Granny's Tale

PULBOROUGH OLD BRIDGE

2011-12-16T06:58:00.000-08:00

MOVING

2010-09-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

This blog has moved to a new URL: http://gillianmcclure.blogspot.com/

GRANNY'S TALE

2010-09-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

When I called my blog Granny's Tale I had in mind my father, Paul Coltman's poem, Granny's Tale. Here's an extract from the first issue of Words-the New Literary Forum by Phillip Vine about Granny's Tale:

'In 1980 four of the United Kingdom's foremost poets met together under the auspices of the Arvon Poetry Foundation to decide upon that year's prizewinning poems in one of the most prestigious of the national poetry competitions. This foursome, who in 1984 might have formed the final shortlist for the vacant Poet Laureateship, were struggling for agreement upon a poem called GRANNY'S TALE. Seamus Heaney did not like it much and talked of its whimsicality; Ted Hughes was explaining that when he started reading it he thought it was mere whimsy but that it had got a hold on him and he now thought it "strong"; Charles Causley, however, was the poem's strongest advocate, talking of its brilliance and of the "real invention of its language" and describing it as a "tour de force. In the final analysis, all four judges, including Philip Larkin, agreed that it was one of the most original poems in the competition and awarded it a fourth prize of £250'.

In 1985 Granny's Tale was published by Andre Deutsch and Farrar Strauss and Giroux with my illustrations as a sort of cross-over book for both adults and children. This proved a bit innovative at that time and, despite being highly Commended in the Kate Greenaway Award, it didn't take off.

The granny I painted was inspired by two old sisters living in a remote part of Southern Ireland - the Miss Collins. I'd visited them once with my father-in-law, a man of the cloth. He warned me not to accept any food or drink unless it was pure spirits on account of the filthy state of their cottage. The old ladies, in sack cloth aprons, were delighted with our visit and were not at all put out when I refused a raw egg to suck. They enjoyed being sketched.

As I'll shortly be changing the name and URL of this blog, I'd like to make this post an epitaph to both Granny's Tales.

AUGUST RECOLLECTIONS

2010-09-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

I find August a relaxing month even when I work right through it - something to do with everyone around me going away and leaving behind a quiet absence - or recollections of all those long gone August seaside holidays which cast a pleasant atmosphere over my working day. I recall it rained a lot on those holidays confining three energetic boys and a very large dog to a small cottage for hours on end. It was John Verney's books that always saved the day - each holiday he leant us a new one for reading aloud - Friday's Tunnel, February's Road, Seven Sunflower Seeds, Samson's Hoard were the ones I remember.

They were humorous and had rip roaring adventures and everyone became absorbed and listened quietly until the sun came out again.

Later, I read Going to the Wars, a story of Verney's time with the North Somerset Yeomanry and then the Royal Armoured Corps after war broke out in 1939. It was a wonderful book crying out for a sequel about his escape from an Italian POW camp, but nobody could persuade him to revisit that time of his life and he settled down to humorous painting. I still have his Dodo-pad and one of his Culpepper Cushions and my last memory of him was in his studio, painting chests of drawers with naughty knobs.

SENDING CHILDREN PEACEFULLY TO SLEEP

2010-08-26T06:52:00.000-07:00

What sends children peacefully to sleep? Last week I travelled to a wedding in Sweden with my two Canadian grandhildren. An important role for me, Granny, was to help wide awake, jet lagged, overtired grandchildren fall asleep - on flights, in churches on mattresses on the floor and in strange hotel rooms. I discovered an unlikely book that did the trick - Nicky and the Big Bad Wolves by Valeri Gorbachev.

It was so scary it ought to have done the opposite. On Amazon it had 'nightmares' emblazoned across it as if to excuse the scariness and say to over-protective parents the book was OK to read as nightmare therapy. But my two and a half year old grandson didn't need nightmare therapy. He just wanted to see some very scary wolves. He would stare intensely for around ten minutes at each page of yellow eyes, pink tongues and white fangs.

I was left to guess what was going through his mind - the process of absorbing fear seemed to require the utmost concentration and this was what stilled him. The cosy pages with Mother rabbit didn't have the same impact and when there were no more wolves left to look at he just wanted me to flick quickly through the remaining pages, reach the happy ending before promptly falling asleep.

Like Fairy Tales, Nicky and the Big Bad Wolves seems to make children confront extreme feelings deep within them. Doing so is evidently a tiring business.

THE HOUSE OVER THE ROAD

2010-08-08T01:08:00.000-07:00

The house over the road is let to visiting scholars and an Israeli family moved in last winter. It was several months before I met the mother in the street with her young daughters. Assuming she was a scholar I asked her about her research at the university. She told me her husband was working at the university but she was a children's author/illustrator - Raphaella Serfaty. http://www.raphaellaserfaty.com/

But that wasn't all - her sister Shulamit Serfaty was also an author/illustrator -

her mother Nurit Serfaty too - nominated in the IBBY Honour List of 2004 -

and, with her father a designer, I discovered the Serfaty family run their own publishing house -The Jolly Giraffe.

http://www.jollygiraffe.com/

When I heard all this, I was in the process of creating my own publishing house, Plaister Press.
Suddenly, the small street in Cambridge where I live and work opened out and embraced a wider world.

A STAINED GLASS WINDOW

2010-07-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

Last year I did a school residency with artist John Wiltshire in a small fenland school, Wisbech St Mary. I'd gone with the school on an outing to the Stained Glass Museum in Ely and we'd found some interesting characters that were later to inspire a story set in the Fen Floods of 1947.

John Wiltshire used the story in a huge stained glass window he did with the Wisbech St Mary pupils. Painted in acrylic on perspex it hangs in the school hall with the story beside it.

Here are some examples of the original paintings Year 4 pupils did for the story - Old Slodger the Ox

the Sure Enough Duck

and the Fen Tiger Fox.

BOOKS DONE BY CHILDREN

2010-07-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

It's exciting helping pupils produce their own published book. The Wishing Eel was done by Year 2 pupils at Fawcett Primary with sponsorship from Cambridge University Press. In this project I worked with the children on the story alongside artist, John Wiltshire, who was teaching them watercolour technique during a term's residency at the school.

With The Tale of Cleo and Monty, I worked for just one day with the pupils of Class 4 at Burrough Green Primary on the illustrations of this story. It had been written by a pupil after a day's workshop given by poet, Tony Mitten, prior to my visit. In the morning I encouraged the whole class to paint indoor and outdoor background scenes in watercolour and in the afternoon they did some very free and expressive character drawings of the cat and the mouse. The day had started with a discussion about page design when I'd shown some of my own picture book artwork. After my visit the teacher had to help Class 4 select and assemble their own images to fit the text.

