Notes on Dr. Maria Tatar's Lecture: “A 'Damn Mob' of Scribbling Girls”

    As someone encountering Dr. Maria Tatar’s work for the first time during this event, I was not disappointed! Dr. Tatar is a research professor at Harvard University and specializes in children’s literature, modern German culture, and folklore. Her research includes authors like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, childhood reading and cultural studies, and folklore and mythology. Her most recent work, The Heroine with 1001 Faces, takes on the staggering yet hidden history of heroines, challenging the male-centric models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this latest publication, Dr. Tatar flips the script on what it means to be a “curious” young woman, emphasizing how these girls depart from the canon through their compassion and craft. Her interests culminated in the event titled “A ‘Damn Mob’ of Scribbling Girls: From Jo March to Starr Carter,” which explored girls from popular media and literature who find agency within domestic spaces and enact their power, not only to survive, but to care for others. 

Dr. Tatar began her lecture with images of warrior women – cinematic women who are dramatically armed and ready for battle. She highlights their strength that both ornaments and sustains their femininity. Whether glittering in golden armor or fitted in a flowing red dress while riding in a chariot, these young women embody a feminine power that defies the traditional domestic spaces they find themselves in. In this opening, Dr. Tatar introduces her argument: these girls, trained to accommodate themselves in a society of gendered propriety, rebel against dominant power structures through their craft. 

The first literary work Dr. Tatar introduces is Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women. However, she invokes the character Jo March through the film directed by Greta Gerwig (2019) instead of the novel. While Alcott captures all the dimensions of the domestic, the acts meant to make a home comfortable, Gerwig’s Jo March exuberantly displays how reading, writing, and acting are radical acts of rebellion. This emphasis on a young woman’s reach for autonomy allowed Dr. Tatar to identify the potential for heroism within domesticity. She identifies writing as a craft that provides an opportunity for heroism, an action that involves both curiosity and care. Tatar defines craft as cunning design, work that has been carried out in multiple modalities such as knitting, weaving, storytelling, or simply talking. 

In both the novel and the film, the heroes of the story are the fathers heading off to war while the women maintain the home space. Dr. Tatar urges us to ask: Who are our heroes? Our heroines? She grafts onto her argument the concept of the hero from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to assert that women are not the ones receiving the call to action. If anything, this persistence of men at the forefront of heroism has become the Hollywood narrative playbook. It becomes an easy correlation to see men returning from war as a literalized hero’s journey. However, Dr. Tatar reminds us that the return in the hero’s journey is always about healing. Here, in curious and caring spaces, is where women can no longer be silenced. 

The lecture took a poignant turn when Dr. Tatar connected her ideas with the COVID-19 lockdowns we have collectively experienced in the past two years. In lockdown, she notes, we were looking for heroes. We found them in our community caretakers, like doctors and nurses, childcare workers, and educators. More than anything, though, we encountered silence. Like the image of Philomena weaving her tapestry, the concept of heroism faces a cultural reboot during the COVID-19 pandemic. The investment in healing and care work, fields predominantly held by women, found a refreshed prioritization and attention from the public. Dr. Tatar turns to Carlos Fuentes and restates, “Writing is a struggle against silence.” Here, she draws a comparison to the strategy of silenced women. As mentioned before, craft becomes the strategy to find a voice. Through texts and textiles, women speak truth to power. 

One of the tenets of her work, curiosity, is seen as the cardinal sin of women while care is delegitimized on the basis of gender oppressive attitudes. Dr. Tatar moves from writing as a form of discovering identity and self actualization to a desire for immortality. This curiosity thus becomes a commitment to causes these young women are passionate about, concretizing their thoughts and ideas in written word. The literary text Dr. Tatar closes her lecture with is Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give. Through the protagonist, Starr Carter, Dr. Tatar realizes that self-actualization and a commitment to social causes are not mutually exclusive. From Anne of Green Gables to Matilda, Anne Frank to Harriet the Spy, the craft of writing becomes a mode of achieving an encounter with an empowered self, a political act that speaks truth to power. 

