Thanks to all who joined us yesterday for our big day out for small people, the Children’s Book Festival.
A crowd of 13,000 little literati populated the State Library lawns and Little Lonsdale Street, where would-be illustrators bent it like Banksy, decorating the bitumen with colourful chalk art.
Mum and crime writer Angela Savage was one of many bloggers to write up her experiences of the day, though she said it was ‘impossible to do justice to it all’. One of her highlights was author Sally Rippin, creator of Billie B. Brown. ‘Given some of the inane, poorly written fiction targeted at young girls, Billie B Brown is a breath of fresh air: well written stories with a feisty heroine at the centre who might well be my daughter’s peer,’ she said.
Mandi at That Book You Like stopped off at the 1001 Nights tent and said, ‘It never wears off really does it? The little flutter of joy when watching your kids really enjoy a story.’ Emily Gale enjoyed Gabrielle Wang’s draw-a-dragon workshop, but reported that ‘the rockstar of the day was Andy Griffiths. The Wheeler Centre was absolutely packed for his first talk and there was some argy-bargy over the good seats.’
Meanwhile, My Book Corner was impressed by Boori Monty Pryor. ‘His ability to involve everyone in the audience, to really engage and involve the children with his captivating story telling was a perfect start to a Sunday morning. Two boys in particular were in absolute fits of contagious giggles and hanging off his every word – now that’s what you call a Children’s Laureate!!’
774 ABC Melbourne’s Libbi Gore was there, too, broadcasting the action live from 10am to midday.
Thanks to all for making it a big day out to remember – and we’ll see you again next year.
(Click on thumbnails to view full size images.)
Co-presented by The Wheeler Centre and the State Library of Victoria.
Working with Words is a series where we talk to writers about their work – and other bookish things. This time, we talk to Andy Griffiths, Australia’s most popular children’s writer.
Andy is best known for the comic pulling power of books like the Just series and The Day My Bum Went Psycho. But while his books are seriously funny, he’s just plain serious about the business of writing.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
Well, if you want to go right back to the start it was in 1975, when I was 14 years old. Pursuit magazine, a Victorian education department publication which was distributed to schools across the state, published my short story, ‘Lost in Time’.
It was about being at a cricket game at the MCG with my dad and then, while attempting to buy three packets of potato chips and two cans of cola, suddenly finding myself transported 100 centuries into the future. It contained many of the same hallmarks of my work today … a first-person narrator (ie. me!) a believable everyday setting, a bizarre occurrence, some fun and games and then my desperate attempt to put things right again – but only making it worse in the process. It also contains my hopeless attempts at descriptive prose, which were no better then than they are today. My wife still laughs about my attempt to describe a complex time machine: ‘a room full of electronic controls, levers and switches – there was just about everything an electronics enthusiast could wish for’.
Nevertheless, I was paid ten dollars for my story. When they sent the payment, I initially thought it was a fine for an overdue library book called Lost in Time. Ironically, many years later when I submitted a story to Pursuit as an adult it was rejected. It took me a number of years after this to recover the pure storytelling voice I possessed as a 14-year-old.
What’s the best part of your job?
Having the time and freedom to follow my imaginative ideas and hunches and over many days, weeks and months watching them slowly coalesce into coherent characters, situations and stories – there’s nothing more exciting, satisfying or mysterious and I never get sick of this process.
I love nothing better than sitting down with a blank piece of paper and playing with words and ideas, challenging myself to come up with something new. The knowledge that you have to write something that you know is going to be read eagerly by many children – and the strong desire not to let them down – can really get the creative juices flowing.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Sitting down with a blank piece of paper and playing with words and ideas and NOT being able to come up with something new – especially when an urgent deadline is looming. Mostly I avoid deadline panics by being fairly organised well ahead of time (I usually know what I’m going to publish at least a year or two in advance), but there’s always surprises and last-minute schedule changes. I find my creativity works best when there’s plenty of time to revise, rethink and backtrack if necessary – I have to be relaxed so I can enter the playful state of mind I need to be in to create an entertaining story. My audience is too critical, and too savvy to go out with anything less than the best I’m capable of.
Of course, once a book is published I can always see ways I could have improved it … that’s the other worst part of the job!
Pippa Grandison and Patrick Brammall in Just Macbeth!: ‘Children are capable of understanding a great deal if you don’t patronise or talk down to them.’
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
There’s been a lot, but maybe the one that comes immediately to mind was the opening night performance of Just Macbeth! by the Bell Shakespeare company at the Melbourne Arts Centre in September 2008. My wife Jill and I worked on adapting Macbeth for young people for almost three years. We wanted to fully involve them in the action and immerse them in as much of the original language of Shakespeare’s original script as we could get away with. Oh yeah, and it had to be funny as well.
It was an insanely difficult project and we gave up on it many times. But Bell Shakespeare were persistent and we always ended up going back to it. By the time it got to opening night, we were pretty sure we had something that worked, but there was no way of knowing until it was performed for real in front of a full house. Fortunately it worked. I’ve never sweated so much in my life.
It was significant for many reasons, not the least being that children are capable of understanding a great deal if you don’t patronise or talk down to them.
What’s the best (or worst) advice about writing you’ve received?
I had a number of great and inspiring writing teachers, such as Carmel Bird. They all gave me useful pointers and lots of encouragement, but perhaps the most practical advice I received was from Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She advocated vast amounts of writing practice.
Writing is a muscle, and like any muscle it gets stronger with use. In her book, Goldberg advocates doing a number of hours of timed writing practice each day. In these practice sessions, you set a countdown timer for a particular time and then write as fast as possible in order to evade the inner censor/critic that lurks in all of us.
By following this method you start discovering who you are as a writer and what subject matter and style really turns you on. It helped me to stop imitating other writers and find a voice that was all my own.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever read or heard about yourself?
At the height of the controversy over The Bad Book – a book of cautionary tales gone mad – a feature article in the Herald Sun accused me of coming up with the idea for the book with my accountant as a way of swindling children out of their hard-earned pocket-money. I had to laugh at that one. Despite the success stories, if there’s one field that you DON’T go into to make money, it’s children’s writing. If you have a sincere desire to tell stories and entertain children and you’re willing to do that whether anybody pays you or not, then maybe you have a chance.
The Bad Book: ‘The Herald Sun accused me of coming up with the idea for the book with my accountant as a way of swindling children out of their hard-earned pocket-money.’
