A whole new book of poems just came out, illustrated by me! I am as surprised as you are. It’s been in the works for a good long time, and suddenly IT’S HERE! My part in it has been inking, painting, collaging and most of all marvelling – Kate Wakeling is an incredible poet.
Last week we went to do our first library visit together, and my mind was blown watching her read to the children, and watching the children react to the poems. They were enthralled, literally swept off their feet, turning into soap bubbles, bananas, mountains and back into themselves.
To me, this book is a celebration of autistic joy (speaking for myself – those words are TASTY), but really it is for everyone – three years old and older – appealing to all senses, presenting the wonder of everyday things in a way you can feel right as you read them, evoking memories of rainy days, blanket dens, lively debates of what animal is the fastest (but what if they took the bus?) – it’s a book stuffed with life in the best way.
It’s out now, published by Otter Barry Books. Get it wherever you like to buy your books, and share it with all your small people, librarians, teachers, parents and lovers of poetry.
Here are Maud and Gitta! They are the heroes of my first chapter book, which is launching today.
This is, naturally, a new experience. I’m sitting at my desk, sipping tea, wondering how I feel. I can’t tell you.
This morning I opened a box: ten copies of the book, ready to take to the launch celebration tomorrow, as presents for friends who supported it all along the way.
I can tell you how Maud feels in this picture, right at the beginning of the first story. She’s feeling not all that sure about the future. Everything is packed up in removal boxes, which is a strange thing to be happening to one’s life, when you think about it. Maud is thinking about it A LOT.
It’s a book about moving. Moving house, but also moving along in life, and finding your way to move in this world. It started as a collection of short stories about a character who was loosely based on myself as a child. I had been collecting them for some time.
Let’s go back to a time between that Viv there and this Viv here now.
The first time someone asked me to write a novel for children I was sixteen years old. The publisher was one of the big German ones. I loved their books. I had been writing and drawing small comics for them for years already. It was a dream job – and I could not do it. They wanted me to write a little adventure book about everyday experiences. I tried to explain that I simply did not understand those. It all ended in quiet disappointment.
Years later, I went to New York and met with a literary agent. She read one of my novel drafts and said it was really interesting to have a character who was “neurodivergent”. I was baffled, and kept writing, and it didn’t go anywhere. I wrote more, but the persistent feedback for all my longer texts was that the characters were “not relatable”. I thought they were… just perfectly normal people.
So I wrote and illustrated picture books instead and kept my longer stories to myself.
Then – not that long ago at all – something changed.
People started to agree that it might be perfectly normal to be neurodivergent, in the sense that there are really a lot more of us than anyone had thought, and that our stories need not all be centered around suffering – they could, for example, be a little adventure book about everyday experiences.
Like moving house.
Maud is moving house, and every chapter represents one of the big things that (in my experience) happen along the way, usually. There’s a bit of magic realism in all of them, because my favourite childhood stories were told in that mode (many of them Czech). They made me feel like the profoundly puzzling nature of everyday things was something you could accept and deal with.
Maud is practical as she confronts the challenges of moving. When the new flat turns out to be haunted, she sorts it out via a phone call through the shower. When she discovers that the local playground is the secret Court of Cats, she demands an audience. She takes her space and makes connections. And, most importantly, she finds a friend who really gets her. She realises that she is someone who can be that friend to others. And however strange things get, the really strange thing would be a world that does not have friends for Maud.
I read the stories out as I was writing them to my friend Chris at our weekly online doodle meetings during lockdown. Later, I met up with my friend Ricky to edit them in a bar in Brixton, where he read them out and we cried laughing (I had entirely forgotten half the jokes along with most of that time, like a lot of people, I guess). He read them to his kids, who gave important feedback. – The book was taken on by Walker Books UK. It was the last one that my long-time art director Ben Norland worked on with me before he retired. The editing was light, to my surprise people said they could relate to Maud perfectly well as it was, even when she invites the rain to her birthday party, and when she forgets to unpack her feelings in the new house, and when she uses up an entire pencil on drawing an entire real horse.
Pauliina Malinen and Marty Cleary helped me get everything in shape beautifully.
