Back to the Garden

Some 30-plus years ago, the filmmaker (now Queen’s University professor) Clarke Mackey began a six-year stint as a preschool instructor. It made a deep impression on him. It convinced him that children exist in a fleeting state of grace when it comes to unfettered creativity, and it put him on the path—a long but determined one—to the eventual writing of Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century.

“During that time when I was doing art, music, drama, and storytelling with children daily,” Mackey writes, “my commonplace assumptions about art and culture were severely shaken.”

For Mackey, the form of boundlessly inventive make-believe that is children’s play signified something not only lost by adulthood but lost to “the dominant cultural order.” He began to wonder if there wasn’t...