Like many children, I grew up reading Shel Silverstein. Before I could even read, my mom would read me his poems and stories. I still have a dilapidated copy of A Light in the Attic and Lafcadio, the Lion who Shot Back, from when I was a child. When I was about eight years old and very into skateboarding, my first real deck had a picture of The Giving Tree on it. It was my favorite story, and despite the controversy on whether or not it is an appropriate story, it guts me to this day.
Shel Silverstein was a misunderstood soul. I think that is what drove me to write about him. Even as a child, I recognized Shel's ability to relate to kids in a way most adults couldn't. I'm not trying to paint him as this soft, gentle, all-loving kind of person; he wasn't Mr. Rogers. Shel was just a normal man born in the 1930s during the Great Depression to immigrant parents. He served in Korea and became jaded and illustrated for Playboy. He was friends with Norman Mailer (not happy about that, but I digress) and Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash, penning several of their most popular songs. He was the quintessential 70s writer-man, complete with a long beard and corduroy pants.
And yet - there is something that impresses me so about Shel's ability to write such gentle, silly, simple yet profound stories for children, and still adhere to this stereotype of the rugged counter-culture Writer-Man. In fact, it gives me hope because it shows that you don't have to be Mr. Rogers (bless his soul) to be gentle and kind. It proves that being a man and being empathetic are not mutually exclusive. That humans, like anything else, are multi-faceted beings that all have the ability to be tender if we try.
Neil Gaiman's lecture transcribed by The Guardian in 2013 (extremely worth reading - I highly recommend it) has to be one of my favorite things ever written about the importance of introducing children to fiction at a young age.
"...And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed."
Shel Silverstein did this for me when I was young, and ultimately became my "gateway drug", as Neil Gaiman phrased it, to other fiction. I was lucky enough to have very kind, gentle, and progressive parents as a child, but Shel's poems and stories helped me realize that all humans have this inherent capacity for tenderness. Shel wrote about a broad range of humans (and non-humans) much different from himself, from Good Little Grace to Terrible Theresa. To Lafcadio, the lion who loved marshmallows and learned to use a gun and shoot back at hunters. He wrote about children riddled with anxiety before going to sleep, a feeling we can probably all relate to. He was able to imagine lives other than his own, something many of us have difficulty doing.
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