Writing the Wrongs - Liz Kessler

Last month, something rather horrible happened. The elections for members of the European parliament led to a widespread vote for far right parties, fuelled by a wave of anti-immigrant feeling.

The day the results came out, I could barely bring myself to get out of bed. I felt depressed, disappointed and quite hopeless. In fact, it started before that. In the voting booth, faced with a ballot paper that seemed to list one far right organisation after another, I felt ashamed and perplexed. Was this really where we were? Was this honestly what people wanted? 

Then the results came out, and I felt much, much worse. Was this the best that we, as a society, could do? Had we learned nothing from the lessons that history has taught us? It seemed not.

So what could I do? I spent the day asking myself this question, over and over again. In the morning, the only thing I could think to do was pull the quilt back over my head and hide away from the world until I felt I could face it again. In the afternoon, I decided I would become an MP – despite never having been a member of any political party in my whole life. By the evening, thanks to one of my lovely writer friends, Elen Caldecott, I realised that neither of these options was really credible, but there was a third.

‘We’re writers, we’re artists,’ Elen said. ‘We have a voice. We have our books. That’s where we can make the change. That’s where we argue for a better world. That’s where we have power.’

She was right, of course, and she was the first person to say anything that actually started to pull me out of my slump.

I thought about her words all day, all week in fact. I thought about how privileged we are to do what we do, to have a job that means our words, our thoughts, our beliefs can find their way into the hands and thoughts of a generation of children: the people who will create the future. Could there really be a more powerful idea than this?

But how to go about it? You can’t exactly write a book that says, ‘Hey kids, here’s what you have to do. Treat everyone nicely; go about your dealings in life with fairness; accept others even if they are different from you; and please don’t ever vote for UKIP or the BNP.’ For one thing, it wouldn’t make for a very interesting read, and for another, no one likes to be lectured – especially whilst they’re doing something that is meant to be fun.

So then I thought about it a bit more, and realised that actually I already do say all those things. I say them all the time. I never intend to, but they always find their way into my books. I think I’m writing about mermaids or fairies or time travel, but time and again, I’m writing about social injustice, about standing up for what you believe in, about accepting yourself and others.

My Emily Windsnap books are at their heart a series about two very different societies who have every reason to mistrust and dislike each other, but who learn to coexist. Emily Windsnap’s family is put in charge of making sure this happens. Emily herself stands up in a court and demands that people are legally allowed to love and marry who they want.

My other books have a habit of doing this, too. Readers quite often write to me and say things like, ‘Your book told me it was OK to be me,’ or ‘Your book gave me the courage to stand up to bullies.’

Really? Did it? I thought it was just about a girl and her fairy godsister.

I honestly have no idea that I am writing about these things at the time, but perhaps it is inevitable that they will be at the heart of my books, when they are at the core of who I am and have been ever since I was a teenager. I’m not really that different now. I just do it more quietly than I did in my twenties.

Yep, that really was me. And yes, Mum and Dad, I really am smoking. Sorry!

Back then I protested against injustice by going on marches and getting people to sign petitions. Now I do it, mostly without even realising it, in my books. But whichever route it is, fighting for a better world, a fairer society and a place where people learn to be confident about who they are and accepting of others are the things that I care about.

So, in fact, all I have to do is carry on doing what I’m doing. One day I might write a book that deals with these themes more explicitly. In fact, I already have an idea brewing for such a book, and am quite excited by it. But till then, what an amazing honour and privilege it is to be able to simply write stories that I love and feel passionate about, and know that as I do so, I am sharing the ideas and beliefs that are at the heart of who I am. To know that every time a child enjoys one of my books, there is a small possibility that they may in fact take its message to their heart – perhaps without realising that they have done so, just as I don’t realise I’m putting the message there in the first place.

This whole idea feels revolutionary. It doesn’t mean that from now on I’m going to pile a load of messages into my books. I believe that this is the quickest way to kill a story flat dead and I would never do it. For me, books have to be first and foremost about the story and the characters. If you approach it from any other angle than this, I think it shows. But the exciting thing is that, as long as I continue to do this, I can trust that the rest will follow.

