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Dreams And Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children
Susan Cooper's sequence of fantasy novels has become a modern classic, internationally established on school and college reading lists and in the hearts of thousands of children. Writers of fantasy, says Cooper, deal in "myth, legend, folktale, the mystery of dream and the greater mystery of Time. With all that haunting our minds, it isn't surprising that we write stories about an ordinary world in which extraordinary things happen."
This fascinating collection of essays, compelling reading for any parent, teacher, librarian, or booklover, contains 20 years of an author's reflections on the nature of craft, imagination, and her young audience. Some of the topics are focused on fantasy; others range from the theater to literacy, from poetry to war.
Although Susan Cooper is also a gifted playwright and television screenwriter (Foxfire, The Dollmaker, To Dance with the White Dog), her novels for young adults contain her best work. Her concern for children's literature permeates Dreams and Wishes, making it a book that is both entertaining and disturbing. At the heart of Cooper's work is a passionate plea for the recognition, in an image-oriented world, of the all-encompassing power and value of the written word.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1996
9 people are currently reading
192 people want to read
About the author
Susan Cooper
173 books2,455 followersSusan Cooper's latest book is the YA novel "Ghost Hawk" (2013)
Susan Cooper was born in 1935, and grew up in England's Buckinghamshire, an area that was green countryside then but has since become part of Greater London. As a child, she loved to read, as did her younger brother, who also became a writer. After attending Oxford, where she became the first woman to ever edit that university's newspaper, Cooper worked as a reporter and feature writer for London's Sunday Times; her first boss was James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
Cooper wrote her first book for young readers in response to a publishing house competition; "Over Sea, Under Stone" would later form the basis for her critically acclaimed five-book fantasy sequence, "The Dark Is Rising." The fourth book in the series, "The Grey King," won the Newbery Medal in 1976. By that time, Susan Cooper had been living in America for 13 years, having moved to marry her first husband, an American professor, and was stepmother to three children and the mother of two.
Cooper went on to write other well-received novels, including "The Boggart" (and its sequel "The Boggart and the Monster"), "King of Shadows", and "Victory," as well as several picture books for young readers with illustrators such as Ashley Bryan and Warwick Hutton. She has also written books for adults, as well as plays and Emmy-nominated screenplays, many in collaboration with the actor Hume Cronyn, whom she married in 1996. Hume Cronyn died in 2003 and Ms. Cooper now lives in Marshfield MA. When Cooper is not working, she enjoys playing piano, gardening, and traveling.
Recent books include the collaborative project "The Exquisite Corpse Adventure" and her biography of Jack Langstaff titled "The Magic Maker." Her newest book is "Ghost Hawk."
Visit her Facebook pages: www.facebook.com/SusanCooperFanPage
www.facebook.com/GhostHawkBySusanCooper
Susan Cooper was born in 1935, and grew up in England's Buckinghamshire, an area that was green countryside then but has since become part of Greater London. As a child, she loved to read, as did her younger brother, who also became a writer. After attending Oxford, where she became the first woman to ever edit that university's newspaper, Cooper worked as a reporter and feature writer for London's Sunday Times; her first boss was James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
Cooper wrote her first book for young readers in response to a publishing house competition; "Over Sea, Under Stone" would later form the basis for her critically acclaimed five-book fantasy sequence, "The Dark Is Rising." The fourth book in the series, "The Grey King," won the Newbery Medal in 1976. By that time, Susan Cooper had been living in America for 13 years, having moved to marry her first husband, an American professor, and was stepmother to three children and the mother of two.
Cooper went on to write other well-received novels, including "The Boggart" (and its sequel "The Boggart and the Monster"), "King of Shadows", and "Victory," as well as several picture books for young readers with illustrators such as Ashley Bryan and Warwick Hutton. She has also written books for adults, as well as plays and Emmy-nominated screenplays, many in collaboration with the actor Hume Cronyn, whom she married in 1996. Hume Cronyn died in 2003 and Ms. Cooper now lives in Marshfield MA. When Cooper is not working, she enjoys playing piano, gardening, and traveling.
Recent books include the collaborative project "The Exquisite Corpse Adventure" and her biography of Jack Langstaff titled "The Magic Maker." Her newest book is "Ghost Hawk."
Visit her Facebook pages: www.facebook.com/SusanCooperFanPage
www.facebook.com/GhostHawkBySusanCooper
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 27, 2016
I don’t read a lot of nonfiction but I was excited to read these nonfiction essays by Susan Cooper about writing. While some of them may be on writing “for” children, this collection wasn’t really… It was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I didn’t like/agree with everything, but she did have a lot of good things to say about fantasy and such, so that was fun! Definitely glad I read it.
