Emily Pohl-Weary

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The research I did for my Master of Arts in Children’s Literature thesis is composed of two connecting parts: an academic essay (the research portion) and an exploration of the process of writing two narrative picturebook biographies (referring to original manuscripts written by me). Picturebook is written as a compound word throughout this thesis (Bader, 1970). The thesis begins with a historical overview of the picturebook format, then focuses on narrative nonfiction picturebook biographies. The two authors used to illustrate this form are William Nicholson and Wanda Gág, who were selected for their contributions to the modern picturebook format in England and the United States of America. More specifically, I examine Nicholson’s book Clever Bill, published in 1926, and Gág’s book Millions of Cats, published in 1928, both of which are still in print to this day.While working on this thesis, I wrote manuscripts for two original narrative biographical picturebooks based on Nicholson and Gág’s lives. I examine the process of researching and writing my manuscripts, which I titled William’s Suitcase and Draw On, Draw Ever, in an exegesis paper. The manuscripts I wrote pay homage to the authors’ creative contributions to the form while encapsulating elements of their life story and journey as artists and authors.William’s Suitcase highlights the world of Nicholson, a graphic artist and classical painter, who had a penchant for capturing the simplicities of childhood. Draw On, Draw Ever is a celebration of Gág, who pushed boundaries in her art, combining elements of folklore with surreal landscapes in the creation of her books. My research contributes to broader discussions about the authors and illustrators whose work contributed to the picturebook format we know today as well as the particular elements and challenges associated with writing narrative picturebook biographies.

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Witches, evil queens, and wicked stepmothers haunt the pages of children’s literature, these monstrous women poised and ready to poison, punish, or bake maidens in ovens. Between dead mothers, evil stepmothers, and the occasional mute grandmother, the woman who mothers is either a negative figure or an invisible one, time either curdling her into something wicked or erasing her entirely.In this hybrid thesis, I aim to assert that this vilification of older women not only represents deeply rooted fears of women’s bodies, but of women’s experiences of time as well. In my academic paper, I reflect on the connection between magic and maternity in the two middle-grade fairy tale retellings, "The Grace of Wild Things" by Heather Fawcett and "The Girl Who Drank the Moon" by Kelly Barnhill, analyzing how both novels use witchcraft to critique the widely accepted narratives of monstrous mothers found in traditional fairy tales. In the excerpt of my young adult fairy tale retelling, The Bear King, I retell the Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun, and West of the Moon”, exploring how the intersection of female monstrosity and female subjection is most prevalent in fairy tales which utilize the animal bridegroom motif, where a marriage between a human and animal takes place.Despite all the stifling morals, harsh punishments, and unrealistic expectations for both old and young women, fairy tales remain a staple in children’s literature, both in their original forms as well as in their retellings. And there, hidden under centuries of dark forests and muttered between evil spells, those monstrous women wait: “We are still here,” they seem to say. “Are you ready to listen?” With this thesis, I hope to answer their question with a loud and defiant yes.

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This excerpt from a young adult hybrid novel, ZeeZee and Me, deals with the impact of divorce and intergenerational trauma on youth mental health as the protagonists Isabelle and Zeke navigate the challenges of puberty while attempting to find belonging. The story is told in alternating first person perspective. Isabelle, who has an auditory processing disorder that alienates her from her peers, falls in with a group of troublesome teens after moving from Montréal to Vancouver in the aftermath of her parents’ separation and while establishing a new persona, she makes a series of poor decisions. In parallel fashion, Zeke turns to risk-taking and substance-use to escape from his abusive father and unwelcome stepfather. The worrisome trajectory of both characters’ lives highlights the notion that without a supportive family, a teenager will become prone to unhealthy coping mechanisms. ZeeZee and Me intertwines visual text and graphic novel chapters to represent the artistic outlets that the characters employ as modes of self-expression. Isabelle is both a photographer and visual artist, and her art is her only constant friend until she meets Zeke. Zeke moonlights as an online comic artist and writes the webcomic Zatoichi in an attempt to make sense of his life. The comic is about an ancestor-spirit of ZZ (Zeke’s alter-ego) who takes ZZ back in time to visit his family at different times in the past while unlocking secrets about his father’s traumatic childhood. Creating the comic is a way for Zeke to explore and question his father’s intergenerational trauma as he begins to piece together information about his Japanese side of the family and how it was impacted by events at the close of World War II. Isabelle first meets Zeke when he defends her against his peer group, then again when he loses his best friend, and finally in art therapy class. Art is the salvation for both characters, art provides solace from the misguided adults in their lives, and art ultimately leads them to find community and each other.

