If you've lived or grown up in Canada, you know about Robert Munsch. You know stories like 50 Below Zero, David's Father, Mortimer and Pigs!. Your teachers read to you from the picture books and then you went back to your little desks and made macaroni pictures or something. Your adults--if they were the sort of adults who read to you--read through Paper Bag Princess and, later, maybe as a sort of hint, I Have to Go!*.

Michele Lansberg once explained to me the inchoate state of Canadian publishing and Canadian literature in general at the time that she was trying to break out. Our early recognition as a place of writers is thanks to the children's authors whose books I had completely taken for granted: Dennis Lee, Phoebe Gilman, Robert Munsch**. The Canadian-authored kids books we know so well have always been priced low so that kids across the board can have access to them. And they started what today is a pretty respectable literary scene, equal parts accessible and hoity-toity and drunk.

I've had three interactions with Robert Munsch in my life. The first was when I, at eight years old or so, wrote him a fan letter--the first of four I've ever sent. The second was at the end of this past June, at BookExpo Canada. He was at the Scholastic booth getting ready to do a reading from his new book I'm So Embarrassed. No one knew it was him. He was just sitting on the floor, reading. The third, albeit an indirect meeting, happens every week when I update Canada's bestseller lists on my company's website. This week he has eight out of the 15 books on the Children's Bestseller List. He usually has between four and eight.

Part of my rediscovered love for him comes from reading him now and seeing how all of his books avoid the didactic pitfalls that make kids' books the most policed editorial in publishing. He just writes stories, and at the same time they're reassuring. 50 Below Zero is about the cold outside the child's home. Love You Forever is, despite some ridiculous book banners' notions of incest, a mother's lifelong pledge to love her son.

I'm going to find that letter he sent me. And I'm adding his Munschworks treasuries to my wish list. All of the paperbacks that were mine have been chewed off at the corners. I used to eat a lot of paper.

Notes:
*Paper Bag Princess: At one point in my women's studies education I was finding it more and more laughable--really--the issues that students in my classes were using to arm themselves in debates. On a morning when I didn't think my education dollars were better spent getting stoned at the Physics Building, or the Geology Quad, I remember arguing in a tutorial that when we read Paper Bag Princess to our young, we are perhaps unknowingly introducing them for the first time to feminism.

**Dennis Lee, Phoebe Gilman: Authors best known for Alligator Pie, in Lee's case, and in Gilman case The Balloon Tree or the Jillian Jiggs series, depending on who you ask.