Words and Feelings

Show Us Who You Are by Elle McNicoll 

Knights of, 2021 

Elle McNicoll arrived on the scene in a blaze of passionate storytelling last year with 'A Kind of Spark'. The book picked up, as one of its themes, the Scottish witch trials explored through the sympathetic voice of its neurodivergent protagonist. It was a masterly debut. McNicoll told a vivid and original story (increasingly rare in today's saturated children's literature market), added to which her viewpoint as an #OwnVoices writer, was beautifully interwoven into the texture of the story, never overwhelming but always challenging in the best possible way. 

Now Show Us Who You Are is here. In this, her latest novel, McNicoll has created - if anything - something even more rich and compelling than her first. For me, A Kind of Spark was masterly but this one is something exceptional. 

Beyond knowing that, what has been difficult - in fact impossible -  is putting into words how this book has affected me. Once I'd read the book, I tweeted:

"I’ve finished reading this now. Umm. I actually don’t know what to say..."

And I'm afraid I am still struggling to get into words what reading Show Us Who You Are has done to me.

It's to do with the story certainly, the fact that it is refreshingly new and boldly plotted. It satisfies in the best kind of literary way. But then there are also the characters. They walked into my life, Cora and Aiden in particular, and surely they are there now for good. Then there's the voice - the voice is something very special indeed; once heard it is unforgettable.  

There are many other layers, shades, reflections, sides, planes to the novel, but the joy is going to be for every reader to discover them for themselves. So I thought that the best thing I could do is to offer some prompts that you might like to consider while you're reading the book. What will the book say to you? How will it speak to you? Maybe the questions, too, might be helpful in engaging young readers you know to develop their thinking about the book too. 

In the end, I've come to the conclusion that, for me,  Show Us Who You Are transcends feeling: it's not about telling, it's all to do with the showing. McNicoll's writing does this effortlessly, and that is rare writing indeed. Her book left me speechless - for weeks afterwards too! - because the whole act of being told the story changed me so much as a reader, maybe even as a human being, that there was literally nothing more to be said. Only felt. 

And that's probably the best kind of reading you can ever hope to enjoy. 

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Questions to think and talk about:

• What does the title mean? What has it got to do with the story that is being told? 
  
• Cora and Aiden are intensely good friends, but not girlfriend and boyfriend. This is an important distinction to make when thinking about their relationship in the story - why?
  
• Mirrors appear in the story in key scenes. What is so significant about them? 
• Cora is an old name that derives from the Greek name 'Persephone'. What do you know about the Persephone myth? What other connections (and disconnections!) does the novel have to that story?
• There are many twists and turns in the storytelling. What surprised you most in the novel? 
• There are many science fiction aspects of the book. Despite this, does the story feel 'real' to you? How does it do that if so?
• What do you think matters most to the author in this book: the characters or the plot? 
• Which was the last book you read with a main character who is neurodivergent? What other books have similar characters?
  
• If you have read A Kind of Spark, does it feel like the books are connected by the same author? How or how not? 
  

An interview with Adam and Lisa Murphy, two 'Dead Good Storytellers'

CorpseTalk: Dead Good Storytellers by Adam Murphy and Lisa Murphy (David Fickling Books, 2021)

The writer-artist duo of Adam and Lisa Murphy will, I'm sure, be well-known to many reading this blog. Their work for The Phoenix in the form of the regular CorpseTalk strip has been a long-term feature of the comic and it's been no surprise that these have been collected into volumes for David Fickling Books: kicking off with a couple of 'Season' editions, themed volumes soon followed - Ground-Breaking Scientists, Ground-Breaking Rebels, Queens and Kings and Ground-Breaking Women. 

The latest addition to this very popular series (at least in my classroom!) is Dead Good Storytellers. Here we are introduced to a wide-ranging group of writers from the very familar (Charles Dickens and Beatrix Potter) to the perhaps less well-known (Enheduanna and Jalaluddin Rumi). Alongside a potted biography in the form of a light-hearted, TV-style interview, we are given a brilliant mini-graphic-novel-style version of one of the writer's works. I was quite amazed by the getting into four pages of Tolstoy's War and Peace, but possibly even more delighted by the comic strip version of Peter Rabbit - personally, I think Beatrix Potter would make a fantastic series like this for modern kids! 

In keeping with the format of the CorpseTalk series, I'm joined here by Adam and Lisa (thankfully though, unlike their usual subjects, they're both still very much alive!), to talk about the place of graphic novels in the classroom, the challenges of working in this medium, and how history can benefit from a refreshing, comic-strip revamp.