What a privilege. What a gift.

So no, I’m not about to seek election as an MP. I’m not going to pull the covers over my head in despair in the mornings, either. I’m just going to carry on doing what I love. I’m going to trust that as I do it, I’m gently, quietly and unobtrusively saying what I need to say. And I’m going to hope, hope, hope that if enough of us are doing the same thing, a whole generation of children will grow up with love, acceptance and equality being the values that rule their world, rather than xenophobia, hatred and fear.

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We warned you this would happen - John Dougherty

I make no apologies for being angry.

If you haven’t already read or watched the excellent second annual lecture to the Reading Agency, delivered last month by the equally excellent Neil Gaiman, please do. You’ll find much to think about and much to agree with, and perhaps you’ll learn something new, too.



I learned something new. I learned this:

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".

The youngest age-group in question is 16-24, and I’m fairly sure I know why they’ve done so badly. You see, it was 16 years ago - when the youngest in that group were babies, and the eldest were only 8 - that the government began to micro-manage our children’s literacy learning.

Oh, there’d been political interference before then, and increasingly so; but it was with David Blunkett’s appointment as Education Secretary that Her Majesty’s Government became so arrogant as to think that some bloke in Whitehall whose sole experience of education was having gone to school was better placed to decide exactly how children should be taught than were trained, qualified, experienced teachers who actually had those children in front of them.

Blunkett introduced something called the Literacy Hour. Teachers protested: it would inhibit creativity; it would bore children; it would dampen enthusiasm for reading. Tough, said Blunkett, you’re doing it. It’ll raise standards.

Well, Mr Blunkett, it would appear you were wrong about that.

I was a supply teacher in those days, and I remember groans from the children when I announced it was time for Literacy Hour. I remember seeing the light in children’s eyes go out as I cut them short, wanting to hear what they had to say but knowing that I had no choice but to keep to the government-imposed clock. I remember coming home to my wife and saying, “When we have children, I don’t want anybody doing to them what I had to do to those children today.”

But however much teachers complained, the response from government was always, “We know best.”

They didn’t. They really didn’t.

And they still don’t. You see, this is not a party-political complaint. Things are no better now that New Labour is but an old memory. Now we have the coalition. We have Michael Gove ordering a one-size-fits-all phonics regime. We have the top-down imposition of a phonics test that is not fit for purpose. We have teachers pressured into the sort of behaviour recently observed by Marilyn Brocklehurst of Norfolk Children’s Book Centre:

Just sat in and watched a phonics lesson. Child was corrected for reading 'ing'. No Joe, you must say i...nnnnnn....ggggggg. Hmmm
— Marilyn Brocklehurst (@MarilynBrock) November 8, 2013

We have so much evidence to tell us that if our children are going to achieve in literacy - and in school, and in life - they need to learn to read for pleasure. To read for fun. And we have a growing body of evidence to tell us that for this to happen, politicians must not be allowed to micro-manage any aspect of their learning.

But what can we do? Nothing. The Secretary of State for Education has assumed the powers of a dictator - literally; there’s no way of holding him, and it usually is a him, to account. Experts who challenge him are dismissed as, well, whatever is the political insult du jour - at the moment, it’s Marxist - whilst their views are misrepresented way past the point of parody.

I began this piece with the wild-haired Neil Gaiman. By the end, I’ve come to the wild-haired Russell Brand (language warning).



Maybe he’s right. Maybe the whole system is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was.

______________________________________________________________________

John's next book:  

 Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers, illustrated by David Tazzyman & published by OUP in January 2014

Have your name shouted by a badger and get a signed book by bidding online in the Authors for Philippines charity auction. 
Well over 200 other items, including many from Awfully Big Blog Adventure contributors.

Awfully Big Birthdays past, and more!

We hope you've enjoyed this ramble through a handful of our hundreds of posts. Any time you have a few minutes to spare, you're welcome to browse the blog archive on the right-hand sidebar - just click on a year, a month, and an intriguing title, and you're bound to enjoy yourself!

Or why not click on one of the labels underneath the archive, and pick a post from there?

