Where The Wild Things Are

When Maurice Sendak was a young boy, he went every week with his mother to Sunday dinner at a relative’s house.   He remembered being both reluctant and terrified to go.  Just thinking he was being ornery, his mother impatiently dragged her young son to the weekly meal.  Sendak says that in that old Victorian house, the living room was dark and foreboding with thick velvet curtains that blocked out the light, and heavy omnious-looking wood paneling covered the walls like a dungeon.  As he stood in the middle of the room, a collection of his elderly aunts and uncles surrounded him, perched in chairs around the perimeter, their canes leaning on the armrests.   As he was required to go from one ancient relative to another to greet each one, their seemingly distorted and wrinkled faces with enormous noses loomed close to him.  And as they pinched his cheek, they whispered in his ear, “I could just eat you up.”  And indeed, the young Sendak was quite convinced that they could.

You NEVER know what a child is afraid of, Sendak emphasized once in an interview I read.  It may make no sense to you at all.

And so, his unusual tales, based on his own childhood experiences, worked out those fears and truths, perhaps in bizarre ways, to help children conquer their own everyday monsters in the real world.

Stories are vital in developing a child’s moral imagination.  A child can hear your admonitions – do this, don’t do that, this is good, this is bad.  But unless they see and experience those truths in stories, a child is left on his own to struggle through the real world.  Stories build the imagination, helping children work things out and discover truth about the world in a place that is safe and secure, often in your lap on the reading chair.  Indeed, even Jesus used stories to drive home the truth.

“Fairy tales and fantasy stories transport the reader into other worlds that are fresh with wonder, surprise, and danger.  They challenge the reader to make sense out of those other worlds, to navigate his way through them, and to imagine himself in the place of the heroes and heroines who populate those worlds,” says author Vigen Guroian, author of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken A Child’s Moral Imagination

If Sendak’s mother had understood what he was frightened of, waggled her finger at him, demanding, “Don’t be afraid,” it may have even made him more wary.  But a story could have made him laugh at his fears. 

And that is why he wrote.

Children’s author Maurice Sendak died today at the age of 83.  His creative mind taught generations of children through monsters in disguise.