There is in Rhode Island a woman who knows her way around an aphorism. She has created some wonders, from one of which the title for this collection of essays and speeches is taken. Her name is Julie Springwater, and the complete aphorism, which she gave me permission to adapt and use, says: “It came from barking with the big dogs.” I have been drawn to, and bemused by, this one since I first saw it printed on a handsome little magnet. “The big dogs” has come at last to mean, for me professionally, the people who are out there in the adult field, writers who mostly have the real clout in the author-critic-analyst business. They are the ones in the forefront, the ones who seem to have the most to say (or bark), can say (or bark) it the loudest, and are saying (or barking) it most often.
Not that we in the children’s field are silent when it comes to criticism and analysis. It’s just that the noise we make in the literary world at large doesn’t amount to much. Still, published writing is published writing regardless of its intended audience, so it’s fair to point out that much of what needs saying, in regard to goings-on, can be said effectively from both fields.
However, effective is as effective does. Our noise, like that in the adult field, is made most memorably, and most objectively, not by our writers of fiction but by our well-trained, well-read teachers and editors, and if the truth be known, I feel that’s where it should stay. Nevertheless, we makers of books are endlessly asked to produce speeches and articles, and after a while they begin to pile up. Collecting them this way, one puts oneself in the path of some rather unattractive assumptions on the part of readers about the weight of one’s self-esteem. But it wasn’t my idea. A bunch of people have said to me, over the years, “You should put all that stuff into a book.” So I thought I might as well. At the very least, it gets it out of the file cabinet.
I don’t do many speeches or articles these days. Enough is enough. But it’s interesting, quite apart from who wrote them, to look back over the contents of any collection like this one where, if things are arranged chronologically, it’s possible to see how the holding and defending of our opinions change, little by little, as we get older, and how what we choose to write about reflects what’s going on in the world around us. Thirty-four years separate the first and the last entry in this volume, and nothing much has been altered except for a comma here and there, so it’s easy to recognize the effect of the passing of time. How firmly we bark while we’re young! And this in spite of the fact that we aren’t nearly as comfortable with ourselves as we will be later on.
There are big dogs everywhere. Still, a policeman once told me, following an encounter of mine with a Peeping Tom, that in some situations a noisy little dog can be more valuable than a noisy big one. Little dogs make harder-to-hit targets, is what he told me. Our dog at the time, a far-from-little mutt who usually gave voice even for the passing of a pigeon on the sidewalk, seemed to know this: She had huddled barkless in a corner while the Peeping Tom was around. Maybe that was wise for her, but it wasn’t very useful to me. So, wise or not, here is most of the barking I’ve done, out there with the big dogs. Maybe someone will find it useful.
—N.B., 2014