We hope you will, and we hope you'll keep coming back to find out what's new here, too.

Thanks to everyone who contributes to An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, whether by writing for it or reading it. We're looking forward to the next twelve months of stimulating, provocative, instructive and whimsical entries - but as the sun sets on our fourth birthday celebrations, let us leave you with a reminder of how we celebrated the first three:
 

For our first birthday, back in 2009, we had a virtual party featuring guest posts, competitions, and games! You can find them by clicking on the link - if you want to read them in order you'll have to start at the bottom and scroll up.

For our second birthday celebrations all our contributors were invited to offer a Top Five connected to children's writing - and what a diverse group of lists we had! As you've seen, one of them is our most viewed post ever - but a click on the link will show you that the others are all worth visiting, too.

And of course, who could forget our third birthday and the amazing online LitFest? The link will take you to the first page of posts - I'm afraid that to see them in order, you'll have to scroll to the bottom, read up to the top, then go to the bottom again to click 'newer posts', and repeat... but you could just dip in.




Anyway, getting through that lot will take you to the end of the evening, so at this point we at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure would like to thank you for joining us on our fourth birthday. We look forward to your company all the way to the fifth and beyond!

1 - Gillian Philip on the filming of children's books

Thanks to a great big ladleful of serendipidity, number one in our list of most-viewed posts includes a connection with both ABBA birthdays and lists!

To celebrate our second birthday, we decided to have a theme for the month, and contributors who wanted to were invited to present their top five of... well, anything to do with children's books. Gillian went for her top five films based on children's books, and accompanied her list with a concise but captivating musing on what makes a good adaptation:

Five Barnstorming Books-to-Movies: Gillian Philip

You'll find more suggestions of great adaptations in the comments, but please feel free to add your own favourites - or any other thoughts - in the comments below this post.

And there we come to the end of our list of most-viewed entries on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure - but not quite to the end of our birthday celebrations. Join us at 7.00pm for one last stop along Memory Lane!

3 - Keren David on "women's" & "girl's" fiction prizes

Should there be a literary prize specifically for women? Does the Queen of Teen award celebrate or denigrate? Keren tackles these questions and more, in a wonderfully nuanced and well-argued post that is our third most-read:

Orange and Pink by Keren David

The link to most-read post number 2 will be here in an hour!

4 - Charlie Butler on privilege

Someone whose posts always make me stop and think,  Charlie - who now writes and posts as Cathy Butler - clearly gave a lot of us food for thought with this, our fourth most viewed post, on how privilege comes in many forms, and can shape both our writing and our world-views without our realising:

You Don't Have to be Posh to be Privileged - Charlie Butler

Number 3 will be here at 4.00!

5 - Linda Strachan on making a living

If you read all the links from the last post, you might have noticed Nicola Morgan's comments about some of the factors that make it difficult to survive financiallly as an author.

In our fifth most read post, Linda tackles that issue in a straightforward manner that clearly attracted our readers' attention. Interestingly, and in contrast with the rest of our Ten Most Viewed, this post attracted very few comments, which suggests that ABBA readers sometimes want to discuss our contributors' posts, and sometimes just want to learn from them.

Diversification or How to survive as a writer - Linda Strachan

Apologies for the late arrival of this post, owing to the wrong kind of megabytes on your ADSL line. Meet you back here in at 3.00pm for number 4!

6 - Nicola Morgan on supermarket book sales

A constant complaint from many authors is that the whole business of publishing and selling books has become so, well, commercial.

Our sixth most viewed post of the last four years is Nicola's funny, incisive, and - needless to say - crabbit look at her local branch of the Chain Bookseller of the Year, including a visit to its bacon aisle.

Books, bacon and chain bookseller of the year - by Nicola Morgan

As a bonus, the extensive comments section includes a debate between Nicola and publisher Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow, with inactive URLS to further thoughts from both of them, which for your convenience I present in active form here:

Kate's reply to Nicola's blogpost

Another thought or two from Nicola

Number 5 will be here in an hour!

Newsflash! New entry at number 8!