April 22, 2021
I bought this used book online for about (don't recall exactly) five dollars. It sat dutifully, if a bit sullenly, on my TBR shelf until its turn came. I opened it, turned to the title page and found that it was an inscribed copy: "For the students at Park Schoolwith best wishes - Susan coooper 1996". I don't suppose this makes it terribly valuable (Ms. Cooper is still alive at nearly-86, and, for a blessing, still seems to be writing: her two last books - picture books, but still - were published in 2019), but it makes it valuable to me.
It is nominally a collection of "Essays on Writing for Children", but Cooper's muse takes her all over the place, wandering most of all to autobiography; usually coming back to the topic above, but not always.And the word "Essays" is loosely used: there are a number of talks and one essay included herein.
And that's just fine. Each of these pieces (except for the interview, whose structure was in the hands of the interviewer rather than Ms. Cooper) is a web of connections that always come back to, not writing for children, but writing and the creative bent. Cooper is somewhere in the gap between "detailed plotter" and "seat-of-the-pantser": she starts out with some characters, a situation, and a general idea of where they're all going to end up, but usually with no idea of how they're going to get there. Incidents, characters, locations present themselves to her, and she knows that they belong in the current story - or that they don't - and the ones that do, find their places.
This is not to suggest that Cooper practices some sort of "automatic writing"; far from it, she is a conscious and conscientious craftsperson and artist. But the material she consciously and conscientiously works with bubbles up from her unconscious mind and the experiences of her past, especially her childhood in England and Wales.
Cooper writes about how her experience of war (she was a child in London during the Blitz and after) made its way to the surface in the five-book sequence "the Dark is Rising", how her childhood homes and landscapes weave their way into her books, and more. She (a Briton who has lived in the United States since the 1960s) writes about how a person transplanted to another place, another culture, feels the shape of things differently, feels holes in her world that nothing in the new place can rightly fill. The Welsh have a word, _hiraeth_, and it is a much fuller word than "homesickness": it is a deep longing of the soul, the desire of the exile or emigrant for "the old country". (She also speaks about how Americans don't often feel this, because our world is polymorphous and still shaping itself: the "old country" needs to be an _old_ country.)
She also describes writing a book set in a geography she remembers well. She wrote about it with a pair of topographic maps pinned to the wall, and made only one change to the terrain for the story's sake - she combined two valleys. Since her novels don't generally give the exact names of where in England or Wales they take place - and the names given are sometimes changed - there's no one to know, really, how faithfully they hew to real geographies: but the reader feels the places as real.
These are warm, friendly pieces. I do not think I learned much about writing for children from them - though perhaps I learned something about Susan Cooper writing for children (which she does not; she writes the book that is there to be written, and lets the publisher decide on categories). But I learned a lot of other stuff, some of it emotional, some of it factual, some of it simply other.
It is nominally a collection of "Essays on Writing for Children", but Cooper's muse takes her all over the place, wandering most of all to autobiography; usually coming back to the topic above, but not always.And the word "Essays" is loosely used: there are a number of talks and one essay included herein.
And that's just fine. Each of these pieces (except for the interview, whose structure was in the hands of the interviewer rather than Ms. Cooper) is a web of connections that always come back to, not writing for children, but writing and the creative bent. Cooper is somewhere in the gap between "detailed plotter" and "seat-of-the-pantser": she starts out with some characters, a situation, and a general idea of where they're all going to end up, but usually with no idea of how they're going to get there. Incidents, characters, locations present themselves to her, and she knows that they belong in the current story - or that they don't - and the ones that do, find their places.
This is not to suggest that Cooper practices some sort of "automatic writing"; far from it, she is a conscious and conscientious craftsperson and artist. But the material she consciously and conscientiously works with bubbles up from her unconscious mind and the experiences of her past, especially her childhood in England and Wales.
Cooper writes about how her experience of war (she was a child in London during the Blitz and after) made its way to the surface in the five-book sequence "the Dark is Rising", how her childhood homes and landscapes weave their way into her books, and more. She (a Briton who has lived in the United States since the 1960s) writes about how a person transplanted to another place, another culture, feels the shape of things differently, feels holes in her world that nothing in the new place can rightly fill. The Welsh have a word, _hiraeth_, and it is a much fuller word than "homesickness": it is a deep longing of the soul, the desire of the exile or emigrant for "the old country". (She also speaks about how Americans don't often feel this, because our world is polymorphous and still shaping itself: the "old country" needs to be an _old_ country.)
She also describes writing a book set in a geography she remembers well. She wrote about it with a pair of topographic maps pinned to the wall, and made only one change to the terrain for the story's sake - she combined two valleys. Since her novels don't generally give the exact names of where in England or Wales they take place - and the names given are sometimes changed - there's no one to know, really, how faithfully they hew to real geographies: but the reader feels the places as real.
