Magazine As Muse

Caroline Adderson - Highlights for Children

 

It was displayed, along with other periodicals which have not survived in my memory, child-level, on low, angled shelves. The covers varied from month to month only in their two feature colours (in 1970 such combinations as turquoise and mint, lime and shamrock, butterscotch and crimson) and the small graphic in the corner. The best part of Highlights for Children was "Hidden Pictures" wherein small pictures were cleverly disguised in the lines of a larger one. "In this big picture find the bird, tepee, heads of two fiddlers, fish, pocket comb, two cups, letter S, bell, toothbrush..."

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I took such exquisite pleasure in finding the pocket comb and the fish and the letter S, and I so clearly remember that pleasure, that it must have some larger meaning, a meaning quite obvious as soon as you see it, like the hidden picture itself. A story or a novel is a picture of something too. It satisfies as a rendering of whatever it represents, but if you look closer, you might find more in it. There are unexpected delights embedded there, surprising juxtapositions that give the picture a different, deeper meaning. You might find all the hidden pictures, or just a few, but each one gives that thrill of recognition, of a larger truth revealed. As a child I developed a strange sense of this activity being somehow daring, even risky. A frisson of near-shame still runs through me when I think of it, and this is why: something happened to me once while my mother left me at the Edmonton Public Library looking at Highlights for Children.

Though this theory is entirely anecdotal, I have noticed that childhood trauma is linked to a future in the arts. The least conducive upbringing you can have if you hope to be an artist is a happy one. Trauma is relative, of course. The more important factor is sensitivity, so lack of frequent beatings need not impede your gifts. Your reaction to the shame of a once-in-alifetime slap might do the trick, for example. Or some seemingly innocuous interaction at the library.