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. 

SCHOOL INSPECTORS

I recently had a school visit that clashed with an Ofsted school inspection; not something that often occurs. The day before my visit, at the close of school, the phone had rung and two Ofsted inspectors had announced they would be arriving the next morning and staying for two days. It was the school’s Book Week. Not many lessons had been planned because of the author visit. The week had been freed up for follow-up activities and everyone was looking forward to dressing up as favourite characters in books, and enjoying a week of stories and reading. But the Inspectors weren’t coming to see an author in action; they wanted phonics and maths lessons. So after the phone call, the teachers had all stayed in their classrooms late into the evening preparing 'serious' lessons. The next day they were stressed, Book Week was fast becoming irrelevant and I spent the day dodging the two inspectors as they went from classroom to classroom looking for phonics lessons.

    How different it all was from another inspection four decades earlier when I was a young teacher in an infant school. I too was trying to give an impressive phonics lesson in ITA (the Initial Teaching Alphabet) but the inspector seemed more interested in a home-made picture book of mine written in the Initial Teaching Alphabet,  and the little boy from the caravan park who was sitting in a big arm chair in the reading corner looking at the pictures.

The inspector took the book away with him and sent it off to a publisher. It was as a result of this school inspection that I changed careers and became an author/illustrator after The Emperor's Singing Bird was published by Andre Deutsch in the normal alphabet two years later. 

My contact with that schools’ inspector didn’t end there. He later asked me to illustrate a book of his own. The name of the inspector who came into my classroom was Alan Jamieson and here are some of the illustrations I did for his book The Carnferry Gang.

EXHIBITIONS

This is the mark on a wall where a picture once hung. I've had a lot of these marks to deal with and I'm left with a lot of blank wall. This is because the pictures are now all hanging in the Ipswich Art School Gallery; part of an exhibition of East Anglian children's book illustrators. My walls will be bare until May.

Coinciding with the Once Upon a Time exhibition, I have giclee prints for sale at Browsers Bookshop and Cafe in nearby Woodbridge where there is a good children's section. Sadly the children's bookshop Young Browsers closed last year.

In Newcastle, I also have some early illustrations from Tog the Ribber hanging at Seven Stories' new Storylab Gallery as part of 'Picturebooks in Progress' showing how a picture book is created from early ideas to final artwork.
You can read more about this brand new gallery and 'Picturebooks in Progress' in the Seven Stories Collection Team blog.

GAFFER SAMSON'S LUCK

The recent publication of Jill Paton Walsh’s new Peter Wimsey book, The Late Scholar prompted me to search on my bookshelf for one of her children’s books, much loved  by my sons back in the mid 1980s –Gaffer Samson's Luck . 

When I read it again, I saw why this story had been such a favourite and also why, in 1985, it had been the Grand Prix Winner of the first Smarties Prize for Children’s Books. I remember being present at that award ceremony because a book I’d illustrated, Tog the Ribber, had been on the picture book shortlist. I didn’t know Jill then and my memory of the ceremony held in the London Transport Museum is a surreal one of trams and buses looming  in the background.   

Gaffer Samson’s Luck starts:

“We can’t be nearly there,” said James, from the back seat of the car. “Here isn’t anywhere. It’s been nowhere for miles!”

“What do you mean, James?” asked his father, driving, with an edge to his voice.

“No up and no down,” said James, “and no trees. Nothing.”

“It’s the fens,” his father said.

The reader is quickly drawn into a landscape of endless horizon, drains, dykes and pumping stations and an ominous sense of water, drowning and the sea.

The land remembered being water; it was soaked in ultra-violet, all its distances purple, as though it was the sea…

The setting of this story is so vivid; the description of the houses in the village where James and his family come to live so real I wondered whether Jill had once lived in the Cambridgeshire Fens. When she recently came to tea, I asked her. Yes, she had lived in the Fens with John Rowe Townsend  for about ten years in a small village called Hemingford Grey.

    The story is short, only 106 pages and is about bullying and friendship, luck and a dare. But it is also about something more. I asked Jill about the old man, Gaffer Samson, his way of talking and his friendship with the young boy, James, in the story. She told me she had based Samson on an old man, Taffy, a neighbour of theirs in Hemingford Grey who had lived and died alone. James’ friendship with Samson was her own friendship with Taffy and when she wrote in fen dialect, it was Taffy’s voice she was hearing.

“What I’ve seen, since thenadays! All changes, all for the wuss. Most disbuggerable!”

Jill said she was happy to create a memorial to Taffy in her story and thinks Gaffer Samson’s Luck  her best children’s book because it comes close to her ideal of a perfect children's book  - 'which should be like a soap bubble with an iridescent surface and an invisible adult thought within.'
The ‘adult thought’ in this brief, beautiful book is ‘there’s a time to die’.

Illustrations copyright Brock Cole

HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR

NON-FICTION MAYHEM

Non- fiction and reference books are possibly the worst hit by the internet where factual information is so readily available, but last week at the 2013 Educational Writers’ Award ceremony I saw a wonderful example of one of these books, published by Templar, written by Tom Adams and illustrated by Thomas Flintham. 

It was the winning book Molecule Mayhem! Steve Skidmore, one of the judges, said they chose a three dimensional, pop up book because it could do something the internet couldn’t –though no doubt it won’t be long before the internet can.

    The awards were held at the All Party Writers’ Group winter drinks reception at the House of Commons where authors can mingle with Lords and MPs who are authors themselves and who are our allies in helping safeguard the right to be appropriately paid through proper legislation. 

HOW DO I GET MY FIRST BOOK PUBLISHED?

 It’s the question I dread, coming from any hopeful new author or illustrator. I know how painful and lonely the route can be via the Writers' and Artists' Year Book when precious manuscripts are sent off into the ether to elusive agents and publishers. So instead of sending anyone down that route, I prefer to tell them about a far more pleasant and companionable way to get published: join SCBWI. On the International SCBWI website there are resources like the Writers' and Artists' Year Book that can be downloaded and on the British SCBWI website there's information about the master classes and opportunities throughout the year to meet people in the UK publishing industry.

    Then there’s the annual conference in Winchester with so many pleasant ways of feeling part of the world of children’s books:

you can feel inspired by meeting an author at the pinnacle of it all; here, the Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman – you can even go to one of her writing workshops.

Or, if you're an illustrator, you can see how it is possible to get published at a young age like Catherine Rayner

and then be nurtured through the first years of your career by a friendly editor like Jude Evans.

There are opportunities to have your work noticed in one-to-ones with agents, show your portfolio to the industry professionals, or exhibit a picture in the Illustrators Show Case run by Bridget Strevens-Marzo

and Anne-Marie Perks. 

There’s a relevant workshops for everyone – whether inspired fun at Visual Story Telling with renowned author/illustrator Alexis Deacon

or serious getting to grips with publicity at Navigating Social Media with Nicola Morgan.

And SCBWI has competitions too, like Undiscovered Voices, that help newcomers on their route to becoming published authors.

Then, when eventually your book is published there's the Crystal Kite Award, won this year by Dave Cousins. It's a peer nominated book award that will make you an 'award winning' author.

And even if you don't win it,  there will be many friends to cheer you on and celebrate with you at the Mass Book Launch Party 

and share with you a slice of the wonderful book cake.