Actually, you can get the answer to the query in the title of this year’s Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture, “Whose Little Dog is That? A Reflection on the Various Sources of Inspiration for the Idle Storyteller,” in the very first FAQ on presenter Chris Van Allsburg’s Web site: The adorable, floppy-eared Fritz, who crops up in every one of Van Allsburg’s books ( “The Polar Express” and “Jumanji,” to name just two) turns out to be a bull terrier that Van Allsburg talked his brother-in-law into getting so that he’d have an interesting-looking model for the dog he was drawing in his first book, “The Garden of Abdul Gasazi.” The brother-in-law agreed, which made Van Allsburg feel like an uncle of sorts to the pooch, so when an accident “sent him to the big dog kennel in the sky at a young age,” Van Allsburg decided to honor Fritz’s contribution to his first book by including a little piece of him in all the others.Īddressing the second part of the lecture’s title, though, promises to take up the full hour-long lecture and could probably spill over into several more just like it.
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