Saturday 31 October 2015

Inspired by Agatha, by Lynne Benton


Earlier this summer my husband and I decided to take a rather special trip, to celebrate a big birthday and our 45th wedding anniversary, and go somewhere that had long captured our imagination.

Our first stop in Devon was at Greenway, Agatha Christie's holiday home.  Nowadays it is run by the National Trust, but many of the writer's things are dotted around the house so you can easily imagine her still living there.  We saw things she'd collected over the years, especially some from excursions to Egypt with her second husband, Max Mallowan, and heard recordings of her speaking.  We particularly liked the frieze in the library, painted by one of the American Coastguards billeted here during WWII.  After the war, when he volunteered to paint it out, Agatha asked him to leave it for future generations to enjoy.

Greenway was also the setting for "Poirot and the Greenshore Folly", and at the bottom of the garden you can visit the boathouse where the murder took place.






But the highlight of our holiday was a night spent in the hotel on Burgh Island, just off the coast of Bigbury-on-Sea in Devon.  Agatha Christie used the island, and the hotel, as the setting for "Evil Under the Sun", and the TV version starring David Suchet as Poirot was actually filmed there.


I need hardly add that we have watched it more than once!



If, however, you have seen the big screen version of "Evil Under the Sun", starring Peter Ustinov, that was not filmed on Burgh Island but on Crete!

When we arrived we enjoyed exploring the island and spotting the tiny cove, again mentioned in the book and filmed for TV, where the murder took place.  Apparently Agatha stayed in a small shack just below the hotel on several occasions while she was writing the book.



She also used the island as inspiration for "And Then There Were None", except that in this case she "moved" the island further out to sea so the characters could be truly cut off from civilisation.  


In fact Burgh Island is so close to the mainland that when the tide is out you can walk across the beach to get there, but it was fascinating to watch the tide coming in from both sides at once, meeting in the middle and cutting the island off completely.






When this happens the only way of reaching the island is by taking the Sea Tractor, an amazing contraption (also used in the TV film of "Evil Under the Sun", much to Poirot's disgust.)

We were hoping to catch a rid on it at least one way, but sadly we missed it and were taken across by taxi, which lacked the romance of the Sea Tractor but was probably more comfortable.

The hotel, which is he only building on the island apart from the Pilchard Inn, is entirely decorated in the Art Deco style, and boasts that apart from wifi there are no modern trappings like televisions in the place.



Unfortunately this also meant there were no tea or coffee-making facilities in our room, which I rather missed!  However, we were offered a free tray of tea or coffee first thing the next morning, and it was rather nice to be woken in our luxurious period suite by a knock on the door, followed by a waiter carrying a tray laden with full silver service.


And in the evening everyone dressed up for the bi-weekly Dinner Dance (the brochure said it was "impossible to be overdressed" for this occasion, so we took them at their word.)  We felt as if we really had stepped back in time, as we sipped our cocktails in the Cocktail Bar before being led into the Ballroom for dinner.  As we ate, a three-piece band played music from the period, eg songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin etc, which we thoroughly enjoyed.  Not many couples got up to dance, but we did our best (ie we shuffled round the floor in time to the music, but "Strictly Come Dancing" it wasn't!) and felt we'd truly entered into the spirit of the occasion.

The next morning at breakfast we were interested to discover that one of our fellow-guests (celebrating her 50th birthday, her mother told me) had been into the Mermaid Pool, a natural pool just below the hotel, for an early morning swim, wearing a period bathing costume with long sleeves and legs.  

We were impressed and congratulated her, and she said she'd always wanted to come and "do it properly"!  I was not similarly tempted, I'm afraid!

As we returned to our car on the mainland we were very glad we'd had the experience of staying there, even if we could only afford one night.  By then we felt as if we knew something about the places which inspired Agatha Christie to write.

They have certainly inspired me!

Friday 30 October 2015

Fabled Beasts And Mythical Creatures: Jigsaws and Shape-shifters, by Lari Don

Centaurs and kelpies, mermaids and selkies... Why are we so fascinated by animal / human mashups? And not just us, now, but most cultures, in most places, since the start of (once up on a) time. The Egyptians had animal-headed gods. The Greeks were happy to slice almost any animal in half and stick it onto a matching bit of human. And most cultures have shape-changer stories.