Today's Ten Most Viewed posts were set up in advance, but I've just checked the stats, and we have a new entry!

Saturday's very witty post from Cathy Butler has had so many viewings already that it's now our eighth most-viewed post, so if you haven't already read it, here as a special Birthday Bonus is:

Recommending Books for Grown-Ups - Cathy Butler

There'll be another post from Cathy, under her former name of Charlie Butler, later on today; and the next scheduled post will be along in a few minutes.

7 - John Dougherty on Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey

I don't know if you heard Ed Vaizey's recent appearance on Radio 4's Front Row, during which he claimed that there's no library service crisis (and I ended up shouting at the radio)?

Clearly the man was unaffected by our seventh most viewed post, in which I sang a satirical song about how useless he's been at looking after our libraries:


What's Wrong With Ed Vaizey? - John Dougherty

See you at 1:00pm for number 6!

8 - Keren David on Young Adult fiction

Definitions can be problematic, for those of us working in Children's Literature at least as much as anyone else. Maybe that's why so many of us read our eighth most viewed post, Keren's stimulating article which took the hazy definition of Young Adult fiction as its starting point:


Young Adult by Keren David 

Number 7 will be here in an hour!

9 - Ellen Renner on the politics of the library

Some of the best posts on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure are probably planned well in advance, but sometimes a spontaneous response to a current event can be an absolute diamond...

... like our ninth most viewed post, my editorial colleague Ellen's reaction to a report that a well-known poet and broadcaster had been banned from a library:

Keeping Politics out of the Library: Aristotle Would Not Be Amused - Ellen Renner

See you at 11.00 for number 8!

10 - Malaika Rose Stanley on mixed heritage

I once had editorial feedback that said, "It's not very likely Adil would have a cousin named Katie - could you change her name to something more Indian?

It's intriguing that whilst children's publishing is much more aware of ethnic diversity than it was when I was young, it still lacks awareness of mixed race families as an important part of our society. I'm clearly not the only one with whom this resonates, because out of well over a thousand posts on this site over the last four years, the tenth most viewed - and one which attracted a lot of comments including a number from readers who don't often comment here - was this thoughtful, provocative, and ultimately affirming piece from Malaika:
Black, White and Just Right - Malaika Rose StanleySee you at 10.00am for number 9!

Our Ten Most Viewed Posts

We've no idea why some posts get significantly more page-views than others, but as a way of sharing with you a selection of great posts of the past this seems to make as much sense as any!

We'll be starting the rundown of our Ten Most Viewed Posts in about 10 minutes. You can read each one by clicking on the link, which will be in big hard-to-miss letters and will open the historic post in a new page or tab in your browser.

Please leave your comments below the new post - the one posted today, 10/7/12 - not the original it links to, or we may never get to read them!

And remember - there are lots of terrific contributions which haven't made the Ten Most Viewed, so please let us know some of your historic favourites. It's worth noting that none of our ten are from the site's first two years - and almost half are from the last twelve months - which probably reflects a growth in readership more than anything else.

Anyway - enough waffle. See you in ten minutes for the start of our Top Ten! In the meantime, have some more cake.

Our first ever post, by Anne Cassidy

Without Anne Cassidy, there would be no Awfully Big Blog Adventure. Recognising the tension between the following facts:

• publishers think writers should blog
• blogs should be updated frequently
• writers are often too busy writing books to blog frequently

Anne decided that the ideal solution was to get lots of authors to take turns updating a single blog. She gathered a group of 15 writers for children and young adults - all of us members of the Scattered Authors' Society - and An Awfully Big Blog Adventure was born.

So when we launched, on 10th July 2008, it obviously fell to Anne to kick the whole thing off, which she did with this understated little musing on the ideal library:

My Dream Library - Anne Cassidy

Please click the link to view the blog. It'll open in a new window. If you'd like to leave a comment, please leave it here - if you leave it below the original post, we may never see it!

Do enjoy reading our very first post. The next Birthday Blogpost will be here at 9.00am!

Another Awfully Big Birthday!!!

It's our birthday!