We are all going to meet in the pub tomorrow, along with a few more friends, and I’m planning to cover the table in paper so everyone can draw beautiful horses if they wish. Or play cards. Or have a pint. Probably all of that. – I hope some of you go read the book. And that you get it. Or maybe, even, that it gets you.
There’s space in the back to draw your own beautiful horses (maybe not in the library copy – I would approve, actually, but it’s not the done thing, even though lots of their books have spare pages in the back that would be really interesting to make use of… in my childhood library that’s where people left reviews, and they ended up sticking in extra pages sometimes).
Where was I?
Oh yes, at my desk. With a box of books. It’s very strange to have that much of my life all packed up in a box.
I think I’m happy!
Maud is Movingis out now and available wherever you like to buy your books!
I am doing a book sale in my shop – signed copies of this and that.
Today, I’m painting watercolour cats and cutting them out with my big paper scissors (they went missing in a house move and only just resurfaced, so I am very excited to be using them). I’ll tuck one of them into every book sold this month.
I’m having to raise a bit of money because I really need to replace my noise cancelling headphones (they are eight years old and more noise than cancelling). So if you’re buying a book, you’ll help me be less stressed out when making new books – and you’ll get a little surprise cat painted just for you, to frame or carry in your pocket or hide in your home to surprise yourself or use as a bookmark or give to a friend. AND you’ll get a signed book.
Michael Rosen wrote a slim, clear, encouraging guide for children to start writing about their emotions, and discover how that can help them to, well, feel right.
In his own words:
I wrote this book because I’ve found writing about my state of mind really helpful and fun at the same time. Sometimes this is because I’ve been troubled – devastated even, as when my son died. Other times I’ve wanted to celebrate and remember great times I’ve had. The help it’s given me comes from seeing myself reflected back at me. This helps me view myself with some degree of detachment, and this enables me to put myself into the company of others, other people who may have experienced this pain or joy too. Togetherness feels better than isolation. I wanted to share these ideas with young people because I know mental health is a big issue for many young people and I hope this book will help them.
Feelings can be a lot.
I was very happy to illustrate it. I’ve worked with Michael Rosen for several a Finding my way of drawing him was enjoyable, and drawing him in all those different moods even more so.
Michael Rosen doing a reading. It’s a good thing to witness, and, he shows us here, a good thing to be doing, too.
There were many opportunities to use my favourite sorts of swirls and blobs to represent thoughts and emotions.
Writing about feelings can start a conversation. It can open up channels into different ways of thinking.
Most of all, I really think it’s a book that will actually be useful in classrooms, and beyond that – the advice is sound, and it reminded me to get back to listening to and writing down my feelings again.
Michael Rosen talks about THINKING in this book as well as FEELING – about perception, and planning, daydreaming, reasoning and remembering… it’s a lovely, methodical explanation of how it all comes together in writing.
Write to Feel Right is published by Harper Collins in their Collins BIG CAT imprint, available to order, and I think that it’s a very good one for parents to use with their children, and really for anyone with children in their life. Feelings can be difficult, but writing is an amazing tool for all of us.
A personal story about the importance of non-fiction books to a young child
School, my father told me, was the best place in the world. It was where you learned about everything. My mother was a teacher then, and I envied all those children she went to see every day.
I couldn’t wait.
But I had to.
Kindergarten was a tiny place just across from the hospital where my father worked. To me, it seemed vast. I couldn’t reach the doorbell, and I never dared to play on the looming slides and swings. I didn’t enjoy painting with water on blotting paper and watching it dry and disappear. I was frightened by the nonsensical clapping songs and I detested any sort of entertainment, especially the magician we went to see twice a year for a treat.
Magic was a lie. The world was full of true wonders. I wanted to know them all, and invent new ones.
I wanted to be in school.
One day I had a fight with another child who insisted that whales breathed water, not air. That was the last straw. I’d already listened to her insisting that clouds were blue on a white sky, as in her drawings, because clouds were full of rain and the sky was empty, and that when the sky looked blue it was just covered in clouds.
We were separated and I had to sit at a table across the room with a child who didn’t talk.
“Did you know that whales breathe air?” I asked her. “They do.” She shook her head quietly. “Do you want to know more about whales?” I asked. She nodded. “I will tell you tomorrow,” I said.
