IN CONVERSATION WITH PIPPA GOODHART

 

 

 

 

In this post I’m in conversation with children’s author, Pippa Goodhart, pictured above. She invited me to a lovely lunch at her house a couple of weeks ago and it was at that lunch that I met her dog.

Gillian McClure: I was very taken with your dog Winnie now renamed ‘Winnie the Trifle Licker’ after her small indiscretion at your lunch party the other week.  But where does the name Winnie come from? Though  I think I can guess.

Pippa Goodhart:  My husband, three daughters and I went to Manchester to see eight puppies, all of them wonderful fat wriggly half-collie half-spaniels.  After much agonising, we chose the one that they were calling Splash, because of the shape of the marking across her face.  My youngest daughter suggested on the journey home that we might call her Winnie instead; Winnie the female-canine, named after the Winnie the Witch.  I’d just started working on Winnie the Witch stories and Winnie stories paid for her. 

 

 

 

Gillian: Well that explains all her doggy mischief. I’d love to know how you came to write the stories about Winnie the Witch and why you write them under a pseudonym.

Pippa: Australian author Valerie Thomas wrote the first, very simple and clever, story twenty-five years ago. Korky Paul illustrated it in his brilliantly mad, energetic, funny and inventive style, and Winnie the Witch came to picture book life. In the quarter century since then, a number of other Winnie picture books have come out. But, about four years ago, OUP decided that they wanted some longer story books about Winnie, aimed at a slightly older age group. There would be four stories in a book, illustrated in black and white. Valerie Thomas didn’t want to write them, but she agreed that I could write the stories so long as the invented name of Laura Owen was used on all the book covers.

Gillian: Was Laura Owen your name or Valerie’s?

Pippa: The choice of ‘Laura Owen’ was entirely Valerie’s. I suggested just putting Korky’s name on the cover, and leaving the author out altogether but she insisted on the Laura name.

I’ve written sixty-four stories about Winnie and her cat Wilbur … and in one of them there’s a clue that I’m the ghost writer of the those stories!

Gillian: I’d love to know which one.

Pippa: The story that gives a clue to me being the ghost writer is ‘Winnie And The Ghost In The Post’ (it comes in Mini Winnie). Winnie, who is no good at reading or writing, decides to use a ghost writer to help her enter a poetry competition. She sends off for a ghost, which she calls Post Ghost, or PG for short .... ie my initials. I’m sure nobody ever notices it, but it pleased me to sneak myself in there!

Gillian: Fascinating. But was it hard being a ghost writer? What sort of problems did you encounter?

Pippa: It was odd taking on a fictional character who already existed, and I wasn’t sure how that would work. So I began rather tentatively, feeling my way. But I soon realised that my stories were only going to work if I made Winnie and Wilbur my own characters. Winnie needed to be a more complex character than she is in the picture books because the stories are a lot more involved. Winnie is a strange mix of adult and child, along with the ability to do magic…but that magic must be used sparingly, or everything could be too easily solved, and you’d have no stories! Meanwhile Wilbur the cat is much cleverer than Winnie, but he can’t do magic, and he is a cat who can’t talk beyond a meow. The two of them, loving and bickering, make a fun pair to play with.

I also play with language in the Winnie stories, and that’s something that people seem to either love or hate (see the Amazon reviews!). Winnie exclaims in ways that sound dangerously as if they might be rude, but actually aren’t (“Thank knitted noodles for that!”) and she does eat some disgusting things. So, for example, having finished making a sandcastle at the seaside, Winnie says to Wilbur,

“There! That’s as pretty as a ferret in fairy wings. I reckon we’ve earned ourselves a nice lice lolly.”

Gillian: I think children love that sort of thing and also it’s good for making them think creatively about words. Finally, what about the collaboration with the illustrator Korky Paul? I’m interested to hear about that.

Pippa: As you can imagine, writing with Korky Paul illustrations in mind is a treat because he likes things the madder the better! I can leave gaps that I know that he will enjoy filling. I can put something like, ‘For breakfast Winnie had one of these … some of those…and a few of them’, and Korky will invent the most wonderful things on plates and in packets and creeping out of pockets!

Gillian: I bet Korky would have done a really funny drawing of Winnie licking the trifle.

  

DOG MISDEMEANORS

Following on from Winnie’s small indiscretion with the pudding last week at the literary lunch, here are two more misbehaving dogs:

 

Marcus Agrippa (Gripper for short) recorded here stealing the Christmas turkey.(I was about ten at the time.) The remains of the bird were cleverly garnished with something delicious and served up as if nothing had happened.

 

 

 

And the dog who manages to wreck the dam in ‘We’re Going to Build a Dam.’ (To be published in March 2013).

