An important precedent
Way back in the 1980s, when I was still teaching and later working to support other teachers, we were blessed with a quite brilliant resource book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdock by American author/illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (perhaps best known for The Polar Express).
It was a picture book of sorts, but not a story as such. Rather it held within each page a myriad potential stories. It was a series of full page illustrations, hauntingly strange and often rather surreal in quality, each with just an enigmatic title and a single sentence of text. What it provided was the most amazingly potent stimulus for talk, for storytelling, for talk for writing, and for imaginative story writing itself. I cannot count the number of times I used it to great effect with school classes, on CPD courses and recommended it to colleagues. (Incidentally, it was re-issued here in the UK in 2011 by Andersen Press and seems to be still available in this edition.)
A new doorway into the imagination
Now we have a wonderful new addition to this area of resource, the rather more explicitly titled The Storyteller’s Handbook. It has been created by talented Australian artist/illustrator Elise Hurst who some in this country may best know for her illustrated edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In fact, this new book has a remarkably insightful, and indeed moving, foreword by Neil Gaiman himself. It is currently published by a US company called Compendium, but is easy enough to source on the internet*.
The Storyteller’s Handbook has a small number of pages with inspirational quotes:
‘Our imaginations are not limited by what is, they can soar into what if.’
‘Stories are doorways. . . All doors are open to us, especially when we make them ourselves.’
‘Every new beginning, every new path begins with a single mind daring to believe that things could be different.’
However, most of the book is crammed with the most incredible double-page drawings, which open these very doors and indeed set imaginations soaring. A few are comparatively simple and amusing (like the penguin aiming to fly with a colourful kite strapped to its back) but most are detailed, complex, and multi-layered, stunningly beautiful in their own right but also shockingly surreal.They jerk us out of our conventional vision of the world and open up a myriad potential ways of seeing and thinking afresh. Many combine both human figures and animals, but in amazingly different proportion and relationship; they are are pictures which need to be seen to be believed (or not believed).
The Storyteller’s Handbook is another truly wondrous thing.
My golden trio
Were I still teaching Key Stage 2, I would categorically want these two books (together with Aaron Becker’s Journey trilogy) in my classroom and I cannot recommend them strongly enough. They would also, I’m sure, be enormously valuable to those children who love to write their own stories at home.
In my mind, they now form a golden triangle for inspiring imaginative talk and writing (without constraining it), portals into other worlds - and perhaps new versions of our own.
Note:
*I strongly advocate buying books from independent bookshops whenever possible, or high street chain bookshops as second best. However, I have to admit that buying on the internet does allow easy (and usually fairly quick) access to books published in the USA.