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I strongly suspect I’d still be the secondary English teacher that I was when I began writing funny stories to inspire my Year Seven English class to get excited about reading and writing. Either that, or a stand-up comedian. I employ a lot of stand-up comedy in my talks to children and I often think of my stories as extended stand-up monologues.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
I think the principles of good writing can be taught – there are proven methods to improve a piece of writing. And I’ve had a lot of success at getting kids – and adults – to tell entertaining stories based on the events of their own lives.
The question of whether somebody is naturally suited to being a good storyteller, however, is a little more open I think. There are plenty of good writers who, for all their strengths, are not so great at telling story – and plenty of good storytellers who are pretty average writers. But in the end, I believe you get better at most things with a sincere desire to improve and the discipline to learn, study and practise.
In April 2013 I’m planning to publish a book called Once Upon a Slime: 50 Fun Ways to Write Stories … Fast! It will be a book of resources for school teachers, creative writing students and children to have fun with writing and storytelling.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to write books for children?
In a nutshell, I’d recommend that you write the sort of books that you loved to read as a child. And when you think you’ve done it read it out aloud to a small group and see if you have their complete attention. And if you don’t, be prepared to go back to the drawing board/writing desk for as many times as it takes. Did I mention persistence? Oh yeah … persistence!
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I’ll love bookshops and paper books until the day I die, but I must admit I’m enjoying e-books – especially for non-fiction. I prefer to buy them through Booki.sh, so that I’m still supporting an independent bookshop.
(NB: Of course, as the proud author of my first and recently published digital-only book, Andypedia: A Complete Guide to the Books, Stories and Characters of Andy Griffiths, I may be open to accusations of a conflict of interest on this subject. I stand accused.)
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
The Catcher in the Rye. I never got over the surprise and delight of the idea of an unreliable narrator. And Holden Caulfield is one of the most funny, sad and complex of all unreliable narrators!
Andy Griffiths is one of the guests for our Children’s Book Festival, a big day out of free fun held on the lawns of the State Library of Victoria on Sunday 25 March. You can check out the full program here. Andy will be signing books at 1.40pm and 3.40pm.
Andy was one of the 12 guests for this year’s Wheeler Centre Gala, Stories to Believe In. You can watch his talk here. His next book, the much-awaited Just Doomed!, will be released in April.
Our article on the politics of pink and pastel Lego for girls provoked furious debate on our Twitter and Facebook accounts last week.
Writer, philosopher and dad Damon Young, one of those who spoke to the Wheeler Centre for last week’s article, shares his thoughts on why pink bricks and ponies may be dodgy, but can be subverted by savvy parents for imaginative free play.
I’ve been playing with Lego for over thirty years. First, as a kid, now as a dad. Over the decades, Lego’s become more ‘boyish’: less smiling minifigures in space-suits, and more snarling villains, stubbled heroes and licensed film tie-ins. More guns, tanks, missiles, fast cars and so on.
Girls can play with all of this, of course – my daughter does. But they often don’t, because they’re taught that girls like pink, flowers, horses, fairies, nail salons, cafe chats and so on. Play is gendered very quickly.
From what I can tell, Lego was once gender-neutral, then ‘boyed’ itself to get market share. If boys like cops and robbers and Star Wars starfighters, then Lego would have them. Bam. Sales skyrocket.
Many girls responded to this typically: it’s not for us.
Having gained a foothold with the boy-branded toys, Lego can now brand with girl toys: hyper-feminised minifigures who like to chat with girlfriends at the cafe before hitting the beauty salon, for example. Not an alien or grave-robbing archaeologist in sight.
Now, is this a problem? Yes, because more knee-jerk sex divisions are dodgy. They uphold traditional ideas about gender roles: girls talk and worry about beauty, while boys fight, die and save princesses. The problem is not necessarily the gender traits: as if one has more value than the other. The problem is that we grow up thinking that they’re ‘natural’; that our education, professional and domestic lives can be no other way. This is what so many toys do: they’re typically conservative, because they recognise and reinforce the easy market categories that already exist, such as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’.
But this is not the end of the story. Together with the media, family life, schooling and employment, toys clearly help to shape our gender identities. But there is no evidence for a straightforward causal relationship between ‘X toy’ and ‘X personality’. Plenty of independent, smart, well-educated, strong women played with Barbie, My Little Pony or Cabbage Patch dolls – I’m married to one of them. She did not simply play out the Barbie fantasy: the dolls were taken from their Valley Girl fantasy-land and given new identities and plots. And regularly taken apart.
Lego is perfect for this. Much of the magic with Lego happens, not with the off-the-shelf play – although it’s clearly good for concentration and motor skills – but with the later free play. All the bits go back into the bags and boxes, and are transformed into new characters, vehicles, buildings. My son’s space police starships and fire stations became a library, a museum, a house, a cafe, and a hundred other things with wheels, walls and sometimes guns.
My hope is that the girl-branded Lego can be used in this way. With good encouragement from parents, girls need not be stuck with traditional feminine characters and scenes. If pink bricks or ponies are first step, they are not necessarily the end of the road.
Parents can provide primary colour bricks alongside the pinks and purples. They can prompt children to remake their cafe or salon, rather than keeping them pristine on the shelf.
If a family genuinely cares about gender equity, and provides a home life of robust respect and reflection, Lego play – regardless of its colour – will reflect this.
If you’re a fan of imaginative free play for kids, you’ll love our Children’s Book Festival, held in conjunction with the State Library of Victoria.
The festival includes workshops, activities, book signings, face painting, petting zoo and more. guests Guests will include Graeme Base, Leigh Hobbs, Hazel Edwards, Andy Griffiths and Sally Rippin.
The Children’s Book Festival is held on the State Library lawns (with plenty of indoor activities, too) from 10am to 4pm on Sunday 25 March, this weekend.
The Age reported today that Lego’s controversial new line for girls, Lego Friends, has won Toy of the Year for its City Park Cafe.
Lego Friends was launched last December, with curvy doll-like figures, given names and distinct personalities, pastel-coloured bricks (including lots of pink) and playsets that include the Butterfly Beauty Shop, Andrea’s Stage and Mia’s Puppy House.
