Tips from the CBI conference and why we need to stop writing the ‘Rudolph Story’ - Kelly McCaughrain

This month I got to attend the Children’s Books Ireland annual conference. As well as doing a mind-melting amount of work to promote children’s reading, including setting up libraries in schools and organising book awards, CBI also put on this two-day event jammed with more fascinating speakers than you can shake a big stick at.

The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Belonging’, and every speaker had an interesting take on it. As usual, I had my notebook at the ready and wrote down all the inspiring soundbites I could. 

And here they are:

Kwame Alexander, who writes verse novels and gives standing-ovation-worthy talks, opened the show with a warm, funny and inspiring session about his experiences growing up and becoming a writer (“my mother was my first librarian”). He said he’s been asked more than once by librarians “what colour his characters are”, “so that they know who to read the books to”. 

His answer to that is that we need to stop segregating books. Books don’t segregate themselves, we do that. “All the books are for all the kids.” He told one librarian to read the books to the kids and if any of the kids asked about the colour of the characters to email him and he’d tell her the answer. She never did.

Picture book writer and illustrator, Daisy Hirst also had something to say about including diverse characters in her books even though she’s white. She concedes that she may not be the ideal writer of these characters but feels that it would be unrealistic to not include them and that, “To me being inclusive is too important to leave it to other people who might know better.”

Daisy Hirst on the classic picture books she grew up with

She was also asked what kept her writing and drawing as a child and said, “My parents behaved as if it was important.”

One of my fav YA writers, Brian Conaghan said, “The books given to kids in schools now don’t feature kids like them and we wonder why there’s this disconnect between them and the books they study.”

True, but Dean Atta, (whose verse novel about a mixed-race gay teen drag artist, Black Flamingo, is a truly beautiful object), said, “It’s important to have diverse characters but teenagers are capable of seeing themselves in a variety of characters.” 

It's beautiful inside too, lots of graphics

I’d agree with that. People sometimes say they were stunned as a child to read a book that featured someone like them (if you’re from NI it was the Kevin and Sadie books which were set in Belfast), but I don’t remember ever having that epiphany. I really believed I WAS every character I read, and none of them were from Belfast. Though to be fair, very few of them were non-white either.

Diversity wasn’t the only issue that came up in terms of belonging and exclusion. At a lunch break, someone told me about a child in their kid’s school who was reading Jaqueline Wilson and was told off by the teacher in front of the class because ‘at 14 she was far too old to be reading JW’. 

Both untrue and completely irrelevant. And when you think about the lengths we go to to get kids to pick up a book, any book, it makes you want to scream.  

Brian Conaghan also said, “It’s a misconception that kids hate poetry. They hate writing about poetry. Everyone does.” I actually didn’t as a kid, but I was a bit weird and I take his point. I’m a big believer that there should be time to read (and write) in school that isn’t assessed or graded or linked to learning outcomes in ANY way. Ironically, I think you learn more that way. 

The thing I love about the CBI conference is that it covers genres you never read or think about, which can be fascinating. At one of the (cake and wine filled) tea breaks, I had a chat with some picture book writers who were discussing the difficulty of giving feedback to new writers about their picture books. The problem seems to be that, because there are limited words to critique, you can’t really cushion the blow by listing lots of things you did like about it. And if the book doesn’t work, then it’s not a case of rewriting a paragraph or fleshing out a character, it’s probably a case of chucking it in the bin and starting again.

How do you tell someone that? The writers want to hear, ‘it’s great but this word doesn’t rhyme or that sentence is clunky’, but, as one of these writers said, “Picture books are all structure. Once you’ve got that right, you can start worrying about pretty words.”

As someone who gives a lot of feedback to fellow writers (and enjoys it actually), I’m always interested in ways of doing this without destroying your mates. I’ve always found picture books tough to critique and I’ve always assumed that was because they’re not my genre, but maybe it’s tough for everyone.

On the inevitable Planner/Pantser debate front, YA novelist, Frances Hardinge said she plans everything in advance because she inevitably falls out of love with the book at about the two thirds mark and the plan at least allows her to finish it. Which is a reason I hadn’t heard before but found hugely reassuring. Maybe there’s something to planning after all. Might give it a go.

Hardinge won the Costa and is the only Children’s writer apart from Pullman to ever do that. She also said that writers for adults are still a bit dismissive of writers for kids, though it’s better than it was, but that she’s always found Sci-Fi/Fantasy less discriminatory in this regard. As in, adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy is more accepting of Kids’ Lit, or ALL Sci-Fi/Fantasy gets equally dissed by everyone? I don’t know but would be interested to hear opinions of Sci-Fi/Fantasy writers.  

A proof of Hardinge's new book was also included in the conference goodie bag!

French/English MG writer, Clementine Beauvais gave a hugely insightful talk on the process of book translation. She criticised the popular view that ‘books in translation aren’t as good because things get lost in translation’ and reminded us that “books in translation are written not just once but twice.” When she’d explained the process of translation, how difficult it is and how carefully considered every word, twice seemed a conservative estimate.

 

How do you do iambic pentameter in French!

Apparently only 2-4% of kids’ books in the UK are in translation, compared to 60% in France. And we wonder how Brexit happened.