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Hi, Adam and Lisa! It's great to join you both on the Blog Tour for Dead Good Storytellers. First off, I've been wondering: what are the advantages of presenting history through graphic novels? 

 
It's a wonderful medium for bringing history to life and making historical personalities comprehensible, relatable and human. The interview format of CorpseTalk is particularly good for this, as there are multiple ways to approach any given piece of information: asking a question from a modern perspective, asking a very obvious question to cover basic information, giving a guest a chance to try and justify themselves, or my favourite: have a guest present the traditional view of themselves as a hero, and then ambush them with some inconvenient revisionism!

 

 

 

When you're planning and writing your books, how do you choose what to present to your audience?

 
Our central mission is always to tell the truth to kids, to the maximum extent possible.  Obviously, when presenting history for kids, there are things we just can’t talk about, but we approach each interview with a basic respect for kids' wisdom, curiosity and desire for meaningful explanations of the world. The comic has a strict limit in the amount of information we can cover, due to the limited page count and the number of words and pictures we can physically fit on the page. So the main job is the back-and-forth process of working through what specific information to include and how to present it, to ensure everything makes sense and gives the best overview of the person's life and times possible in that space. Once we’ve done an initial round of reading and research, we’ll talk over the material and make an initial stab at what facts, stories and bits of context are most relevant and exciting. Then it goes through multiple drafts, juggling how much set-up each bit needs, what order to introduce things to ensure facts build on one another, who should be explaining what, what questions to ask to get the necessary answers etc.

 

 

What is the place of humour in presenting history to children? Are there any limitations or difficulties with taking this approach?

 
Humour is essential to the way CorpseTalk works, as it injects fun and energy that make it something kids want to read. It also makes the information presented "sticky" - kids remember stuff when it's attached to a joke. This allows us to slip in the history without it feeling like learning, but rather letting kids feel proud of the things they now know. Naturally, there are some stories that lend themselves to a more serious approach - Anne Frank springs to mind, or Martin Luther King. Once the series was well established, it became clear that it could handle occasional serious interview subjects without losing readers' attention. Although, even in those cases, there are always opportunities for humorous moments if they are handled carefully.   

 

 

How do you ensure CorpseTalk represents diverse figures from history? 
 

This is something we devote a lot of time and attention to. Originally, when CorpseTalk was just being published in The Phoenix magazine, and books were just a hopeful dream of the future, we were basically just doing random people, many of them were actually kids’ suggestions. When we start planning one of the themed books (Scientists, Women, Queens & Kings, Rebels and now Storytellers), we look at who we'd already done interviews with, and then decide who the best people would be to fill the remaining pages. We have basically a massive spreadsheet of existing interviews and possible interviewee names, grouped under existing and possible books, and then we juggle them around with Anthony, our brilliant and remarkably patient editor at DFB. We’ve always tried to fill each book with as many different points of view as possible; with lots of women, different ethnicities, different parts of the world and also different time periods. But most of all, making sure every guest is fascinating, unique and has a great story to tell.

 

 

Are there any historical figures that you feel especially passionate about presenting in CorpseTalk? Why those people in particular? 

 

Adam: I always feel especially proud when we're able to introduce kids to more obscure historical figures they (or their teachers and parents!) might not have heard of before. We just completed an interview with Ibn Battuta, the medieval traveller whose incredible journeys provide a fascinating glimpse into everyday life during the medieval Islamic golden age.  I was also really excited to include Enheduanna in the Storytellers book - the first writer in all of history that we know anything about. I heard about her on the fantastic Literature & History podcast. Despite having lived such an inconceivably long time ago, her life is full of fascinating stories and has all kinds of shockingly relevant lessons for the modern world: on the power of empires, the role of propaganda, the place of women, and the capacity of literature to shape the world. Plus some of the most utterly insane myths I have ever heard!

 

How would you like to see CorpseTalk used in school settings?

 
We'd be supremely honoured to know that CorpseTalk was useful as a teaching resource. We've run a number of successful workshops getting kids to do their own interview comics with historical people they already know about - that could be extended into a more substantial project, including getting kids to research their chosen subject, as well as researching historical costumes, architecture etc for the drawings. It would also be great to see CorpseTalk being used to introduce kids to historiography - something we think a lot about in the production process. Why did we include certain facts or viewpoints, but exclude others? Would they have handled the interview differently?

 

 

It really is wonderful to see the graphic novel format adapted so brilliantly to non-fiction in CorpseTalk and it's been great to hear about your writing process. Thanks so much, Adam and Lisa!