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

Signs of Childness?

An Unsettling Number of Children's Literature Academics

Twenty years ago, Peter Hollindale of the University of York published a book that has provoked and inspired scholars of childhood ever since. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books discussed many things, but its main aim was to identify the qualities that characterise the state of being a child. “Childness” is an unusual word, though it was not Hollindale’s coinage; he wanted something without the heavy connotational baggage of words such as “childlike” (which seems to invite an idealistic view of children) or “childish” (which pictures them as defective). By contrast, “childness” is, semantically speaking, a tabula rasa.

It’s a fascinating question, and one often pondered. Although people talk of childhood innocence, for instance, I’ve never been clear whether innocence is a real quality that for better or worse children eventually lose (but, if so, what does it consist of?), or merely an absence of something else, which (again, for better or worse) experience eventually supplies.

I read Hollindale’s book many years ago, but it was on my mind again last Friday because the sagacious Clémentine Beauvais, ABBA blogger and York academic, organised a one-day conference to mark its anniversary. It was a delightful occasion, with contributions from many of the big names in children’s literature studies in the UK and beyond, including Hollindale himself, who came out of retirement for “one last job”, much like John Rambo. I wish I had time to tell you about all the papers, many of which were excellent, but I’m going to stick the one that was perhaps the most unusual – the attempt of a musicologist, Liam Maloy, to quantify the “childness” of various pieces of music and to supply them with a “Children’s Music Quotient” (or CMQ). He proposed to do this by making lists of qualities that he associated with childness, assigning a score for each one to a candidate piece of music, and combining those scores to create the piece’s CMQ. The qualities were listed under three broad headings: music, lyrics and sonics. For example, major keys were deemed to have more childness than minor ones; full rhymes more than half rhymes; percussion more than strings, and so on.

Literary scholars don’t generally work this way, and it took us some time to decide whether this was brilliance or nonsense. (Perhaps you have an opinion of your own?) I will mention, though, that Maloy confessed himself surprised at how often “adult” themes crept into music written for children, including music that otherwise had very high CMQs. Think of the death and murder meted out in such children’s favourites as Bernard Cribbins’ “Hole in the Ground” (“It's not there now, the ground's all flat/ And beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat”) or “Right, said Fred” (“half a ton of rubble landed on the top of his dome”), or even the double murder of Alma Cogan’s “Middle of the House” – all delivered in jaunty 4/4 time.

But did these songs become successful with children despite their violence, or because of it? Playground rhymes are notoriously violent after all, from the parental hacking of “Lizzie Bawden” to the multiple limb losses of “Baby Shark”. Perhaps it’s a mistake to put these things under the “Adult” column, when so many children appear to be fond of them? Might a love of gore be a sign of childness rather than its opposite?

I was recently reminded of one of the Grimm brothers’ tales, called “How Some People Played at Slaughtering”. The plot is simple, if sanguinary. Two brothers see a pig being slaughtered, and decide to imitate the procedure in a game. Unfortunately, the elder brother takes the game too far, and slits the younger brother’s throat. Their mother, attracted by the noise, enters and, seeing what has happened, takes the knife in anger and stabs the killer. However, meanwhile she has left a third brother, a small child, in the bath, and when she returns finds him drowned. In despair, she kills herself. Her husband, returning from work, discovers the melancholy scene and dies of grief.

I’m not sure if the story has a moral, except perhaps “Right, said Fred”’s “You never get nowhere if you’re too hasty”, but there’s an appealing neatness about the way that each death leads domino-fashion to the next. Also, death and pain being pretty frightening things, it may be comforting to be able to take them out and look at them, and perhaps even find them funny, in the safe and structured confines of a tale or cheerful song. This I suppose is why people enjoy watching horror films, too, although that’s a taste I can’t claim to share.

In any case, Wilhelm Grimm removed the story from later editions on the grounds that it was too gruesome. He probably thought he was doing so to avoid scaring child readers. But perhaps it was really for sake of the adults?