Any one who takes young children to a beach witnesses their curiosity as they explore every little stone and shell. After all, it’s right under their gaze. No one has to tell them what to do. Henry Ferinni and Stephan Mallette’s children’s book about the poet Charles Olson’s early years in Gloucester serves a similar function. Children know this book is for them, they connect to this story immediately. They are inspired to speak, to write, to draw. Little Charlie Goes To Gloucester, shows children that this shore is connected to a great sea coast city which was once populated by Native Americans, explored and settled by Europeans and connected by stories to the Ancient Greek World.
How could Olson’s influence be felt at this age when even young children are distracted by I-pods, and large TV screens that display mesmerizing colorful video games? Children do peruse young people’s books, which are still resplendently displayed in children’s libraries and most bookstores. They turn the pages, point to things, read to themselves, and will often listen intently when people read to them.
One of the stand out qualities of Little Charlie is its interactive aspects. I read it to two of my grandchildren, Edith and Isaac, both seven years old. I knew that Ferrini wanted the narrator to engage children because of the topics addressed and the way certain questions are posed (with illustrations) such as, “Have you ever caught a Silver Hake? Look how different it is from a Cod Fish!”
When I came to page eleven where little Charlie had begun to write stories, (the page depicts a hand holding a pencil writing on a curled piece of paper) Edith had begun to write and illustrate her own book. Isaac said, “I looked up in the clouds today and I knew I could write about something that is happening in the clouds.” Isaac, like Edith responded to almost every page. “I know about Moby Dick, he said, “I heard about it.”
Stephan Mallette’s illustrations are impressionistic black and white drawings (pastel), precisely rendered. Full-color illustrations depict imagined history, the ancient and mythic past and on the last page of the book, the view from Tablet Rock in Gloucester. “Look closely…” says the narrator, “on deck is a fisherman doing what fisher people have been doing from the beginning of time.”
Ferrini’s award winning documentary Polis is This, Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, brings community, history and geography to the screen, and the prophetic messages of Olson’s epic, The Maximus Poems. Olson’s love for Gloucester was deeply connected to his values, his concern for the past, the changing face and interior of all of life on this planet. Because Olson comprehended the world as an integrated whole, he is recognized by many poets and critics as an ecologically conscious writer. Poet Sam Hamill commented that Olson, who died in 1970, was “an ecologist thirty years before the word hit the streets.” This human connection to the natural world and to place is evoked in the pages of Little Charlie as young Olson comes to know Ten Pound Island, Half Moon Beach, Dogtown, giant boulders and the arrowheads he found with his father next to Tablet Rock at Stage Fort Park. Near the end of the story, the narrator encourages children to “dig into the place we live to find out why it is the way it is.”
“Children will listen,” writes Stephen Sondheim in the musical Into the Woods.” ”Careful the things you say…careful the tale you tell…” Ferrini’s story about Little Charlie embodies these values, and introduces children to a very great American writer.
Written by Henry Ferrini and Illustrated by Stefan Mallette
27 pages paperbound. 2010. $12.00 Ferrini Productions Inc. 5 Wall Street, Gloucester, MA 02130, www.ferriniproductions.com