An Awfully Big Blog Adventure is four today, and to celebrate, here's a lovely picture of a cake taken by my friend Michael over at foodimaging.co.uk (do take a look. The pictures are mouthwateringly gorgeous).

But there's more! To celebrate our first four years, we're taking a little stroll down memory lane. Throughout the day, we'll be linking back to blogposts you may have loved and blogposts you may have missed, beginning in a few minutes with a link to our very first blogpost of all and then continuing with a run-down of our top ten Most Viewed So Far.

Do keep dropping in through the day, and please join in the celebrations by leaving your comments. Tell us how long you've been reading ABBA, or why you enjoy it, nominate your own favourite post from history, or just wish us a happy ABBA birthday!

Your host today, on behalf of the editorial team and everyone who posts on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, is John Dougherty

Big Fat Fibs and the Big Fat Fibbers Who Tell Them* - John Dougherty

It’s going to be an unashamedly political post today, folks; but before I begin here are a few pictures from my recent visit to Delhi for the Bookaroo festival:

Big thanks to Jo Williams and the Bookaroo team for inviting me and for organising such a great festival, and to the British School in Delhi for sponsoring my events!

But while I was having such a terrific time in India, hanging out with the 2 Steves and making some lovely new international author friends, events were moving on apace with the campaigns to save our libraries.

Campaigners on Judgement Day

As you may know, on 16th November Mr Justice McKenna ruled in the High Court that Gloucestershire and Somerset County Councils’ plans to drastically cut our library services were unlawful on equalities grounds. “Hurrah!” we all said, as the judge quashed the plans, and told the councils they had to go back to the beginning and start again.

So, what’s the problem? Well, here in Gloucestershire the council’s statements about the High Court judgement have been somewhat austeritical with the truth.

On the day of the judgement, council leader Mark Hawthorne told Channel 4 news that the judge had ruled that the council had not breached its duties under the 1964 Libraries Act - an assertion he repeated on BBC local radio the next day. He has also been widely quoted as saying that “the most important thing here is that the judge said that there is nothing wrong with our plans to transfer some libraries over to communities”.

Nice for the council if it were true. In fact, as explained here, this is based on a misreading. All the judge was saying was (a) it’s for the Secretary of State, not him, to decide whether the council’s plans comply with the act, and (b) since community libraries fall outside statutory provision, they’re not relevant to the act. You can have 100 libraries handed over to communities, or none: the question is, do the council’s own libraries meet the requirements?

Okay; but we can see how that mistake might be made, yeah? I mean, it’s not as if Gloucestershire County Council has its own expensive lawyers to advise them on what the judge meant… Oh, it does? Well… well, maybe they were busy, or at lunch, or at A&E after banging their heads against a wall following the judgement, or something. It’s still a bit harsh, even as a matter of hyperbole, to use the word ‘fibs’ - isn’t it?

No, I don’t think so. You see, in the same interviews, Councillor Hawthorne also claimed that the council had lost only because it had been tripped up on a very small technical point. I’ll repeat that, in his own words: “What we’ve been tripped up on here is a very small technical point.” You can see it around 2 minutes 10 seconds into the Channel 4 video.

Let’s compare that with the judge’s words, as quoted in The Guardian:  the breach of equalities duties was "substantive, not merely a technical or procedural defect".

Hmm… Judge McKenna: “substantive, not merely a technical or procedural defect.”
Cllr Hawthorne: “a very small technical point”.

Who’s telling the truth here, reader?

Here’s a clue: the judge also described the council’s plans as both unlawful and “bad government”, said it was “important to the rule of law” that they be quashed, struck out those plans, refused the council permission to appeal, and awarded full costs against the council.

Councillor Hawthorne may not have been deliberately lying; but he certainly wasn’t telling the truth. And there’s no evidence that he’s retracted his assertions - in fact, all the public statements I've seen from the council suggest to me that they see the High Court judgement as a minor inconvenience, a “small technical point” to be worked around.

So the question I’ve been asking is: is this man really fit to be in charge of our public services?

I have no problem with someone making a mistake. I can forgive someone who makes a huge mistake and then sets about putting it right. But our public servants should respect the rule of law. And the evidence suggests to me that Councillor Hawthorne does not.