The Lego Friends Butterfly Beauty Shop
The product – which borrows elements from Disney Princess – is a response to the fact that Lego has appealed mostly to boys in recent years, especially over the past decade, with the company adding superhero and Harry Potter themed sets to its line. Lego CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstrop said they’re aiming ‘to reach the other 50 percent of the world’s children’.
Lego Friends has attracted outspoken enemies, with an active petition to ban it.
‘So, now we have boys’ Lego and girls’ Lego, instead of just Lego, a creative toy that all children could play with,’ says Monica Dux, Wheeler Centre regular and author of The Great Feminist Denial. ‘This development is symptomatic of the deepening gender divide in early childhood, a divide which is becoming ever more ubiquitous, and is being forced onto children at younger and younger ages. But where does this process end?’
‘Though there is educational value to playing with Lego, it’s just a toy company that needs to make money,’ said feminist website Jezebel. ‘Girls have already been conditioned to want pink and sparkly toys about ponies and princesses (though mercifully there’s no royal family in Heartlake City) and it isn’t the company’s job to change that … we’ve reached the point where girls see blocks in primary colours and think they’re not for them.’
Neuroscientist Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, also believes girls are put off Lego by social conditioning rather than any implicit need for pink and princesses. But she reluctantly endorses the Lego Friends range nonetheless. ‘If it takes colour-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains.’
Penni Russon, author of books for children and teenagers and mother of two girls, recalls playing with Lego as a child ‘in a way that could probably be perceived as gendered’; she made houses and cars, and especially liked the doors and windows that opened and the flowers. But she says that although she probably would have played with pink Lego if it was around, she won’t be buying the ‘silly insipid girl version’ for her children.
‘I think we have all been conditioned by nostalgia to see Lego as something beyond a product and a corporation. Talk about lifelong brand affiliation! Nostalgia (and totally brilliant marketing) drives us to see Lego as some kind of vital childhood experience that enhances intelligence and creativity. But do kids really get more from Lego than wooden blocks, art materials, electronics sets etc? Is it so vital that every child find a Lego set that suits them?’
Writer and philosopher Damon Young is, like so many of us, a product of that lifelong affiliation. He’s been playing with Lego for 30 years – first as a kid, now as a dad. ‘Over the decades, Lego’s become more ‘boyish’: less smiling mini-figures in space-suits, and more snarling villains, stubbled heroes and licensed film tie-ins. More guns, tanks, missiles, fast cars and so on,’ he says. ‘Girls can play with all of this, of course – my daughter does. But they often don’t, because they’re taught that girls like pink, flowers, horses, fairies, nail salons, café chats and so on. Play is gendered very quickly.’
The curvy, pastel-clothed Lego Friends minifigures
He says the hyperfeminised Lego Friends is a problem; toys that reinforce traditional ideas about gender roles and make concepts like ‘girls talk and worry about beauty, while boys fight, die and save princesses’ make these stereotypes seem natural, rather than choices, among many available. ‘Toys clearly help to shape our gender identities.’
But he believes that girl-branded Lego, while ‘dodgy’, can still encourage free play that transcends the boundaries of its pastel boxes.
‘With good encouragement from parents, girls need not be stuck with traditional feminine characters and scenes. If pink bricks or ponies are first step, they are not necessarily the end of the road. Parents can provide primary colour bricks alongside the pinks and purples. They can prompt children to remake their café or salon, rather than keeping them pristine on the shelf. If a family genuinely cares about gender equity, and provides a home life of robust respect and reflection, Lego play – regardless of its colour – will reflect this.’
But Monica Dux remains sceptical. ‘If you think this initiative from Lego is benign, just look at the focus of their new gendered product. Girls get to play ‘cafe’ and hang out in Lego hair salons (!!!), while boys can do almost anything, from travelling through space to constructing cities, having adventures in a wide variety of worlds both historical and imaginary.’
‘If children do learn through play, which of these two lessons would you rather give your daughters?’
Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women’s Day. The Wheeler Centre will be marking the occasion with two free events.
At 12.45pm, The Stella Prize’s Christine Gordon will deliver this week’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the topic Feminism is Personal.
And at 7.15pm, conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her journeys through some of the world’s most fascinating and divided societies in The Tenth Parallel.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
Fans of Game of Thrones, the series based on George R.R. Martin’s novels, shouldn’t miss eyeballing the medieval feast staged to celebrate the DVD release. But they might want to miss out on actually eating it. Complete with bloodied pigs’ heads, ‘eyeballs’ and ‘dragon’s eggs’ drizzled with liquid gold, it’s a feast for the eyes, but not one that will necessarily work up an appetite.
‘Anything about chopping dudes up, I’m into that,’ says chef Grant King, who hopes to make Darth Vader in chocolate next.
Rachel Cusk’s latest memoir, Aftermath, about her separation from her husband of ten years, includes lines like, ‘My husband said he wanted half of everything, including the children. No, I said … They’re my children … They belong to me.’ Cusk caused a scandal – and spawned the ‘mummy memoir’ genre – with her brutally self-analytical memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work, in 2001. She sharply divided critics, who either loved or hated her for laying bare the dark side of motherhood. The Guardian says of Aftermath (April): ‘She has again mined her life and told of her experience of being a woman, in a Read the extract and make up your own mind.
Rachel Cusk: ‘If there is a disjuncture between how women live and how they actually feel – which to me there is, in motherhood and marriage – I will feel entitled to attempt to articulate it.’
Stephen Colbert is making bookish news this week, after a gag during a two-part interview with Maurice Sendak (which he began by saying ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’) has turned into a book deal. After pitching an idea for a sequel, While the Wild Things Are: Still Wildin’ (starring Vin Diesel), Colbert joked he was writing a picture-book-in-verse, I Am a Pole (and So Can You!) and read a preview aloud. Sendak, who told Colbert that most children’s books are ‘very bad’, admitted, ‘The sad thing is, I like it.’ So did Grand Central Publishing, who has signed him up, with a publication date of 8 May 2012. ‘It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a children’s book,’ said Colbert. ‘I hope the minutes you and your loved ones spend reading it are as fulfilling as the minutes I spent writing it.’
Stephen Colbert: ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’.