Why are we fascinated by these impossible creatures and their stories? And what are the differences between our need to have people shift into animals, and our need to have people who are also part-animal?

I was privileged early this month to do a launch event for someone else’s book (I know that’s a bit unusual, but I stepped in at the last minute when unforeseen circumstances meant the real author couldn’t be there.)

Kate Leiper's beautiful selkie
So I was on stage, waving A Treasury of Scottish Mythical Creatures, showing Kate Leiper’s gorgeous pictures and reading Theresa Breslin’s enchanting words, and chatting to school kids about selkies. I asked if anyone knew what a selkie was. One pupil said, “It’s a half-seal half-girl.” And I said, “Very close!” then explained that a selkie is sometimes a seal and sometimes a girl, rather half a seal stuck to half a girl. Which we then realised would look a bit like a mermaid...

Which made me think about the similarities and differences between two very distinctive forms of animal / human mix and matches.

There are the shape-shifters, the sometimes-human sometimes-animals: the werewolves, the kelpies, the selkies, the kitsune, the frog princes, the lion women and hyena men...

And there are the jigsaw-ed beasts, made up of bits of people and bits of animals, but always the same shape: the mermaids, the minotaurs, the centaurs, the satyrs...  (The Greeks were masters of these mix and match monsters, but you find a few in other cultures too.)

So what’s the difference between them, and why do we love (or need) to tell stories about them both?

I believe that shape-shifters are fascinating because they could be right beside us, right now. You can’t tell whether the person sitting beside you on the bus in the morning will be a wolf creeping up behind you tonight...

But shape-shifters are often vulnerable too, depending on the rules of their magic. I love Kate’s picture of the selkie, because she has buttons down her tummy, to show that the sealskin comes off when she becomes human. And if she loses that sealskin, she can’t become a seal again. So in Scottish folklore there are a lot of very disturbing and frankly abusive selkie wife stories about a fisherman getting himself a reluctant wife by stealing her sealskin.

It’s not just female selkies who are vulnerable. I tell a story about a werewolf who needs to wear his own clothes to become human again, and is trapped as a wolf when his trousers are stolen.

So, shape-shifters can be vulnerable, and also very easy to hide inside a crowd. This makes them very useful in stories!

And shape-shifters allow us to imagine having different powers and skills. Flying, running, jumping, swimming. It’s probably the opportunity to imagine a human sensibility inside a body with an animal’s capabilities and limitations that attracts me to writing about shape-shifters.

Also, perhaps, shape-shifter stories allow us to explore ideas about what is ‘animal’ inside people, and what is ‘human’ within animals. (What is worthy of compassion, respect, understanding, perhaps? Though, of course, we shouldn’t just extend those to humans... )

But what about the jigsaw-ed beasts, the composite creatures? What about the half-horse half-man, or half-woman half-fish? What do we get from them?

I love writing about these creatures. I love their imagery and their power. The main baddie in several of my Fabled Beast novels is a minotaur, and the sidekick hero in all of them is a centaur. Mainly because I love the idea of a creature that thinks like a human being, but has the power of a large animal.

Perhaps our desire for that mix of agency and strength is why we don’t have a lot of compelling stories about half-worm half-girls or half-mouse half-boys. Thinking practically, if nothing else, the animal has to be big enough for the join at the neck or waist to seem plausible...

But while I love to write about the mix and match monsters, they are perhaps less generally useful and universal in stories than shape-shifters. Mainly because they’re a bit obvious. I’m fairly sure that wherever you’re reading this blog, you’re not sitting next to a minotaur. (Though it’s nearly Halloween, so I might be wrong...) The jigsaw creatures can’t hide among us as easily as the shape-shifters. They are less likely to be our friends and neighbours.

However they are very useful for creating monsters made of things we understand and recognise. (Minotaur = bull’s head + man’s body. There, you’ve got the picture in your head already. That kind of shorthand is very useful for an oral storyteller.) Also, I find centaurs are great for kicking doors down.

What else do you think these animal / human fabled beasts and mythical monsters give us, when we’re  inventing, telling and remembering stories? I’m sure I’ve only mentioned a few of the ways they're useful and important to us as we imagine and create...

