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IBBY AWARDS

A guy like Carver comes along only once in a while, if ever.

We first worked together in a big middle class collegiate in Ottawa in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a time of change in the school system, a system that had been so set in its ways for so long, the Grade 13 Upper School state-run central exams had been abandoned.

Some authorities looked upon this change as the loss of control over method and content which would inexorably lead to lower standards, abuse of tradition, chaos, the evisceration of the system itself, general erosion of public morality, tilling the soil for the growth of atheism and communism, the decline of Western civilization, the barbarians breaking down the gates, Armageddon and in all likelihood the end of the world.

Innovation was the call.

And there was nobody more ready to innovate than Peter Carver.

He was often charged with not only throwing out the baby with the bath water, but also jettisoning the basin, the sink and whole kitchen, or bathroom, depending on whether you were lower or middle class.

One of the new courses Carver introduced was classical film study. A new credit course.

Just to show how deep the administration's feel and understanding of Carver's program was, on the PA the principal announced that the film to be shown tonight for the Grade XII film study would be Janet Leeg in Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Pah Sickoh."

We had ordered, to back the film course, a number of class sets including a movie review collection in paperback by the New Yorker magazine's redoubtable Pauline Kael. She called her collection Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Our principal at the time was an illiterate. Like most illiterates with a university degree he was a racial bigot and also had the concomitant filthy mind, and paperback books struck fear in him.

He tried to ban and burn our copies of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and ranted to us how he knew that the introduction of the paperback book would release a putrid bubbling cesspool of filth into our schools. Talking to this "educator" was like a punching a bag filled with sand.

But it was in the new writing courses that Peter Carver found his home.

We were the first school in Ontario to offer full time writing courses, for everyone, as an option. No exam. At one point we had over 25 classes of writing in progress, some 500 candidates. It was while working our way through how to teach these full time writing courses that Carver honed his skills.

We dropped the word "creative" from "Creative Writing" which used to be a small club of pupils whose parents were convinced that there was something special about their babies, and went to work.

How to nurture fledgling writers became Carver's forte. And how to take the fear out of the process.

And when he left the school system, he took these tools he'd developed with him into the Canadian publishing industry.

All of Carver's invaluable contributions to various and divergent aspects of the Canadian children's literature industry radiate from his sure, firm grasp on how to bring on writers. Carver knows what Northrop Frye kept saying: "A writer's desire to write can only come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitation of whatever he's read..." And so reading and writing were never separate in Carver's approach.

His work on developing material for early readers comes from his insight into how writers develop. His work on developing material for reluctant readers, which is altogether different, grows from there, too.

His work at the Children's Book Centre and its publishing program, and authors in the schools and Children's Book Week has had immeasurable influence and results, and comes from his instincts regarding where potential writers are hiding.

While he was at the Children's Book Centre, Carver sent me to the Western Arctic for a number of unforgettable days! Yellowknife, Inuvik, Aklavik, Cambridge Bay, Coppermine, places like that. Down there in the Arctic Circle I became a speck and, ultimately, in the land with no horizon, I disappeared. When I stumbled back south I reported to Carver. "This experience has changed me," I said. "I don't know who I am any more!"

"Good," says Carver. "Now you can go looking for yourself all over again. And don't forget to write it down!"

His freelance editing of fiction and non-fiction, his on-going Freedom to Read kit, his numerous writing for kids workshops and talks he's done coast to coast over the years, his many awards you see listed in your program ­ all of the above radiated from his passion, symbolized by his running the Writing for Kids classes at George Brown College.

Dozens of writers have come out of there, by the way, with careers in the business.

Carver, the teacher, has a trick.

His trick reminds me of an approach taken by Vladimir Nabokov during his literature classes at Cornell in the 40s and 50s.

He opens one lecture on Robert Louis Stevenson with a long description of the Transformation of Butterflies:

There comes for every caterpillar a difficult moment when he begins to feel pervaded by an odd sense of discomfort. It is a tight feeling ­ here about the neck and elsewhere, and then an unbearable itch . . . . Then comes the most critical moment. You understand that we are hanging head down by our last pair of legs, and the problem now is to shed the whole skin ­ even the skin of those last legs by which we hang ­ but how to accomplish this without falling? . . . . The pupa splits as the caterpillar had split ­ it is really a last glorified moult, and the butterfly creeps out ­ and in its turn hangs down from the twig to dry. She is not handsome at first. She is very damp and bedraggled. . . . You will ask ­ what is the feeling of hatching? Oh, no doubt, there is a rush of panic to the head, a thrill of breathless and strange sensation, but then the eyes see, in a flow of sunshine, the butterfly sees the world, the large and awful face of the gasping entomologist. [That's Carver.] . . . . Let us now turn to the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde.

Carver starts with his group, writing, critiquing, discussing, writing from another angle, rewriting, imitating other writers, until some of his students after being nudged, cajoled, needled, induced, exhorted, pressed, provoked find their own voice: it is at that moment that Carver, like Nabokov, says, OK, now you can begin.

Tomorrow is the longest day of the year 2007.

And it could very well be the most important day for some of Carver's students ­ tomorrow is the last day of the recent session. This last day for some of them could very well be their first.

First day with their newly discovered voice.

Having sat on Canada Council juries for different types of grants, I would often read on applications from candidates wishing to set up book clubs, writing roundtables, writing camps, contests, reading and writing symposia, bragging how they'd been tutored by Carver at Brown.

His influence has been pervasive. Carver has made a point of knowing just about everybody in the business.

In the late 70s when he joined, there wasn't much of a kid lit business in Canada. In 1978 there were slightly over a dozen books for kids entered for the small list of awards.

Last year the GG jury read over 220 entries and tried to narrow the list down to five and then to one.

Carver grew with this industry and nudged its growth at the same time.

I had a manuscript in 1976 I didn't know what to do with. Carver found Patsy Aldana, who had a publishing company but no manuscripts.

He put us together.

We've been a couple ever since.

Now she's a big shot with a whole lot of employees and an international reputation and position.

Carver has been putting people together ever since.

That he is eminently deserving of this award is apodictic.

Carver is a teacher. True teachers, like he is, teach what is then, in turn teachable. You pass it on. You have to. And so it spreads.

Peter and Kathy Stinson can have a dinner at their house and fill their big table with students from as far back as the late 60s and early 70s up to as recent as last week. Such is the admiration and respect there.

And, more often than not, after a few wines, he'll play some chords he knows on the ukulele for them, and before they know it, they are singing along.

This is the "Claude Aubry Award for distinguished service in the field of children's literature in Canada."

I knew Claude Aubry. He was an Ottawa guy, like me, and like Carver.

And he was a lot like Carver.

Smart, genial, generous, skilled in people and cunning and confident in his craft. Aubry ­ he'd enjoy being here for this. He'd agree. You pass it on. Congratulations, Peter.

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