*We don’t have a legal team here on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, but if we did I’m sure they’d want me to make clear that today’s title is (a) hyperbole for comic effect, and (b) a whimsical and extremely tenuous reference to Al Franken’s book about something completely different. For the record, I’d like to state that I have no evidence that anyone associated with Gloucestershire County Council is either big or fat. Oh, and I acknowledge that it’s quite possible that they actually believe all of their statements, even those which are demonstrably untrue.


As per our disclaimer, all opinions expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other member of the team, including the site owner.

John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com.
He's also now on twitter as @JohnDougherty8, and consequently will probably never do any work ever again.

His latest books include:

Finn MacCool and the Giant's Causeway - a retelling for the Oxford Reading Tree
Bansi O'Hara and the Edges of Hallowe'en
Zeus Sorts It Out - "A sizzling comedy... a blast for 7+" , and one of The Times' Children's Books of 2011, as chosen by Amanda Craig

BLACK, WHITE AND JUST RIGHT - Malaika Rose Stanley

Mixed-race people have existed ever since our ancestors first set out to explore and wage war - and today, the UK has one of the largest and fastest-growing mixed race populations in the western world. Partly this is because of the greater number of people who choose to define themselves as mixed-race on census forms and elsewhere and partly as the result of more mixed marriages and relationships and more blended, adoptive and step-families.

The BBC’s recent Mixed Britannia series told some of the stories behind the headlines and statistics and stirred up quite a few personal memories of my own. As a result, I decided to try and compile a list of children’s and YA books which feature mixed-race and mixed heritage main characters and I began by asking friends, colleagues, social network contacts and UK publishers to let me know what’s out there.

I didn’t particularly want to politicise the idea but, of course, it is political. For some people, racial mixing represents the hope and positivity of a multicultural society whilst for others, it undermines national and cultural identity.

Simply asking the question raises some tricky issues because the mixed-race (or bi-racial, multi-ethnic, mixed heritage or whatever you want to call it) experience is so varied and complex. Whether someone chooses to identify themselves – or the characters in their books – as mixed-race depends on who’s asking – and why. Is it The Office for National Statistics, a National Book Week event organiser or the British National Party?

Self-definition is crucial and in my experience, physical appearance, familial influence (or lack of it) and racism all affect how mixed-race people identify themselves and this can change at different points in their lives.

                      

            

For me, as the daughter of a Jamaican father and an English mother, I sometimes felt rejected because my skin was too fair and my hair was too straight and sometimes because my skin was too dark and my hair was too frizzy. ‘Mixed-race’ was definitely preferable to the labels of half-caste or coloured that I had dumped on me as a child growing up in care in the 1960s – and to the names I got called at school and in the street.

In the 1970s, complete with my Angela Davis style Afro and radical pan-African and feminist politics, I was shouting it loud: I was black and proud! I was black and beautiful too, although my skin colour was actually rather more beige.

My sons were born in the 1980s and that was when I realised that the lack of diversity in children’s and YA books had persisted from my childhood to theirs. Racial identity has never been the problematic issue for them that it once was for me, but we still had to search hard to find kids that looked like them in the pages of books and it was one of the reasons that I started writing myself. My sons are now both in ‘mixed’ relationships – one with a beautiful young Hindu woman and the other with a beautiful young woman of Irish and Jamaican descent. And if I’m ever lucky enough to have grandchildren, they’ll need books too.

Of course, most families encourage their children to be proud of their cultural heritage, but what happens when, for whatever reason, children do not have access to these family connections?  What happens when mixed-race and multi-ethnic children do not see themselves reflected in books – except possibly as the ‘best friend’ or ‘trusty sidekick’ or in gritty tales of so-called social realism and the tortured search for identity? Where is the magic, the romance, the comedy?

As the mixed-race population has increased, in the media at least, ‘brown is the new black’. Mixed-race people have been appropriated as the supposedly more acceptable and less challenging face of diversity. But that’s not the whole picture. Although mixed-race people are highly visible in some spheres of life – we can model haute couture, win F1 Championships and BAFTAs, and even become the President of the United States - in some fields like educational policy, we are often ignored. Is the same true in children’s and YA publishing?