    I was very intrigued by Dr. Tatar’s inspirations for this work. One of the most compelling was Scheherazade, a major female character from One Thousand and One Nights who is also a scholar and reader. She is a storyteller, and known as a master of cliffhangers, who understands the seductive power of stories. Dr. Tatar also emphasizes that she is a survivor, ensuring that others will be saved and protected from the antagonist of her story. She also invokes the classic tales of Pandora and Eve, two young women whose bodies are sexualized and whose curiosity is read as carnal rather than intellectual. Through these figures, she calls on us to consider replacing empathy with curiosity, craft, and care. Rather than universalizing our characters or their experiences, Dr. Tatar invites us to raise critical awareness about the codes of gender that inform power in these texts and, ultimately, the way we perceive “domestic” activities as passive. As she states in the lecture, “readers often seek their mirrors in books.” Through the close reading Tatar promotes, we achieve tools for learning how to navigate our real world relationships via the representations we find in these stories and move with the mob of scribbling women. 

    Readers and writers in the audience also asked some very intriguing questions about Dr. Tatar’s work. Some listeners asked about the labor of our bodies, the work of our hands, and how to reconcile this with the public arena. Dr. Tatar invited us to compare Jo March with Starr Carter, and the modes they used to share their voices. While Jo March hand-wrote her thoughts, Starr Carter takes on a megaphone and a computer keyboard as powerful instruments for securing justice. Other listeners discussed what it means to “give up” one’s femininity in exchange for strength, or if femininity can be perceived as strength itself. Dr. Tatar invokes examples from modern film and media, like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross) or Snow White from Snow White and the Huntsmen (dir. Rupert Sanders) – both of these young women display strength while also being connected to poetry, song, and art. A few others brought up the question of rethinking passivity from past to present. We’re invited to look more deeply into domestic actions while understanding the circumstances of women like Jo March as narrow. Dr. Tatar inspired me to use that historical past to reimagine curiosity, craft, and care in today’s world. This reimagining allows us to reconstruct our imaging of girlhood while understanding our own writing as heroic.

DN

"Unhappy Ever After: When fairytales end badly" a lecture by Neil Philip

 

On Thursday, March 18th, the NCSCL was delighted to virtually host Neil Philip for his talk, “Unhappy Ever After: When fairytales end badly.” Well over a hundred listeners joined us through Zoom from both sides of the pond.

The topic that drew so many people to join us was tragic endings. Although most people have come to associate fairytales with the lighter iterations found in Disney adaptations, many of these tales originally end in grief and disappointment. For example, Philip describes how the “greatest of wish fulfillment tale type, Cinderella,” has evolved into a version that ends sadly: in a Brazilian version, Maria’s sister-turned-snake Labismina helps her to escape marriage to her own father but is forgotten when Maria marries a prince. Philip claims that “it is the lonely fate of Labismina that sticks in the mind, not the happy one of Princess Maria,” and goes on to reference Zuni and Eastern Indian versions of this tale with their own tragic endings. He acknowledges that there are also tales that purposefully twist listeners’ expectations of a happy ending via comedy, such as the “English gypsy variant of The Water of Life” told by Taimi Boswell.

He then transitions into a text that is much more familiar to the audience -- that of Little Red Riding Hood. Perrault’s 1697 version is the one with the question-and-answer dialogue that we recall, but in the Brothers Grimm iteration, Red Riding Hood is eaten along with her grandmother and a woodsman cuts them free from the wolf’s belly. Even more gruesome, however, are the French versions, one of which can be found in Catherine Orenstein’s Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked. In this tale, the wolf serves the girl her own grandmother’s flesh, but the young girl manages to escape by claiming she needed to relieve herself. Philip adds a factual tidbit here about the standard three-volume book wherein one can find over 2,000 folktale types across cultures -- Little Red Riding Hood is listed at ATU-333. 

