I am good in libraries, in bookish spaces. I understand how they work and I’m comfortable in them. It’s a skill honed over many, many years of being bookish. A commitment to the spine, to the folded edge.
I am equally conscious that those spaces that I inhabit are, quite often, full of privilege. A library can be an intimidating space. It should never be, and we should stand against such demarcation of public spaces and fight against the barriers established therein. But it can be intimidating.
Every new is new, until it’s old. Every fear is fear until it’s known.
I’m a writer, a critic, a student, and yet I find myself defending that too much in some spheres. I research children’s literature. I find it an important worthy topic. I find it fun, relevant. Exciting. And yet: pauses.
Somebody told me the other day that there are only two things which never let you down: music and books.
I think they’re right, but I think that statement needs something else adding onto it. Music, and books, and story. That last word, that great intangible edge that defines our lives. That we perform, every day, with ever step we take and whether we choose to go to Asda or Tesco, the bus or the train.
Story is in everything, quite clearly. Define a story for me, quickly, loosely. Your first instinct. For me, I return to the idea of beginnings. Endings. A start, an end. Something in between. It’s a structure that was taught to me in junior school. It’s a structure that left me in tears once, in front of the class, as I wasn’t able to follow it.
Instinct. Patterns. Returning to what you know, even when it’s not comfortable. Even when it’s not right. Yours. Familiarity. A regularity of rhythm, of expectation. The prince needs to find his one true love. The evil needs defeating. We need our patterns. Our familiar spaces.
Narrative; that great drum beat. We march to it, we echo to it, we search for it. We love, lie, live to it.
I study children’s literature because it is the drum. It is the first drum, and often the loudest. The most present. The most recurrent. The story that’s passed down through the ages, from parent to child, from shelf to hand. These are the beats which define us, which make us. And when we know them, we know them intimately. Lovingly.
I had an argument about a film once. Independence Day. Aliens, explosions and Will Smith. It’s a film made by numbers, almost, if you break it down to the morphological level. The level of breath, of beat.
Doesn’t make it a bad film though.
The narrative of Independence Day is one that fills the gaps. Same with a thousand other films, novels. Story. The constancy of story, the way it fills us and edges our bricks with a neat and solid mortar. Being given the skills to recognise those narratives is a gift; and one that I live to share, every day.
Learning how to read is a superpower. Learning how to read the markers of story; the tropes, the archetypes, the figures that make the story what it is, is also a superpower. Sometimes learning to read isn’t enough. It takes you to the edges, the ring fenced space of books that are suitable for you and the great morass of those that aren’t. The tempting otherness. The wild beyond.
We look for patterns as humans; we exist for rhythm and pattern and structure.
Working with, talking about, living with children’s literature allows us to interrogate what those patterns are and to enable readers with the strength to challenge them. Us. Everything.
Defy the fears.
And change the world.
Daisy May Johnson 
As a musician who is also a story-listener I agree absolutely. And I also see much of music as story too, whether it’s classical or folk, dance or symphonic, pop or world music. It’s narrative as much as pretty much all the performing arts are — ballet, musicals, mime, drama, pantomime, opera — because they require the dimension of time to unfold. Even photos, paintings, doodles, sculpture are narrative art because whether it takes you a split second or whether you linger to observe you are searching for meaning, for pattern, for order, a story. The drumbeat then is like the pulsing of a heart, it’s the essence of life. It’s more than a privilege, it’s our being.
Agreed. “The story that’s passed down” is vital, particularly today when everything seems to be here and gone in the blink of a tweet. I recently became involved in oral histories and there is something about the voice, speaking of life stories and history that is incredibly moving. A sense of immortality and the echo of the drum beat.