subject matter for which she had become known around the world.’

This idea of letting go of indigenous subject matter from the mid-80s is the line that is taken in Patricia Wrightson’s UK obituaries…but one of her most interesting and challenging books is the unusual, dreamlike Shadows of Time. This novel, published in the wake of Australia’s bicentenary, seemed almost to revisit the world of Wirrun, with both an indigenous main character and seemingly indigenous spirit characters.

We’ll be looking at Shadows next time on Books and Adventures. To go to part four of this feature, click here.

>Patricia Wrightson, Part 2 – The Representation of Aboriginality

Mechanical Dolphin

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Clare Bradford’s 2001 Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature was one of the key academic texts to question Patricia Wrightson’s use of Aboriginal myth.

Bradford’s study was a clear-headed critique of Aussie writing for children, with lasting value. Reading it now prompts us to consider, for example, that this year’s Australian movie Tomorrow, When the War Began, adapted from the 1980s novels by John Marsden, is also implicated in the period of colonialism by harking back to the ‘frontier spirit’ in a tale of white teens fighting back against Asian invaders.

For Bradford the key question was how children’s texts try to position their readers with regard to aboriginality. From 1950s books, where Aboriginal Australians ‘appear, if at all, as a melancholy presence, doomed to extinction’, to more recent appropriations of Aboriginal myth, she diagnoses a tendency to represent Aboriginal people as an undifferentiated ‘Other’ to the white Australian readership.

Bradford questions the image of Wrightson as an advocate or defender of Aboriginality. She writes: ‘To look closely at the discourses which inform these texts is to recognise how the warm glow of Aboriginality conceals its appropriating and controlling strategies.’

In Wrightson’s later Shadows of Time, Bradford suggests, the novel’s Australian spirits are merely mapped on to Western notions of hobgoblins, mermaids and dragons.

Brian Attebery and Mark Macleod have both emphasised that Wrightson was always careful to use figures from Aboriginal superstition and myth rather than sacred religious beliefs such as creation myths, trying to focus, as Attebery writes, on fantastic creatures ‘without explicitly invoking religious ideas.’

This was an attempt to show respect by populating her fantasies with the creatures of folk tale rather than figures of religious significance, but Clare Bradford questions the legitimacy of such a sliding scale, where all supernatural tales are assigned a value – sacred or trivial – according to the writer’s judgment: ‘Cinderella and ‘How The Kangaroo Got Its Hop’ jostling in the lowest level, Adam and Eve at the top with the Rainbow Serpent … Wrightson’s use of the term ‘superstitious’ degrades the narratives that she claims for her own purposes.’

Against this, we can read Attebery: ‘No amount of care can make [Wrightson] into a tribal elder, nor can her use of Aboriginal folklore ever be fully ‘authentic’. However, she can become… a participant in the reshaping of tradition for a modern world in which authenticity is an inaccessible ideal.’

So why was Wrightson looking to participate in these traditions at all? Next time we’ll go back to the 1930s, the time of her childhood, to look at the impulse by some white Australian artists to ‘save’ a culture they saw as threatened with extinction.

For part three of this feature, click here.

>Patricia Wrightson, Part 1: The Song of Wirrun and Beyond

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m starting an in-depth look at the work of the late Patricia Wrightson (1921-2010) this week.

I read her trilogy The Song of Wirrun for the first time this year, immediately after hearing news of her death in March. It’s an absorbing, sophisticated fantasy quest rooted in Aboriginal mythology.

A few comments from my earlier blog post are here. I wrote it based on the books I happened to be reading at the time, Wirrun and John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, which draws on British legends for its spooky, dark adventure. Now, looking back, my comments on ‘the power of the land’ seem rather naïve in the face of long and deep-rooted debates about the place of Aboriginal culture in Australian children’s writing.

I was keen to move beyond the snapshot of Wrightson’s work offered by the obituaries and, from my limited Pommie perspective, try to understand the issues raised by her use of indigenous Australian myth. In fact, I was compelled: these books were just so gripping for me as a reader, I needed to know why they were out of print and so controversial. Over the next few posts on the blog I hope to give an outline of the critical debates on Wrightson for readers as new to her novels as I was.

Mark Macleod, Patricia Wrightson’s friend and publisher at Random House, was kind enough to join me for an e-mail discussion of her work and legacy. I started by asking him about the importance she held for Australian children’s literature in the postwar period, as both a writer and as the editor of Australia’s School Magazine.