But whatever niches they occupy in the ecosystems of our story world, I love writing about the shape-shifters, and the half and halfs...

I’ve written about them from my very first book, and I’m not going to stop now. There are centaurs, fauns and minotaurs, working with or against werewolves, mermaids and selkies in my Fabled Beast Chronicles. There are kelpies and various winged shape-shifters in the series of novels I’m working on now. I’ve also written a whole collection of shape-shifter stories, Serpents & Werewolves, including many of the myths, legends and folktales which inspire my novels.

So now, having mused about why we love and need these fabled beasts, I’m off to write a scene discovering how much faster my heroine can run with paws rather than trainers...

(And if you think Kate’s selkie picture is fab, you might be interested to know there’s an exhibition of her artwork at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh from 4th December until 9th January.)


Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
Lari’s website 
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Thursday 29 October 2015

Turn on, tune in...? - John Dougherty

I forgot my phone the other day.

I hadn't gone far when I realised I'd left it in the kitchen, still plugged in to the charger; and I almost turned back to the house to get it. But then I thought, Well, I'm only going to be gone for a short while. It's not very likely that anyone's going to need to get in touch with me before I get back.

So I carried on into town. And although I wasn't without my phone for long, I noticed a couple of interesting things.

The first was how many times I found myself about to reach for it. It's become habitual for me - as I suspect for many of us - when I have a spare moment, to check my emails or my Twitter feed; to see if anyone's been trying to contact me. And even though my phone wasn't in my pocket, still something kept triggering that little internal prompt - I'll just look at my phone.

The second thing I noticed was how, as that prompt to check the screen was immediately followed each time by the realisation that I couldn't, the pattern of my thoughts began to change - and change in a way that felt oddly familiar. Without the constant interruption of the internet, my thoughts began to flow again.

The thing is, the ability to muse idly is pretty important for a writer, and it was disturbing to realise how little of it I've been doing lately. But the ability to just pause for a second and check my electronic communications had become a constant interruption to that stream of daydreaming, the little river of ideas that should run constantly in the background and into which we should be able to dip whenever our creativity becomes thirsty.

I'm making an effort now to diminish that habit - to remember that just because I can check the internet, doesn't mean I must. It'll still be there later. And as a result, I'm finding myself making contact with a way of being that I'd almost forgotten about.

The writer Jonathan Stroud has recently launched a campaign aimed at giving children Freedom to Think. Take a look; it's a very simple yet hugely important idea, and I'm entirely in favour of it. But the freedom to think - and the time and space in which to do it - is something that adults need, too. We need to allow ourselves to be bored.

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John's Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face series, illustrated by David Tazzyman, is published by OUP.

Wednesday 28 October 2015

Adapt At Your Own Risk - Clementine Beauvais

This is one of my French books, La louve, fabulously illustrated by Antoine Déprez:




When I say 'fabulously', I mean it in both senses of the term: they're brilliant illustrations, but they also reproduce very well the fable-like feel and texture of the story. La louve is an original story, but it is what is generally called a literary fairy tale - a new story made to feel like it's a classic folk or fairy tale.

This might be why, when La louve recently appeared in the White Ravens list at the Munich International Youth Library, it was described as 'a retelling of a Russian folkale'. To my knowledge (and that of my Russian friends), it isn't. There are many folk and fairy tales around the world that involve transformation, wolves and curses, but this one isn't a retelling of any one in particular.

After La louve, however, the publisher, Alice Editions, has asked us to work on a second opus which would be an adaptation or reinterpretation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I immediately agreed, because I've been fascinated by that weird tale for a long time. So I started to think about how to do it. The idea was not to retell the tale, but rather to write an original story inspired from, or reactivating or reimagining, the tale.

I soon realised it was an enterprise fraught with interesting peril. First I thought I’d focus on the rats, perhaps make the main character one of the rats. But immediately, a problem emerged: the glacial contemporary political and ideological connotations of a narrative that involves hordes ("swarms"?) of rats "invading" a village, spreading an illness, being thrown out, and drowning. The portrayal of a population identified as parasitic, swarming the streets of a nice little traditional village and taken away to die - in the water - in exchange for money, has a very unpleasant ring to it; or at least, it should, to anyone who’s even vaguely concerned with what’s happening in the world today. You'd have to be the most candid person on Earth not to realise.

