The Dissolution of Traditional Boundaries in Author Schools for Children

Traditionally, children’s literature was indisputably understood as literature written by adults for children. However, scholars like Marah Gubar (2013, 2016), Nina Christensen (2016), Victoria Ford Smith (2017), and Elisabeth Wesseling (2019) have challenged this assumption. The rise of children as authors, especially in digital spaces, has spurred discussions on child authorship and the creative agency of young writers (Wesseling 2019, 1). Research in children’s literature has been largely premised on the asymmetry between adult authorship and juvenile readership, but Wesseling argues that a shift in perspective is needed to fully understand and come to terms with child authorship. This paper presents selected findings from an empirical study of child writers in Danish author schools, which are free-time programs where children and young people write and sometimes publish their own stories and poetry, taught and mentored by professional authors. The study is exploratory and ethnographic, focusing on the children’s perspectives on writing in the author schools (Heger in press). On the one hand, the children experience a stark contrast between their creative writing in the author schools and the writing practice they encounter in regular school settings. On the other hand, the study also highlights the dissolution of traditional boundaries between leisure and school, children and adults, and aesthetics and pedagogy. Notably, the distinction between adult authorship and juvenile readership becomes increasingly blurred. The paper further explores this dynamic by illustrating what I term "kinship in writing" (Heger 2024), linking the empirical findings with Gubar’s kinship model (Gubar 2013; 2016).