He explained how Wrightson acted as ‘an enabler, whose passionate commitment to making stories with an Indigenous theme part of the literary mainstream helped prepare readers for the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists who followed. The cross-cultural partnership of Dick Roughsey and Percy Trezise, who changed Australian picture books in the 1970s, for example, found an audience already used to thinking of Indigenous subject matter for children as exciting, dramatic and edgy. That is at least partly due to the high profile success of Wrightson as a ‘real author’ in the education market before them.’

Yet somehow Wrightson has become a writer less read than revered: a name to conjure with, but one whose books are difficult to obtain.

‘It was significant that news of her death was carried in Midwest newspapers and regional networks in the United States, but barely rated a mention in Australia,’ Mark Macleod suggests. ‘I think we are still vaguely embarrassed or guilty about the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of Indigenous people – but in many cases that view is not the result of close acquaintance with the texts themselves.’

So why are these fantasy adventures by a heavyweight of children’s literature so hard to get hold of these days? And what is there to say about her use of Aboriginal myths and beliefs in those fantasies?

Over the next few blog posts, I want to look a bit deeper at Patricia Wrightson’s work and legacy. As critic Brian Attebery points out in a 2005 article, ‘the borrowing of one culture’s traditions by another is a serious and risky business’, with a danger that privileged white societies ‘acquire whatever is of value in indigenous culture while consigning the bearers of that culture to invisibility or extinction.’

So how might we read Patricia Wrightson’s relationship to the Aboriginal myths in her writing – appropriation, advocacy or something else entirely?

We’ll be looking at this question next time on the blog. For part two of this feature, click here.

>Roland Pietsch on The Real Jim Hawkins

Mechanical Dolphin

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Today on Books and Adventures we’re joined by Roland Pietsch, a historian whose chequered past includes running a music venue, and work on TV’s Who Do You Think You Are?, alongside university and outreach work in East London.

Roland’s book The Real Jim Hawkins, released this month, looks at the real-life counterparts of the hero of Treasure Island – boys as young as thirteen who enlisted in the Navy when Britannia ruled the waves. For fans of Robert Louis Stevenson’s great adventure story, it’s an opportunity to see the truth beyond the swashbuckling adventure.

‘Of course I was a Treasure Island fan as a kid, even though I grew up in the very non-maritime city of West Berlin,’ Roland told me.


Roland Pietsch

‘Treasure Island had been adapted as a West German television series. Then my auntie from the other side of the Wall gave me the actual book, and an East German record, as Christmas presents. Jim Hawkins’ treasure hunt not only easily crossed national borders, but even the hardened ideological borders in my childhood.’

As an adult researching his PhD, Roland discovered the truth behind Stevenson’s novel in the archives of the London Marine Society, an eighteenth-century charity that recruited thousands of impoverished boys for service at sea.

Roland found that the real-life boy sailors had a surprising amount in common with Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins: ‘Both were placed in such dangerous and adventurous situations, that they had to stop being boys and prove themselves in the adult world.’

One of the reasons for recruiting sailors so young was to make them immune to the horrors of war. The Navy fostered a culture of fearlessness and nonchalance in the face of danger. It was also necessary to impose discipline on unruly boys brought on board.

Roland compares this to ‘an eighteenth-century ASBO’, but then points out that Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins is no clean-cut hero himself: he takes the stolen treasure at the end of the novel, without considering that his mates have no more right to it than Long John Silver and company: ‘Doesn’t this hint that even the fictional Jim Hawkins was a bit of a cheeky character?’

Sadly the fictional Jim’s prospects were far happier than those of real 18th-century boy sailors.

In such dangerous roles as ‘powder monkey’, boys were expected to fetch gun powder from below decks to charge the ship’s guns, dodging shot and wooden splinters in the heat of battle.

‘Many lost their lives at sea,’ says Roland, ‘or struggled to come to terms with witnessing so much bloodshed at such a young age. Some battle scars went deeper than a wooden leg.’ Alcoholism and internment in the infamous madhouse at Bedlam were often the consequence of a seafaring youth.

One of the more incredible real-life stories discussed in Roland’s book is that of Mary Lacy. Disguised as a boy, this teenaged girl managed to serve on board a cramped Navy vessel. Ships of the time like HMS Victory comprised 850 men in a small wooden world, 50 metres long, 15 metres wide and 6 metres deep, a challenging place in which to conceal one’s true gender.

‘Then again,’ Roland points out, ‘washing opportunities were limited, so nobody ever detected Mary. The closest they came was when she challenged one of the other ship’s boys, who was a bit of a bully-boy, to a fight – she was expected to take her shirt off for the boxing match!’

