Striking a chord

Even When You're Sad by Jenny Pearson
Beginnings by Eloise Williams 

The more I read, the more I feel. 

These are not just words. When I read, I sense particularly deep connections with some books that seem to really strike a chord within. That musical metaphor is not just words either. Music is very important to me. Whenever I think about the question, 'What luxury would you take to your desert island?', it would either be my piano or my record collection with some way to play it!. (And it would probably be the record collection because I can't play everything I love particularly well!)

When I was growing up, my parents bought me a magazine partwork called Storyteller. Many of us 80s kids remember this fondly: every fortnight I would buy a magazine of stories which were read on an accompanying tape. I would plug into my Walkman and listen. The stories I remember most vividly are the ones that I also remember for their music. One in particular, Captain Bones, completely terrified me at the moment where a skeleton aboard a rowing boat appears to the strains of an ondes martenot wailing. I could feel the horror of the boy in the story. Every emotion heightened, all thanks to that strange, sliding tune. 

I have written music myself since my teenage years, studied composition at university, and now write songs for my school to learn and sing. I want to share with the children the sense that music not only enhances our lives but helps us connect - with stories and with each other. Singing is a community thing.  Reflecting on this, I realise that my other great passion in teaching is reading aloud to children - again, a community thing, like singing, easy and fun to do. 

One of the books that I read to my class a few years ago now that changed my whole outlook on what stories meant to the community of readers in my class was Jelly by Jo Cotterill. I wrote about how this book transformed the quality of Book Talk in my class for the Open University Reading for Pleasure site (https://ourfp.org/eop/tell-me-in-story-time/). What was developed simply as a result of reading a fantastic story with inspiring characters and then talking about it all as a class is still wonderfully mysterious to me. I know things were happening in the children's heads and in their hearts as we read but what those things were is still left up to each individual to understand. 

I've recommended that book to so many teachers and children in the years following that reading of Jelly, so I was delighted to be paired with Jo for the Empathy Lab's Blog Tour for Empathy Day 2021. And to work with her on choosing music inspired by the Empathy Shorts was just the perfect activity: I remember very well indeed the moment at the end of the novel where Jelly sings and, instead of reading, I played Jo's song that she had written for her protagonist: music for the author, clearly, was the best way to express the feeling there. (You can hear it here, but read the book first/alongside! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgd_okmKSE0) 

For Empathy Day, Jo chose music for Eloise Williams' Belonging and, being the super-creative that she is, also drew a picture to express her feelings from the story - interestingly, my classes all love to draw too while I read aloud to them each day! For me, I went straight to Jenny Pearson's Even When You're Sad and immediately felt the urge to write a song inspired by the story. Hopefully, I've managed to capture Jenny's brilliant ability to write of children's deep sensitivity with each other, but also their strength, good humour and resilience, too. The song, despite the thoughtfulness of the lyrics, is a kind of wonky, upbeat march. 

I hope children and grown-ups everywhere get to use their deep resourcefulness and unashamed creativity this Empathy Day to celebrate and develop their own empathic responses. Draw! Make! Listen to music! Compose! Stories are strange, arcane, borne of the human creative impulse; let's use our own creativity to connect with them.

The Empathy Lab's Empathy Shorts are all available to download here for FREE! https://www.empathylab.uk/empathy-shorts 
A Family Pack of activities has also been produced with loads of great ways to develop and celebrate empathy through literature and connecting lives to stories: https://www.empathylab.uk/family-activities-pack 

 

Life Stories

Untwisted by Paul Jennings (Old Barn Books, 2021)

Paul Jennings' writing always wins. 

Having spent the majority of my teaching career working with older junior children, every one of those classes has had me read at least one Jennings story to them. It's usually Spaghetti Pig Out (which works particularly well straight after lunch) or The Strap Box Flyer (which usually ends up with me staring out after the last line is read at a sea of completely shocked faces), though, truth be told, many of the tales from the 'Un-' books have been massively enjoyed. Being the curious type of reader, I've often wondered what makes them so good and also so loved: Immediacy - yes. A plain-talking prose style with often clear-cut sentence structure - yes. Surprising twists - ohhhhh, yes! But ultimately, I can't work out what it is exactly. Jennings is a kind of magician and as with the best of magic tricks, you want to know how he did it whilst at the same time keen to leave the actual mechanics in a kind of mysterious haze. 

