Reading Pooh in India, 1962
Title and/or Affiliation
Author
Presenter Bio
Uma Krishnaswami has been writing for children for over thirty years. Her novels include Naming Maya (2024 Phoenix Award), Step Up to the Plate Maria Singh, and the Book Uncle trilogy. She has also written picture books like Monsoon, Two at the Top: A Shared Dream of Everest, Out of the Way! Out of the Way! and Look! Look! Uma is faculty emerita, Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Session
Pooh’s Enduring Appeal
Start Date
10-7-2026 1:45 PM
End Date
10-7-2026 3:00 PM
Abstract
Memories of early reading can have an enduring effect on us. A. A. Milne’s books played a role in my forging a post-colonial reading and writing mindset, within and outside the scope of the Hundred Acre Wood. I can compare this process to reading other writers (like Kipling and Enid Blyton) whose work was easier to question, their stances more open to interrogation. The range of animal characters, the arrival of new ones, hierarchies and rules that echo the play of children, and the central role of the sole human child made Pooh uniquely capable of opening multiple entry points into questions of setting and agency. An unsentimental dialogue with books we love is essential for those of us who write for young readers. We don’t have the luxury of nostalgia. We can’t disregard the question of audience. We ought to embrace the rare honor of writing for those who will live in a future we don’t yet know, the contours of which we’re incapable of predicting. Whatever Milne might have drawn from in the 1920s, the template of the forest superimposes readily on today’s unstable world.
Reading Pooh in India, 1962
Memories of early reading can have an enduring effect on us. A. A. Milne’s books played a role in my forging a post-colonial reading and writing mindset, within and outside the scope of the Hundred Acre Wood. I can compare this process to reading other writers (like Kipling and Enid Blyton) whose work was easier to question, their stances more open to interrogation. The range of animal characters, the arrival of new ones, hierarchies and rules that echo the play of children, and the central role of the sole human child made Pooh uniquely capable of opening multiple entry points into questions of setting and agency. An unsentimental dialogue with books we love is essential for those of us who write for young readers. We don’t have the luxury of nostalgia. We can’t disregard the question of audience. We ought to embrace the rare honor of writing for those who will live in a future we don’t yet know, the contours of which we’re incapable of predicting. Whatever Milne might have drawn from in the 1920s, the template of the forest superimposes readily on today’s unstable world.