Wondering what to read this year? Readings’ Martin Shaw has asked a handful of Australian writers to share the books they’re most looking forward to in 2012 for a series of posts for Kill Your Darlings. Nam Le is looking forward to new books from Chloe Hooper, Hilary Mantel and Richard Ford – and the second novel from Rachel Kushner. And there were multiple mentions of Texts in the City host Ruby Murray’s first novel, Running Dogs (Scribe, May) and Paddy O’Reilly’s Fine Colour of Rust (Harper Collins, March), which will be released simultaneously in Australia and the UK. Israeli comic short-story writer Etgar Keret, who will be appearing at the Wheeler Centre next month, also earned a nod for his new collection Suddenly a Knock at the Door, which got a rave review in last weekend’s Australian.
Etgar Keret: The Australian says, ‘There is method in Keret’s madness, and genius, too.’
In the lead-up to this week’s Oscars, the Independent talked to five novelists about their books’ transitions from page to screen. Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants, said director Alexander Payne ‘met my whole family, and they all ended up being in the movie’. He said, ‘Almost every line of dialogue was right out of the book, every sequence, the music I’d mentioned, the clothes they wore, the places they went to.’ Lionel Shriver thinks Lynne Ramsay’s movie of We Need to Talk About Kevin is ‘rather wonderful’, though ‘the movie does lean towards Kevin being evil from birth, whereas that’s more up for grabs in the novel’. Fay Weldon, however, enjoyed the money for the rights to her book The Life and Loves of a She Devil, but says the movie (starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep) ‘missed the point entirely’. She’d still do it again, though.
‘I still see myself as a struggling writer,’ says Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants
Is it too soon? Just 11 years after it was first brought to screen, Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho is set to be remade. Variety reported last week that Lionsgate has a remake of the film in the early stages of development. The news prompted Ellis to tweet, “I have warned Lionsgate that I will not approve a new version of "American Psycho” unless it stars SCOTT DISICK or MILES FISHER.“ Watch the video of Bret Easton Ellis' 2010 appearance at the Wheeler Centre.
Meanwhile, not-so-young adults who enjoy reading young adult fiction – and there are a lot of us who do – may recognise themselves in a new film starring Charlize Theron. Written by Juno writer Diablo Cody, Young Adult tells the story of the author of young adult novels who goes to great lengths to seduce her high school boyfriend, who’s now married with a young child. Here’s a glowing review of the film by a writer of young adult novels.
What would Shakespeare’s plays have looked like had they been published as kids' books? Maybe something like this.
The Dolly Parton show is in town and so it’s a good occasion to pay tribute to the veteran country singer’s work to promote literacy among poor kids. Since 1996, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library USA has mailed every child under five in participating counties a book every month until their fifth birthday.
Should YouTube have a literature channel? It’s a question raised by the blog The Fiction Circus (brought to our attention by Media Bistro). Needless to say, we endorse the campaign wholeheartedly so that videos such as this one may find their true home. But then again, we would say that, what with our own YouTube channel and all.
One of our favourite collective nouns is ‘murmuration’, in reference to groups of starlings. Murmurations used to be a more common and more spectacular sight in Europe, but starling numbers have dropped some 70% since 1970. It refers to the sound made by the great clouds of starlings that flock together on late wintry afternoons in northern Europe. We found this YouTube video of murmurating starlings hypnotic for all kinds of reasons. It’s a promotional video for a book on economics, although you wouldn’t know it from the footage, which inspires in the narrator all kinds of grandiloquent philosophising. Do murmurations of starlings have something to teach us about the future of humanity? We’ll reserve our judgment on that, but enjoy the spectacle. (More murmuration.)
In 1984, American author Chris Van Allsburg published a book called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The highly unusual book consisted of a series of drawings with a title and a single line. The conceit that linked the drawings together – explained in a fictional editor’s note at the start of the book – is that each drawing was taken from a different book, created by a mysterious artist called Harris Burdick. The 14 drawings, effectively, were supposed to be samples by an illustrator who, in 1984, had left them at at the office of a children’s book editor called Peter Wenders, promising to return the following day with all 14 completed manuscripts. Harris Burdick, the story goes, never returned. The drawings are intended to be finely imagined prompts for readers to make up their own stories.
Now, 14 children’s authors, including Lemony Snicket, have taken Harris Burdick’s legacy to the next level. The authors – who include Lois Lowry, Louis Sachar, Kate DiCamillo, MT Anderson, Linda Sue Park, Gregory Maguire and Jon Sciezska – have created stories to match the illustrations. The new book is called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick – here’s a preview.
Illiteracy and poverty go hand in hand. There are almost 800 million adults and children alive today who can’t read, and most of them live in the developing world. Closer to home, only 15% of indigenous children at year 7 level in remote communities can read at an acceptable standard.
With Indigenous Literacy Day being yesterday, and today being International Literacy Day, we cast our minds back to an inspiring appearance by John Wood, who was a guest at the Wheeler Centre earlier this year.
A hiking trip in the Himalayas in the 1990s exposed Wood to the high levels of illiteracy among Nepalese children. A Nepalese teacher explained the paradox in these terms: Nepal is a country that is too poor to pay for universal education, and yet as long as children remain uneducated Nepal will remain a poor country.
At the time, John Wood was Microsoft’s Australian marketing manager. He left the boardroom to found Room to Read with the motto, ‘World change starts with educated children.’ “Education,” Wood told the Wheeler Centre audience, “is the one issue that affects every other issue.”
Tomorrow night at the Wheeler Centre, the Indigenous Literacy Foundation is hosting the Art for Country auction to raise money for literacy resources for the communities that have provided the artworks to be auctioned.
Image credit: Ingvar Kenne
Mark Mordue on why modern-day fatherhood is all about eating breakfast standing up.
It’s Father’s Day morning, the year 2011. No Glad Wrap in the house. Do you have any idea how that screws with dad’s main day of the year? Three kids, lunches to make and pack, no Glad Wrap! My day is in tatters, man. Ruination. It’s going be a big climb back after this kind of start, let me tell you.
The kids are up early. I notice on special sleep-in days like this they always wake up early. They’re excited. There are two different father’s day events at the two eldest kids schools. I’m a guest DJ at one. Which effectively means loading up my ipod with 70s rock, 80s post-punk pop and a few hip hop tunes and old country numbers, then I’m on my way to found my own groove nation.
Of course you try to be a crowd pleaser, but personal taste creeps in. At the last minute I get cold feet about the prospect of playing Nick Cave’s ‘No Pussy Blues’ at the school Fathers’ Day breakfast. What was amusing and irreverent last night when I put my ‘mixed tape’ (I’m so old) together now seems crude and likely to offend. Dear me – what to do?