Then along came Untwisted. This unique hybrid of a memoir-writing guide - like all those short stories - kept me entertained and completely transfixed throughout: although this is not a book for children, the same clarity and affective qualities of his writing for younger readers is there still. In short vignettes that dart back and forth from his earliest memories to just a few years ago, Jennings spins the yarns that share very similar, equally incredible scenarios with his fiction - a house that is cut in two and transported to the middle of nowhere being just one of these! The storytelling has that companionable tone that you might easily mistake for listening to an old friend telling you a story in the pub. The reading of this book becomes compulsive: like all good tales, you can't wait to discover how it all turns out. 

But there is so much more to this book. As a Writer-Teacher, I kept getting distracted by the fascinating insights into Jennings' development as a writer and his generous - almost throwaway - gems of writing wisdom: 

"A children’s author has fewer words to choose from than one who writes for adults, and these words need to be relatively simple."

It sounds maybe obvious, but when placed in the context of Jennings' own life-stories we see where his approach really comes from. When he was at school, his class was asked to write on a given subject. What Jennings ended up writing was particularly short (ahem!) - but clearly incisive, as his teacher declared: 

"Jennings has answered the question as well as anyone else but he has done it in half the number of words."

These kinds of stories about the learning of his craft shows how closely life and writing are interwoven. Important lessons (but maybe not the one the teacher intended!) were learned from direct experience: words matter; meaning matters; clarity matters.

Later he writes:

"My feeling is that children’s authors need to be able to put themselves into the world of kids and know what fears, hopes and experiences they face."

Again, it perhaps appears that this should of course be the case, but the overall impression of the whole book is that Jennings is showing us how life and writing are the one and the same. So the act of writing becomes the act of sharing, a yearning for connection through words between writer and reader. Jennings, whose life has been devoted strongly to the power of reading and in particular to those children who struggle, has created in Untwisted a testament to that very central importance that reading and writing has in all of our lives. It's more than just words.

Of course, reading Untwisted added more than a little to my enjoyment of the conjuring trick that is this writer's particular genius; but more than that, I came away more deeply appreciating what reading and writing can do. Jennings reveals that the life of his stories are absolutely 'the stories of his life' - just as our own, surely, are to each of us. 

***

Untwisted is published on 3rd June 2021. With grateful thanks to Ruth Huddleston of Old Barn Books who provided me with a proof and the photos (taken from the book) for this blog. 

"No Country": An Interview with Patrice Aggs and Joe Brady

No Country by Patrice Aggs and Joe Brady (David Fickling Books, 2021) 

The world of graphic novels for primary-school-aged children is an exciting one nowadays. There are the comic-book hijinks, larger-than-life characters, pulse-popping tales of InvestiGators, Bunny vs. Monkey and Amulet; but there is an increasing range of stories that introduce children to more serious issues through the uniquely visual style that only graphic novels can provide. For the children I teach, Jerry Craft's New Kid has raised questions around equality while When Stars are Scattered has opened their eyes to the refugee crisis, to name but two very popular examples. 

No Country by Patrice Aggs and Joe Brady combines both the thrills of a traditional and the startling wake up call to the contemporary horrors of civil war. I read it in one sitting (unusual for me, as I often need to take time to process what I'm reading) but I literally could not put it down. I've strongly recommended it to my class and everyone who has read it has been equally excited - and also not been able to stop reading!

It's a terrifying read in a lot of ways: a family are torn apart by civil unrest and - as with Boy Everywhere by A.M. Dassu - I could not fail to feel the impact: this could so easily happen to any of us, I thought. As with the best of reading, I've been left with more questions than I had when I began the book, so it's been an absolute joy to have been given the opportunity to interview Patrice and Joe about their writing and No Country in particular. 

***

Hi Patrice and Joe! I really enjoyed No Country and it's really resonated with some of my recent reading, such as AM Dassu's Boy, Everywhere and When Stars are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed. What was the original inspiration for your story? Where did it all start? 

JOE: Refugees from Syria, the nativist reaction to it in the UK and elsewhere, and what I felt was a general empathy deficit around the whole crisis were triggers for the book. But for me, it’s also about something quieter and more personal.

