children’s culture

Ever since I worked as a preschool teacher in the 1970s, I have been fascinated by the relationship between toys and stories.  I remember observing children at this preschool using toys to create their own stories.  Sometimes toys functioned as characters in their stories, or they used toys as props in complex narratives that they made up on the spot while engaging in pretend play.  Sometimes the children brought in toys based on characters from movies or television shows.  I remember a girl who liked to bring to school several finger puppets representing characters from Sesame Street. She carried these finger puppets in a Sesame Street lunch box.  Around Christmastime, another child brought in his mother’s tattered copy of a Little Golden Book called Santa’s Toy Shop, and he asked me to read it to him over and over again.  His mother told me to be careful with the book because it was one of her favorite books from her own childhood.

A few years ago, I was talking to Kathy Merlock Jackson, my friend and frequent collaborator, about the narrative elements associated with toys, and I found out that she shares my interest in this topic.  We decided to edit a book about toys and stories, and we set to work contacting potential contributors and editing their submissions. I am pleased to announce that this book, which is titled Once Upon a Toy: Essays on the Interplay Between Stories and Playthings, will be published later this month.  Kathy and I are excited that the book is already listed as an “Amazon Hot New Release” in the category of children’s literature criticism. The contributors to Once Upon a Toy come from around the world, but Charlotte writers are well represented. In addition to my essay on “The Winnie-the-Pooh Toys and Their Immigration to America,” the collection includes two other essays by Charlotte writers.

Paula T. Connolly, a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, contributes an essay titled “From Luxo to Lou: Toys in Pixar Shorts and the Search for Meaning.” In this essay, she analyzes the roles that toys play in several of Pixar’s short films, including Luxo Jr. (1986), Red’s Dream (1987), The Tin Toy (1988), Knick Knack (1989), Geri’s Game (1997), Sanjay’s Super Team (2015), and Lou (2017). As Paula points out, these short films served as a springboard for Pixar’s famous Toy Story films.  In her essay, she argues that these short films “provided creative opportunities for Pixar to explore the often complex and varied roles that toys play in our lives.”

Maya Socolovsky, who is also a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, contributes an essay titled “The Edge of Play: Belonging and Borderlands in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Picture Book Super Cilantro Girl/La Superniña del Cilantro.”  In her essay, Maya focuses on a 2003 bilingual picture book by Juan Felipe Herrera. She examines how Esmeralda, the young girl who is the central character in this picture book, incorporates a found plaything, in this case a bouquet of cilantro, in her fantasies. Esmeralda imagines that the bouquet of cilantro gives her superpowers, which she uses to help rescue her mother who has been detained at the border between Mexico and the United States. In her essay, Maya writes, “The bouquet of cilantro… becomes, through her imagination, all at once a thing of play, quest, and adventure, as well as a vehicle for rehearsing activism, social justice, and change.”

For readers who want to know more about Once Upon a Time, please click on the following link:  https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/once-upon-a-toy/

Paula’s and Maya’s contributions to Once Upon a Toy underscore for me the important scholarship that is coming out of Storied Charlotte in the field of children’s culture studies.