Harris Burdick

In my interview with myself, I made reference to Harris Burdick as one of my favorite authors. He's the mysterious author/illustrator in the book by Chris Van Allsburg, who as the story goes, gave a stack of illustrations with captions and titles to a publisher, along with a promise to provide the complete stories if the publisher was interested. The publisher was indeed interested, but could never again locate Harris Burdick.


The Mysteries of Harris Burdick is simply a reproduction of those illustrations, each for a different story, and each with a compelling caption and title. The idea is that you supply the story yourself.

It's an awesome concept, and Van Allsburg's, excuse me, Burdick's drawings are wonderful, of course. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Allen, introduced my class to them by forcing us to write some of the missing stories. I don't know what everyone else thought of the idea; I was too enthralled to notice. Never had I had so much fun doing schoolwork. My renditions always came out disturbing and dark with happy endings—or so it seemed to me at the time. I was ten years old. I fell in love with writing.

My parents bought me my own copy of the book. I wrote a few more stories, but either because typing was so arduous at the time or due to my short attention span, there are still stories that I haven't written. The worst part is that I don't know what happened to my copy of the book. I think one of my sisters may have borrowed it to use in their own classroom, or possibly my Dad. (There are a lot of teachers in my family.) Hmm?

Anyway, now I have a daughter who loves writing stories. I know she'd love the book. Not surprisingly, it's not available through paperbackswap.org, so I'll have to shell out for a new copy if I can't find mine. I want to give her what Mr. Allen and the mysterious Harris Burdick gave me so many years ago.

(Man, I'm tearing up just thinking about it. *sniff*)

Comments

  1. AlbertaSeptember 17, 2010 at 12:14 PM

    I love that book! I wrote a few stories for it myself, though I have no idea what happened to them. My boys show no interest in writing stories, they prefer designing games. I may have to get it and see if it sparks some interest. If not, that's okay. I imagine one could make a pretty good living as a game designer. PS I also love paperbackswap!

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