I moved to England in 2008 and, while I was not forced to leave my home, I feel a persistent longing toward that place where I’m from – even though it doesn’t exist in the same way as when I left it. Basically, I’m happy here in England and at the same time I’m homesick all the time. On the surface, No Country is a story about refugees, but to me, deeper down, it’s also about the longing to be home and how that tears you in two. That’s what is vital to me personally about this story.

 

And what about the title, 'No Country'? Where did that come from?

JOE: The title was one of the last things to come together. We went back and forth so much about it, and we came up with so so so many other options. I won’t mention what those titles were, but there were a lot of them. When I’m trying to come up with an idea, I tend make very long lists of (mostly very bad) possibilities, and make other people listen as I read them out loud. When I got to No Country, it just felt right to everyone in the room. To me, the title ‘No Country’ is about believing so strongly in something like a nation that it forms a key component of your identity, only to have that thing vanish and you discover that it’s only ever been an illusion

 

How did publishing the story originally as a part-work in a weekly comic affect your thinking and writing of the story? 

JOE: There’s something very special and vanishingly rare in this format in that it forces kids to wait a week to find out what happens next in a story. This leaves them with space to think about the story and predict what might happen next. On a larger scale, this means that Phoenix stories get to unfold in the imaginations of kids for months, giving them so much space to create and imprint themselves alongside the story.

Originally, No Country was all going to be about the weekly format. It wasn’t intended to have a single narrative at all. No Country was conceived as a series of short stories about life in this particular world. They weren’t explicitly related, I just wanted readers to go through a series of experiences with these characters in hopes that they would start to feel like friends. As we went on with making it, we started noticing through lines and connections, and then found ways to tie them together. And eventually we bound it together into a single book – including adding four brand-new never before seen scenes!

PATRICE: It's like a dress rehearsal.  Things get seen more clearly and more rhythmically until the whole show comes together in the book.  I love rethinking pages, expanding or contracting scenes until we hit the right spot! Of course a weekly deadline makes everything more urgent, but that's a bonus a lot of the time. I'm sure Joe would agree that it kept both of us from over-thinking, so we could keep our ideas fresh.

 

 

The book has an almost breathless pace and grips the reader from the very start. How did you go about achieving this? How important is pace to you as storytellers? 

JOE: Thank you! A few people have said that the story is gripping, and I’m really happy to hear it. Pace is very important as a storyteller. I suppose where the pacing comes in No Country is the tension built in the space between what they want as characters and what they have. We worked hard to keep their goals just at the tips of their fingers but never fully in their hands.

Towards the ending we did actively try to make it fast paced. The story elements that, for me, raised the pace were the life or death stakes and the separation from Dad’s protection. We also made a choice to swing between the extremes of relief and terror as much as possible. The happiness at getting food in the supermarket shifts into the shock of being accosted on the street, which folds into the reprieve of returning home… I’ll stop with the spoilers now.

PATRICE: Joe's a great writer! It started as a weekly! That sums it up for me.

 

Although the narrative is fictional, the scenario feels very real. How did you go about creating an authenticity around the situation the family find themselves in?

JOE: From a writing and preparation perspective, I tried to tackle the idea of what Bea’s life was like in a systematic way. One of the first scenes I wrote was the one in which Dad talks to Bea about what life was like before. That came from lots of researching, talking about and thinking about what in life we take for granted. I made lists of things we take for granted, bits of our infrastructure that aren’t resilient, how we could cope if those things were gone, and how does that feel in a tactile way. We started out by making stories about Bea and the other characters dealing with each of those things one at a time. Most of these stories didn’t make it in the book, but the ones that did make up the heart of the plot of No Country.

But, really, the heavy lifting of this was done by Patrice in the art. Her art is filled with details that populate every nook and cranny of the world. The woman doing washing up on page 18. The nervous look on Dad’s face as Dom (the baby brother) chases a butterfly toward barbed wire on page 56. The soldier munching on sweets as he tells people they aren’t allowed in the supermarket on page 137. One of my favourite panels in the book is on page 18, in which the family are on the sofa talking to Mum. The way Bea, Dad and Hannah are positioned in relation to each other feels so authentic to me, and that authenticity to how the family feels is key to the feel to the rest of the book.