Roland’s book offers a fascinating and often surprising glimpse of the truth behind the vision of seafaring life found in novels and movies. It’s available here, and you can find Roland’s article on The Real Jim Hawkins for Sabotage Times here. For more information, visit Roland’s website, http://www.rolandpietsch.com/

Next time on Books and Adventures – pausing only to catch breath after the Birmingham Half Marathon – we’ll be beginning our in-depth look at the writing, and legacy, of Australia’s Patricia Wrightson.

>help2read – Volunteer Literacy Support in South Africa

Mechanical Dolphin

>Books and Adventures continues our world tour of literacy support this week, heading to South Africa to visit the literacy NGO help2read.

help2read founder Alex Moss started visiting South Africa shortly after the introduction of democracy to the country in 1994. A visit to a township with a leading member of the struggle against apartheid inspired Alex to help with the construction of a new society in South Africa.

‘I was struck by the shocking levels of illiteracy arising out of the lack of adequate education during the apartheid years,’ Alex explains. ‘I was convinced that the disadvantaged majority would only ever be able to reach their full potential if they could fully enjoy the benefits of education, benefits which require the prerequisite of literacy.’


Working as a volunteer with Volunteer Reading Help in the UK showed Alex a model of literacy support which could be taken to South Africa at a comparatively low cost, but it took time for the project to get off the ground.


Early in 2005, Alex met Dee Cawcutt, the Principal of Muizenberg Junior School, just outside Cape Town. Dee offered to put her school forward as the first for what would become the help2read programme. The children, aged 5-12, are selected by class teachers as being those, other than children with special needs, perceived as most in need of assistance. They read and play literacy games with their volunteer helper, working in the school library or a quiet place outside the classroom, supported by help2read’s resource boxes full of interesting and beautiful books.

Alex takes up the story:


‘In the summer of 2005 I persuaded my daughter to come back from Washington DC, to be trained at VRH and to go to Cape Town to set up the programme. She arrived in Cape Town in early November 2005 and quickly set about recruiting volunteers wherever she could. On 1 February 2006, six trained volunteers started at Muizenberg Junior School.’


Within weeks the school was reporting unprecedented change in the pupils on the programme, ‘from being completely shut down to becoming happily involved in school life and the excitement of learning.’


The early volunteers for help2read were, like those of VRH in the UK, often middle-class people eager to share the benefits of their education and make a contribution to society. In South Africa, this group continues to provide a significant minority of volunteers – but a great change has come about from 2006, when help2read began recruiting from among the parents of a township school.


This proved very successful and quickly became the model for most help2read volunteer recruitment. Alex explains: ‘The volunteers are the literate parents of children at the same school as the children they are helping and are able to achieve equally impressive results with the children as those we gained at Muizenberg. Volunteers also benefit from the empowerment that they experience in becoming a respected member of the school community and with the success which they achieve with the children they are helping.’


help2read has already helped over 5000 South African primary school children to become literate. ‘In every single case,’ says Alex, ‘these children would have been early drop outs from the education system without the help our volunteers have given them. Now each one of them has the opportunity to go all the way through the system, to university and beyond.’


help2read’s sights for the future are also set high. Having adapted the VRH model, developed in a wealthy Western country, to a South African setting, the help2read team are planning to extend their programme to all African countries where English is the medium for education.


‘We hope to open our first programme outside South Africa by 2012,’ says Alex. ‘In the longer term, we believe that the help2read concept can be replicated in other languages and can be a major part of the solution to the literacy problem that exists in all developing countries.’


To find out more and get involved, visit http://help2read.org/

>Running for Reading at Herne Bay Infant School

Mechanical Dolphin

>Busy times at Books and Adventures – but we still need your help to raise just £510 for a Reading Helper at Herne Bay Infant School.


Tomorrow I’m speaking at a VRH event in Kent, the county where I first discovered this amazing charity – and I’ll be dropping in to the brilliant school whose pupils need your help.


Our fundraising target is tantalisingly close – as is the race; my aching legs will find the end of all this training on 24th October a welcome relief – so every penny counts.


Click on the widget below or go to justgiving.com/booksadventures…

>Books Around the World with Outside In – Children’s Book Week Event

Mechanical Dolphin

>Just a quick reminder that next week is UK National Children’s Book Week.

This year’s theme is ‘Books Around the World’, and to kick things off, the team at Outside In are holding an event at the Free Word Centre, Farringdon, on Monday 4th October at 5pm.

Alexandra and Ed from Outside In will be talking about the ‘Reading Around the World’ programme which has successfully encouraged UK children to read more books in translation.

You can find my May 2010 interview with Ed here and more on Children’s Book Week at the Outside In website, here.

