The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories

Before I could order it, my colleague Diane Hofmeyer gave me a copy and said ‘you must read this’. My own discovered of Rodari happened in 2012 when I was introduced to his work by Daniel Goldin during the IBBY Congress in Mexico. I found out that his influence was extensive both in Europe and in South America, but the only English edition of his work I could find was in pamphlet format published by the New York Teachers and Writers Collaborative in 1996 – a document now lost but which I sent to various UK publishers in the hope of interesting them in publishing an English version.

Rodari’s influence,as I indicated, has been extensive in Italy and beyond, and his thinking is embedded in much good practice. Indeed many strategies that are in use to develop children’s creativity have been influenced by his thinking, but without this necessarily being realised or his name known. His ideas about juxtaposing random words and ideas as a story base; using fairy tales; subverting them and telling them ‘wrong’; thinking about what happens next; these are all strategies that we may know and use. His accounts in the book are full of examples of children’s writing that results from working in these ways.

The book includes a short but illuminating chapter on reading comics, unpicking in a very clear way the complex skills that the child reader is using.
The imagination of the child does not passively assist; rather, it is urged to take a position, to analyze and synthesize, to classify and decide….  the mind is engaged in such complex attention (P238)

Recognising and following characters, understanding voice, understanding the use of colour in images to represent meanings, working out who is speaking and understanding all the subtle codes of comic illustration – Rodari recognises the importance of these readings, regardless of the quality of the comic’s contents.

Rodari discusses the value of reading for pleasure and the ways in which this can be developed in the classroom. He distinguishes between what he calls the technique of reading which can be developed without developing, in his words, the taste for reading. He largely blames an overemphasis on the use of the book for grammar, for interrogation, for evaluation, a process which has been so clearly described by Michael Rosen in many of his articles and poems.

There is an interesting discussion on creativity in the chapter called Imagination, creativity and school. He argues that:
Creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination …creativity is synonymous with ‘divergent thinking’, that is thinking that is capable of continuously breaking the patterns of experience…P275

The debate around these issues is very reminiscent of the debate played out in Philip Pullman’s trilogy The Book of Dust.

The book is a joy to read and is enriched by Forsyhe’s imaginative and quirky illustrations. Whilst some thinking is specific to Rodari’s time and political context, there is much that is still relevant and speaks to now. Jack Zipes says in his acknowledgements that ‘perhaps we shall help bring about a Rodari renaissance in English-speaking countries’. I do hope so.