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This excerpt from a young adult novel, Wish You Were Gone, deals with topics of grief and memory as they intertwine with immigrant experiences and movements towards the global north. The story follows eighteen-year-old, Colombian-American, Maria Molina Herrera, after the passing of her maternal grandmother, Abuelita Lucero. Not to worry, though, because María doesn’t have to grieve. She’ll see her Abuelita again. Not in an, “I’ll see you in my dreams” or supernatural signs kind of way. María’s family can tether the souls of the departed to the living world, essentially bonding her blood and family marriage for eternity. So, everything is great because Abuelita Lucero will return and life can go on as normal. Except not really. María’s connection to her grandmother has been severed by none other than Abuelita herself. For María to be able to talk to her grandmother’s soul, Abuelita had to leave an item in her will for María to use as a conduit. Out of petty resentment over an argument, Abuelita Lucero didn’t leave anything for María’s parents, little brother, or María herself. Confused and hurt by her grandmother’s decision, María decides to take matters into her own hands, not only wanting to fully understand Abuelita’s reasons for doing this, but ultimately fix the rift post-mortem. She enlists the help of both dead and living relatives to undertake the bureaucratic process of inserting her family into Abuelita’s will (yes, even the dead can’t escape legalities) and, in the process, discovers out family secrets that might have been better left alone and now threaten to irreversibly break her family.

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Immigrants make up almost a quarter of the Canadian population (Statistics Canada, 2017), but the emphasis on success and integration in immigration discourse overshadows the difficult aftermath of relocation for many immigrant families, especially on immigrant children. After all, “if the promise of citizenship is offered as a promise of happiness, then you have to demonstrate that you are a worthy recipient of its promise” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 133). However, many factors make it challenging for even families to discuss these complexities with each other. In this thesis, I will first outline the intricate nuances of the changes in immigrant family dynamics, then illustrate the importance of establishing a space where immigrant children can fully express and process their experiences and emotions in order to write a narrative that transcends their identities as ones solely defined by the hardships and trauma of immigration. Then, I will discuss why the epistolary form, with its intimate and candid nature, can provide this space for migrant children, and how its representation of consciousness can be an effective tool in constructing truth and identity when it comes to narrating migrant child experiences.

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Scholarly discourse surrounding Francesca Lia Block’s novels tends to spotlight the author’s interrogation of pedagogies concerning sexual trauma. Lee A. Talley and Elizabeth Marshall, for instance, argue that Block’s texts invite the reader to rethink conventional approaches to sexual assault narratives. Block’s texts shift the critical attention placed originally on the victims of sexual abuse onto the victims’ male aggressors, whether that be the “skanky” (Block 102) rapacious father figure that “Wolf” recuperates from traditional fairytales (Marshall 218), or the cultural forces that enable predatory figures to both construct and enact their sexual fantasies in the first place (Talley 119). Like Marshall and Talley, my thesis examines cultural eroticisms of girlhood in Block’s work, attending to the predatory man’s imagination of eroticized girlhood. Specifically, my thesis focuses on three tales in The Rose and the Beast — “Beast,” “Snow,” and “Charm" — and explores the male characters’ sexualization of girlhood by emphasizing their engagement with a critically overlooked feature of the collection: the garden. First, I situate Sarah Dinter’s understanding of the literary garden as an expression of adult constructions of childhood within a psychoanalytic context, arguing, through Freud’s theory of dreamwork, that flowers in the garden function as objects of displacement through which the father in “Beast” and the gardener in “Snow” repress their pedophilic fantasies about their daughters. My second chapter focuses on “Charm” and considers the rapacious father figure’s pedophilia through a critical race and post-colonial perspective. Merging James R. Kincaid’s theory of childhood as an erotic lens with Anne Anlin Cheng’s work on racial melancholy and cultural constructions of the “yellow woman” (415), I interpret Pop’s photographs as potent expressions of the infantilization underlying the erotic racialization of the Asian woman — a racialization that both disavows and retains the character Rev as an ethnic other.

