One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography by Mackey Margaret

Abstract

Reviewed by: One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography by Mackey Margaret Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography, by Margaret Mackey. University of Alberta Press, 2016. "The past remains hidden in clouds of memory." —Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior "It is exactly in this way of clouds flickering back and forth in front of the sun that I know the basic structures of my literate life were put in place, day by day, night by night—but I have no access to that knowledge now, except backward into the Murk." —Margaret Mackey, One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography In trying to describe the beginnings of literacy, Margaret Mackey reaches for the same metaphor that the Japanese poet Bashō used over three hundred years earlier to describe similar difficulties in accessing the intersections of personal and cultural pasts. This sun-and-clouds parallel that both writers use suggests the universal desire to recover memory and the struggle to do so, a process even more difficult for adults trying to retrieve memories of early childhood. This effort lies at the heart of Mackey's One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography, a splendid study on how children attain literacy. To describe the period of childhood before individual conscious memory begins, when the crucial foundations of literacy are laid, Mackey borrows the term "Murk" from the novelist Wayne Johnston. As a fellow Newfoundlander, he is a peculiarly apt source for the metaphor, for Mackey's focus in this profound study is her own emergence from the Murk in her childhood home of St. John's, Newfoundland. A central tenet of her argument is that by querying, as fully as possible, the experience of one embodied emerging reader and her texts (herself in this case, as the most accessible reader), within the context of a particular time and place, the general patterns of literacy acquisition can be better understood. She summarizes this aim thusly: "If I achieve my ambition, the singular nature of these particularities will offer a better understanding of literate development than can be supplied through generalities alone" (45). Mackey brilliantly achieves [End Page 201] that high ambition in this magnum opus, which crowns a distinguished academic career. Mackey's scholarly background makes her particularly fit to explore a project of this magnitude. As a professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, she has developed a wide repertoire of disciplinary and theoretical approaches in her scholarship, which she brings to bear in this study. A seasoned and accomplished scholar, awarded for her work in media, literacy, and children's and young adult literature and culture, she effectively integrates into One Child Reading a set of multidisciplinary analytical tools to understand the complex confluence of cultural and historical forces, literacies and texts that were operating in the place where she learned to read: St. John's, the most eastern urban center of North America, in the province now called Newfoundland and Labrador. As Mackey notes, she thus grew up in a place that was both geographically and culturally marginal, at a time when it was facing the long-term repercussions of several deep cultural crises: disproportionately large loss of life during World War I, a growing poverty that resulted in bankruptcy in 1932, and a politically divisive shift in national allegiance from its original status as a dominion under Britain to confederating as a province of Canada (28–29), all events that had profound impact on the institutions that governed her daily life and the texts she encountered as she moved into literacy in the 1950s. Mackey thus chooses to ground her discussion of becoming a reader in the familial, social, and historical forces of a new province that was redefining itself as it learned its new place in a nation that it had only recently joined. She notes that "[l]iteracy is a family event, a social and civic event, a historically and geographically located event—and a textual event" (xv). Mackey here acknowledges how any young reader is enmeshed within many overlapping communities and discourses, all of which affect how that reader becomes literate. In distinguishing her study as...