Philip notes that even the Grimm brothers’ darker fairytales are a result of altering the original tales to be lighter. Grimm adds what Philip calls a “literary flourish” to the juniper tree tale, which concludes with a happy ending after “a story that is relentlessly miserable.” Dark themes and other key elements carry on through the iterations of stories. Hans Christian Andersen, the author of the original tales of many fairytales we know today, often writes with themes of grief, suffering, and disillusion. Philip explains that Andersen was rarely one to write happy endings, instead the iterations are “infused with melancholy” and he was “merciless to the characters'' in his tales. Although these happier stories are more popular, Philip quotes Oscar Wilde, “there are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.” Ultimately, Philip says, storytelling can be seen as an act of reparation for the world. 

Partway through the talk, an ill-intentioned attendee unmuted himself and interrupted with inappropriate comments. Thankfully, Natalie moved quickly to kick him out and reported him immediately. The lecture resumed without incident, though we were no longer able to admit latecomers. 

After Philip concluded his lecture, the chat was opened up for questions which came pouring in. A few of them, along with Philip’s responses, are listed here:

Q: Why do you think children are associated with fairy tales?

A: It started with the Grimm's; they called their collection “Children’s and Household Tales.” The children’s section was really quite short, but as they released newer editions, they realized children were being read these stories, so they softened quite a lot of the elements. Evil mothers become evil stepmothers, for instance. By the end of the 19th century, you get really influential series of books of fairy tales which are specifically aimed at children. The stories are made more acceptable for a child audience. So that’s the beginning of our assumption that fairy tales are expected to be enjoyed by children.

Q: What do you think is the appeal, aesthetic or psychological, of tragic fairy tales?

A: It’s the same as the appeal of horror films and gothic novels; it’s just part of human nature that people like sad things as well as happy things. It is fair to say that the majority of traditional fairy tales do end up with a happy ending, but they put the poor protagonists, both male and female, through the most terrible suffering and troubles along the way. So the happy ending, what Tolkien called the eucatastrophe, is won through suffering. 

Q: Why do you think people have edited the original fairy tales to something that can now be read to children?

A: The Victorians -- well, 19th century people; let’s not say Victorians since the Grimms’ first version came out in 1812 -- they were sort of prudish about what was suitable for children. It’s interesting what they thought was suitable, like terrible retributions at the end of fairy tales like Cinderella's sisters getting their eyes being pecked out by doves and people being made to dance in red hot shoes regarded as perfectly acceptable. But they tried to weed out the sexual elements. It’s just part of the transition of these stories from an inherited oral folkloric inheritance to a literary one. People like Angela Carter have tried to put back all the things that were taken out.

Q: It’s refreshing to hear a scholar identify ways their thinking has changed as you mention with the Fens tale or your conception of authenticity’s value or otherwise. Have you experienced any other major shifts in your thinking over the years, scholarly or otherwise?

A: That’s certainly an example when my mind has been changed by someone else’s scholarship. I’m very much more aware of the individual voice of the storyteller in the story and that’s what I value in any particular story, rather than having a more generic interest in Snow White stories, let’s say. That and an interest in all the other elements in a story: the language, cadence, intonation, pauses, gesticulations. The relation between the storyteller and the audience is a very potent, dynamic thing in storytelling. My thinking about folk and fairy tales has remained much the same, but deepened and widened. There are things such as Mrs. Balfour stories where I’ve had a change of heart and thought. I’ve just written, for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a biography of a woman called Ruth Tongue, who was a very famous storyteller in the second half of the twentieth century in England. My initial attitude was that Ruth Tongue was basically a fraud, which I thought since I heard recordings of her actual voice: very cut-glass, upper class English and her storytelling voice which is a very heavily accented Somerset dialect.  I thought that something is not right here. And learning more about Tongue, I’ve begun to think she is not correct in what she says about where she learned these stories and who she learned them from because it doesn’t stack up, but actually it makes her more interesting as a creative storyteller because she is basically making all this stuff up. Someone said she “collects from herself,” which I thought was a very polite way of putting it.