I’ll swap it for Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s ‘Come Up and See Me, Make Me Smile’. I always remember one of my friends’ fathers accusing me of being a homosexual for liking that song when I was 12. I think it was because Harley wore mascara and a fur coat with no shirt on in the video clip, which seemed kinda cool to me at the time – not that I ever adopted the look for myself.
Anyway, back at Masterchef Central I use some disposable plastic containers – left over from takeaway Indian meals and rinsed clean – to pack the sandwiches in. Dads are genius improvisers like that. My partner is meanwhile trying to make sure the kids get dressed – and put their shoes on as well! Then we are finally out of our own private madhouse and on our way to a larger, school-organised one.
My DJ efforts prove to be somewhat frustrated as the hall stereo keeps getting turned off due to surges brought on by all the tea urns. So I stand beside the electrical mains switching the power on again every time it goes off. It strikes me this is not the safest way to celebrate Father’s Day, but damn it, I put David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ and Johnny Cash singing ‘Solitary Man’ on this mix, and whether the crowd wants it or not I am giving it to them. ‘Golden Years’ comes out a little like this: Golden ..ears, G..ears… Wah.” Long pause. “Wah.”
My partner has been co-opted to do the barbecue and has disappeared into a cloud of smoking bacon fat. I am amazed she can smile at all but she seems to be enjoying herself.
Image via terriseesthings/Flickr
Somehow my youngest son has attached himself to my leg, and is weeping and crying because he wants a bottle of strawberry milk from the canteen, which is still officially closed. Which means he cannot have that strawberry milk. The tears and screaming suggest he has been through a savage beating or received news of a death in the family.
I have to drag him across the stage where I am DJing in front of audience of about 100 other highly distracted dads and their families. Most of them are busy dealing with their own kids or trying to have a conversation over my annoying music, but I still feel my crying-son-attached-to-my-leg-and-being dragged-along look lacks the right aura of parental harmony and love that I am seeking to project. He finally lets me go and I make a break for it as he lays resentfully in a tantrum-ish heap.
I decide to get a bacon and egg roll off my partner and a coffee as well. What the heck. It’s 8am and I’m just a modern guy, as Iggy Pop used to sing. Every now and then as I walk around with breakfast in my hand – and isn’t modern fatherhood the art of having breakfast standing up? – I catch another father’s eye, and get some weird amused smile or a hard-working, stunned nod of the head.
Up on the stage the kids all start reading poems for their dads that are very hard to hear, then the whole event declines into a rambling multiple-choice quiz that no one ever wins. My partner takes off with our two youngest children to the next port of call, the Father’s Day celebration at my daughter’s school down the road. My son goes to his class. I’m left with his football and my ipod throbbing to Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in an almost empty hall.
Outside the sky is grey as my hair, threatening rain that does not seem to come. I’m able to stop for a more solitary and calming coffee at a local café where what sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach is being piped through the stereo. It’s now 10am. And there is plenty of Father’s Day yet left to burn. I promise myself not to yell at the kids tonight when they bicker and harass me. All the time I sense the main game is tolerance, patience, listening, and more patience. It’s the lesson I keep having to re-learn every day.
I know the kids have surprises for me, cards they’ve made, presents they have picked up at the stalls being held at their respective schools. A key ring, a bottle opener, a bath flannel with a football team logo, maybe I will even score some red wine as well if I am lucky. I realize I can get some Glad Wrap at the shops on the way home, and feel a new mood of fatherly zen begin to descend over me. The static of the morning is still subsiding, and yet what I find I want – and need – all over again is my family around me once more. Though maybe not attached to my leg. Just to be safe, I’m thinking I’ll buy some strawberry milk as well anyway.
Mark Mordue is the 2010 Pascall Prize Australian Critic of the Year. He is currently working on a biography of Nick Cave.
You’ve heard Samuel L. Jackson read it. You’ve maybe even heard Werner Herzog read it. But have you heard Australia’s favourite storybook reader, Noni Hazlehurst, read the children’s book spoof sensation, Go the F-ck to Sleep?
Noni will be a guest at the ‘Unaccustomed as I am’ event next week at the Wheeler Centre.
German ‘Sesame Street’ logo via WikiCommons
A new book claims that television shows such as Sesame Street propagate radical left-wing ideology. Newspapers across the world – including this Telegraph report, taken up in The Age – have reported on the publication of Primetime Propaganda, by US conservative columnist Ben Shapiro. Shapiro interviewed leading producers of shows like Sesame Street, and concluded they are trying to “shape America in their own leftist image”. This is how the Independent summarised the book’s findings: “The TV series Friends undermined family values; Sesame Street taught ethnic minorities about civil disobedience; Happy Days had a subtle anti-Vietnam subtext; and the 1980s cop show MacGyver tried to persuade pistol-packing Americans that guns are bad”.
It’s not the first time Sesame Street or its host network, the Public Broadcasting Service, have come under political fire – and it tends to come from both sides of politics. Sesame Street has regularly been accused of promoting a gay agenda. However, it’s also been criticised for its depiction of women and Latinos as well as for being “too wholesome” – here’s a Time review from 1970. In that same year, in just its second season, it was banned in the southern US state of Mississippi. Conversely, in 1973, Sesame Street was denounced in the USSR as “the latest example of United States cultural imperialism”. Rock, meet hard place. As of 2009, the show had won 118 Emmy awards.
Happy International Children’s Day.
Melbourne author Alison Goodman’s fantasy children’s book Eona has debuted at number five on the New York Times best-seller list in its category. The children’s chapter book best-seller list lists best-selling books intended to be read by children aged between seven and ten. The name refers to the fact that most of these lavishlly-illustrated books are divided into short chapters. Alison Goodman has published books for children and young adults since 1998, when her debut novel Singing the Dogstar Blues was published. She has previously been a DJ O'Hearn Memorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Four Australian author-illustrators of children’s books will be touring China this month and next as part of an initiative to promote the local industry in the Middle Kingdom. The tour, billed as the ‘Swimming with Stories’ festival, will feature an exhibition of book illustration as well as workshops focusing on writing, illustration and other facets of narrative performance.
