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The Zena Sutherland lecture: and still the story.

Article Excerpt
The day approaches when the speaker who has the honor of this podium will not remember Zena Sutherland personally, but the writers of my generation knew her, and like every writer since, I have a career that owes her a debt. For all of us who write for the young and the half-grown; for all of us who believe that picture-book illustration had better not be second-rate art; for all of us who believe that childhood is a jungle, not a garden; for all of us who believe the story still stands because fiction can be truer than fact, Zena Sutherland remains both godmother and midwife, with her neat cuffs turned back and plenty of hot water on the boil.

It still matters to us here in the twenty-first century that the great revolution in books for the young, the great turning-away from the parochial sanctimony of before, the great revolution of the young themselves, coincided with the high noon of Zena's career. She was a university faculty member, but her field was "children's literature," and so she flew beneath the radar of the "political correctionists." In fact, she embodied Robert Conquest's famous axiom that "everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands."

With a cool asperity, she believed that the young deserve a well-crafted story--and that they could take it. That the narrative is a structure strong and supple enough to tell the traditional tale while tumbling taboos. That sentimentality is the enemy of both literature and politics. That you can pity the young or prepare them for the world, but you cannot do both.

When Robert Cormier spoke from this podium, he recalled that when she arranged to meet him at Midway Airport, Zena sang down the phone, "Be down to get you in a taxi, honey." Cormier wrote the signal young adult novel of the second half of the American twentieth century, The Chocolate War, a novel that will be read a century hence because it finds the pivotal moment in all our American history, that time--somewhere in the 1970s--when the balance tipped, and power passed from adults to the young. That time after which teachers had to defer to their students in order to keep their jobs. Cormier captured the epiphanic moment that Lord Byron called "fate changing horses." It was 1973. President Nixon abolished the military draft, thus removing the last adult constraint upon the young, and adolescence turned...

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