These are warm, friendly pieces. I do not think I learned much about writing for children from them - though perhaps I learned something about Susan Cooper writing for children (which she does not; she writes the book that is there to be written, and lets the publisher decide on categories). But I learned a lot of other stuff, some of it emotional, some of it factual, some of it simply other.
May 27, 2023
Each of the pieces included in this collection requires a bit of focus, Cooper has not been one to give a breezy light talk that has little behind it. That, and the fact that my used copy is a (like new condition!) hardback with dust jacket and so doesn't travel as easily, led to a much longer reading time than is usual for me. Several of the pieces repeat points made in others, and the final interview probably shouldn't have been included (the interviewer comes across as absolutely determined to force her books deep into the Arthurian canon for good, and if the interview was for an Arthur-related piece I would understand better, but no such indication is given), but there's a lot of really interesting content here. Definitely worth the read for her fans and for people in or interested in the industry.
January 23, 2013
A beautiful collection of essays from one of my favorite writers. Its subtitle is "Essays on writing for children," but really, it is so much more than that. It is writing in general, it is life, it is imagination and dreaming and what we do with the gifts we've been given. A truly inspirational collection, one which I am thankful to have in my personal library.
June 30, 2012
The Alphabet Peddlar should be read, not only by writers (it's intended target), but also by every lover of both fantasy and young person's literature.
February 16, 2021
A collection of talks Susan Cooper presented over the years, it's mainly about what books and stories are and what they can be for children. I love the opening anecdote where she recounts getting "the call" from the Newbery Committee that she had won the honor award for The Dark is Rising. She had never heard of the Newbery Award before. Some of the essays overlap in content and theme, but there are some gems of wisdom and insight from a talented writer. One of the best nuggets is in her essay "Worlds Apart," reflecting about what books can do for children:
"Without knowing quite what they're doing, they put themselves inside a protective vehicle which will help them get through life without being damaged . . . a small other world into which children -- and adults too -- can retreat, as a refuge from the cares and traumas of their lives. While they are inside it, reading, they have left the real world and are living in another. They have escaped. But if they are lucky, there's something else happening as well. They may be changed, just a little, by living in this world apart. They may take back a talisman from it, some small buried insight or idea that will stay with them forever, and help them in the hard matter of understanding and surviving their own world."
"Without knowing quite what they're doing, they put themselves inside a protective vehicle which will help them get through life without being damaged . . . a small other world into which children -- and adults too -- can retreat, as a refuge from the cares and traumas of their lives. While they are inside it, reading, they have left the real world and are living in another. They have escaped. But if they are lucky, there's something else happening as well. They may be changed, just a little, by living in this world apart. They may take back a talisman from it, some small buried insight or idea that will stay with them forever, and help them in the hard matter of understanding and surviving their own world."
May 27, 2020
I loved this book. Most of the essays included here are from talks given to the faithful, those who love and value children's literature. It is not a book about how to write for children, although there are many recommendations for how to think about that task. It is a book about why to write for children, and about how essential reading is to forming an imagination. She discusses myth and fantasy, and there is a lot of splendid autobiography and humor. This book deserves to be much better known and appreciated than it is. It would probably be best for a reader to have already read The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper's most famous novel, both to understand the references to it and to avoid any spoilers. Thoroughly enjoyable.
November 26, 2023
Although this book is older it has great wisdom in it and good stories! Written in chapters that were speeches she had given it was easy to find chapters that had a subject worthwhile to read.
June 7, 2012
It is strange that so many places, including my system has this book in the juvenile section. It is mostly speeches Susan Cooper gave over the years to ADULTS on writing for kids. This is a book most definitely meant for adults not kids! Fundamentally she talked about the good fantasy writing does to encourage imagination among kids. She recommended other authors, probably Alan Garner the most. I had one of his books as a kid and loved it but I don't think I've read anything else by him. Since the book is a collection of Cooper's speeches over the years, there is a fair amount of repetition in them. It was hard going but I'm not sorry for the time I spent on this book. However, I can't honestly give it more than 3 stars, and if I didn't admire Cooper's books so much, it probably would have been lower. This is a book for lit professors and possibly writers exploring their craft. I can't imagine a kid reading this. Possibly a teen but I would really doubt it. However, don't get me wrong: I still consider Susan Cooper a superb writer. These speeches were just too similar to make up an entire book. In fact I have a few of her fiction titles on reserve and really need to reread the Dark is Rising series.
Addendum: I am so thrilled that Susan Cooper was honored for her life time contributions to children's literature through the Margaret A. Edwards Award! Hooray! And congratulations because this is well deserved!!!
Addendum: I am so thrilled that Susan Cooper was honored for her life time contributions to children's literature through the Margaret A. Edwards Award! Hooray! And congratulations because this is well deserved!!!
July 31, 2007
Her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, talks at Simmons College, lectures at Harvard...all marvelous.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews