Talking with Nina Jaffe
at Bank Street College of Education
By Kristen Z. Stavisky
I recently sat down
with Graduate School faculty member Nina Jaffe to talk about
her latest project, a collaboration with HarperCollins Festival
Readers and DC Comics on a series of books, including four
readers for ages four through seven, and two chapter books
for ages ten and up. The series features a long-cherished
American icon, Wonder Woman. Nina was able to offer her own
interpretation of Wonder Woman, emphasizing the character’s mythological background. The resulting
stories reflect Bank Street values integrated with themes that
thread through Nina’s previous works, such as The Cow
of No Color, including stories featuring wise and strong women
drawn from world folklore. During our conversation, Nina shared
her specific inspirations for Wonder Woman and the collaborative
journey that brought her vision to life. I asked Nina to talk
about her own memories and how these influenced her interpretation
of Wonder Woman. “Using childhood memories to understand
the developmental-interaction approach is integral to coursework
here at the graduate school.” This training informed
her thinking as she sought to connect the Wonder Woman of popular
culture to this new series of books for children.
“When I was ten years old, I attended summer camp in
upstate New York. For ‘free choice’ time, I decided
I wanted to learn archery and went up the hill to begin practice
(all the other campers in this group were boys.) The counselor
said: ‘Maybe this isn’t the right group for you.
Why don’t you join the farm group? You can feed baby
goats!’ Later that summer, the farm group took a trip
to the county fair. I entered a calf-wrestling contest (which
meant running across a track, grabbing a calf, and dragging
it into a small square outlined on the field) and won! Recalling
these experiences helped me imagine Diana’s feelings
and motivation as she took on the challenges and rites of passage
key to claiming her role as champion of peace and justice outside
Paradise Island.” In 2002, HarperCollins and DC Comics,
aware of her work and background in storytelling and folklore,
approached Nina to write a book series for young children.
Wonder Woman was about to experience another reinvention. Nina
had the honor of transforming Wonder Woman into a literary
creation, revised and translated for an audience of young readers.
Nina describes her
work on the series as one of the most collaborative professional
experiences she has had. Nina, with editors at HarperCollins
and DC Comics, and illustrator Ben Caldwell worked together
to bring a new kind of Wonder Woman to life. The professional
interests that have guided Nina’s career, particularly
linguistics, social studies, storytelling, and folklore, were
encouraged by the entire creative team. They shared a vision,
a desire to create a strong role model that all young girls
could relate to. Nina notes the series’ decidedly un-Barbie-like
representation of Wonder Woman. This Wonder Woman is graceful,
muscular and strong and as reflected in Caldwell’s illustrations
proud of her multi-ethnic heritage as an Amazon princess. The
hope was to create a more global superhero that young girls
from many backgrounds could engage and identify with.
Throughout the Wonder
Woman series, children are guided to make sense of the world.
Nina uses familiar settings and current issues to contextualize
the stories. The Bank Street influence is clear. Just as
Bank Street uses Social Studies as the center of the curriculum
and encourages children to make meaning of the world around
them, Wonder Woman’s adventures tackle
current issues and problems. In The Journey Begins, Nina’s
Wonder Woman confronts Ares, god of War (particularly timely
given current geo-political realities.) In the climactic episode,
Wonder Woman shows Ares the futility of fighting and the ultimate
destruction caused by war. She promotes a message of peace
and uses her intellectual gifts to avert tragedy. In The Rain
Forest, Wonder Woman takes up environmental issues and fights
to save the Rain Forest and the people that live there. Both
stories allow children to see that they can take positive steps
and have an impact on the difficult problems we face as a society.
As Nina researched and wrote the Wonder Woman series, the connections
to her professional life and ideas articulated at Bank Street
continually surfaced throughout the creative process. Nina
noted that in the original Wonder Woman—both comics and
TV series—the writers portray her as traveling from the
idyllic world of Paradise Island to “man’s world.” Nina
pondered the terminology and advocated for a change—believing
that young readers needed a new, more inclusive metaphor that
would still preserve the distinct worlds of the Wonder Woman
mythos. And so, “man’s world” became “mortals’ world” in
both the readers and chapter books. In addition, she had access
to DC Comics’ references, past and present, and used
her own sources on Greek mythology and folklore, as well as
the Bank Street Library.
The Bank Street Bookstore
carries the result of Nina’s
work, the Wonder Woman series, with personalized inscriptions
available on request. Visit http://www.bankstreetbooks.com
to learn more about the new Wonder Woman.#
An interview with Nina Jaffe will be included in a documentary
which will be released in spring 2005 with Volume 3 of the
Wonder Woman TV series on DVD (produced by New Wave Entertainment
with DC Comics/Time Warner).