So many of these pages were very different from what I expected as the writer, but that’s one of the most joyful parts of being a comics writer: the artist teaches you things about your story. In the creation of a comic, it’s the artist who is the direct storyteller; the one who guides the readers through the world of the story. As the writer, I created a lot of what eventually became the book, but ultimately, it’s the job of the comics writer to pass the project to the artist, who then makes it feel real.   

 

Who are your big influences and heroes of storytelling?

JOE: I’m dyslexic, so I wasn’t actually a big reader as a kid. I read comics in the newspapers like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side because they were nice and short. I watched lots of films and TV too, but for my young self the magic was in the theatre.

Theatre is the big influence in storytelling for me. There’s so much joy in getting together with a group of people, stepping into the story together and carrying on at all costs; all to an end of inviting an audience into that space. Reading Keith Johnston’s books on Improv was massively influential and Stanislavski’s thoughts on acting really seem to apply to storytelling. Also influential were the countless drama teachers who showed me what it means to inhabit a person within a narrative.  From studying theatre in high school, I knew I wanted to work in creating stories when I grew up and that I wanted that work to be collaborative, which writing comics really is.

But, if there was an author that really turned my brain on, it was Kurt Vonnegut.

PATRICE: When I did a school visit as a children's book 'visiting illustrator' years and years ago, the kids asked what was the best story I'd ever drawn pictures for. I told them the best book I'd ever done was by an author they probably hadn't heard of - Phillip Pullman. Well, they've heard of him now.

 

Comic heroes are almost too many to list, like trying to do a Desert Island Discs version for illustrators. But 'illustrating' is not what comics do - they tell the story in a more integrated way.  The best learn their craft in the old 3-panel strip format from American newspapers, in my opinion. That's why my heroes include people like Leonard Starr and Chic Young. (Who they? I hear you ask) I love the storytelling skills of Jillian & Mariko Tamaki, Herge, and, again, Pat Mills.  My pictures are always influenced by Emmanuel Guibert and Joann Sfar, even though I don't draw like either of them!

 

 

How do you feel the story and pictures connect young readers to the crisis?

JOE: I wanted to tell a story to the readers that inverts what is familiar: a story that starts in a collapsed warring state which feels like home, and moves to a functional society that feels strange and foreign. I’d like No Country to be a bridge which helps connect readers emotionally to the crisis. My hope is that it will help them look at stories in the news and see the actual people. The circumstances of the lives of a kid from England and a kid from Syria who was forced to escape violence are vastly different, but the inherent value of those kids is precisely equal. I hope after finishing No Country, readers can sense the fundamental equality all people share, so that when they next come across a story about a refugee elsewhere in their life, they’ll approach that person with a higher level of empathy and will consider the people coming here in a more personal and compassionate way.

PATRICE: Comics are a magnet for kids! As a big kid, I'm immediately drawn to a page of pictures and speech balloons.  The connection is instant, and only gets better as I slowly absorb it panel-by-panel.  With a big topic like a refugee crisis, it helps to break it down into digestible portions.  Young readers really want to know what is going on behind headlines and usually don't know where to start. I wish someone would do a history comic about the Cuban Missile Crisis, something that happened when I was eight, and I never figured out what. All I knew was the grown-ups were scared.

 

 

What are the benefits and challenges of presenting the refugee crisis as a graphic novel? 

 

PATRICE: Everything is more urgent and believable for me if I can draw it out, make it visual in a sequential way. There are so many great comics out there that do this! Joe Sacco's Palestine, Ruta Moden's Exit Wounds, Pat Mills' Charley's War - when I wasn't sure what to draw, what to emphasize, it was a great help to reach for these and explore how they did it. It makes me want to tackle a lot more when I revisit those superstars.

JOE: There are no words to describe what these millions of people are living through. The benefit of graphic novels is that you don’t always have to find them. With the lightest touch, we can show the readers the characters’ lives – let them visit a place they’d never be able to see otherwise.

