Dr. Brandi Estey-Burtt Delivers McKendy Lecture

7:00 PM
BMH 101
St. Thomas University

Dr. Brandi Estey-Burtt will deliver “How to Eat a Book: The Monstrous (Autistic) Child and Children’s Literature,” as part of the 2024 John McKendy Memorial Lecture on Narrative. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, October 29 at 7PM in Brian Mulroney Hall Room 101, St. Thomas University .

Children’s literature is both an integral part of childhood learning in Western/ized cultures and a complicated site of big feelings about childhood, storytelling, and societal norms. Upon being asked, many people will quickly say what their favourite kids’ book was growing up. But there’s been a lot of anxiety about children’s books circulating in public discussions lately. There are questions about what and how children read, questions that very much tie into the relationship between children’s literature and larger societal issues. In other words, there are worries about what we’re feeding kids in the stories we give them. What does it mean to “eat” a story?  And what if those stories cause indigestion for readers of different ages and appetites? 

In part, these anxieties rest on how childhood is now constructed as a time of innocence, a recent idea that is accompanied by the notion that children should not be exposed to certain kinds of stories. But these anxieties also betray deep unease with children’s own appetites – how kids are sometimes portrayed in children’s literature as hungry, almost monstrous creatures who threaten the very norms of society itself. 

“In this talk, I will examine some key literary examples of this hunger before focusing on how autistic children have been specifically portrayed as monstrous, deviant figures in large part because of their enigmatic appetites. I suggest that more recent books written by neurodiversity advocates have challenged this idea of the deviant autistic child by exploring the connection between eating and children’s agency. Though there’s long been concern that stories for children will devour their readers, I argue that there’s an equally long narrative tradition in which the children bite back.”

Brandi Estey-Burtt is an academic researcher as well as a writer and illustrator. Her work focuses on representations of autism and neurodivergence in picturebooks and middle grade novels, and she is the past recipient of the Eileen Wallace Research Fellowship in Children’s Literature. Her work is forthcoming in various academic fora such as the Children’s Literature Quarterly and the Routledge International Handbook of Childhood and Gender and can be found in popular culture websites such as Women Write about Comics and The Middle Spaces. Her writing for middle grade audiences has received several awards for emerging writers.

About the John McKendy Memorial Lecture on Narrative

The annual CIRN lecture is named in honour of Dr. John McKendy, a much loved and respected member of the St. Thomas community and a founding and active member of CIRN until his death in October 2008.  John passionately explored the interplay of discourse and narrative in relation to justice work in our society, a passion reflected in his research, teaching, and activism.