The book was a Business and Enterprise project in association with Linton Village College and Cambridge University Press.

In so many picture books today, the illustrations are executed by adults in a child like way. This page from The Tale of Cleo and Monty could easily be mistaken for one of them but no - it's the real thing - genuine child art.

UK TRADE & INVESTMENT & PLAISTER PRESS LTD

2010-07-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had two meetings with my business mentor at UK Trade and Investment, East of England, Chris Kubicki. In the first I was given a lot of sound advice about the business side of Plaister Press which is now a limited company. It was followed by a group meeting with fellow writers and illustrators who have all benefitted from UK Trade and Investment funding and business mentoring. We had a piece in the Cambridge News last week about how this has had a beneficial effect on the overseas co-editions of our books.

It was great to share news and swap books with friends in the group. I will be giving these two to my grandsons: When Daddy's Truck Picks Me Up written by Jana Novotny Hunter and illustrated by Carol Thompson and Come to Me my Chickadee! written and illustrated by Carol Thompson.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC TREES

2010-07-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

I like to use a rigger - a long flexible brush - when I paint the branches of trees. I can suggest the swaying of the twigs better with this brush. The tree here, from The Tiger and the Persimmon in The Land of the Dragon King , is done in a traditional Korean style.

In another of my Korean stories, Clever Rabbit, the tree I painted is influenced more by the anthropomorphic trees of Arthur Rackham which I loved a child.

I did it like this, with a face and hands because, in the story, the pine tree is a character and talks to the man and the tiger.

The story I'm currently working on is inspired by trees I climbed when I was a child. Trees have always held a fascination for me- they stand so still, yet have so much life in them. I love the bark patterns where the branches meet the trunk - like elephant skin. It took a long time to really understand holes - that branches once grew from them - and to see how the bark patterns work around them.

In this illustration the tree is more of a presence than a character so I wanted only the suggestion of an expression - you have to look hard to see the tree's features.

TROUBLE WITH COVERS

2010-06-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

This is the first Selkie cover published by Doubleday. It was supposed to have the title in rainbow-coloured foil (which doesn't come out here in the scan). Unfortunately, the printers got it wrong and used gold instead.

I'd come up with some other cover designs but my editor and designer, influenced I think by the success of the Rainbow Fish, wanted a large seal head with eyes that followed you round the bookshop. They kept making me do the head larger and larger. Interestingly, in his review, Quentin Blake didn't like the rainbow- coloured foil on the first Selkie cover . This is what he says: 'A gleaming seal's head, alert with life, dominates the book's cover. It is on the cover also where there is the only discordant note: the single word title in a silver ribbon-like lettering which, though no doubt kindly meant on the part of the publisher, would seem to have more to do with chocolates or silk stockings and which doesn't at all suggest the intensity of this curious book.'

My American publisher Farrar Strauss & Giroux didn't want the UK cover design and asked me to paint another one reflecting the atmosphere of the story. I used the American cover design for the Plaister Press edition.

Now I'm working on my new book and I'm faced with the dilemma of how much to give away on the cover.

BOOKSHOP AUDIENCES

2010-06-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

Here are children at a bookshop event. I don't just do a signing in bookshops but like to have children acting out parts of my story with puppet characters. Here they are acting out a scene in Selkie at the Steyning Bookshop - exploring their own ideas and changing the story.

Bookshop workshops can be a bit more tricky than school workshops because, even with a specified age range, you have to be prepared for all the younger siblings coming along too. They often sit quietly on their parent's knees and listen but there's always a few who don't...

DUNKIRK & CALAIS

2010-06-16T06:09:00.000-07:00

The story of Dunkirk and the little boats that is currently being celebrated has a special interest for me - I wouldn’t be here were it not for the paddle steamer, the Medway Queen, that rescued my father from Dunkirk beach.

Now I have another strand to weave into that story. My father died in 2003 but still alive and living alone opposite my parent’s house in Washington village is a farm labourer, Frank Brooks. He was with the Rifle Brigade in Calais in 1940 when my father was on Dunkirk beach. Frank’s battalion was guarding the port and holding back French refugees; pregnant women and children, all trying to board the ships and escape the 1st Panzer Division that was encircling Calais. Just before the battalion was forced to surrender, Frank attempted to rescue an injured friend lying outside his bunker. He was carrying him to safely when a mortar hit them. The friend took the full blast and was killed; shrapnel tore through Frank’s trousers and arm. So at the surrender, when the Germans pointed their tommy guns and ordered everyone to raise their hands, Frank could only raise the one hand.

After days of no sleep and very little food, the captured soldiers were forced to march 200 kilometres across France; a land littered with the corpses of animals. They ate horse meat and mangle worsels dug out of the earth and finally reached a POW camp at Thorn (Stalag XXA). There the Red Cross documented and photographed them. At the next camp, Frank saw that photo and was unable to recognise himself. From then on he was just a number, 8128.

From Torn they were sent in trucks along a small rail track to the Polish camp at Marienburg (Stalag 20B). For the next five years, Frank worked on a small primitive farm where he was given extra food. The POWs who worked on farms were moved out of the camp to a Fire Station Depot where they were locked up at night and let out to work during the day. The farmers wore military armbands and were responsible for the POWs on their farms. No one attempted to escape.

On the farm where Frank worked there was just the old farmer, his Fraulein and a mentally deficient maid who had been sterilised. During the six winter months, the nearby river froze; wagons had to be converted into sledges and everything was moved into the barns which formed a long line of buildings. It was an orderly life with no waste. The pigs were killed by a single axe blow; their throats cut and the blood made into black puddings and sausages. Every part was used right down to the fat which was made into lard and given to the POWs on rye bread. The German army took a share of everything.

When winter ended the livestock was taken out of the barns. Cows were milked in the fields; hooves shankled by a cord. Eels were harvested in the river and ploughing was done by a team of four light draft horses pulling the plough with a chain; stepping over it at the corners of the field when they changed direction. It was in spring time, when doing the ‘long work’ (ploughing a long stretch of the field), Frank told me he felt happy. Seated on the rear left horse, leading another to his right and two more in front of him, he would crack his whip - made of willow with a dried eel skin tied on to give a bigger ‘crack’- over his head and sing.