Readers get to sit with the people and places of a graphic novel for as long as they want (unlike, say, a film which is a medium that dictates the time we get with each image or prose that asks the reader to take in every bit of information in linear order). Comics readers’ eyes are allowed to wander off the charted narrative in a way that simply doesn’t work the same in other media. For example, the first image of the book is Bea looking at her dad when he thinks he’s alone. It is the only moment when his mask slips and we can see how sad and lonely he is. Like Bea at the time, we’re too young in this world at this point to fully appreciate what we’re seeing at that moment, so we might miss the nuance, but we might not. And that’s just the central action! Behind that image and around it, there are so many details that film or prose would either have to brush over for pacing or overly focus on – the bees on the page, the discarded posters outside, the overstuffed bins, the discarded bottles on the mantle. Comics readers can slow down and take in the scene, or speed up and find out what happens next – they are in the driver’s seat. It’s one of the things that makes comics such a special medium. 

They certainly are! Thank you so much, Joe and Patrice. I've loved reading No Country and I absolutely cannot wait for the next installment!

A Hat-trick for Howell

The Garden of Lost Secrets / The House of One Hundred Clocks / Mystery of the Night Watchers by Ann-Marie Howell (Usborne, 2019/2020/2021)

Moondial by Helen Cresswell (Faber, 1987)

A Small Pinch of Weather (contains The Serial Garden) by Joan Aiken (Jonathan Cape, 1969)

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (Oxford, 1958)

Tatty Apple by Jenny Nimmo (Methuen, 1984)

The books I grew up with, as for many grown up readers, still hold a cherished place in my heart. I grew up in the heyday of a kind of second Golden Age of children's fiction when Kaye Webb's tenure at Puffin Books cast its spell on the imaginations and hearts of children and young readers everywhere, and Jenny Nimmo's Tatty Apple, Helen Cresswell's Moondial, Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden all resonate with a vital hum down the years to the reader and person I am today - three stories in particular that have become part of the landscape of my inner literary world; all three connecting - quite directly - both the real and imaginative lives of children.  Nimmo's theme of bullying in Tatty Apple is a stark counterpoint to the eponymous, gentle green rabbit;  Minty explores her growing independence and sense of self in Moondial, whilst at the same time the book paints the suffocating (and nigh-supernatural) world of a Victorian country estate; and although Joan Aiken's Armitage family may eat mundane 'Brekkfast Brikks' for breakfast, they also slip in and out of adventures involving eighteenth-century princesses, dragons and all sorts of other, quite impossible things. 

I love all of this. I love the way in which children's imaginations are properly explored in these tales. I love how the authors know exactly what it is to be a child, faced with the everyday one minute and then at the next slipping into a fantasy world of their own making. It happens all the time with so many children - you just have to watch them at their play to see this in action. 

While the range of exceptional literature for children continues to expand, I still have a real affection for books of that vintage; so I was delighted to discover the work of Ann-Marie Howell, a teller of engaging, vivid stories that echo the sensibilities of those earlier books and their writers. Her books lightly tread that same border between the real and the imaginary: you'll find ghosts that aren't ghosts, curses which turn out to have a more human than supernatural darkness, and places shadowed in mystery but now ache to see the light. The storytelling tradition is joyously celebrated in Ann-Marie's writing- we can never have enough of those kinds of story.  

I am so proud to have been asked to reveal the cover of Ann-Marie's new book, Mystery of the Night Watchers, and I genuinely cannot wait to immerse myself in the world it depicts...We may have a little while to wait until we can read that book, but I urge you (if you haven't done so already) to enjoy Ann-Marie's earlier work in the meantime. I have read The Garden of Lost Secrets three times now, alone and with my classes and - a sign of a great story, this - I keep discovering new things on each re-read. In fact, just like I do when I pick up those beloved books of my childhood. 

The Garden of Lost Secrets (2019)

Ann-Marie's first novel is a mystery-adventure set largely in the garden of a stately home. Based on Ickworth House in Suffolk, the story is very much in the mould of the classic 'garden' stories such as Moondial and Tom's Midnight Garden. It is not by chance that key scenes in all of these books happen at night, and the dusky, nocturnal atmosphere of the garden becomes almost a character in its own right. I've used this book in Year 6 and its impact on the children has been hugely well-received. 'The best thing is the mysteries,' said one boy after reading it. 'They keep you wondering all the way through...' 