I contacted the publicity departments of 18 UK publishers – and heard back from only three! Sadly, one of these had no books with mixed-race characters, but OUP sent Catherine Johnson's Face Value - a murder mystery set in the London fashion world - and Barrington Stoke sent James Lovegrove’s The 5 Lords of Pain – a series of fast-paced stories about saving the world. So let’s hear it for models and gangsters and for martial arts, magic and demons from hell! Of course, I have to mention Tamarind – publisher of several picture books and middle grade fiction titles with mixed race characters, including my own Spike and Ali Enson – a story of inter-planetary alien adoption.

I am grateful to everyone who took the time and trouble to let me know about their own and other people’s books: Sarwat Chadda, author of Devil’s Wish and Dark Goddess, featuring ‘bad-ass’ hero, Billi Sangreal; Catherine Johnson, screenwriter and author of ‘enough books to prop up several tables’ including the historical Nest of Vipers and the contemporary Brave New Girl; Eileen Browne, illustrator of Through My Window, now back in print but first published in 1986 when ‘it was the first ever picture book in the UK – and the USA! - about an interracial family, where ethnicity wasn’t part of the story’; Zetta Elliott, author of A Wish After Midnight and networker extraordinaire; and so many others, too numerous to mention.

I hope the final list, now hosted by Elizabeth on the Mixed Race Family website (click here), will be a useful resource for families, children’s centres, schools, etc. Many of the books are quite dated and many are US publications which may be less easily available and less reflective of the British experience, but I felt it was better to leave people to make their own choices and draw their own conclusions. I am happy to correct errors, add omissions and include new publications.

It’s a short list – and not in a good way - but in the end, isn’t quality always more important than quantity?

The Empty Chair - Celia Rees

Every day, authors appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival give their time to stand in solidarity with persecuted writers by reading aloud from their work. The readings are organised by Scottish PEN, in conjunction with Amnesty International. Pride of place at these events is given to an empty chair. The chair represents those writers who cannot be there, who have to have their words read by others because they live in repressive regimes that seek to silence them by censoring their work; subjecting them to imprisonment, torture, or worse, for daring to express their views and for demanding that their voices be heard.

All the writers taking part in this event must feel, as I did, honoured and humbled to be reading from the work of fellow writers who have suffered, and are suffering, for the right to do something which we take so very much for granted. We are free to write what we like, read what we like, say what we like.

I sat in the tent, listening to my fellow writers reading the words of our brother and sister authors, famous and anonymous, imprisoned or in hiding, in China, in Cuba, in Burma and in Bagdad. All around us events were going on, audiences queuing up, readings being given, while back in the yurt, a fair few egos were on display. I thought about how lightly we hold our freedom to take part in this sharing of words and writing and I found myself looking at that empty chair and wondering: would I be prepared to take the risk? Would any of us? As I did so, words came into my head. Words from the hymn, As I Survey The Wondrous Cross:

my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.

If you are attending trhe Book Festival, go along to show your support and solidarity. These events are free and happen at 5:30 every day.

Victims of Tokenism? - John Dougherty

When I was young I was a voracious reader, but I never read any books about children just like me. I don’t think anyone had written any.

There were lots of books about children a bit like me. I mean, most of the kids in the stories I read shared my skin-colour, more or less; but they were English. The Famous Five, the Pevensey children, Wendy Darling and her brothers - English, and posher than me, the lot of them.

But that was okay, because all the children on telly were English too. Clearly, people like me just didn’t get to appear in books and on television. Probably nobody from Northern Ireland had ever written a book, or at least not one good enough to go in the shops.

Well, apart from CS Lewis, I was proud to discover; but he didn’t really count - not properly - because according to the potted biography in my Narnia books, he’d only been born in Belfast. Being born somewhere isn’t the same as living there, and it didn’t say anything about him living in Northern Ireland. Maybe his parents had just been here on holiday or something. He’d certainly done all the interesting things in England, like being a professor. And anyway, he’d written a book, and hadn’t I already learned that people who were from Northern Ireland - I mean really, properly from here - didn’t write books? So he can’t have been from here. Not really.