Life on the farm came to an end when the Red Army advance meant the area had to be evacuated. The farmers became refugees themselves and the POWs were forced to march for three months back to Brunswick in Germany, covering 20 to 40 kilometres a day along the Baltic coast, sleeping in barns, churches and factory building - sometimes out in the open. This march became known as the ‘march of death’; the winter of 1945 being the coldest of the century. Those who survived it and reached Brunswick were left to fend for themselves in an old disused brewery until they were liberated by the American 8th Army in April. The POWs all had dysentery and their weakened digestive systems were unable to cope with the rich food the Americans fed them. Despite this, Frank’s abiding memory of arriving back at RAF Lyneham in an old Dakota on 19 April 1945 was of the NAAFI serving tea and doughnuts. He weighed less than seven stone. It took a two month regime of malt, cod liver oil and vitamin tablets at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, plus a good delousing, to restore him back to normal.

Frank turned 100 last weekend and there was a huge party in the village. I could not stay on for it and so celebrated with him the day before. All he asked for was a card, a donation to the Poppy Appeal and an outing to a nearby garden centre for a cup of tea and a doughnut.

I'd like to thank Midge Gillies for checking out Frank's details in the Rifle Corps Office, Winchester. Midge is currently writing a book about Polish POW camps.

PUB QUIZ

2010-06-07T09:14:00.000-07:00

The two worst questions asked on school visits are: how much do you earn?and are you famous?
My butcher helped me find the answer to the second question when he told me my book Selkie was on the pub quiz. The next time I'm asked that tricky question in schools I can reply with another tricky question - If an author's book is on the pub quiz does it mean that author is famous?

DRAWING ON WALLS

2010-06-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

Don't we all love writing and drawing on walls - probably because we were forbidden to do it as children. Well, there's a great place where children's authors and illustrators can do just this; at the Norfolk Children's Book Centre run by Marilyn Brocklehurst. She asked me to let you all know about her wall.

WRONG GLUE

2010-05-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

When The Seven Stories Children's Book Centre bought three of my Selkie pictures, I donated a Selkie rough, the dummy and a sketch book. I was concerned to find, when I looked them out, that there were yellow stains on some pages of the dummy and sketch book where I'd used a glue - probably any old glue I had to hand - Pritt Stick maybe - not thinking about long term consequences. I consulted a paper conservator and was told the stains could probably be removed. The safe glues he recommended were: Shofu starch paste which has to be made up fresh each week and if I wanted something that was less bother to make up, then sodium carboxymethylcellulose. Both are available from Conservation by Design.

http://www.conservation-by-design.co.uk/

Conserving artwork is one more thing to think about but, one day, it will be worth it.

THE PEARCE MEMORIAL LECTURE

2010-05-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

I always associate hens with Philippa Pearce - she loved to keep hens and we did a book together in 1996 - The Little White Hen.

Philippa died in 2006 and the Pearce Memorial Lecture was set up in recognition of her great contribution to children's literature. Last year Michael Rosen was the guest speaker at Homerton College, Cambridge and today the steering committee met to plan the 2010 lecture which will be held at the Seven Stories Children's Book Centre in Newcastle with Michael Morpurgo the speaker. Next year the lecture will be back in Cambridge again and Philip Pullman will be the speaker. Follow the link to find out more about the lectures and how to book: http://www.pearcelecture.com/

THE LITTER FAIRY

2010-05-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

I took a break from illustration this morning when my eyes started to ache and cycled to the Cambridge market to rest my eyes. That was where I saw the litter fairy -

beautiful but smelly.

Like all good fairies she offered me a gift - a nice cloth bag for my old plastic one. So I exchanged bags, got on my bike and went back to the drawing board. And my eyes felt better.

STEYNING FESTIVAL

2010-05-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving children's workshops based on Selkie plus a signing at the Steyning Bookshop on Monday 31 May during the Steyning Festival. Follow the link for details: Steyning Festival - Literature

Steyning is situated beneath the West Sussex Downs and there's a great walk from the town to Chanctonbury Ring along the South Down Way, with a view of the sea to the south and the Weald to the north. Chanctonbury Ring was always a landmark for ships at sea. It used to look like this before the great storm of 1987 blew down most of its beech trees. I was pleased to see that it's now going to be replanted, even though it will take another century before it looks like this again and I won't be there to sketch it.

PICTURE BOOKS FOR OLDER CHILDREN

2010-05-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

In his post on the London Book Fair, John Shelley gives an interesting interpretation of UK children's picture book publishing, saying that unlike other European countries it has 'been downgraded and closely bracketed as only for kids'. I was also pleased to hear that Anthony Browne was championing picture books for older children and adult collectors in the Big Picture seminar at the fair.

John Shelley - London Book Fair

I've had great difficulty in getting UK publishers to take my own picture books for older children over the last few years. My frustration at not being able to proceed with any book and complete it, led me to set up the Plaister Press - (see the posting Plaister Press on 16.4.2010).

Working with typographer, Lisa Kirkham, I plan to publish my own high quality picture books under this imprint and sell to a niche market which, if it isn't already lurking out there already, I believe will return in reaction to, and as an alternative to, the mass market.

SEVEN STORIES

2010-04-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

In a week my exhibition of picture book art at Newby Hall ends and I've just heard that the Seven Stories Children's Book Centre have bought the artwork of these three pages of Selkie. I'm thrilled and will be donating the dummy and a sketch book to go with them.

I've found it difficult to sell my Selkie artwork so knowing that it is part of the Seven Stories collection comes as a great relief.

The Seven Stories Children's Book Centre

THE BOOK HIVE

2010-04-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

I discovered a wonderful new independent bookshop on Saturday - the Book Hive in Norwich. It has some beautiful and unusual children's books; the choice of an enthusiast, Henry Layte. His shop is so enticing it's hard to leave without a purchase. There are comfortable chairs for sitting and browsing - even a free cup of coffee. No wonder it was full of Grannies enjoying buying very special books for very special grandchildren.

http://www.thebookhive.co.uk/aboutus.php

PLAISTER PRESS

2010-04-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

I set out thirty six years ago as an author/illustrator but during the past decade I've been more writer than illustrator; holding a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship for three years and producing a dozen or so unpublished picture book texts. Now I want to return to being author/illustrator again, revisit those texts - all at dummy book stage - and complete the artwork.

I'm aware I've not chosen a very good time to do this when publishers are taking fewer and fewer picture books like mine.