At home, I asked my mother about whales, and I concentrated hard to learn it all. My mother had a song she liked to sing about a whale called Jonathan who swims in the ice-cold Northern sea, and she told me that whales eat krill, which is all the tiniest things in the sea.
The next day I couldn’t wait to see my new friend.
“Welcome to school”, I said. “Whales are not really fish. They live in the ice-cold northern sea and they eat krill.”
The next day, my class had doubled. Two silent children stared at me with awe, and all I had prepared was the subject of carrots. All I had learned about carrots was that you can eat them in a way that leaves a weird spiny core, and I had no idea why that was the case.
“This was a short lesson, “ I said after my demonstration, “but tomorrow I will teach you about time.”
At home, I went straight to the bookshelf. There was a whole row of non-fiction books, heavily illustrated, including “The How and Why Wonder Book of Time”. Time seemed an easier subject than for example dinosaurs, because there were many dinosaurs but only one time.
I stared at the images of sundials and wondered if I could make one. I deciphered the words as well as I could.
I had already learned to read by badgering everyone constantly to tell me what every bit of writing anywhere said, and once I realised that the word on the sugar packet was SUGAR I was off, reading first all the labels, then all the signs and finally all the books in my world.
I wasn’t so good at talking yet. Sentences came out of my mouth in the wrong order, some sounds weren’t quite right and I wasn’t ever sure what other people actually knew about or what I had only dreamed.
But I tried my best.
“Welcome to school,” I said. “If you fall into a black hole in outer space, you keep falling forever. But you won’t, because you can’t fall upwards, that would be flying. Maybe we can make a clock, but I don’t know how. I’m sorry. I will find out more.”
A short time later, we were told that we’d go to see the magician again. I started screaming and didn’t stop until they’d taken me out of kindergarten forever.
From then on, I stayed home and read and drew and learned. I was happy that I didn’t need to waste any more time with clapping and water painting, and I was looking forward to starting school.
It turned out that school meant sitting still and learning one letter at a time.
The first day we all went “i”, which was the sound one might make sliding down a slide or stepping in a puddle, as the pictures illustrated. I leafed through the book and wondered what it was trying to teach me. It was all complete nonsense. There was no information at all, the pictures were lovely but was this really the only book we would be reading all year?
Every day I went and wondered what was happening to me. There was a classroom library, but I wasn’t allowed to touch the books unless it was reading time, and reading time only happened when it rained at recess. Asking questions was bad. I drew animals and rockets all around the edges of my exercise book, telling myself there would be an end to every lesson. The first weekend, I hid under a chair at home and told everyone I lived there now. Soon after, I started having stomach aches and nightmares.
I still dream about school and wake up sick.
I’d forgotten about all of this until last week when I went to visit a friend who has a two year old daughter. At bedtime, there was a huge stack of story books to choose from, several of them written by me.
She chose an illustrated French dictionary instead. “That’s her favourite”, my friend said.
I watched them read together.
My friend read out the words, asked questions and explained. Her daughter nodded to herself, whispering the names of animals, making claws and growls of lions not as make-believe but to remember: lion. It’s striking how grown-up tiny children look when they are learning something.
It’s just as striking as the child-like joy of an adult who just worked something out… because in this, the most profound and life-important enjoyment, we remain the same.
We all want to work things out.
That child I was fighting in Kindergarten was reasoning out the nature of clouds as much as I was, and she really cared about whales.
If the adults had taken notice and picked a few books off the shelf for us to look through together, our tiny self-teaching school would have grown and grown.
They let us paint with water to save on paper when they should have let us mix colours.
We could have made a sundial with the adults, right outside, right then, if they’d just asked us what we were doing instead of laughing at our seriousness.
We sang clapping songs every day to keep in line when we could have sung about whales in the ice-cold northern ocean.
And school…
My dad was right. School should be the best place in the world.
It wasn’t. There was no best place. But there were books.
I love my job of writing and illustrating stories for children, but my first, true and most profound love will always be non-fiction books. If you write them, thank you.
If you read them: welcome to school.
Tomorrow we will build whatever you want, I hope.
This is a repost of an article I first wrote in 2016.