A simple retelling of the story just about gets away with those connotations, because the literal explanation proposed by the story - the plague - works sort of fine, and you can sort of turn off the metaphorical reading. But with an entirely new story, you can’t claim innocently that you don't mind that extra layer of meaning. It just invites itself, whatever you do. 

So of course you can play with these political connotations, and turn the story on its head, getting the rats to be the good guys in the story; the misunderstood, the oppressed and the silenced. You can even write an interesting story where the plague is an invention of the humans to create suspicion against the rats. You'd turn the story into a politically committed tale, preaching compassion towards a marginalised group.

Yeah. But it's a really tricky thing to pull off, because in this roman à clefs you're still identifying a group of people as rats - whether or not you're arguing that it's someone else's vision, that's pretty dangerous.

I know Art Spiegelman's done it. I'm not Art Spiegelman though.

In other words, I couldn't see a way of adapting the Pied Piper of Hamelin story without grappling with the metaphorical political implications. And while I'd be happy to do that in another context, it absolutely wasn't what I wanted this particular book to be. It was supposed to be like La louve: intemporal, slightly frightening, low-key and poetic. Not political. 

So I took the story differently. I decided to get rid, so to speak, of the original tale, by putting it in its entirety on the first page. The story begins with a young girl whose grandfather tells her the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And then the story starts, seemingly unconnected to the tale. But it loops back onto itself... and connects, at the very, very end, with the very, very first page.

Dealing with this adaptation, I felt like I'd spent quite a while, at least a month or two, thinking about how to catch it, a bit like you would observe a scorpion thinking of the best way to pick it up without getting stung, and getting it to do what you want it to do. Coincidentally, the YA book in French I'm currently working on is also an adaptation. And there again, I spent many train rides looking out of the window, thinking of how to catch that particular scorpion.

I'd be curious to hear your stories of adaptations, retellings or reimaginings of classical tales or novels - I'm sure there are many around, as it's quite a common thing to do. Do tell! 

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Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

Tuesday 27 October 2015

By the pricking of my thumbs... Lynn Huggins-Cooper



I have been getting rather excited this week, since it's my favourite season - Halloween approaches! I may be 51 on Halloween this year, but I still feel a thrill when I drive past the pumpkin stall at the local farm, and 'Trick or Treat' goodies fill the shops. I was born just after midnight on All Hallow's Eve 1964, so I am definitely quite far into crone territory these days, but 'The Season of the Witch' excites me every bit as much today as it always did. All those years of parties!


I even got married at Halloween (in a black dress, with orange flowers, naturally!) - and then had a hand fasting to follow in a fabulous gothic library. I am Halloween Girl.




I have been thinking though - does 'The Halloween Effect' go even deeper than a love of candy corn and a penchant for all things pumpkin? It certainly seems to. It has affected my reading - I have a lifetime membership to 'Cemetery Dance' magazine and Ray Bradbury is my favourite author.




I'd say it affects my writing, certainly. I have written a significant number of supernatural and scary things, including series fiction about a haunted school - 'Too Ghoul for School' and 'Walking with Witches,' about girls haunted by the spirits of women from the witch trials in Newcastle in the 1600s. I have two writing projects currently; one is about a haunted metro station, and another is about a strange bat-like boy - so I think it is safe to say that Halloween is a rich thread running through my work!




I even make pumpkins and witches as part of my 'day job' - apart from writing, I teach craft classes in felting and creating altered books. The past few weeks have been all about Halloween! At Faerierealms, I have been making garden witches, pumpkin shaped altered books (from scruffy old books bound for the recycling bin) and tiny felted pumpkins. I'm even writing a craft book about how to make them. 




So hopefully this week will be a productive time for me, writing-wise, as a result of the smell of pumpkin spice and candle wax - and the visits from little Trick-or-Treaters. Look out for my spooky offerings, coming to a bookshop near you. Happy Halloween!




