So while I could enjoy books - and I did, believe me; I did - something inside me just accepted that books were about English kids, and written by English people.

To be fair, there were a few non-English children in some of the books I read. There was Prince Paul in Enid Blyton’s Secret series. He was African - although, as we learned approvingly in The Secret Mountain, his behaviour in the face of danger was just like an English boy’s, so that was okay [Note: see correction in comments, with thanks to Saviour Pirotta]. And I think Donald and Jean in Borrobil were Scottish. I liked Scottish people, probably because they were pretty well the closest you got in fiction to Northern Irish - apart maybe from the odd thick Paddy in sitcoms, and they really didn’t count, because they weren’t like real people at all.

Oh, and there was Nico in The Luck Of Troy. He was Ancient Greek.

I did come across one novel about Northern Ireland, when I was a teenager and they were just starting to invent Teen Fiction. It was called Under Goliath, and it was really good. Of course, it was about the Troubles, because the only time you ever saw anything about Northern Ireland it would be about the Troubles. Even if to me it was about being miserable, and bullied at school, and escaping into magical worlds any chance I got, I understood that to - the people who wrote books and made TV programmes - Northern Ireland meant the Troubles.

It was only a few years ago that I came across a series of books about children like me. By that point, of course, I wasn’t a child any more, but my inner child still was, and he was very happy about it. They’re by Sam McBratney, best known for Guess How Much I Love You, and they’re about Jimmy Zest and his classmates. My inner child and I could tell at once that these were children like us, because they said the sorts of things we and our classmates used to say:

“Ah, go on, give us one of your scones.”
“Go and get lost, Shorty.”
“Go away and give my head peace.”
“Just a wee bit, Gowso, I’m starving!”
“Your head’s a balloon, Zesty.”
“Wise up, Zesty.”

None of the children in the books I read as a boy ever said anything like that, nor did the kids on television - even when Grange Hill was invented - but my classmates and I did. These children, my inner child and I were sure, were Northern Irish children. I looked up Sam McBratney on the web; and, sure enough, he’s from Northern Ireland. I just had to be right.

Best of all, they weren’t Northern Irish children from sectarian areas learning important lessons about tolerance or getting involved with paramilitaries; they were just Northern Irish children being, well, children. Getting into scrapes, falling out, being silly. I loved them.

So when, a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I came across a copy of Jimmy Zest, Super Pest in the library, we borrowed it. But it was a more recent edition - 2002 - than the one I'd read before; and in the illustrations they’d done something terrible.

They’d made two of the characters - Penny Brown and Stephen ‘Gowso’ McGowan - black.

Don’t get me wrong. Black kids are still, I think, under-represented in children’s fiction, as are most minority groups. The tendency in children’s publishing is still to default to white; a few years ago, an editor asked me if, in a story I’d submitted, I could perhaps turn one of the characters - any one - into a black child. To which I replied, “How do you know none of them are?” She’d just assumed they were all white because I hadn’t specified otherwise in the text. And that’s wrong. Where there’s an opportunity to even up the balance in favour of a minority, it should be taken, because all children need to see themselves represented in fiction.

But Northern Ireland does not have a large African-Caribbean population. Take a look here if you don’t believe me. Statistically, it’s enormously unlikely that you’d get two unrelated black children in the same class anywhere in Northern Ireland. Which means that this no longer looks like a book about children from a Northern Irish community.

Jimmy Zest is already about a minority group - a group that’s horribly, horribly under-represented in children’s fiction. And - in the name of equality - they’ve made it look like just another book about English children.

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John's latest book, Zeus Sorts It Out, has just been published by Random House Children's Books, and his next, Bansi O'Hara and the Edges of Hallowe'en, will be published on September 1st.

You can visit his website at www.visitingauthor.com.

I'm going to be away when this post appears on Thursday. If I can get online I'll join in any discussion; if not, I look forward to seeing your comments when I get back! - John