I recently attended a presentation by the wonderful children’s picture book writer David Weisner. A better classification for his “books” is “magical journeys”. Weisner’s recent Caldecott Medal winning books contain cloud- making factories, flying frogs and underwater villages. They contain very few words.
His explanation for writing books with no words? He thinks children and other readers should use the visuals and their imaginations to create their own stories.
What a concept! In a world where having information, having all the answers, all the details, is equated with “knowledge”, here are books like Tuesday, and Flotsam which quietly open doors for us. And that’s enough.