Monday 26 October 2015

Guy Fawkes Night...again

by Julie Sykes


 This started off as a post about Guy Fawkes Night. The annual event celebrated in Britain on 5th of November, to commemorate a failed terrorist attack that was planned to take place on 5th November 1605.

In short, a group of Catholics attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the Protestant King, James 1, and his Government inside.

I was researching the facts - 36 barrels of gunpowder, the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, Catholics v Protestants, Robert Catesby, Guido Fawkes – and then I got to the bit where the plotters were arrested, tortured and executed.

Yep, tortured AND executed.

Two things struck me, then. Firstly neither side came out of this smelling of roses.

Secondly, doesn’t it all sound depressingly familiar?

One religious group fighting against another. Torture and execution. It's an age old problem that continues today along with slavery and discrimination.

Will we ever learn to live together in peace? Are humans destined to fight for supremacy?

Whatever your beliefs, whatever your race, gender, sexual orientation, hair colour or whatever, we all, every single one of us, have a fundamental thing in common. 

We are human.

And yes, we may be different in lots of other ways but surely that’s a good thing! No, actually it’s a GREAT thing. Being different helps us all to survive. It most certainly doesn’t make us better or right or superior to anyone else.

We don’t have to like everyone. I'd even go as far to say that it's practically impossible to like everyone. But wouldn’t it be BRILLIANT if we could look at a person and see just that… A PERSON not a religion, an ethnicity, a sexual orientation or whatever.

Nadiya caused a bit of a storm when she won Bake Off. It's all over the media with shouty headlines like, 'Veiled Muslim Woman.’And? Nadiya won Bake Off because she was a FANTASTIC baker. On top of that she was also kind and very entertaining. Congratulations Nadiya. You deserved to win. 

We’re all in this life together. In the scheme of things we’re not even here for that long.

See the person.

Accept that sometimes you have to agree to disagree.

Try much harder to be TOLERANT.

It’s not rocket science, which brings me back to Guy Fawkes Night. If you’re celebrating on November 5th then have fun.

Fireworks at the 2009 British Fireworks Championship in Plymouth.By Nilfanion (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons







Sunday 25 October 2015

Making a Difference by Tamsyn Murray

I've done some author visits to smaller schools recently. Schools where it was obvious there wasn't much money at home. These visits weren't promotional, there were no books for sale so that wasn't how I knew. It was simply that by looking at some of the kids, and listening to what they said, I could see that money was tight.

Behaviour was often an issue on these visits - not because the pupils were naughty, but because my visit was exciting and new and they didn't know where to draw the line with their enthusiasm. They were bubbling over with ideas and fizzing with excitement that they wanted to share with the person next to them. On top of that, there were a lot of children who needed extra support. We were writing story plans so that they could write a story for a local competition and some children didn't want to enter, so were reluctant to do a plan. Others weren't sure they would be able to write the story. 'We don't have any paper at home,' a girl told me. Many of the children lacked confidence. 'This is rubbish,' a boy said, waving at his half-finished, wildly imaginative plan. 'I'm rubbish.' Another boy really surprised me by telling me who his favourite author was and describing his favourite books - to my shame, I had already observed him and decided he wouldn't be a reader. Some of them saw me as a teacher but most knew I was different. 'I've never met an author,' was something I heard a lot and one boy fixed me with hopeful eyes. 'Will you give me one of your books?' he said, in a way that made me think he didn't have any books of his own. And when I asked for suggestions of heroes and villains from books, there were a lot of characters from films instead.

Every child wrote a plan. Every child came up with characters and a setting, a problem and a solution. I know that some of them won't write the story to go with it, but for these children simply doing the plan was a big step forward. Finishing something, understanding that they can do it, seeing that with a bit of tweaking they can make their ideas better, spinning a story out of nothing - these were things they perhaps hadn't known they could do before my visit. I left those classrooms exhausted but knowing I had made a small difference.

And a day or two later, I got some feedback from some of the schools, which isn't something I usually have. The children had written what they thought of the story workshops and the schools hadn't selected the only ones with the best handwriting or highest, they'd chosen some from less able children too. These comments made me realise even more how much the kids had got out of an hour of story planning.

They weren't the easiest school visits I've ever done. But they were great visits and I will remember them forever.