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For nearly fifty years, science fiction creators and posthumanist scholars have been imagining what our future environments alongside androids and cyborgs will look like. While some see technology as a threat to humanity (Francis Fukuyama), others envision new forms of subjectivity (N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway) that can be derived from the “decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates” (Cary Wolfe xvi). Whether these narratives depict utopic or dystopic futures, as humans travel into space, it is not just the final frontier they are discovering, but also their posthumanity. The cartoon Final Space (2018), a space opera parody with a high appeal to young adult audiences, depicts a posthuman future where humans and artificial lifeforms co-exist within the same environments. However, it is not without distinct liberal humanist hierarchies where biological life is valued over that of artificial life. Using a posthumanist framework, I explore the liberal humanist hierarchies present between the human and robotic characters within Final Space and examine how the show’s use of parody interrogates this anthropocentric mindset through a study of three robotic characters. The S.A.M.E.S. defy their sameness when their brief moments of individuality upset liberal humanist hierarchies; yet, they all perish within the show’s first season. Using theories of artificial morality, KVN depicts an autonomous moral agent whose existence confounds various posthuman boundaries, particularly those surrounding life and death. Lastly, HUE’s change from the AI of the Galaxy One spaceship into a small robotic shell aligns with Hayles’ argument about the necessity to consider embodiment for the posthuman subject. Using Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang as a comparative text, this thesis examines the hierarchy of AIs and artificial bodies in Final Space through the lens of posthuman ethics and critical disability studies.

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In Eurocentric culture, misused reductionist handles are manifestations of reductionism’s mutation from a specialized tool to examine limited aspects of the world into a worldview of its own, a fragmented epistemology “predicated on the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances” (Latour 474-475). As someone whose naïve belief in the Eurocentric concept of Truth was challenged by exposure to Indigenous ways of knowing, I examine in this thesis the consequences of this misuse of reductionist handles by contrasting Eurocentric Canadian with Indigenous Canadian literature. In “Royal Beatings,” Alice Munro depicts how theatricality, a reductionist handle, is internalized by characters who thereby reduce themselves to culturally created roles; in “Miles City, Montana,” she depicts how idealism, another reductionist handle, is internalized by characters who then face irreconcilable contradictions in reality. On the other hand, the Nuu-chah-nulth origin story “How Son of Raven Captured the Day,” presented in E. Richard Atleo’s Tsawalk, uses theatricality as a holistic rather than reductionist tool that emphasizes the importance of maintaining respect for all. Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water also portrays the conflict between Eurocentric and Indigenous epistemologies through its emphasis on contextualization and use of water as a powerful holistic symbol, thus clarifying water’s rebellion against reductionism in “Miles City, Montana.” The concept of misused reductionist handles is useful for future research on reductionism’s epistemological influence, which can be guided by examining not only the differences between the Eurocentric worldview and other worldviews, but their intersections as well.

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Children and teens can—and often do—look for representation of their lives in children’s literature. An emerging area in children’s fiction is the inclusion of transgender and non-binary characters. However, these fictional characters are usually teens, although increasingly, children are being included. There are few works that include transgender and non-binary parents, even though they are part of our society, leading to a gap in children’s literature. Notably, Happy Families, the earliest mainstream children’s novel with a transgender parent, was only published in 2012. In this exegesis, I explore the research strategies and creative process involved in developing my children’s middle grade novel, The Fractured Life of Becca Crease, which features a key relationship between a teenaged protagonist and her non-binary parent. I discuss how transgender and non-binary parents are portrayed in published English language children’s literature and materials in North America. Additionally, I explain how my process of writing a contemporary novel was informed by understanding how children and teens may experience a parent’s gender transition, particularly within a family resiliency framework, and how mainstream society’s awareness of gender identity and associated language is rapidly shifting. While there are currently very few stories portraying families with transgender or non-binary parents, highlighting this gap may bring awareness to writers and publishers concerned with improving diversity in children’s publishing.

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No abstract available.