However, when a benefactor gave me £5,000 to proceed on a book, I saw my chance. I created the Plaister Press (named after my benefactor) and republished Selkie in order to fund the first of my unpublished picture books. Now I have the happy prospect of years of illustrating ahead of me, working at my own pace, without hiatus and delay which I find so destructive to the process of creating a book and enjoying not just the interrelation of image and text, but typography too, as I work closely with freelance typographer and designer, Lisa Kirkham.

THE COLONSAY BOOKSHOP

2010-04-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Colonsay bookshop has agreed to take forty copies of my new edition of Selkie; both Georgina and Christa who run the shop sounded delighted the book was back in print.

The Inner Hebridean island of Colonsay was the inspiration for this book. We'd had a decade of family holidays there when our children were young.

I loved the rugged landscape and the atmosphere of the past clinging to it -

the ruined village

-the old bedsteads built into the dry stone dykes.

I drew on the atmosphere of this remote place for my story -

even using some of the inhabitants, like the oysterman, as characters in the story.

Getting books to the island bookshop called for ingenuity. In the end I found friends going there in June who agreed to deliver them for me. So last week, on my way to a family wedding in Sussex, I was a book rep for a day, dropping books destined for Colonsay off in Woking before delivering more copies to the Steyning Bookshop.

SHAPE CHANGER - SELKIE

2010-04-07T09:35:00.000-07:00

When Random House wouldn't re-print Selkie, I was frustrated. Selkie had sold steadily for over a decade and would continue to do so, if kept in print. So I decided to re-issue it myself. I got back the rights - something that's becoming increasingly difficult to do - found a typographer who had a particular interest in picture books and a good local printer who would print 1,000 copies at a reasonable price.

I now have a small warehouse under my spare room bed.

It's great being able to take Selkie into schools again; one of my most popular workshops is about magical creatures that change shape and is based on this book.

Now I feel I've become a shape changer myself - author/illustrator turned publisher. I'm in control again but, like the Selkie, I must make sure I don't lose my old skin if I want to change back and complete the next book.

HANGING AT NEWBY HALL

2010-04-02T02:09:00.000-07:00

After an early start and a three hour drive north with the car full of pictures in bubble wrap I arrived at Newby Hall last Tuesday to hang my exhibition.

The events manager, Lara Strangeway helped me -

- just as well, or the exhibition might never have been up in time for the pre-season drinks party in the evening.

At lunch time, there was a moment to slip into the gardens and sketch.

Gardeners were busy everywhere; cutting back and tidying the borders, unwrapping statues - before the new season started.

Inside, food was being prepared, drink poured and the waiters lined up ready to serve. In the past it would have been the same - a huge amount of activity opening up the house and welcoming back the family after a winter's absence. Today it was not the family being welcomed back but the general public - in particular the season ticket holders.

They all turned up on a dark rainy night to enjoy the party in the Grantham Room.

Here I'm with fellow children's writer, Daphne Peters, whom I ran across before the room filled up and the signing and selling started.

PRESERVING ARTWORK

2010-03-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

A book rep first alerted me to the correct way of storing my artwork at the launch in Heffers of The Land of the Dragon King when my watercolours for that book were being returned to me after publication. He told me to protect them with an acid-free paper.

Last week I took a piece of artwork to a paper restorer after it came back from my American publisher creased. I learned from the paper restorer that the strippable board I used for my early illustrations, done in acrylic, was was not safe in the long-term. He told me to store my artwork without the CS board backing it - better still, mount it on an acid free board that would not affect it over the years.

As I'm in the process of selling artwork I feel I have a responsibility to sell something that is not going to deteriorate over the years. Thankfully, I've never used Doc Martin's inks that are popular with illustrators because of their vibrant colours but are known to fade badly with time.

I do sometimes wonder how much illustration there will be available for sale in the future when increasingly illustrators are using materials that don't last or are going in for computer generated art rather than illustrating in the traditional way.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

2010-03-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

I often get asked 'how did you become a children's writer and illustrator?' and I tell the story of how I was a teacher at Loanhead Primary for three years and how, when I was teaching a Year 1 class to read in ITA (the Initial Teaching Alphabet), I made them a book called The Emperor's Singing Bird. This book was spotted in my classroom by a School's Inspector who sent it off to a publisher.

And that was how it all started. In 1974 Andre Deutsch published The Emperor's Singing Bird - but not in the Initial Teaching Alphabet - and I gave up teaching.

The bit I don't always tell is that the School's Inspector, Alan Jamieson, was an author himself and I illustrated a book of his, The Carnferry Gang, set in Glasgow. I'm very grateful to the part Alan Jamieson played in getting me started.

CHILDHOOD WORK

2010-03-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Searching for material to include in the leaflet for my exhibition at Newby Hall, I came across some childhood work: stories I wrote and illustrated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One was the adventures of our dog, Grippa; another, Black Tentacles, was set in 'one of the Phillippine Islands' - terrible spelling in both.

I wonder where I found my facts for the second story: is there a Sulu Sea and are Hikuai and Tojo really Philippine names? I failed the Eleven Plus exam around this time for letting my imagination run riot and not sticking to the facts.

In Black Tentacles, I got round the problem of not being able to spell by making my younger sister type it out so any errors are typos. I also charged sixpence if anyone wanted to read my story. I do hope I gave a cut of the profits to my poor, put-upon sister.

EXHIBITING PICTURE BOOK ART

2010-03-14T08:54:00.000-07:00

I've exhibited with other illustrators on several occasions such as - Picture This: Picture Book Art at the Millenium at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2000 and at Drawn Here: Children's Book Illustration from Sketch to Finished Page in Ipswich in 2008. Anthony Browne did the posters for both these exhibitions where artwork was not up for sale.

From 1 April - 3 May 2010 I'll be having an exhibition at Newby Hall, North Yorkshire. This is my first one-woman-show and I'll be selling artwork, for the first time, from books like Selkie, Tom Finger and Bruna.

In August another illustrator, Catherine Rayner, will also be exhibiting at Newby Hall.

Here's a link : Newby Hall Exhibition

WORLD BOOK DAY & BOOK WEEK

2010-03-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

Nice to think of all the books being read to children on World Book Day. Thankfully, the weather was good last week as hundreds of authors and illustrators headed off to schools all over the country. Now that schools and authors are well briefed about these visits there are hopefully fewer bad experiences than in the early days. I had a good book week this year, going to three very different schools: a small rural state school, a large urban state school and a small private school in a Victorian house in London. That was all I could manage in the week. I had to turn three others down. It's a shame schools don't spread their Book Weeks more evenly over the year.