For me one of the most interesting talks was the last one of the weekend, by picture book writer and illustrator, Mary Murphy, who decried the ubiquitous ‘Rudolph story’ in picture books and talked about belonging vs fitting in. The Rudolph story goes like this:

• Character is rejected by the group for being a (red-nosed) weirdo
• Group has a (sleigh-navigation-GPS) problem
• Character solves problem with their unique (sleigh-guiding) weirdness
• Group accepts character (into reindeer games) because they’re useful.

But as Mary pointed out, you should be accepted anyway. There is nothing wrong with you the way you are, whether you’re useful or not. 

This may be quite common in picture books (I’m not a picture book reader but it does sound familiar). Do we do this in MG and YA too?

Mary drew us a picture book about a roaring bee to illustrate

There was lots more, including a ‘Coven of YA Witches’, Celia Rees, the always exciting New Voices slot, and beautiful poetry read by the teenagers setting up their own YA Lit festival! A really inspiring weekend!

Thanks to QUB for sending me and thanks to Elaina Ryan and her CBI team for putting on yet another great event!

We work. We play. We tell stories.

Kelly McCaughrain is the author of the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year,

Flying Tips for Flightless Birds. 

She is the Children's Writing Fellow for Northern Ireland #CWFNI

@KMcCaughrain

Bold Girls by Sheena Wilkinson

As a young woman, I never hesitated to say I was a feminist. I had a very consciousness-raising sort of aunt who used to take me on International Women’s Day marches before such things were cool and mainstream. None of my friends ever even knew that it was IWD, and I certainly couldn't have persuaded them to join me. I remember, in eighties Belfast, as a young teen, being shouted at in the street on such a march: ‘Get back to Greenham Common, ya pack of lezzies.’ It was all a bit wearing, but it helped inspire Star By Star, my suffrage novel with its determined feminist heroine, Stella. 

In some ways I'm not very far removed my younger bolshy teenage self who braved ridicule to march the streets of Belfast. That's why I was so thrilled to be included in Children’s Books Ireland’s new initiative, Bold Girls, a celebration of girls and women in children’s books. 

Here is what CBI has to say about their  project:

BOLD GIRLS' aim is to break down societal barriers and to instil confidence in girls and young women by showing them female characters in children’s books with agency, power and opinions, addressing at a young age some of the issues that stand in the way of women achieving their ambitions, whether that be in leadership, in government, in the arts. BOLD GIRLS will highlight and review books that feature strong, intelligent, self-possessed female protagonists in children’s books, as well as celebrating twenty female Irish authors and illustrators, both emerging and established, who have made an exceptional contribution to the canon of Irish children’s literature.

We’re delighted to be presenting Bold Girls with our partners Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, KPMG Families for Literacy Program, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and the G-Book Project and the National Women’s Council of Ireland.

For the centenary of women’s suffrage in Ireland in 2018, Children’s Books Ireland’s BOLD GIRLS project celebrates strong, confident, intelligent, brave women and girls in children’s books, giving them much-needed visibility alongside their male counterparts.

The Bold Girls Reading Guide

This is the short essay I wrote for inclusion in the Bold Girls Reading Guide: 

Sometimes I was a tomboy; sometimes I played with dolls. Sometimes I had plaits; sometimes I wore my hair cropped short like George in the Famous Five. I owned nothing pink, but as everything in the 1970s was swathed in brown-and-orange paisley swirls, that wasn’t a political statement. At my girls’ school, it was fine to be good at maths and science, though I wasn’t, and I always knew I could grow up whatever way I chose to.

I was a bold, confident girl – the first hand up in class; the first one on to the stage; always ready with an opinion. I loved writing stories and music and books, and I called myself a feminist as soon as I was old enough to spell it. For me, feminism has always meant fairness.

The estate I lived on was quite rough, and I was the kind of bold girl who easily got into fights, so I was encouraged to spend most of my spare time in the local library. This wonderland was where I first fell in love with the world of books and stories, a world I’ve never left. I used to look at the books on the shelves and imagine seeing one – or two, or a whole row – with Sheena Wilkinson on them.

a bolder girl than she looks...

At school and in books I was used to seeing women in positions of leadership, but growing up in Northern Ireland in the Troubles, it seemed to me that men made conflict and women tried to stop it, but men were in charge. Mrs Thatcher was a bold girl, right enough, and a leader, but even as a teenager I could see that she didn’t stand up for other women.

Studying books set in girls’ schools for my PhD deepened my feminism because it allowed me to read women’s history in much more depth than the wars-and-rebellions history we’d done at school. I learned that this history wasn’t considered as important as “real” history. This is changing now, as we celebrate the role women played in shaping our present, the battles they fought for votes and equality and respect.

Now I write those books I dreamed of in my orange-and-brown paisley-patterned library-haunting days. I write about girls and boys and horses and wars and rebellions and music and suffragettes and schools and stars and friendship.

I visit a lot of schools and I see plenty of bold girls, but I also see girls who don’t like to speak up, girls who are worried about not being “nice”, girls who let themselves be defined by how they think society wants them to be. And even though in some ways there are so many more choices now, and society is so much freer, I often feel that it was easier for me to be my own kind of girl back then.

I’ll always write about bold girls, and I’ll be a bold girl even when I’m an old woman. Being a bold old woman sounds like fun.

In the company of some other Bold Girls at TCD

Last week I was in the magnificent Long Room of Trinity College Dublin, seeing the project launched in the company of other writers and book enthusiasts, many of them now friends. I can't wait to get involved in whatever the project has to offer and to spread the boldness!