A Small Gardener Scripts Her Own Life

The psychiatrist Pedro Boschan (2008) has explained “that something is ‘traumatic’ not because of the intensity of the perception or the content of the representation, but in the inability for transforming the event to something ‘psychical’” (p. 30). In consequence, psychotherapists seek to heal traumatized children in part by enabling them to transform their raw experiences into healthy narratives. As Boschan indicates, such children—even more so than traumatized adults—find transforming their raw experience into a “psychical” narrative quite difficult. “Because of the immaturity of the ego,” notes Harold Blum (2007), “children are more susceptible to trauma and require greater support from sustaining objects with whom they identify in order to recover from the traumatic experience with new mastery and adaptation” (p. 64).

Manifesting the wisdom of psychotherapy, children's literature portrays how young traumatized protagonists tell their own stories. In Markus Zusak's young adult novel The Book Thief (2005), Liesel Meminger, traumatized by Nazi warfare, survives by writing her own story. In Clare Vanderpool's Moon over Manifest (2010), another young adult novel, Abilene Tucker, abandoned by a shiftless father, finds her own story by reporting those of others. The picture book The Gardener (1997), illustrated by David Small and written by Sarah Stewart, provides a compelling example—in a work specifically intended for children—of how a child's scripting of her own trauma can transform inchoate and conflicted feelings. In The Gardener, Lydia Grace Finch, uprooted by the Great Depression and forced to live with a distant relative, thrives by writing her story via letters home. While Small's artwork portrays Lydia Grace's feelings of being overwhelmed, Stewart's text conveys, in the form of a first-person narrative, her growing sense of confidence. Through the combination of word and image in The Gardener, the reader can observe how Lydia Grace masters