You rarely meet other authors during Book Week though I remember once passing Val Biro in a school corridor during a particularly relentless day of non-stop workshops at a large London school with a young male head teacher who was hitting some big targets.

"This one's going to do me in," Val gasped. " Haven't even been offered a coffee." His car Gumdrop was parked in the playground. He'd driven it in rush hour traffic round the M25 to get to the school by nine.

All a long way from a quiet day in the studio.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

2010-03-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

My first grandson is about to have his second birthday party. Sadly, I can't get over to Vancouver for it but maybe I'll catch a glimpse on skype video.

As he likes dogs I've bought him for his birthday two dog stories in board book format: Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion & Margaret Bloy Graham

and Where's Spot? by Eric Hill.

And because I like cats, a cat story in board book form: Ginger by Charlotte Voake. It's great these classics are all coming out in board book form.

The dog story I didn't get him was Good Dog Carl by Alexandra Day.

I find some of the images of the very realistic rottweiler a bit disturbing and I'm surprised to find it is now a board book.

Another book I will send is an old hardback copy of Red Riding Hood re-told in verse by Beatrice Schenk de Regnier with Edward Gorey's witty pictures because I know my son enjoyed it as a child and will enjoy reading it to his son.

DRAWING GRANNY

2010-03-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

When I first painted Granny in Selkie my editor Penny Walker at Doubleday found her too thin and her nose and chin too angular.

She asked me to make changes and Granny ended up a plumper and more comfortable character.

Now that I'm a granny, I've become my own editor when it comes to drawing grannies. Now I like to draw my grannies younger and a little more glamorous.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS & THE WOMEN'S INSTITUTE

2010-02-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

I gave a hands-on, illustrated talk to the Burwell WI this week about writing picture book texts and illustrating.

Writers and illustrators shouldn't dismiss the WI when planning their calendar of engagements. The audience in Burwell spanned a range of ages - mothers and grandmothers. They were informed, interested and asked many questions. As well as receiving a fee, I was able to sell a lot of my books; the WI taking a small commission - 10% - for their funds.

Afterwards, two of the audience, a teacher and a school librarian, approached me about possible visits to their respective Primary Schools. The school librarian told me she was on the panel of the Kate Greenaway Award this year.

I've worked with older people on other occasions, during community residencies and found these events rewarding. On one, the inmates of a residential home were given sketch books and encouraged to write and draw in them. Several said they couldn't begin to write but I found they were natural story tellers when asked about their WW2 childhoods. Their vivid tales and anecdotes were recorded and later shared with some year 2 pupils.

All this makes me recall I'm a granny too - an overseas granny who only sees her grandchildren twice a year; missing, in between, all the little milestones of their development - first laugh, first mouthful of solid food, first steps, first sentence.

However, I'm compensating for this absence by creating new picture book stories with them very much in mind. Maybe if I were with them all the time I wouldn't feel the need to do this or I'd find there wasn't the time.

SUMMER STORY BOAT & JAN MARK

2010-02-24T09:31:00.000-08:00

When a friend told me she had bought a narrow boat and was thinking of turning it into a story boat for children, I was reminded of the Summer Story Boat in Hertfordshire and a story telling event I did alongside Jan Mark back in the late 1980s. It was the first time I'd met Jan, though I knew her books. We both had sons with us. It was a sunny day and there were large audiences of young children on the banks by the boat. Jan's son Alex, was very helpful during her workshops, I remember. But my son, who was much younger, started to develop a fever and my final workshop of the day had to be curtailed so I could rush him off to a doctor.

This memory is tinged with sadness as Jan died in 2006 in her prime. Here's a link to another of Chris Stephenson's Carousel articles:

Remembering Jan Mark

RYAN AIR & THE CAROUSEL INTERVIEW

2010-02-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

Never take a Ryanair flight the evening before your Carousel interview. Here's a cautionary tale:

A couple of years ago I was sitting having a late afternoon drink in the lovely Piazza Maggiori with some other illustrators after the last day of meetings at the Bologna Book Fair. Two of us had to get to Forli airport that evening, an hour's drive away, to catch a Ryanair flight home.

I was beginning to worry about the Carousel interview with Chris Stephenson the next day. I'd once done an interview for radio with a warm up chat while a light shone red. When the light changed to green, we were on air. Mesmerized by the colour of the light, I became tongue tied. I was hoping the interview the next day wasn't going to end up like that.

Time for one last drink in the Piazza before dragging our cases of books and portfolios of artwork off to the station - strange there was no airport bus running that evening...

When we arrived at Forli we found there was no transport from the station to the airport. We waited the best part of an hour at a bus stop and eventually a Sicilian soldier joined us. In pidgin English, he started acting gallantly towards to my fellow illustrator who responded in pidgin Italian and, when an empty bus turned up, going somewhere other than the airport, he indicated she should get on it with him. I followed. It all felt very foolish. We were heading off into the dark - and had no idea where. Eventually the bus stopped in a housing estate and the driver made the three of us get off. We saw another bus was waiting. It was going to the airport - huge relief. At the airport the Sicilian soldier parted company chivalrously in pidgin English.

Forli airport was uncannily quiet - just a handful of book fair people like us looking in vain for the Ryanair flight to Stansted. But there was no flight that night - nothing until 10.20 am the following day. Ryanair had changed its schedule. We'd all had the email several months before informing us of the change. None of us had registered or believed Ryanair could do something so outrageous as moving a flight back by twelve hours. It wasn't just illustrators who had made the mistake; there was a publisher - male - there too. He looked so shame-faced he wouldn't speak to the rest of us. As we tried to decide what to do, the prices of the seats on the next Ryanair flight the following morning were going up by the minute. My friend decided to return to Bologna and hang out until the prices returned to normal but I couldn't do that. Chris Stephenson would be standing on my doorstep the next morning. How could I get in touch with him to tell him where I was? I didn't have his phone number. Who would know it? I found I had Jill Paton-Walsh and John Rowe Townsend's number and phoned them. They were in and still up but didn't know Chris' number. However, Jill rose to the challenge and, despite the hour, phoned all the authors she thought might know it -Ann Thwaite - Clive King - goodness knows who else - and finally got it.

Meanwhile, Forli airport closed for the night and all stranded passengers were packed off to a grizzly motel that did a roaring trade thanks to Ryanair’s schedule changes.

Spent a very uneasy night sharing a room with a packager. At breakfast, the publisher sat at a table on his own, unable to look anyone in the eye.

