This week

Posted on 05/03/2014 by clembeauvais

This week, like many other authors, most of what I’m doing involves talking to people like this:

It’s the week around World Book Day in the UK – and authors are visiting schools everywhere to meet enthusiastic children who want to READ!

Authors are amazing.

In her school visits, Kate Rundell does tightrope-walking:

Julian Sedgwick does knife-juggling:

But even the rest of us, who just talk, ask questions and show pictures, make children happy:

And THEY make US happy:

So this is just a little post to say THANK YOU to schools, bookshops and parents for organising all this –

and if you’re wondering what you could do to make your children’s school a little better…

… persuade them to invite an author!

Happy World Book Week to all,

Clem x

The quality of silence

Posted on 26/02/2014 by clembeauvais

School visits in primary school are nothing like school visits in high school. Primary school is Care Bear land: children are enthusiastic, chatty, unhibited, fun, on the edge of their seats. You leave feeling exhausted and deliriously happy, with tripled self-esteem. Especially when they’ve made you a book-shaped cake and cupcakes with your initials.

Yeah I’m showing off.

High school is resolutely different. Something happens in the first few weeks of Year Seven – you can spot it as soon as you come through the door. Pupils look distrustful, sarcastic – they stare at you, and then at one another, exchanging funny little smiles. Some of their questions and comments are unsettling, if not downright offensive. Evidently on purpose. All the more so if you’re young, female and blonde.

But after a few minutes, if you show them that you’re on their side, you gain their trust and the atmosphere gets more relaxes. And then you can talk about really interesting things, and have fun, and tackle serious topics, and let them speak about themselves, and listen to them.

So it’s not the same dynamic at all in a primary school visit and a secondary school visit. In particular, though I often conclude my primary school visits with a reading, it had never come to my mind to do a reading for high school students.

Well, I was having lunch last year during a literary festival in France and talking to another author who suggested I should. He said teenagers loved being read to. I didn’t believe him for a second; I put on my best polite face (“Really? How interesting!”) while secretly thinking “The poor man is completely disconnected from the real world – the teenagers he read his books to must feel terribly offended to be treated like babies.”

Not a teenager.

Coincidentally, though, that very same afternoon I did a school visit in a Year Nine class where the teacher said to me in front of everyone: “The students would very much like you to read an extract from your book to them”. They’d already all read that book (La pouilleuse), or were supposed to (in France, you do school visits only when schools have studied your books).

Since a teacher had asked, I wasn’t going to say no – like most academics, I’ve always scrupulously followed teachers’ orders – but I thought, once again, that the poor adult was completely deluded: teenagers, I firmly believed, don’t like being read to.

Of course I was completely wrong. Hardly had I begun to read that I noticed the extraordinary quality of the silence that had fallen on the room. The students were staring into emptiness, or at their hands or feet. They didn’t look enraptured, hypnotised or stunned – simply silent, and listening.

What struck me was how different that silence was from the silence you get when you read something to primary school children. Primary school children fidget, giggle, whisper. They’re so used to being read to, it’s just normal to them.

Not to those teenagers. They’d lost the habit – the habit of finding themselves in a situation where there’s nothing else to do than to listen to a word after another, to each sentence with its rhythm and musicality. For them, I could tell, it felt new.

(And no, I’m not subtly bragging about the rhythm and musicality of my book; I’m pretty sure I could have read them anything. It was all about the situation, not the text.)

(And no, I don’t have his voice.)

When I finally found a place to stop, there were a few more seconds of that silence. Then they started moving again, and some of them said, “Just a few more pages…”

Since then, I always try to take time at the end of my high school visits to read extracts from the book. Something always happens. I know, now, that literature teachers know it – and sometimes take advantage of this amazing quality of their listening, to read them texts that they wouldn’t read themselves with the same focus, the same attention.

At the risk, of course, of gradually breaking the spell…

Should children’s writers like children?

