PATRICIA POLACCO: A WOMAN'S VOICE OF REMEMBRANCE

KAY E. VANDERGRIFT

Patricia Polacco's stories deserve serious attention because of their importance both as children's literature and as the voice of a woman who truly celebrates women's lives. Her work embodies the metaphoric power that unites human beings.

BASIC THEMES IN POLACCO'S WORK

Polacco's stories are in many ways a reflection of her own life. In Firetalking, her photo-autobiography for children, she speaks of her stories as being true, "Of course it's true. . . but it may not have happened." (p. 30) She is a consummate storyteller who draws upon family history and ritual for many of her tales. Through them, she preserves and passes on the very essence of her being, of those things she cares about. Thus, her picture books for children are a kind of reflective autobiography [Although a term often employed for adult autobiography, it seems useful here. See, for example, Estelle Jelinek's Women's Autobiography and Shari Benstock's The Private Self. or metaphoric autobiography in which aspects of her personal history are recorded and transformed to make them universal and accessible to children, both as living memories shared and as new meanings which can take their places in each child's developing sense of the world. The humanity captured in Polacco's work is shared so powerfully through the structure of story and the visual images on the page that each reader or listener can incorporate some portion of that humanity into his or her own life's story. Her enthusiasm for life and for storytelling is captured in the bursts of color and the energetic movement of her illustrations as well as in her words.

Unlike most authors of children's books, Polacco does not create essentially childlike stories in which the reader becomes the central character living through his/her own story. Rather, she respects young children enough to believe that they can accept their places in the human community, playing small but essential roles in the life stories of that community and identifying with others very different from themselves. Listening to her stories, they learn to care about and to feel with those much older then themselves, those who lived in different times and places than they could ever experience, and those of different racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds than the people in their own circumscribed lives. The power of these stories is that they present these differences respectfully and joyfully, often as a part of the author's own childhood, while allowing child readers to participate, not just in the characters' stories, but in the larger stories of what it means to be human.

The above passages are taken from a chapter entitled "Peacocks, Dreams, Quilts, and Honey: Patricia Polacco, A Woman's Voice of Remembrance," published in my Ways of Knowing: Literature and the Intellectual Life of Children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA POLACCO'S WORKS

Polacco, Patricia. Appelemando's Dreams. New York: Philomel, 1991.
Polacco, Patricia. Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair. New York: Philomel, 1996.
Polacco, Patricia. Babushka Baba Yaga. New York: New York: Philomel, 1993.
Polacco, Patricia. Babushka's Doll. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Polacco, Patricia. Babushka's Mother Goose. New York: Philomel, 1995.
Polacco, Patricia. The Bee Tree. New York: Philomel, 1993.
Polacco, Patricia. Betty Doll. New York: Philomel, 2001.
Polacco, Patricia. Boat Ride With Lillian Two Blossom. New York: Philomel, 1988.
Polacco, Patricia. The Butterfly. New York: Philomel, 2000.
Polacco, Patricia. Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1988. (Poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer with additional text and illustrations by Polacco.) New York: Putnam, 1997.
Polacco, Patricia. Chicken Sunday. New York: Philomel, 1992.
Polacco, Patricia. Firetalking. Photos by Lawrence Migdale. Katonah: Owen, 1994.
Polacco, Patricia. I Can Hear the Sun: A Modern Myth. New York: Philomel, 1996.
Polacco, Patricia. In Enzo's Splendid Gardens. New York: Philomel, 1997.
Polacco, Patricia. Just Plain Fancy. New York: Bantam, 1990.
Polacco, Patricia. Luba and the Wren. New York: Philomel, 1999.
Polacco, Patricia. The Keeping Quilt. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Polacco, Patricia. Meteor! New York: Dodd, 1987.
Polacco, Patricia. Mr. Lincoln’s Way. New York: Philomel, 2001.
Polacco, Patricia. Mrs. Katz and Tush. New York: Bantam, 1992.
Polacco, Patricia. Mrs. Mack. New York: Philomel, 1998.
Polacco, Patricia. My Ol' Man. New York: Philomel, 1995.
Polacco, Patricia. My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Polacco, Patricia. Picnic At Mudsock Meadow. New York: Putnam, 1992.
Polacco, Patricia. Pink and Say. New York: Philomel, 1994.
Polacco, Patricia. Rechenka's Eggs. New York: Philomel, 1988.
Polacco, Patricia. Some Birthday! New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Polacco, Patricia. Thank You, Mr. Falker. New York: Philomel, 1998.
Polacco, Patricia. Thunder Cake. New York: Philomel, 1990.
Polacco, Patricia. Tikvah Means Hope. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Polacco, Patricia. The Trees of the Dancing Goats. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Polacco, Patricia. Uncle Vova's Tree. New York: Philomel, 1989.
Polacco, Patricia. Welcome, Comfort. New York: Philomel, 1999.
Polacco, Patricia. When Lightning Comes in a Jar. New York: Philomel, 2002.
Polacco, Patricia. "Words From Patricia Polacco. The Story Behind Pink and Say." 2 pages dated 1994. [Attached to a personal letter from Refna Wilkin, Executive Editor, Putnam dated 26-9-94.]

OTHER MEDIA BY AND ABOUT PATRICIA POLACCO

Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair. Video. Color, 23 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1996.

Babushka's Doll. Audio Cassette. New York: Scholastic, 1995.

The Butterfly. Audio Cassette. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1996.

The Butterfly. Video. Color, 30 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1996.

Chicken Sunday. Audio Cassette. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1992.

Chicken Sunday. Video. Color, 14 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1992.

The Keeping Quilt. Video. Color, 13 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1993.

Meteor! Audio Cassette. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1999.

Meteor! Video. Color, 13 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1999.

Mrs. Katz and Tush. Video. Color, 29 minutes. Lincoln, NB: Great Plains National, 1993.
Patricia Polacco: Dream Keeper. Video. Color, 23 Minutes. New York: Philomel, 1996.
Parents Kids & Books: The Joys of Reading Together. Video. Color, 30 Minutes. Dallas, TX: Kera Productions, 1993. (Available through NCTE)

Pink and Say. Audio Cassette. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1996.

Pink and Say. Video. Color, 28 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1996.

Rechenka’s Eggs. Audio Cassette. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1991.

Rechenka’s Eggs. Video. Color, 11 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1991.

Thank You, Mr. Falker. Audio Cassette. St. Petersburg, FL: Spoken Arts, 1999.

Thank You, Mr. Falker. Video. Color, 23 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1999.

Thunder Cake. Video. Color, 13 minutes. New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1990.

WORKS ABOUT PATRICIA POLACCO

Vandergrift, Kay E. "Peacocks, Dreams, Quilts, and Honey: Patricia Polacco, A Woman's Voice of Remembrance," In Ways of Knowing: Literature and the Intellectual Life of Children. Ed. By Kay E. Vandergrift. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996, pp. 259-288.

Vandergrift, Kay E. "Patricia Polacco," in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers. ed. by Laura Berger. 4th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1995. 759-760.