My concept for Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland is grounded in my background as an illustrator, a literary scholar, an expert and collector of illustrated editions of Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and a teacher and close observer of children over many years. When introducing Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland to my fourth graders, I have noticed that they generally have no exposure to the story other than the Disney movie, or a book closely based on the movie. Despite some scholars' views that the book remains popular among children today, my impression is that children rarely read the original even when given it as a gift. Certainly my students would be unlikely to know it so well if I didn't introduce it to them.

As I read the book to my students, they follow along in many different illustrated versions. I give context to the story, reading them parts of the original poems and songs Carroll parodied, providing information about the real Lewis Carroll and the real Alice. We stop frequently to compare different illustrations. Beautiful as the illustrations are, I they do little to help my students progress in the text. Rather, it is my animated reading and commentary that helps most. Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland does not have a strong story line. It is not an adventure in the sense that most of my students know. Alice is trying, vaguely, to get to a garden, but mostly she wanders about observing the strangeness of Wonderland. The Disney version is more of a quest, and Alice is quite frightened by all she encounters. Carroll's Alice is never frightened, only fed up by the end of the story. Most illustrators do beautiful, elaborate drawings that are often haunting but rarely amusing.

I have begun an illustrated version of Alice with the hope that it will engage children today. I intend it to be highly visual- almost a graphic novel. Contemporary children need visual cues to help them with a book like Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland , one which has antiquated language and which doesn't have a dramatic, heart-stopping plot. My Alice is a child of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. She is a mixture of Ramona and Eloise- someone who could easily skin her knee or tear her dress, not a prissy inactive child in a pinafore and sash. My Alice runs and acts, she doesn't just stand about politely chatting and observing. Carroll's Alice was meant to be spunky and contentious, and somehow many of the currently available versions don't give that impression to my students.

I wish to keep the illustrations simple and imbedded in the text. In fact, in my original drawings the text and illustrations are a whole, and I inked the text myself. My conception is of each page as such a whole, carefully constructed to advance the story and, most of all, to highlight the brilliance of the language. Thus the first page shows Alice moving from the dull world of her sister and Oxford into the colorful world down the rabbit hole. The next two pages were designed to work together- the reader has to turn the book in order to view them properly. (We have done something a bit different with our Web version.) My plan is to incorporate visual puns galore from foreshadowing elements of the story on the shelves of the rabbit hole (though difficult to see on the Web, they include red roses, a map of Oxford, white kid gloves, a croquet mallet and a jar of confits) to the looking-glass over the little glass table. The illustrations must be as physically close to the actual text they illuminate as possible. This is very important to me. The smallness of the illustrations is intentional. I have noticed that children are charmed by smallness, they don't need large illustrations as much as they need to be charmed, to be engaged, and to be visually guided to read and enjoy this very wonderful and unique story.