Last week I took a few trains to Worcester Massachusetts to study history and drink seltzer at the American Antiquarian Society. The AAS posted about a two day symposium on “Historic Children’s Voices” a few months ago on the Association for Library Service to Children lists and I was hooked by this new to me idea of finding children’s writing in archives. They have a very strong video channel so you can watch all the great talks yourself, but you won’t get to make not small talk with Koritha Mitchell.
The title of this post comes from Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Literature, who explained to me that she had been fighting for academic recognition, high standards and funding for research and processing and preserving collections of children’s literature for 37 years and was not bitter yet. The bleeding edge is going beyond the work of adults for children and finding the children’s work and experience in their own words and actions. Librarians can be fighters for freedom and justice in pink jackets and hallowed halls, in cataloguing records and in grant meetings, and in the sources we provide young scholars. And we must be.
On the train up I listened to Tiya Miles’s book All That She Carried and worked on my little stitches while thinking about mothers, history and “primary sources.” The symposium gave me lots more to think about, especially reconsidering the framing “silences” which the organizers had chosen to emphasize the inequities in what is preserved in archives. In the Q and A a scholar pointed out that was part of a deficit mindset, focused on what wasn’t there instead of what was and that framing can cause harm to young people and discourage all of us. We mourn the voices and individuals who weren’t able to write or create or whose work was not preserved or valued due to misogyny and white supremacy and other grinding prejudices. But we can’t let that mourning be all we do or block us from seeing and creating positive abundance and new ways of learning and understanding.
More adventures to come this week.
Fly Into the Mystery 