 

The House of One Hundred Clocks (2020)

Following swiftly on from her debut, Ann-Marie's next book was set in Cambridge, a city very close to my own heart. This time the mystery is an impossible one to fathom from the start: a man requires a 'clockwinder' to ensure that the hundred clocks in his house never wind down, for if they do something terrible will happen. Ann-Marie's writing keeps you enthralled throughout - the almost supernatural strangeness of the clocks and their attendant 'curse' is at last revealed but - as with Garden - not before a whole other range of threads have deliciously entangled the narrative. (If you're ever in Cambridge, you might like to follow the walking tour I wrote to accompany a reading of the book: https://afewtoread.blogspot.com/2020/02/clocks-and-colleges.html) 

Mystery of the Night Watchers (2021)

Just as with her first two novels, Ann-Marie's new book published in June is based on a real-life house: this time, the Cupola House of Bury St Edmunds. In this story, the reader's imagination turns to the night sky. Here's what the publishers have to say: 

It’s May 1910 and the blazing Halley's comet is drawing closer to the earth, when Nancy is uprooted to start a new life in Suffolk with a grandfather she has never met. Nancy is forbidden from leaving her grandfather's house and discovers its secret observatory. As the mysteries begin to pile up Nancy must bring dark secrets from the past to light – even if doing so will put her own life at risk.

And now, at least one mystery about this book (just like in Ann-Marie's stories) can finally be put to bed. It's with great pride that the glorious cover of Mystery of the Night Watchers is revealed exclusively in this blog. It is the stunning artwork of Saara Katariina Soderlund with book cover design by Katherine Millichope.  

I'm certain the whole thing is going to be another hands-down winner and cannot WAIT to read it - congratulations, Ann-Marie! 

***

Mystery of the Night Watchers by Ann-Marie Howell is out on 8th July 2021. Copies of the new book may be ordered from your local independent bookshop (please do support them). Blackwells, Heffers of Cambridge, or Marilyn Brocklehurst at the Norfolk Children's Book Centre, I'm sure, would all be very happy to help you.

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. 

***  

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.

***

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!
 

Return to Serendib

 The Boy Who Met a Whale by Nizrana Farook (Nosy Crow)

Hot on the heels of the hugely popular The Girl Who Stole an Elephant from Nizrana Farook comes her next Serendib adventure: The Boy Who Met a Whale. This exciting story follows Razi and his sister, Shifa, as they are drawn into the world of Zheng, a boy whose tales of a lost treasure prove too tempting to resist.

 A glorious, vivid setting forms the rich backdrop to the fast-paced narrative - Farook's own Sri Lankan background provides the reader generously with enticing scenes of stilt-fishing, busy markets and hot, sandy beaches, building a truly immersive experience. 

Our heroes form a trio whose personal characterisation is beautifully drawn. We feel very early on in the novel that we know these children: Shifa's bravery and fiercely protective nature is strongly presented throughout, while Zheng is passionate and good-hearted, if a little too fond of the sailor's tall tale! Razi's inner sensitivities, especially those that relate to the loss of his father, form the crux of the plot, though this is all so lightly and masterfully done that the climax of the story (when 'the boy meets the whale'!) is at once an intense shock, overwhelmingly beautiful, and deeply moving.

And let's not forget the villains! If the excitement of being trapped in a tropical storm or coming across a pod of whales in the open ocean weren't enough, then the threat and sudden appearances throughout of the dastardly duo, Marco and Cook, certainly intensify the thrills. But they're not the cosy kind of story-book villain - the danger is very real with murderous intent and greedy ruthlessness.

The story would make a perfect choice to share with Year 4 especially. This is a tricky year group for which to provide quality read-aloud books - the children are ready to tackle much longer narratives and have a deepening maturity to cope with the sensitivities that such stories might bring. The plot of The Boy Who Met a Whale is very fast-paced with mutiny, storms, sea-monsters and murderous villains virtually falling over each other as they fall headlong from the pages. As such, the audience will be left breathless at the end of each chapter, calling out for 'just one more'! 

The ending is pure satisfaction in the best traditional sense, and leaves ample room for further adventures from our intrepid trio of heroes in the future. I, for one, hope there will be many more!