Thirty-one authors and illustrators will be featured, and four of them will visit the People’s Republic in person: Sally Rippin, Leigh Hobbs, Ann James and Alison Lester. Swimming with Stories begins at the Bookworm in Chengdu from May 18 to May 22, moves on to the Shanghai Children’s Museum from June 1 to June 5, and winds up at the Beijing Bookworm from June 6 to June 9.
A kids' book with a twist is proving to be a pre-publishing phenomenon in the US. The book, Go the F—– to Sleep, is actually an adult cry for help, presented in a tongue-in-cheek spirit as a kids' book. And it has its origins on Facebook. The New York Times reports author Adam Mansbach – writer of ambitious, and unmistakeably adult, literary novels – posted the book’s title last year at a time when his then two year-old daughter Vivien was taking two hours to fall asleep. Reaction from his friends was so positive that he extended the idea and invited kids' book artist Ricardo Cortes to illustrate it.
The book isn’t due to be published until October. That hasn’t stopped it from becoming an enviable publishing success story. On the basis of its title alone, it’s already an Amazon bestseller. It peaked at number 2 on the Amazon bestseller list last Thursday, after the author appeared on a panel over the Easter weekend – the first publicity he’s done for the book – prompted a Twitter frenzy and was picked up by Boing Boing.
The shortlist for the Children’s Book of the Year has been announced. The awards – hosted by the Children’s Book Council of Australia – are the nation’s most prestigious. Congratulations to all shortlisted authors, as well as authors of notable books for each category, as listed on the CBCA website.
The shortlist for the 2011 Picture Book of the Year is: Mirror by Jeannie Baker, Family Forest by Kim Kane and Lucia Masciullo, My Uncle’s Donkey by Tohby Riddle, Two Peas in a Pod by Chris McKimmie, Hamlet by Nicki Greenberg, and Why I Love Australia by Bronwyn Bancroft.
The shortlist for the 2011 Early Childhood Book of the Year is: Maudie and Bear by Jan Ormerod, Look See, Look At Me by Leonie Norrington and Dee Huxley, It’s Bedtime, William! by Deborah Niland, Noni The Pony by Alison Lester, The Tall Man and the Twelve Babies by Tom Niland Champion, Kilmeny Niland & Deborah Niland, and The Deep End by Ursula Dubosarsky, illustrated by Mitch Vane.
The shortlist for the 2011 Younger Readers Book of the Year is: Duck for a Day by Meg McKinlay, Toppling by Sally Murphy and Rhian Nest James, The Red Wind: The Kingdom Of The Lost Book One by Isobelle Carmody, Henry Hoey Hobson by Christine Bongers, Just A Dog by Michael Gerard Bauer, and Violet Mackerel’s Brilliant Plot by Anna Branford.
The shortlist for the 2011 Older Readers Book of the Year is: The Piper’s Son by Melina Marchetta, The Life of a Teenage Body-Snatcher by Doug MacLeod, The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett, About a Girl by Joanne Horniman, Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley, and Six Impossible Things by Fiona Wood.
The shortlist for the 2011 Eve Pownall Award for Information Books is: The Return Of The Word Spy by Ursula Dubosarsky and Tohby Riddle, Our World: Bardi Jaawi: Life At Ardiyooloon by One Arm Point Remote Community School, Wicked Warriors and Evil Emperors by Alison Lloyd and Terry Denton, Zero Hour: The Anzacs on the Western Front by Leon Davidson, Drawn from the Heart by Ron Brooks, and Science Behind: Theme Parks, Playgrounds and Toys by Nicolas Brasch.
If you pass the State Library lawns today and they seem to have a slightly crumpled look, you’re not hallucinating. It’s estimated that about 9,000 kids, parents and grandparents attended the Children’s Book Festival yesterday in overcast but mostly dry conditions, crushing every single one of those blades of grass. The event was a roaring success and we wish to thank everyone involved: our co-hosts the State Library of Victoria, Alan Brough and ABC 774, all the volunteers and event supporters, the authors and illustrators who were the stars of the show, and most of all everyone who attended. We’ll be publishing a selection of images in tomorrow’s Dailies, and in the meantime here’s a link to a review of the event in today’s Age.
All week we’ve run a series of articles on kids' and young adult books to coincide with the inaugural Children’s Book Festival this Sunday from 10am to 4pm.
Today we finish the series by following up on a story we ran last week, when the UK’s education secretary Michael Gove suggested school kids should be reading 50 books a year. The Guardian reports that some kids' book authors have reacted to the comments with scepticism. Anthony Browne has suggested that the government’s library closures give the lie to Gove’s comments, and Phillip Pullman, author of the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, agrees, adding, “Where are they going to get these 50 books a year from?” In a related article, the newspaper asked its readers to suggest reading lists for kids aspiring to meet Gove’s challenge – here are the responses.
We also liked this blog on dreams and writing by young adult author (and young adult) Steph Bowe, we were moved by these American inner city kids' stories.
Feel free to share your links to kids' book-related blogs and websites you like.
See you Sunday!
We add our congratulations to the long list of accolades for Shaun Tan, who’s backed up his Oscar win with the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Worth 5 million krona ($765,000), it’s the world’s richest prize for literature for children and young adults. Tan was reported as planning to donate a portion of the money to the Indigenous Literacy Project.
Another Australian to have won the award, endowed by the creator of Pippi Longstocking, is Sonya Hartnett, who won in 2008.
The conventional wisdom is that it’s usually wise to read the book before you see the film. But as filmmakers cast their sights further and further afield for inspiration, sometimes the film is definitely better than the book.
A case in point is news that a film is to be made of a how-to guide to pregnancy. Production company Lionsgate has announced that Kirk Jones, director of Waking Ned Devine and Nanny McPhee, is to adapt What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the screen as a romantic comedy. Written by Sharon Mazel and Heidi Murkoff (who will co-executive produce the film), the pregnancy manual spent almost 10 years on the New York Times bestseller list and is now in its fourth edition.
It’s not the first time the book will have graced the silver screen: it has already made cameo appearances on film (in Knocked Up) and on television (Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel is seen reading it during her pregnancy on Friends). It’s also not the first time a feature film has been made based on an instruction manual. The film He’s Just Not That Into You (starring the aforementioned Aniston) was based on eponymous 2004 how-to book on dating written by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo (excerpt), which was in turn inspired by a TV show (Sex and the City). For more book recommendations on pregnancy and parenting, see this recent Daily.
The Children’s Book Festival, hosted on the State Library Lawns by the Wheeler Centre and the State Library of Victoria, is on this Sunday 3 April from 10am.