There were many other questions and answers which we were not able to fit in this blog, but it seemed that many people were able to enjoy the fruit of Philip’s scholarship! His clear expertise, thorough research, and insightful conclusions sparked ongoing conversation on this compelling topic. Even Philip’s cat had something to add! Thank you to those who attended our first virtual scholarly talk. We were delighted to have such an engaged audience.

For those who missed it, the lecture and Q&A were recorded and can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBzElceP2nE

Our next guest lecture will be in April; keep an eye out for the details! In the meantime, we hope you pick up a tale that ends unhappily ever after.

Dr. Mary Galbraith’s “The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation”

On Wednesday, October 30th, The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at SDSU had the honor of hosting Dr. Mary Galbraith for her talk, “The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation.”

Our director, Dr. Joseph Thomas, began by thanking all who have made the event possible: the library (especially Linda Salem and Markel Tumlin), the graduate assistants (Sofia and Ashley), and Dr. Mary Galbraith herself. He then introduced our guest, saying she is a woman who works to “respect the child” in her research. The full text of his introduction is included below:

Dr. Mary Galbraith has always struck me as the prototypical SoCal woman. A salient exemplar, really. You see, Mary grew up in Los Angeles, shuttling between her Southern California home and a home across the sea, in London. After finishing high school, Mary headed a little south to UC Irvine, attending that legendary school during its first year. Afterwards, she left her SoCal home for Berkeley, where her worldly, cosmopolitan, SoCal grooviness was enriched and complicated by the student protests going on during 1969, the high-water mark of the 60’s youthful, utopian hopefulness. I’m put in mind of the famous passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . .

But on that cresting wave came, as Mary explains in an interview, “tanks on campus; helicopters flying over dropping tear gas.” She got out, had a kid, lived her life, returning to school in the 80s, eventually settling at SUNY Buffalo, a spot that couldn’t be more different than SoCal.

But Mary flourished there, working as a graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Graduate Group. She worked on her doctorate in English while taking courses in philosophy, psychology, computer science, child language acquisition. The searching intelligence that came of age traveling back and forth between London and Los Angeles, primed for difference, for unexpected confluences and concatenations began developing the interdisciplinary approach we’d come to call “Childhood Studies,” a theoretical and practical academic approach that puts into conversation the resonant insights of literature, psychology, history, anthropology, and neurobiology as a means of better understanding childhood, a time in which the child’s varied experiences of the world has yet to calcify into rigid categories. Although I wouldn’t call her a Romantic (not to her face), she does respect the child and its novel experience of the still-new world, Wordsworth’s “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! […] “whose exterior semblance” (if you’ll forgive my shift into second person)

[…] doth belie

Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet
dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the
blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the
eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal
mind[.]

Mary’s ranging, complex, and groundbreaking scholarly work serves the interests of – as she puts it – “feeling from the other side,” of understanding as best we’re able, the child’s existential situation from the child’s perspective, a critical paradigm suggestive of what Peter Hunt would come to call “childist” criticism. Mary’s work is marked by a desire to articulate the child's experience as rigorously as possible using all the theoretical and scientific and literary critical tools available to us. Today, we’ll get a taste of that project.

But first, knowing how important students are to Mary’s work (she exemplifies the scholar/teacher model) I’d like to invite one of her students, Ashley, to the front of the room, to give Mary the kind of introduction I’m unable to give.

Graduate Assistant Ashley Nguyen then took the stage to describe her work under Dr. Mary Galbraith: 

It was my honor to be Dr. Galbraith’s student last fall in her English 501: Literature for Children course. Professor Galbraith’s class was my first encounter with the study of children’s literature. The theme was “fantasy and a touch of the real,” which highlighted the authorial background that underlies the fantastical aspects of familiar texts such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. She showed us how children’s literature provides a place for authors to work through childhood traumas, reimagine difficult relationships, and create alternative narratives in which the child character has unprecedented agency. This course was also my first scholarly encounter with Asian art and critique; we utilized Japanese aesthetics to analyze picture books and Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. 