Posted on 27/02/2013 by clembeauvais

That author

Every time I do school visits or go to a book fair, there’s always a grumpy paedophobic author somewhere. S/he’s been writing for longer that I’ve been alive and s/he’s seen it all. S/he’s sipping coffee in the teachers’ common room and ranting about those damned kids and their unimaginative questions. S/he’s in here for the €€, not the experience. S/he’s going on and on and on about ‘that annoying kid who always asks how long it takes to write a book and where I get my ideas from.’

And me, meanwhile, young, enthusiastic and naive and rather a fan of younger humans, I’m all like ‘Oh my! Goodness me! How can you possibly say that, you monster, you ogre ? Surely it is the greatest happiness in the world to talk to little readers, however dumb the questions! Surely the marvelous feeling of profound and inexplicable bliss that fills one when one is faced with children is universally shared!’ and I put my hand on my heart and I think of the cute freckles, dimples and missing teeth, and I swallow back tears of shock and fear and I wonder if this clearly deranged author should really be allowed to roam the school premises.

Slight exaggerations may have found their way into the previous two paragraphs, but the question’s not a stupid one. Should children’s authors actually like children? I don’t mean just tolerate, but actually like them? Should they feel increased levels of happiness, a certain special sense of connection, when in the presence of the kawaii beings? After all, there are dozens of misanthropic adult authors who don’t give a damn about their readers. And no adult author will ever be asked to confirm that they like adults.

Things Camus didn’t say

‘Oh yes, I love adults – I just love them. I love their happy faces when I sign their books, and they always come up with things that I find just wonderfully unexpected and marvelous… how can I explain it? It’s so mysterious. I can’t say why, but I’ve always been at ease with adults. Maybe it’s because I haven’t forgotten what it feels like to be an adult. I get on with them really well. They’re great, basically, and that’s why I write for them.’

We’d think they were bloody mental. What if some authors actually like writing for children because – like Philip Pullman – they think it’s a great experimental platform – which it is – but don’t really have anything to say to real kids outside of what they tell them through their art? How much of it is about the idea of childness, the ability to play with concepts, art forms, narratives that are particular to children’s literature – and how much of it actually has to be about real children?

That’s the crux of the matter, really. You can love the idea of children just as you love the idea of backpacking up and down the Andes, but you might suddenly find yourself a little bit less keen if you actually ended up parachuted into the montainous jungle. I think I love real children. I think I love talking to them, I think they make me laugh, surprise me and amaze me, and I think being around them makes me happy, but rationally, there’s no way this sweeping generalisation is possible without a preexisting idea of kids as a cool bunch of people, without a preexisting idea of childness as a special property for a human to have.

I like her

Because it’s a bit like saying ‘I love cats’. I do love cats. But in fact I don’t. I don’t love all cats. I don’t like the ones that scratch and bite, bizarrely enough; I prefer the cuddly ones that purr, thank you very much. And yeah, when I go into a primary classroom, I tend to prefer the enthusiastic little Hermione whose hand shoots up into the air all the time to the sexually precocious duo of boys who ogle me and snigger and scribble down things to each other on a piece of paper.

So we have to grant one thing to the paedophobic writer: at least they’re seeing the kids as humans. As fallible, annoying, boring and silly, but as humans. The blissful, all-loving writer who ‘just adores kids in general’ might as well be saying that they love cats. Or old people. Or gays. Or Tories. Or dyslexics. You get the idea.

There are people who just love writing and for them, going into schools to talk to real kids is one of those things you have to do in your day job but that you don’t particularly like, such as brainstorming the name of a new guava-and-tapioca shampoo or filling in an Excel spreadsheet with the office’s stationary budget for the year or whatever people who have real jobs do.

And then there’s the rest of us, bumbling around like a flotilla of fairy godmothers, hopelessly endeared to the little readers, envisaging our work as a sort of whole project of life and mission for and with children, and unable to understand that yeah, some writers may tailor every single one of their books for people whom, in reality, they don’t really care about very much.