In the lead-up to the Children’s Book Festival on Sunday, Chris Morphew is blogging this week on the website of ABC Radio National’s Book Show.
Chris is a young adult author who’ll be appearing at the festival on Sunday. He wrote the first four titles in the smash-hit Zac Power Mega Missions series. He has since written a total of 12 Zac Power books as well as six titles in the popular series The Phoenix Files.
Chris writes for a segment of the children’s book market educational experts have come to call the reluctant reader. There are several kinds of reluctant readers: smart kids who like books but who read with difficulty; kids, some of whom can read well, who aren’t interested and thus at risk of falling behind; and kids with learning problems that impede their reading. Fortunately there’s a wealth of websites, research and resources to help teachers and parents with reluctant readers.
On the subject of how he came to write for reluctant readers, Chris comments, “I’ve never made any conscious decision to create a career out of writing for reluctant readers. It all happened more or less by accident … I am constantly amazed by the number of humbling, heart-warming emails I receive from parents of formerly-reluctant readers – or even from the children themselves – telling me how The Phoenix Files has helped to change their mind about books…
“But it does make me wonder if we have a tendency to get a bit too fixated on uncovering a magic formula for ‘curing’ reluctant readers when, at least for some of them, the solution may simply be a case of finding the right book for the right child…
“Reluctant readers are not some peculiar alien species with an entirely different way of interacting with texts. If they’re going to connect with a story, they’ll do it for the same reasons that all of us do: characters we can fall in love with, plotlines that make us think and dream and gasp and wonder, expressions of hope and redemption that shine light out into the darkness of the world.”
Winners of the Book Trust’s Best New Illustrators Award have been announced in the UK. According to the Trust’s website, the winners – Joe Berger, Claudia Boldt, Katie Cleminson, Chris Haughton, Alice Melvin, Sara Ogilvie, Levi Pinfold, Salvatore Rubbino, Viviane Schwarz and Kevin Waldron – “represent the best rising talent in the field of illustration today, who demonstrate remarkable creative flair, artistic skill and boundless imagination in their work”. An exhibition of the winning artists' work the Illustration Cupboard has just ended and will commence a tour of the UK.
In this narrated slideshow showcasing examples of the illustrators' work, award judge and children’s laureate Anthony Browne notes, “these illustrators recognise that the true picture book has a gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that’s filled by the imagination of the reader.”
Last year in Australia, two illustrators – Andy Geppert for Little big tree and Andrew Joyner for The terrible plop – shared the Crichton Award for Children’s Book Illustration. Here’s a link to the Illustrators Australia award winners for 2011, and here’s another to the Australia and New Zealand chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
The Wheeler Centre and the State Library of Victoria will host the Children’s Book Festival this Sunday, 3 April. Featured illustrators include Roland Harvey, Judy Horacek, Anne Spudvilas, Elise Hurst and many more.
Look up the word ‘parenting’ on Amazon and expect to wade through some 61,559 responses. ‘Pregnancy’ is slightly more manageable at 25,678.
First-time couples about to embark on the long haul of raising children are often understandably eager to read up on what they’re in for. But with so many books out there, where do you start? Well, probably not here. There’s the ‘tiger mother’ approach currently doing the rounds recently touched on here at the Dailies and then there’s the Philip Larkin approach (Oliver James turned it into an entire pop psychology), whose effect is most likely to be prophylactic.
There are heaps of great blogs on parenting too, including Planning With Kids and Bad Mummy. But on pregnancy? Here’s a freshly-minted reading guide to get you started. It’s author, Edan Lupicki, is expecting and writes on pregnancy with insight: “A lot of childbirthing books focus on what you can do, what you must do, etc. as though it all depended on your efforts and will. What bothers me about that is that it can turn into disappointment and blame, if things don’t go as planned.”
The Children’s Book Festival is being held at the Wheeler Centre and the State Library of Victoria on Sunday 3 April from 10am to 4pm for kids who love books and their parents (regardless of their parenting philosophy).
It seems the world of ideas is in the throes of one of its periodic visitations on the subject of talent, success and parenting. This latest wave is all about tough love. Just in the last few weeks, the term ‘tiger mothering’ has entered the popular lexicon in a quite spectacular way following the publication of a memoir of mothering by Chinese-American author Amy Chua. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is, according to a New York Times review, “a diabolically well-packaged, highly readable screed ostensibly about the art of obsessive parenting.” The book has created a flurry of debate about raising successful children. The writer, a Yale professor, has even received death threats on account of her book (here’s an excerpt). Read some responses to her book here, here and here.
In 2009, NYT columnist David Brooks also wrote – controversially – on childhood and talent. Inspired by two books – The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin – Brooks described the ideal childhood of a hypothetical literary genius. As well as the usual (reading, mentors, practice and so on), it seems this wunderkind would benefit from some tragedy: “It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success.”
Top UK literary agent Caradoc King has just published a memoir called Problem Child. In a promotional piece in The Guardian, King argues that a miserable childhood isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. “You could argue,” he opines, “that a conventional happy childhood is rather disabling because it doesn’t prepare you for the real world where the family unit isn’t there making life so good.” It seems King may have been dusting off his Philip Larkin.
The Children’s Book Festival is being held at the Wheeler Centre and the State Library of Victoria on Sunday 3 April from 10am to 4pm for kids who love books and their parents (regardless of their parenting philosophy).
Update: the Raising Children network is a leading Australian online parenting resource. Their website has lots of good advice for parents, including here, here and here.
Freya Blackwood, illustration from Amy and Louis, text by Libby Gleeson, Scholastic Press, 2006, watercolour on paper, courtesy of the artist
Look! The art of Australian picture books opens today at the State Library of Victoria, celebrating the modern picture book.
According to exhibition curator Mike Shuttleworth it’s a showcase of the rare skill of combining illustration and narrative. “The dog eared books that line your bookshelves (or your child’s bedroom floor) are the work of real artists and gifted storytellers. Book illustration is a craft that calls on artistic and narrative skills,” Shuttleworth says.
The exhibition features 120 pictures all hung 35cm lower than standard exhibition height specifically for browsing littlies. But it’s anything but your standard exhibition. “The range of media alone on display in Look! will surprise visitors to the exhibition. A series of three minute films is also being screened in the gallery.”