Dr. Galbraith is stunningly dedicated to her scholarship. As a student just barely entering the children’s literature field, I was shocked at the complexity of her research and how much time and effort she gave it – on top of all of the courses she was teaching! Even so, she always gave her students her full attention, meeting us where we were and yet challenging us to push ourselves further, to think critically about even our most cherished childhood stories and movies. Furthermore, she taught that while academic critique is valuable, we can still appreciate texts for the affective responses they evoke. These insights affirmed my interest in studying children’s literature at the graduate level, and now I focus my research on Asian American children’s literature that reflects the lived experience of its authors and readers. I owe much of my growth as a scholar to my experience in her classroom, and it is a huge honor and privilege to introduce Dr. Mary Galbraith!  

Dr. Galbraith's lecture clearly communicated her stunning dedication to research as well as teaching. Her passionate discussion of the deictic imaginary eschewed the markers of a conventional academic lecture, more closely resembling her work in the classroom. As rigorous as she was clear and convivial, Dr. Galbraith began by explaining that deixis precedes language while language allows people to create transportable or translatable deixis.

In the deictic imaginary, Dr. Galbraith reminded, a storyteller invents and the listener (or reader) collaborates in that invention. She explains this concept further: “It is important to note, fiction is not untrue at all, since fictional narration is a creation, not a statement. Only statements can have truth or untruth.” Dr. Galbaith emphasizes that fictional language creates imaginary presence. When we read, we create these stories, and often children are much better at making an imaginary world than adults are. Dr. Galbraith feels that “imagination is, in my mind, the most precious thing the human race has made”. She praised readers for the ability to mentally envision entire worlds, following an author’s “very long conversational turn that ends whenever you decide to stop reading.” 

Come Away From the Water, Shirley by John Burningham

Dr. Galbraith used an image from Come Away From the Water, Shirley to emphasize the bifurcation between adults focused on settling on the beach and sipping their coffee, and the child who views the ocean with limitless possibility. She noted that the child is constantly forced to repress her curiosity. Dr. Galbraith went on to describe poetic narrative theory and quoted that “a fictive reality ‘is’ only by virtue of its being narrated” (Hamburger 136). 

Dr. Galbraith had prepared her 1989 dissertation abstract to share with us, but was unable to due to time constraints. She explained that much of what she had written about then was relevant to what she is doing now. She looks forward to meeting up with the “twenty other people in the world who are really focused on [deixis]” at an international conference in the coming year.

According to Dr. Galbraith, mimesis is the flip of deixis. She gestured to a chair, indicating that while an author captures presence in words, the reader imagines by turning words into presence. Deixis is the author’s performance of presence in words, and mimesis is the reader’s following of “the outstretched finger” through imagination. 

Dr. Galbraith explored The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen creates a compelling and heart-wrenching story of this “Little Match Girl” who after suffering from abuse by her father is sent out into the cold world with nothing but the clothes on her back and a few matches. Set in the time of many children dying, the young girl’s experience outweighs the narrator’s comments on the text. Dr. Galbraith emphatically takes the side of children in stories such as this. She notes that the only other person with any real personality is the boy who steals the girl’s slippers. 

Illustration from Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen’s book is vital for background in a study of children’s literature, as he is considered the first author actually writing for children and representing the voices of children. Dr. Galbraith argues that “The Little Match Girl” is not didactically aimed towards children, but rather condemns adults, who in the tale do nothing to help the dying girl.

The event concluded with a Q&A session during which students asked about the pedagogical repercussions of this topic, about further resources, and how to better assist students with learning disabilities.

Dr. Phillip Serrato and Dr. Joseph Thomas pose with Dr. Galbraith.

