FLOOD USED IN SCHOOLS

This week the UKLA Book awards announced their long list and Flood was included in the 3-7 years category.

Copies had to be sent to the twenty teacher judges.

Since its publication, I’ve used Flood a lot in schools with nursery and foundation. I bring along original artwork for the children to look at and spot how many little creatures, besides the three main characters, are afloat on debris in the flood.

I also have colouring sheets where each creature can be matched with the object it is sitting on in the book. 

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With slightly older children, we make up new characters and start a group story about a flood. Here they are insect characters to fit in with the class’ bug theme.

Then there's an opportunity to act out with puppets the orientation part of the story: ‘to the right and to the left’ when the ox, fox and hen cling on to each other’s tails and steer their way through the water.

    We end with a discussion about friendship. The characters at the start of the story are not nice to each other; the ox wants to kick the fox and the fox wants eat the hen. But they all have to cooperate and work as a team if they are going to survive the flood. By the end a change has occurred and they have become friends.

‘…they had to squash up close. Then the rain stopped and Old Slodger the Ox thought “Maybe, after all I won’t kick the fox.” And the Hungry Fox thought, “Maybe, after all, I won’t eat the hen. And Fussy Hen stopped squawking, and stopped looking this way and that, and was peaceful and quiet.’

But the big question is - will they remain friends once the flood draws back and there are fields again - when life returns to normal?

A NEW LOOK FOR A NEW BOOK

Recently, a bookseller remarked on how different my picture books looked from each other. I suppose Plaister Press has given me the freedom to do one-off books rather than be brand or series led. By having all my in-print books now standing together on the Plaister Press bookshelf and not scattered among different publishers’ lists as they were in the past, there’s less of a need to make them all look alike just in order to be recognizable.  

   So I have been enjoying a different technique for each new book – glazing in Selkie - a lot of waiting around with this process as each glaze has to dry naturally:

wet watercolour washes with colour dropped in and pigment tide-lines in The Little White Sprite and Zoe’s Boat -  always a bit chancy: 

waxing in We’re Going to Build a Dam - a sticky business:

and ink splattering in Flood – messy - I have to be outside to do this.

Now, with my latest picture book, I’m scratching. This needs a tough paper as I’m scratching with a dry pen nib while the paint is still wet. Arches 90lbs rough can take this.     

   Just as an author strives to find a new voice to fit the narrative of each new story, I like to do a similar thing with images. I search for a ‘look’ that matches the underlying feeling of a picture book story and that invariably means finding a new technique to best express it. 

    It’s not easy making each book look so very different from the last and as I embark on a new book there’s always a temptation to repeat the tricks of technique mastered in the previous one. I sometimes wonder whether, were a particular title to take off, the business side of me would put pressure on the creative side to follow it with a brand of very similar looking books. But that has not happened yet. 

EMAIL FROM JOYCE DUNBAR

Hi Gillian,

Thanks so much for the copy of FLOOD. It's a lovely book and to me it's a marvel that you have written, illustrated and published this book on your own. A brave undertaking! You need a very special combination of skills. At first you must have been a lone ranger - but as recent articles show, more and more authors are taking charge in this way - including many who are previously published.

The rest of us are threatened on two sides - on the one hand the new breed of self published authors - often very media savvy - why else would they do it? - and good at self promotion. On the other side, publishers forming larger and larger conglomerates with a tight agenda - and with precious few exceptions, smaller publishers afraid to take risks. Which leaves traditionally published authors somewhat stranded.

It's a beautiful book, with your characteristic variety of texture and delicacy of tone - telling a story with a strong theme of survival against the odds - in such a quirky way that I couldn't help wondering where it came from. The happiness
of the ending is muted and left me with a vague feeling of melancholy.

Then, it struck me.  It reads very well as an allegory of your (our) struggles as a writer. You are Fussy Hen, Slodger the children's book industry - now getting old and lumberingly large; fox at first is the wolf at the door, morphing into the guy who helped you set up Plaister Press; the flood is what threatens us all. 'Fussy hen
found to her surprise that she could steer' - is your discovery that you can take control of your career with a bit of financial backing; the island is where you are now - a lone publisher with the big old one beside you -   not altogether secure but
not drowned either. The ending is safety on a tiny lonely island, so both happy and sad.

I didn't try to figure this out - it just dawned. Maybe it is as much my projection as your unconscious. But anyway - it is a very intriguing example of the way images indirectly and metaphorically can tell a story about change.  I think we are both
so lucky to have started our careers in the 70s and 80's. A golden time.

I can only say this because I've known you so long as a friend - and I hope you won't think I've taken liberties. I hope it sails forth into the world with as much courage as you have shown in producing it and in taking charge. Bravo! To you and Fussy Hen!

Love

Joyce

Thank you, Joyce, for your insights. My last three picture books have had a water theme but not the one I’m working on now. This new book is about a mouse with not a drop of water in sight.  I wonder what that can mean.

A TALE OF TWO TAILS

When I’m asked which comes first in my picture books, the images or the words, I say the words come first. I like to do a first written draft and then, when I’m thinking about page layouts and the integration of image with text, I do the second draft, removing unnecessary words where images can do the work instead.     However, I do hold an image in my head right from the start – it forms the essence of the book.

    In my latest book, Flood– published in July 2014 - that first image was a bit paradoxical - a hen in a flood, safe in what looks like a red furry nest but really it's a fox’s tail. It was from this image that the story started to emerge; a hen trying to dodge the eyes of a hungry fox who wants to hold her in his stare and then eat her. So what's preventing the fox from doing just that?

Another tail. In order to survive the flood the fox has to grab the tail of an ox and cling on tight.

And then I realized that the anxious little hen, at the back of this string of animals relying on two tails to survive, might also be able to help. From my very scant knowledge of rudders, I knew that if you turn a rudder one way the boat goes the opposite way.(I tried it out with a toothpick and match box) So the hen in my story discovers, in the course of looking this way and that, trying to avoid the eyes of the Hungry Fox, that she can steer.

She squawks out directions, the fox turns his head, pulls on the tail of the ox who then changes direction. 

In this way they proceed through the flood until they reach land.

And so, from the first image of a hen in a foxy nest, I arrive at my story; a sort of flood fable with friendship at the end.

FLOODS

A few years ago I did a residency at Wisbech St Mary’s Primary School and out of it came a flood story. We had been looking at old photos of the 1947 Cambridgeshire Fen floods. One of the pupil’s grandfather remembered those floods and his reminiscences fed into the writing and stories we were working on during the residency.

It was pictures like this of incongruous things floating in the flood that inspired some of the images in my picture book Flood though I was careful not to include anything too human floating around.

 Instead, I tried to create the surreal beauty of nature gone topsy-turvy:

I was working on these pictures this winter against a back drop of all the flooding in the south west of England. It was quite a submerging experience and now the book is complete I’m relieved to be back on dry land again.