There are activities in the gallery, plus an art and craft area, Play Pod, in Experimedia. The books included in the exhibition are available to read in the gallery (and to buy at Readings’ new State Library store).
Ron Brooks, illustration from Fox
Tomorrow features a huge day of activities featuring authors such as Terry Denton, Anna Walker and a launch by Playschool’s Jay Laga’aia. The exhibition features more than 40 artists including the works of Alison Lester, Ann James, Terry Denton, Graeme Base, Shaun Tan and Bronwyn Bancroft.
Curious George is one of the characters appearing on an app this Christmas
Just in time for stocking stuffers, Publisher’s Weekly have surveyed what children’s publishers are doing with iPhone/iPad apps.
One of the leading players on the very small screen is Scholastic who Publisher’s Weekly believes “is one of the leaders in the app space among the children’s houses, having created six iPhone/iPod Touch apps, and two iPad apps”. Their best performing app so far has been I Spy Spooky Mansion. which “broke into the top five apps among paid kids’ games”.
Some of the faces fronting apps are familiar. Disney, for example, are bringing out a series of book games featuring Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and a new app “based on Toy Story and is what it calls a “premium storybook”. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Disney have “a significant commitment to monetizing some of its big brands with apps”.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are bringing several of their most popular characters out as apps, including Curious George. The company admits that many of them “mimic the experience of the book itself”, though the Curious George dictionary app including the ability to tap on objects to see what noise they’d make. It could make for a noisy Christmas day.
An unfinished manuscript by Theodore Geisel, better known to children for generations as Dr Seuss, has recently been sold at auction and there’s excitement that it will add a new word to dictionaries.
The manuscript, All Sorts of Sports, introduces the word “blumf” to the world. The book follows athlete Pete who at one point exclains “There are so many sports, let’s see… I could bowl, jump hurdles, or water ski. I could blumf. Or blumf blumf blumf blumf blumf. ”
Some have said that “blumf” was just a placeholder piece of text until Geisel thought of something better to add. Over at the Hot Word they’re running a thread about what the word means with most leaning towards the placeholder.
Some commenters have taken up the challenge, like Mark Lagunzad who wrote “Blumf it’s an individual sport where a blumfer named Blumf E. Blumf blumfs you the blumf.” Smoothius got poetic with: “To play blumf you most blort and sprankle being careful not to twist your ankle”
Just when you’re recovering from the Booker surprise, the National Book Foundation (NBF) has announced the finalist for the US-based National Book Awards and closer to home Inside a Dog has announced their shortlist for the Inkys.
The Inkys' list has the pick of Australian YA authors including the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Young Adult Fiction, Kirsty Eagar’s Raw Blue. The Inkys are based on a popular vote so you can vote for your favourite YA book.
The NBF awards saw another nomination for Peter Carey in the fiction category after missing out at Tuesday night’s Man Booker announcement.
The full NBF list is:
Fiction
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America; Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule; Nicole Krauss, Great House; Lionel Shriver, So Much for That; and Karen Tei Yamashita, *I Hotel *
Nonfiction
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea; John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq; Patti Smith, Just Kids; Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War; and Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
Poetry
Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City; Terrance Hayes, Lighthead; James Richardson, By the Numbers; CD Wright, One with Others; and Monica Youn, Ignatz
Young People’s Literature
Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker; Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird; Laura McNeal, Dark Water; Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown; and Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer
And the books shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards YA Prize are:
Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar
Swerve by Phillip Gwynne
Phew. I don’t have to keep my mouth shut any more! Except about the winner, of course, but that’s easier somehow. It’s just a cosy little one-book secret, rather than a big rambling three-book secret. I think my secret limit is two books.
Big congratulations to all the shortlisted authors – I’m extremely proud and excited about our shortlist. And also congrats to the authors we longlisted: Kirsty Murray for Vulture’s Gate, Richard Harland for Worldshaker and Bill Condon for Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God. You can also read the full judges' reports.
Judging this year was a completely different experience to the 2007 VPLA – which makes sense I suppose, given that you have a completely different set of entries for the year, and a completely different set of judges. (Except me. I am not completely different.) One important difference was that we didn’t have to write a judge bio for the website, or provide a photo. Which absolved me from the photo-choosing despair that I encountered last time! I was going to go with this one, in case you’re interested:
Myself and my fellow judges (Pam Macintyre from Viewpoint Magazine and Leesa Lambert from The Little Bookroom) used the same judging process as the last time I was a judge – once the entries were received we all squirrelled ourselves away and read like the blazes, and we each created our own personal longlists for our next meeting. We kept our longlists a secret from each other until the meeting, to see if there would be any overlap.
In 2008, when I judged the award with lovely authors Kirsty Murray and Simmone Howell, our initial personal longlists had very little overlap, which I found fascinating. So there was lots of re-reading and re-evaluating done after our initial read-through. Our final shortlist and winner were arrived at through a lot of analysis, a lot of brain-wracking, a few more meetings, and a bit of voting.
I expected pretty much the same turn of events this year – when you give three different people a pile of 75 different books and ask them to pick the best ones, you’d assume you’d get some different answers.
So Pam and I turned up at the Little Bookroom on Longlist Meeting Day with our little piles of novels hidden in our bags.
I produced my longlist first. Then Pam produced hers. Then Leesa pulled out hers.
Each of our 4-book longlists overlapped by at least 3 books. Wow.
“So,” Pam said, “Which one do we think is the winner?”
And we all held up the same book.
Then we kind of got the giggles, because it was so unexpected, and so exciting! We were unanimous before we’d even opened our mouths!
Narrowing down the rest of the shortlist took a bit longer – a bit of re-reading and discussing and voting, but given that we already had a three-book overlap in our longlists it didn’t take too long.
So: a different year, a different set of entries and judges, a completely different judging experience. Last time I was pregnant, this time I have an 18mth old. Both years it has been exciting, confusing, and brain-tearingly full on. So has the judging.
I can’t imagine what will happen if I judge this award again in the future. Probably I’ll just have given birth to triplets, we judges will have a shortlist of twenty books that we CANNOT cut down any further, our heads will explode and someone else will have to judge the award for us.
Oh, and did I forget to tell you this year’s winner? How terribly remiss of me.
This is a crosspost from Anna Ryan-Punch’s Reading Your Favourites. She is a YA/Children’s lit reviewer, poet, alpha-librarian and mother.
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