Have a great weekend, all.

>Reach Out and Read at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Centre

Mechanical Dolphin

>Staying with our transatlantic theme after our feature on San Francisco’s Reading Partners, this week finds Books and Adventures in New York to find out more about the Reach Out and Read (ROR) programme at the New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Centre.

ROR is a national literacy and healthcare programme which operates across the USA. Under the scheme, volunteers read stories to children in clinic waiting rooms, paediatricians advise carers on the importance of reading aloud, and children visiting their doctor from the ages of six months to five years receive a new book to take home at every check-up.

Paediatricians and educators working together founded the programme in Boston in 1989; in 1997, Reach Out and Read came to New York Presbyterian Columbia Medical Centre, serving families in largely Spanish-speaking areas of Northern Manhattan.

Over 13 years the programme has grown from a single site in Washington Heights to cover five clinics, serving more than 10,000 children and distributing nearly 20,000 books per year.

Volunteers commit at least six months a year to engaging children in literacy activities and demonstrating to carers that sharing books with a child helps them to bond and communicate with adults. Volunteers’ interactions in the waiting room can inspire parents and carers to support their children’s literacy at home.

Paediatricians and hospital administrators have shown equal dedication to the programme, reflecting their belief that exposing young children to high quality, age-appropriate literature will not only encourage a passion for books, but also have a positive impact on growth and development.

‘Paediatricians do not merely give books to their patients as lollypops at the end of a well-child visit,’ says Emelin Martinez, Literacy Co-ordinator at New York Presbyterian. ‘They provide parents with advice and strategies they can use to enhance their child’s social, cognitive and motor skills development in using books that are developmentally appropriate.’

ROR as a programme takes a long-term view of literacy support: as part of care visits throughout early childhood, doctors see the same children two to four times a year.

‘Advice from each encounter builds on the last encounter and at the end of the five years, each child has a library of 12-14 high-quality, culturally, developmentally and linguistically appropriate books,’ explains Dr. Mary McCord, medical director of the programme. Many volunteers establish a bond with patients who attend multiple well-child visits. As the average wait in a clinic runs to two hours, volunteers have plenty of time to engage children with pleasurable and constructive reading sessions on each visit!

What really marks ROR out from other literacy programmes we’ve discussed on Books and Adventures is its pre-emptive approach. Where many schemes operate with a remedial focus, ROR aims to prevent literacy problems before they start. There is a focus on delivering anticipatory guidance to the carers of young children, promoting literacy and healthy development from as young as six months.

Emelin Martinez explains how this attention to literacy benefits a community’s health and well-being: ‘From a population perspective, poverty is the single most important determinant of health. Education has proven to be the only strategy to successfully move people out of poverty. Promoting literacy is one of the most important tasks that a paediatrician has with their patients early in life, to ensure that children can become healthy and successful adults.’

The ROR team at Presbyterian are proud of the positive impact their programme has had on families in Northern Manhattan. Caregivers have reported that watching their children’s interaction with volunteers has inspired them to implement the strategies seen in the clinic when they get home.

Emelin Martinez says, ‘On many occasions, I’ve witnessed parents reading to their children in the waiting rooms of our clinics, which demonstrates that parents’ behaviour regarding early literacy is changing. For some families, ROR books are the first books they have in the home. For others, parental illiteracy emerges as a problem when giving out these books and encourages caregivers to attend literacy programmes themselves. For paediatricians, it is touching to see how children ask for the books as soon as they come in, changing a long standing tradition of having stickers or candy be the reward for a medical visit.’

Huge thanks to Emelin Martinez and Dr. Mary McCord for joining Books and Adventures to discuss a programme which reflects such a positive and progressive approach to literacy and well-being. You can find out more at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/residency/peds/new_compeds_site/programs_ror.html

>Birmingham Half Marathon / Volunteer Reading Help Fundraising Update

Mechanical Dolphin

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As regular readers will know, I’m running the Birmingham Half Marathon on 24th October to raise funds for Volunteer Reading Help, after I found out that they need just £510 to fund their helper for 2010-11 at Herne Bay Infant School in Kent.
Well, I’m glad to say we’re now more than three quarters of the way there, thanks to some generous donations.

In particular I’d like to thank staff and customers of the Anne Tudor fashion shop in Stratford-upon-Avon, who worked hard to boost my coffers prior to the run!

Just a few hundred pounds will pay for a year’s worth of one-to-one work with the children who most need support with their reading skills, so please click on the justgiving widget at the bottom of this post or head straight to justgiving.com/booksadventures to help out this marvellous charity.