I think Chris thought I'd devised a clever plan for getting out of the interview because he immediately fixed up another time. When it did eventually happen some weeks later, I needn't have worried. Chris had no red or green light, no dictaphone, not even a note pad. When he interviews authors and illustrators he simply engages them in a friendly conversation about what they like talking about most - themselves and their work. He then cleverly writes the article from memory. Here's a link to mine:

Carousel Article

GLASGOW SLUMS

2010-02-17T09:34:00.000-08:00

Looking again at Fly Home McDoo I've been reminded of how obsessed I was, back in the 1970s, with the Glasgow slums. Maybe it was because I had to live in Glasgow for three years.

I spent a lot of my time in the Gorbals and Maryhill sketching. Today, these Victorian tenements have all had their nineteenth century grime removed and are restored to beautiful pink and yellow sandstone but back then they were grey. In places, Glasgow looked like a bomb site with piles of rubble and rubbish and gaping gable ends exposing interior walls and intimate glimpses into what was once someone's home -patterned wall paper and old fireplaces.

What appealed to me as an artist were the small patches of colour in this dirty grey setting of boarded-up shops and tenement back courts. I found the Glaswegians an exceptionally warm and good humoured people and I was always trying to slip the the place into stories but my editor, Pam Royds, was firm - no picture book stories set in slums -

somehow she missed the one in Fly Home McDoo.

ZEITGEIST

2010-02-13T06:36:00.000-08:00

It's an annoying thing, but it can happen, that other authors have exactly the same idea as you at exactly the same time. They call it zeitgeist.

I had a bad case of zeitgeist in 1979 with my third picture book, Fly Home McDoo, a story about a racing pigeon. Within a week or so of publication two other racing pigeon stories had appeared: Mr Potter's Pigeon illustrated by Reg Cartwright

and Bertha and the Racing Pigeon written and illustrated by Pam Ayres. Needless to say, McDoo lost the race.

There's not much you can do about zeitgeist - when an idea is 'in the air' we're all tapping into it.

It was donkeys not pigeons in 1993. I did The Christmas Donkey embellished with gold

and Jan Ormerod illustrated Father Christmas and the Donkey embellished with silver.

That bit of zeitgeist worked to both Jan's and my advantage when, in December 1999, I was unable to give a Christmas Donkey talk to some librarians because I had to go into hospital. At short notice Jan kindly gave the talk for me and was able to give the librarians value for money by adding an extra bit on her Christmas donkey book and selling lots of copies of both.

SCARY STORIES

2010-02-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture book published in 1971 that my sons enjoyed when they were little; the girly title belies the content. It's a story set in Russia about a little girl, Natasha, who loses her way in a forest and is captured by a witch. It's Natasha's doll - no ordinary doll - that helps her escape from the witch.

An even more scary witch story is Teeny-Tiny and the Witch-Woman. Published in 1977 and illustrated by Michael Foreman, it was my youngest son's favourite picture book.

Here's a passage from it that is quite as terrifying as Michael Foreman's pictures of the witch:

'The moon shone down on that knobby white fence. Was it a wooden fence? No. It was made of bones -leg bones and arm bones, little people bones. Teeny-Tiny stared at the fence...'

I've always been concerned this story might have had some lasting ill-effect on my son but he reassured me not long ago saying, as a six-year-old, he identified with Teeny-Tiny, the youngest of the three brothers, who is never taken in by the witch's cunning and is clever enough to help his brothers escape.

He remembers his father reading him this story and feeling protected because his father's arms were around him making him feel safe.

CAKES, VICARS & BOOK LAUNCHES

2010-02-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

Heffers Children's Bookshop, when it existed, hosted some great book launches for my Bloomsbury and Frances Lincoln books. I remember Bloomsbury had a cat cake specially made for the Tom Finger launch. A lot of books were sold on these occasions and it was a good opportunity to get to know the book reps.

Earlier book launches were often hosted by a school, following a term's residency. The launch of Tog the Ribber was at Great Chesterford Primary and again there was cake - a chocolate skeleton cake. The children had made shadow puppets and put on a magical show for that launch.

I had one disaster - the launch of Witch Watch at a Primary School in Saffron Walden in 1989 when the vicar completely stole the show:

"A few years ago I would have thought it was all innocent fun but the climate is different now," he told the press. "There is an increase in involvement in the occult in this area and I have had reports of witches coverns and black magic practices..."

Well, the advent of Harry Potter has changed all that. Let's hope the vicar is no longer troubled by the occult and his parishioners have been able to put away their broomsticks and settle down to a good read.

A Wolf in the School

2010-02-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

Publishers like their authors and illustrators to do as many school visits and library and festival events as they possibly can. Helen Mortimer, the OUP picture book editor, talking at the SCBWI meeting last week, stressed the importance of us all doing this to publicise our books.

A whole new set of skills, totally different to writing or illustrating, suddenly has to come into play to avoid boring the audience to tears or overexciting them and causing havoc in the classroom.

Back in the 1980s I got away with dressing up as the wolf in my book 'What's the Time Rory Wolf?' and telling the story in a growly voice; ending up with the suggestion we all play a riotous game of What's the Time Mr Wolf? The teachers always looked alarmed at this point... Later the book was included on the National Curriculum List for Seven Year Old Tests.

Now, things have to be a little more sedate. Here children paint lucky pebbles and make wish books in family workshops at the Ely Eel Festival and the 2009 Cambridge Wordfest.

This workshop was inspired by 'The Wishing Eel', a story I wrote and Year 2 pupils at Trumpington Primary School illustrated during a community residency.

Oh well, times change - those wolf sessions were a lot of fun, but it was hot under that wolf mask and the growling took its toll on my voice in the end. Anyway, I'm a granny now and grannies don't dress up as wolves. In fact - it's wolves that dress up as grannies...

Gustave Dore: Red Riding Hood

HOP PICKING

2010-01-30T04:41:00.000-08:00

Here are some oast houses in Kent. They remind me of childhood holidays at my grandmother's house when we used to go hop picking. My sister and I didn't do much picking; we preferred playing among the hop vines.

But the families from the East End of London, who were picking hops alongside us, had hands stained brown from picking.

Recently I gathered some visual reference on hop picking from the Museum of Kent Life near Maidstone with the view to doing a story set in 1940 when the Battle of Britain was taking place in the skies over the Kent hop fields:

I found out that the hoppers who used to come to Kent by train from London were known among the locals as 'the London bug-squashers'.

