Discovering the New Book

Posted on 18/06/2012 by clembeauvais

It’s always an exciting moment: opening the parcel with the publisher’s stamp on it, and taking your first author copy out of the bubble wrap. Cool and relaxed writers not like me probably peel off the sellotape with a yawn, fish out a book while munching on an organic cereal bar, hmm-hmm their way through the pages, and put it down again as if nothing particularly more exciting than updating Firefox has happened to them recently.

Not so, let me tell you, on this side of author-land. I arm myself with a carving knife, ruthlessly eviscerate the cardboard box, and do not rest until every single book has been smelt, stroked and weighed. But I never open them, of course, for fear of finding a typo.

Although this time I did manage to restrain myself enough to take a picture of the box (though the blurriness shows a certain lack of control):

And here it is! my latest baby, a YA novel in French called La pouilleuse (Girl with Lice) which is coming out at the end of August. If you’re interested and well-versed in Gallic, here’s the French webpage for it.

I’m delighted with it – Sarbacane, the publisher, have done an awesome job. The cover and the pages are super thick, the blurb on the back cover is spot-on, and they haven’t forgotten the dedication to my little sis’. Gorgeous colours, too, on the front cover.

So my small family of books is growing, all French-speaking so far, but I can’t wait for Sesame Seade to meet its siblings and speak a bit of English to them.

Clem x

Harry Potter and the Ivory Tower: Conference Report

Posted on 21/05/2012 by clembeauvais

Of course any press release with the words ‘Harry’ and ‘Potter’ next to each other in the headline is sure to catch the attention of journalists – and they struck gold last week with the announcement of an international academic conference, organised at the University of St Andrews, on the study of J.K. Rowling’s series ‘as literature’.

The beautiful city of St Andrews… much better weather than when I was there!

Predictably, they found a couple of irate (and probably partly misquoted) academics from another office in the Ivory Tower, who expressed indignation at the squandering of thousands of Sickles and Galleons on such worthless endeavours.

I’d personally tend to think that in these dark days when studying the Arts & Humanities is getting more and more difficult for everyone, we should all stick together and support each other rather than deplore the fact that other academics are thinking about things that we think are not worth thinking about. But maybe that’s a very Potterish sort of altruistic attitude which you don’t cultivate if you spend all your time studying Ulysses. Ok, enough sarcasm.

I was there. The conference was a great success, because it managed to strike the right balance between true, heartfelt, endearing passion for the subject matter, and the respect, academic precision and intellectual rigour which such passion can lead to. I have to say I was a little bit worried about the potential geekiness of it all. As an unashamed potterhead, I’m more than happy to sport round glasses and hand-drawn scars at midnight releases – but that’s not what I want academic conferences to be like. Quantum physicists and Kantian scholars can make geeky jokes all they like and dress up as waves and particles if they want to – everyone takes them seriously anyway. But when your subject actually is a Mickey Mouse subject, you can’t afford to be self-deprecating about it. You have to defend it non-stop. You have to be as ~~Sirius~~ serious about it as it deserves.

And thankfully, despite a few Ravenclaw scarves and Gryffindor backpacks, the St Andrews conference did exactly that. Of all the presentations I went to, none were parochial, anecdotal, expected. Some were truly mind-blowing, and masterfully delivered: a jaw-dropping analysis of paternal atonement with the figure of Snape, a critique of pedagogical strategies in Hogwarts and their potential influence on the perception of learning and teaching by young readers, two sophisticated and subtle analyses of racial stereotyping using the representation of Goblins and House-Elves. In short, it was inspiring, rigorous, and not, as I’d feared, a self-indulgent gathering of fans marveling at Jo Rowling’s incontestable storytelling genius.

If it makes people smile, that’s great – but I hope it also makes them think. It isn’t just careless, or uninformed, to dismiss the Harry Potter series as a serious object of analysis; it is intellectually dishonest. I’m sure – well, I hope – that in forty years’ time, when I nostalgically browse through my past blog posts stored in a chip directly implanted in my brain, I’ll laugh that such a conference was ever laughed at. Meanwhile, I look forward to the proceedings and thank the St Andrews people for organising such a successful event in spite of all the Rita Skeeters in the world.

Clem x

New episode of the podcast

Posted on 20/05/2012 by clembeauvais

Lauren and I have been busy recording and editing the next few episodes of our podcast on children’s literature, Kid You Not podcast – and the latest one is now online! it’s Episode 10, and it’s on Sex in Teenage Literature. Steamy. You can find it on our website, by clicking here – or just download it by clicking here – and/or follow us on iTunes!

More updates soon, on Sesame, other projects, and my academic life, once it all starts getting a little bit less hectic!

Clem x

Just a Sprinkling of Sesame

Posted on 20/03/2012 by clembeauvais

Et voilà! first post on my new English author blog. I’ve never had an author blog in English before, because I’ve never been an author in English before – so my only author blog until now was in French, like my published children’s books. And like myself (it happens to the best of us).

But sacrebleu, last year to keep myself busy I knitted a little novel-looking sort of story with the finest English wool, with characters in it and a bit of blue and green background to make it look all geek chic on windy winter days, and lo and behold, the curiousest thing has happened that has made it absolutely completely necessary and tremendously compulsory for me to start an author blog in English: a book deal. I know, I wasn’t sure they existed either. But there you go, here it is, it’s with Hodder Children’s Books, and it’s a fairly good excuse for a first blog post, I think.

And this fairly good excuse is called Sesame Seade! (though bizarrely her parents are convinced that she’s really called Sophie). Sesame is an eleven-year-old roller-skating self-made superheroine with as many connections in her brain as there are stars in the universe. She’d quite like a pet duck. Her parents aren’t keen (they won’t even consider a duckling). Professor Seade (Mum) is a Pharmacologist and Reverend Seade (Dad) is a Chaplain, and both of them are ever so slightly baffled by their wunderkind. Especially when she turns super-sleuth to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Jenna Jenkins…

And all this happens in quite a nice little corner of the world called Cambridge (which I vaguely know, I looked it up on Wikipedia once), and it’s a series of humour, mystery and adventure (all at the same time) featuring happy ducks, a yellow boat, a flock of ballet dancers, a notable absence of tangy tangerine strings, strange professors, sleepy students, and above all a hyperactive heroine with two best friends and a sometimes dangerous cat.

The first book in the series will be published in April 2013! It’s mainly for fun-loving kids who blew out eight, nine, ten or eleven candles at their last birthday party – but I’m fairly sure that reading it won’t kill anyone with better- or less-well-lit celebratory cakes.

More soon! but I promise this won’t be a blog about solely Myself and Sesame Seade. Just like my French blog, there will be A Lot More about Children’s Literature In General. Because that’s what I love.