The NCSCL is grateful to all who helped make this wonderful event possible. We especially thank Dr. Mary Galbraith! For an audio recording of the full talk with images and presentation slides, please see the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mbtnPGCL4

-(SS) and (AN)

Dr. Michelle Abate's "Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past

Please join us on Wednesday, February 20^th at 4 pm in Room LL430/431 for “Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past,” a talk by Dr. Michelle Abate, Professor of Literature for Children and Young Adults at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Abate will be presenting on Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s critically acclaimed and prize-winning LGBTQ+ young adult novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Sáenz's powerful historical novel is set in the 1980s. However, it lacks any mention of the AIDS crisis, one of the major crises consuming the United States and the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s.

Abate argues that although the absence of AIDS may initially appear to be a historical oversight, Sáenz is actually offering empowering insight on a completely new way of looking at queerness in the 1980s. Instead of deliberately ignoring AIDS, Sáenz is creating a parallel timeline without the oppression of the existence of AIDS. In doing so, Aristotle and Dante are in an environment where they can live and flourish being queer without the growing stress of the AIDS crisis to create an environment without homophobia-fueled neglect, fear, and apathy. 

According to Abate, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is not to be analyzed as a historical novel, but instead that it ought to be analyzed as a new type of queer speculative fiction in an era otherwise full of fear and misunderstanding towards the queer community. This new insight will allow us to understand this beloved novel in a new and innovative light.

We can't wait to see you at Abate's talk!

(SS)

His Soul is Rising: Visiting Scholar Michelle Martin's Lecture

Scholar Michelle Martin opened her lecture, “Lynching 101: Young Adult Primers on the Murder of Emmett Till, at SDSU’s Love Library with a sobering, bluesy ballad, “The Ballad of Emmett Till” from playwright Ifa Bayeza:

“Come on let me tell yuh the tale of Emmett Till / Though they put his body down / His soul is rising.”

Introduced by Dr. Joseph Thomas, who described her as “clear-eyed, elegant, and aesthetically nuanced,” Michelle Martin tackled the horrifying truth of the brutal 1955 murder in Mississippi—which helped spark the Civil Rights Movement—of 14-year-old Emmett Till. With 2016 marking of the 61^st anniversary of Till’s brutal murder and the American political climate as divided as it has ever been, Martin described ways to include our country’s horrifying past of slavery and objectification in children’s literature. A line is drawn in considering the way that children’s texts often rework sensitive topics, such as racism, to be less authentic as an attempt to protect children. And with this, an inevitable question arises: How, then, does one tell the truth?

The prevalence of violence in our society, from gut-churning brutality in in TV shows like “Game of Thrones” to grim news reports saturating radio shows and news stations, is considered a norm, while also having a numbing effect on our minds. Michelle Martin’s research is focused on how Y.A. texts are engaging young adults more than ever, especially historical fiction about Emmett Till’s lynching. One such book is Chris Crowe’s Mississippi Trial, 1955 and the historical nonfiction companion Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. These intricate texts of blackness, she notes, are a critical site of resistance and transformation and, thus, important mediations between young readers because they combat sensationalism and clear up inaccuracies surrounding the trial and Emmett Till himself. Bringing this awareness to picture books, on the other hand, is more difficult. Poet laureate Marilyn Nelson wrote A Wreath for Emmett Till as a narrative poem especially for young readers in the the Italian sonnet style, in an effort to try to find the right words without mitigating the reality of Emmett Till’s death. It serves as a remembrance of Till’s murder, his mother’s loss, and the memory of other countless victims that suffered through these atrocities. It’s worth noting that these sequences of sonnets are interlinked and called a “crown of sonnets”—a heroic “crown” for Emmett Till that harkens to the wreath in the book’s title.

In the end, telling and retelling these stories—of Emmett Till, of Eric Garner, of Trayvon Martin—decreases the power of the perpetrators. The contemporary erasure or retelling of Black history is an unsettling commonality due to white privilege and speaks to a need for more accurate narratives of our history. And may those narratives start in young children’s books and young adult novels, and may they propel future generations into action.

Dr. Martin’s visit definitely gave the NCSCL some really intelligent ideas to muse over until next year’s visiting scholar. We thank her for her time and inspiration!