LITERARY LUNCH

What could be nicer than a literary lunch on a glorious October day at a beautiful location in Grantchester: 

 … “would I were

In Grantchester, in Grantchester!”

-except for an unseen menace, 

“[ in] the lovely hamlet Grantchester”.  

- a dog who smelt a pudding in a bag and got to it before being spotted. 

 

Here are Adele Geras, Anne Roony and Pippa Goodhart inspecting lick marks on the pudding.

 

Here they are again deciding the unlicked parts could still be eaten...

And so, with the dog (whose name was Winnie,) banished out of earshot, out of sight, lunch was restored.

“… Grantchester! Ah Grantchester!

There’s peace and holy quiet there…”

 and

“Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?”

 

Quotes from 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' by Rupert Brooke 1912

HALLOWEEN

From Witch Watch by Paul Coltman that I illustrated in 1989

 

AN AFTERNOON WITH COMPANIES HOUSE

When an email came from Companies House inviting me to a free Information Day in my home town, I decided to go because filing company returns and accounts hold the same terrors as submitting VAT and tax returns,with big fines if you muck up.

   The smiling faces of the Companies House staff, offering refreshments on arrival, immediately dispelled all my fears. This is a non-profit making orgsanisation; their prices are coming down this year when everywhere else prices are going up. As for the fines, they don’t go into Companies House coffers but into those of the Treasury. The point of the Information Day was to help new directors avoid giving money to the Treasury and offering some clever tips on avoiding trouble.

  As well as all the practical information, it was an entertaining afternoon too. We all loved hearing about the tricks people get up to when forming a company – like making their dog the director in order to avoid  fines . Or their two-year-old son, arguing, “But that’s all he ever wanted for his birthday – to become a company director!"

    So if you’re an author running a publishing company and get an invitation to go to one of these  Information Days - go.

  

SELF PUBLISHING AT THE CWIG CONFERENCE

‘Self publishing’ kept cropping up at the CWIG Conference, Joined Up Reading, last weekend.

On Saturday, the tone of the sessions was gloomy.  Everyone knew there were big changes afoot in the publishing industry yet nobody had a clear idea about where it was all leading. As the weekend wore on, I ran across a few less gloomy authors who had embarked on self publishing ventures and others who were thinking about it; getting back the rights of their out-of-print books and then publishing them as e-books on Amazon or spotting a niche market and publishing small print runs of their own physical books.

  

The self publishing session, run by Susan Price, Martin West and myself, was first thing on Sunday morning and a good number of authors got out of bed for it.

Susan got things going, talking about Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? publishing e-books. She was witty and made people laugh which meant they were a bit more awake when it was my turn to talk about Plaister Press publishing physical picture books and the problems of being so small in an industry geared to big. My only attempt at wit was this drawing of cartons of books left on a palette in a lay-by when the delivery lorry couldn’t get down my street. 

 

 

Finally, Martin, being a publisher, gave the audience some salutary advice about venturing into self publishing physical books before introducing his new organisation, Authorisation! which helps authors publishing independently with warehousing, distribution and sales.

The audience looked as though they were starting to feel positive again as they saw a choice of self publishing routes that could lead them out of the gloom.

Then came a surprise; a session on The State of the Industry followed ours and during it Philippa Dickinson, Managing Director of Random House Children’s Books said that she would be venturing into self publishing herself – bringing back into print her father’s books. She’s the daughter of the highly acclaimed children’s author, Peter Dickinson - now in his eighties and with all his books out-of-print. It seemed a paradox that the MD of Random House is moving from big to small and choosing the self publishing route to bring her father’s books back into print.

 

 There's a full account of the content of this self publishing session on Susan Price's 25 September blog post for  Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? 

THE FIFTH PEARCE LECTURE

The 5^th Pearce Memorial Lecture was held at Homerton College, Cambridge last Thursday and Malorie Blackman was the speaker. The title of her talk was: 21st Century Storytelling: Will the advent of new technology create a paradigm shift in the writing and reading of children's literature?

Here she is with Jill Paton Walsh

     

 

 and with Philppa Pearce’s daughter, Sally and grandchildren Nat and Will.

Malorie opened up a big discussion about the merits of both the physical book and the enhanced e-book. I guess that anyone attending this lecture series would be a lover of the physical book but possibly open minded about the merits of interactive links to stories and on-line reviews by young bloggers. So it was good to hear one book form could compliment the other and there would still be a place for the quality book to treasure, touch and hand on down to grandchildren.

It was interesting, also, to hear that Julia Donaldson was against The Gruffalo becoming an e-book.

All the lectures can be downloaded from the website:

 

The Pearce Lecture