"What is even more surprising is when readers say: 'My God, you must have known my mother!' or 'My daughter told me the same thing!' or 'That's my experience
exactly!' " (Translation.)

Ginette Anfousse. "Les livres que j'écris, comment et pourquoi." Des Livres et des Jeunes. Vol. 5, no. 13, Autumn 1982, p. 8.

"During twenty five years of conscientious teaching I never did find a test to measure the value of either mere reading or of literature itself. I only know, even now, that students, who have been exposed to, involved in, moved by, touched by, seduced by the magic of words, seem to be better listeners, sit still longer, have longer attention spans, tend to trust their own creativity, get kind eyes, have larger vocabularies, tend away from bigotries, in fact are generally nicer, more developed humans than the ones who have never recognised the deepest part of themselves distilled in poetry and works of fiction."

Jan Truss in a letter written for the exhibition.

And . . . by the time they do set out, the books  --  with their tales of places not yet actually visited (the farm of The New Baby Calf, the Irrawaddy, Prince Edward Island)  --  will have shown them some of the places they might be going. The books will have pointed to limits transcended, vistas not otherwise even dreamed.

The books will not only have shown. They will also have given strength. The children off in corners with Claude Aubry's Le Loup de Noël or Maurice Gagnon's Simon or Marianne Brandis's The Quarter-Pie Window are not just travellers, they are the sharers of others' lives. Ask them and they will tell you  --  how they wept and laughed and trembled, how they felt deeply all the important moments "like we were living it."

On the one hand, then, they will have been exploring  --  experimenting in a context of perfect safety with all sorts of responses not their own. They will have been finding out what it is like to walk in the skin of someone less rash or someone braver; to be the class clown, the daredevil, the picked-on. Consciously or unconsciously out of all this, they will have been accepting and rejecting, considering the elements of their own nature that are more or less desirable, nurturing the parts of them they have so far found no space for in the world.

On the other hand, through all the tears and fears and laughter, they will have been confirming their own experience; knowing it as part of something extending out beyond themselves. In the process, they will have been discovering that they have access to all the strength of all the ages; that they bear within their beings all the great vastnesses that are our human resource.

The significance of this access may perhaps best be summed up by two stories. The first is taken from Pierre Berton's book Vimy and involves a young gunner who found the courage to go out into No-Man's Land on behalf of a friend because he had in his head the line from a poem by Robert Service that says: "A friend's last need is a thing to heed." ² The second is about a five-year-old walking alone through the darkness of a night-time wood. She explained she had managed it by reciting Little Red Riding Hood to herself, over and over. ³ This may seem an odd choice in the circumstances  --  unless of course we remember that really Little Red Riding Hood is a story of horrors battled and beaten; of how a person might survive.

Then perhaps we will take into ourselves the facts that although Lucy Maud Montgomery may have been hiding, she was also discovering a life where kindness and caring were still possible; that in keeping off the ice, Roch Carrier was giving himself a way to explore the potentials for contributing through the talents that are his own.

¹ Jean Little, Little by Little: A Writer's Education (Markham, Ont.: Viking, 1987), p. 66.

² Pierre Berton, Vimy (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, c1986), p. 280.

³ Recounted in Aidan Chambers, Book-talk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children (London: The Bodley Head, 1985), p. vii.