Perhaps the story I had in mind had too specific a theme for the picture book market today and might be better approached as a longer book with chapters and black and white drawings - a variation on the evacuation stories set in WW2.

KENT SKETCHES

2010-01-27T04:50:00.000-08:00

I've taken my light box and and work-in-progress and transferred my studio for a few days to Kent where I'm house -sitting one dog, one nephew, six quails and some hens. I'm close to the Stodmarsh bird reserve where cormorants roost and nest in dead trees that rise out of the water. It has a primordial atmosphere.

...just seen the fox go by. It'll be feeding its cubs and knows exactly where the quails and hens live. The last time I house sat here I was late locking them in and they were all taken.

GRANNY'S CLOCKS

2010-01-24T01:56:00.000-08:00

In Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce there's a grandfather clock that strikes thirteen in the middle of the night. Tom discovers time does strange things at that hour.

Below is Philippa's own grandfather clock decorated by Anthony Maitland with images from her book:

On my kitchen wall there are three clocks. It feels as if time is moving about when I look at them -but in a more mundane way. There will be many grannies with families overseas who have clocks like mine, helping them avoid waking people up in the middle of the night.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets, Burnt Norton

LARGE HEADS AND SPINDLY LEGS

2010-01-20T08:12:00.000-08:00

It was after being impressed by the intelligence of a six-year-old who happened to have a large head and very spindly legs that I started to draw children like that. He has become the child proto-type I carry in my head for all my child characters.

Quentin Blake, in a review of Selkie in Books For Keeps said 'there was something reminiscent of the fairyland illustrations of Dicky Doyle' in my illustrations.

Dicky Doyle was a Victorian illustrator, 1824- 1883, who also went in for large heads. Perhaps that was what Quentin Blake was referring to. Here are two examples of Dicky Doyle's work:

And here is a page from Selkie with that child with the large head and spindly legs:

PENGUINS ARE COOL DOWN UNDER

2010-01-17T06:36:00.000-08:00

Some think the Kindle e-book signals the death of the book as we know it; that the cool thing is to have books downloaded onto hand held devices. But here's something quite different coming from a very 'in' magazine in Australia - the Vice Magazine. In the Student Guide is an article called Get Smart. I'm quoting from Read:

'Books are important...Penguin Classics are acceptable on the condition they are out of print. New copies are rather 'low rent' for the serious intellectual, because ideally you want to look like you grew up with such books strewn carelessly all over the house, and when you wish to bone up on Galbraith, you don't bother with a bookstore, you languidly fetch a copy from the family library.

For this reason, out of print, dog-eared Pelican books with the blue and white covers are highly desirable. Forget about bookmarks: you know the page you want because you've read it a dozen times already, remember?

And from Read Some More:

Good topics include design, psychology, (leftist) economics and philosophy. Anything that's likely to have a difficult to learn, semi-technical vocabulary attached to it that'll intimidate anyone who happens to peer over your shoulder on the bus. Schopenhauer, Marx, Freud, Derrida and Lacan all score well here. Thick books are awkward, cumbersome and ugly. Stick to thin books. Thick books are for people at airports. Thin books look austere and poetic.'

If you were to go to General Pants Co - an Aussi high street fashion clothing store you'd find, in accessories, not Kindles with downloads but a selection of orange and white Penguin books. They are called 'Popular Penguins' with a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. The range is broad, from Hardy, Austen and Wilde to Nick Hornby, Roald Dahl and Donna Tartt.

Does the thin, old, foxed Penguin really think he can engage in battle with the e book Goliath?

THE KINDLE & A WW2 KNAPSACK

2010-01-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

Lisa Jardine A_Point_of_View_08_01_2010

I thought I'd pick up on a couple of points made by Lisa Jardine in a Point of View last week: that books are meant for sharing; not something envisaged by those marketing the Kindle in this Year of the Electronic Book.

'Passing a book from hand to hand' was what was expected to happen to this Penguin re-printed in 1941- the blurry type reads:

FOR THE FORCES

Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it, so that men and women in the Services may enjoy it too.

- something one wouldn't want to do to a Kindle. However, a Kindle with all its downloads would have been ideal in a soldier's haversack - better in many ways than this WW2 equivalent -The Knapsack published in 1939 for 'the soldier on active service' - a pocket book of Prose and Verse compiled by Herbert Read.

It has Pages for Notes and Additions. A Kindle could easily supply Additions but not Notes - for as Lisa Jardine observed there is no way of annotating a Kindle or filling the margins with private jottings.

Kindles are purely functional with no human story attached whereas this worn copy of The Knapsack does have a story. It survived Dunkirk along with the soldier who read it and scribbled in it. They were recued by a paddle steamer, the Medway Queen.

The soldier was my father and the book will always be cherished.

DRAWING CHILDREN

2010-01-10T05:58:00.000-08:00

When I sketch children, I sketch them as I see them - in proportion. However, when I start to put children into a story I alter their proportions. I see children differently when they become characters playing a part in the narrative. They often have to pit their wits against the challenges, quests and villains in my stories and so, although diminutive, they have to act far older than their size dictates. Here are Queenie and Ben in the rough and penultimate page of my book Tom Finger.

Mario, in this rough and first page from Mario's Angels, is also small yet in the story he feels grown up enough to offer help to the fresco artist, Giotto.

I suppose inside every child is a future adult so I try to capture a sense of that in my child characters.

BOOK SIGNINGS - AGONY & ECSTASY

2010-01-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

Last year I had my most successful book signing ever - with a queue going across a school hall and out of the door. The trouble was I had two broken wrists. I'll not forget the agony and ecstasy of signing so many books with arms in plaster.

Giving a signed copy of a book to your grandchild is very special and it's not hard these days to find an author or an illustrator to sign your book when good independent bookshops hold frequent author/ illustrator events. Here are a variety of signatures. Michael Rosen's:

Michael Morpurgo's with a little squiggle:

If you're lucky you might get several squiggles:

Philip Ardagh adds a special authenticity stamp to his signature:

And something extra over the page:

Some illustrators like to do a little drawing

- that is if they haven't broken both their wrists.

SLIDING GLIDING FALLING

2010-01-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

January is the month the Fens can freeze and there's skating on the flooded fields out at Earith, Upware and Welney. If you go through the ice you won't drown.

Not so on the Lake of Menteith in Scotland when Bonspiels were held in 1079 and 1981 and skaters had to make way for the curlers; there the water was very deep.

Oh dear is that a Mothercare pram in the middle of the lake ?

At the Bonspiels the curlers drank so much the local pub ran dry and a mist of whisky fumes hung over the ice but no one fell through.

This photo taken on Pulborough wild brooks reminds me of the boys in the short story Sliding by Leslie Norris:

'Then, unexpectantly, without warning, he found himself free of the binding friction that held him. He had begun to glide.'

Last year I too briefly experienced the magic of gliding without friction, propelled by the wind over the ice at Earith. And then I fell and was brought down to earth with two broken wrists. This New Year resolution is to avoid skating backwards and stay upright.

NEW BORN

2009-12-25T11:18:00.000-08:00

Life’s beginning is all bodily function - milk, wind, nappies – until that precious moment when small dark searching eyes find yours, a smile flickers and love is born.

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

2009-12-23T02:18:00.000-08:00

I remember the night before Christmas as the night of no sleep when my children were little. No one could go to bed until the stockings were retrieved and filled and it was well after midnight before the eldest finally gave up listening out for Santa. An hour later, the youngest would get it all wrong and wake up and then, at the crack of dawn, a roar of tearing wrapping paper would usher in the day.

The comfort for grannies feeling the absence of their grandchildren this Christmas is they can at least look forward to an unbroken night before Christmas and a long lie on Christmas morning.

Finding the right words

2009-12-19T04:19:00.000-08:00

Today’s grannies not only have to learn how modern pushchairs fold, how baby car seats strap and how bottle sterilisers work but if their grandchildren live overseas they also have to learn the right words too:

When in Canada I’ve learnt, for nappy say diaper, for cradle say bassinet, for pushchair say stroller, for pavement say side walk, for bin lorry say garbage truck, for torch say flash light, for sweetheart say buddy. And then there are those special words for the bedtime comforters; blankies, shawlies,bompies, barnims... and more in Carol Thompson's lovely book Noo-Noos.

Grannies all over the world will be able to find the right words of endearment in Carol's latest book Come to Me My Chickadee!

Here is a page of them:

Grannies on long haul flights

2009-12-15T04:46:00.000-08:00

I expect there are many grannies like me on long haul flights this Christmas; worrying about the effect of emissions on the world, yet longing to be with our grandchildren.

Years ago I sat next to a great granny on a long haul flight. She told me she had made the journey every Christmas for over twenty years to see her grandchildren and great grandchildren but that this would be the last time as she had started to need wheel chair help.

Here are two picture books I've chosen for my grandsons; this one a lovely, simple, board book for the baby

and this slightly scary one, signed by Michael Rosen and with a CD of the song inside, for the toddler.

Ghost Stories

2009-12-10T05:57:00.000-08:00

I recently had a meeting over lunch with my very first editor, Pam Royds, in a small room at John Murray Publishers in Albemarle Road. The room was haunted.

John Murray is a descendant of Byron’s publisher and I was told Byron broke off with Mary Lamb in this very room. Was the ghost a hysterical Mary Lamb or some other rejected author?

No unhappy ghost came between Pam and me as we enjoyed our talk and sandwiches. The feeling in the room was good. So perhaps the ghost was a happy one; an author who’d received a huge book deal and wanted to return and relive the moment, again and again throughout eternity. That's what my ghost would do.My own granny had a ghost story. When she was a teenager she saw a ghost of a young woman climbing the stairs in her house. The ghost was wearing a uniform she didn’t recognise. Some years later when WW2 broke out, my granny joined the WVS and when she was given her uniform she saw it was identical to the uniform worn by the young woman climbing the stairs. The ghost had been herself.

Advent Calendars

2009-12-07T06:01:00.000-08:00

My children never had advent calendars with chocolate inside. Instead every year, out came the old wooden advent calendars I’d made them when they were little, with hinged windows opening onto an image from a Christmas story, poem or song which was read at bedtime.
When they grew up I wondered whether they’d felt deprived of the real chocolaty advent experience. I was therefore happily surprised when my eldest son asked for his old advent calendar for his own son.
So down it came from the attic and, after a new lick of paint, was shipped to my grandson in Canada, along with all the old Christmas books.

Oh, and some chocolate money too, for now I’m a granny I’m learning to become indulgent.

The Digestive System at the House of Commons

2009-12-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

It was at the House of Commons that Steve Alton and Nick Sharratt won the 2009 Educational Writers’ Award; at the All Party Writers Group winter drinks reception held at on 2 December.

Their book was The Gooey Chewy Rumble Plop Book about the digestive system – I know my grandsons will love it when they’re a bit older.
There was a wonderful incongruity between the book’s long pink rubbery tongue and pop up guts and the solemn venue.

As we all sipped wine and ate canapés in Dining Room A, the Digital Economy Bill was having its second reading. Outside the loos I’d seen a bit of it on the screen but there was no sound and not being a lip reader only managed to catch a ‘no’ to something from Lord Mandelson. The significance of this bill for authors and illustrators is that audio and e-books are included in Clause 44. We have our wonderful Public Lending Right Scheme to thank for that and its Registrar, Jim Parker, who has our interests so much at heart.

Here’s a photo taken at the second International PLR Conference at Copenhagen back in1997 when I served on the Advisory Committee. Jim is right in the front.

The 2009 SCBWI Conference

2009-12-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Two things have prompted me to start this blog, a beautiful new grandson and the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in Winchester. The weekend was a lot of fun but nerve wracking too because I had to do some work at it; a two hour illustration workshop and a key note talk.

But I needn’t have worried. SCBWI members are wonderfully friendly and supportive. Afterwards I wanted to stay connected with them all and thought blogs, theirs and mine, might help with that. But writing and illustrating isn’t the only important strand in my life and there are others I’d like to connect with too – grannies everywhere. I hadn’t told anyone at the conference I was a granny because everyone there was young and had young children; mentioning grandchildren tends to be a bit of a conversation stopper in these situations. So I kept quiet. Oh dear. I’m very new the whole granny business and obviously have a lot to learn.

One thing I’m learning is that grandchildren can breathe new life into old. This happens in so many different ways but for the writer and illustrator, grandchildren inspire new ideas for stories. The other thing I’m learning is that I’m not alone in being a very part-time granny. There’s a new generation of grannies who don’t see their grandchildren very often. The job market and gap year travels are sending our children abroad and the chance of them meeting someone of a different nationality and settling overseas is high. This pattern has created a generation of grannies who rely on skype and weekly video calls to develop a relationship with their grandchildren.