Poetry Slam Dunk

 

What a ball we've had for Poetry Day Ireland in the Oblate Hall in Inchicore, throwing balls and words around!

Thanks to all in SMGS and in Mercy for being game, to Poetry Ireland for the support and the funding, and to the RTÉ News and Morning Ireland crew for tagging along.

Here is the poem(written by me!) that was read on air.

Lost: Poetry - Have You Seen It?

What a morning we've had with Second Class!
Since January is Poetry month and we're all finding it a bit mysterious, we decided to look into it, or rather to look for it.
We kicked off with a really interesting brainstorming session where we wondered about things like What does a poem look like? Can it be about anything? What does it do? Suggested answers, in no particular order, included: rhymes, patterns, feelings, mystical creatures, doom and death, detail, lines, breath and nervousness. These 8 year olds are on the ball.

We then had a look at what wasn't poetry. After all, what's the difference between 'The Friendly Cinnamon Bun' by Russel Hoban and the cookery book version? Or between the nursery rhyme Wiggly Woo and a few lines from the National Geographic website on earthworms?
We were now ready to sort through a big bunch of texts (some found in poetry books, some elsewhere) (some in French!), in groups, and decide what belonged to poetry what didn't.

This wasn't a test, there was no 'wrong' answer, each group could make their own decisions. It was so interesting seeing what was selected (nearly everybody went for short rhyming texts), but it was equally fascinating to see what wasn't. Shape poetry was a flop, for instance. Presentation mattered: anything illustrated with photos was automatically deemed, in some groups, as 'facts'. Some texts were selected on the basis of having illustrations of cute bunnies or nasty dinosaurs.

I then asked each group to vote for their favourite poem and tell us what they had liked in it. 'Good rhyming' was clearly high on the kids' checklist, even when they picked (as one group did) something in French (which they don't speak). Subject matter played a part, while one group liked the image that Margaret Mahy's 'My Sister' painted in their heads ('My sister is remarkably light/ (…) We use her instead of a kite'). We noted that the poem worked even if you didn't have a sister yourself. We talked about poems that were funny and poems that used repetition and made you want to dance and wriggle.

After all that thinking it was time to move around, if not wriggle and dance (but that was ok too) and launch into our poetry treasure hunt! Everyone came back with a series of words that belonged just to them and was invited to combine them in a striking image. Each kid added a stanza (usually illustrated) (sometimes a full-blown epic) to a collective piece that grew and grew, over three long hall tables.
Criminal hairdressers, colour-changing dogs, evil rubber ducks (they seem to be a thing), football-playing skeletons, officers in rubber duck costumes (told you), vampires, peacocks, the moon, and much, much more made an appearance in our crazy poem!
There was a lot in it, for everyone, (enough for 2 sessions, even), but this bunch was game and almost no-one noticed when the bell went for break!
Take a bow, poets!

The Wilds of Kildare

Last week was another busy week, as I was invited to take part in the Children's Books Festival organised by the Kildare Libraries: Newbridge, Athy, Kildare Town, Maynooth, Leixlip, Naas, Celbridge... the county holds no secrets for me now.
I met with hordes of enthusiastic Senior Infants, 1st and 2nd class, plus, once, an entire school where children aged 6-12 all had some excellent questions about the writer's job and the intricacies of Disaster David. They were not alone in this. Everywhere I went, the kids were full of chat and ideas and comments, in the best possible way.

We did a lot of predictions and wondered if people could break their legs in a book for children (they can). We looked at how a book was made and explored the role of the illustrator, the writer and the printer (sorry editors and publishers, you were only briefly mentioned!). We talked about giants and about how we might live if we suddenly became one: would we play football with the moon or basketball with humans? eat our breakfast out of a bathtub? use lots of planes as a jetpack to go about the world? wear trees or houses for clothes?

There were some brilliant suggestions there and some terrific drawing of what life might be like if we had a Gigantor (a gun for making everything giant-sized), if our entire family could fit in the palm of our hand, if we could (literally) break into banks and so on. Some of our giants were too big to fit on the page, one of them (stroke of genius!) even had her head on the other side of the paper!

A week before the end of the school year, one might have worried about a certain lack of focus or too much excitement (in one school they still had the bouncy castle from Active Week up and running, an actual BOUNCY CASTLE!). There would have been no need: those kids were so on the ball and into it, and SO well behaved. Special mention of the school I met in Athy who came into the library, sat down on the mats and just listened without anybody telling them to do any of these things. And also a special shout out to the ladies of Presentation Girls in Maynooth, all 60 of them, who were awesome.
To everyone, thank you so much! It was a pleasure meeting you and sharing stories with you (some young writers in Celbridge actually brought in their own productions!). Have a brilliant summer!

As promised

And for the vile unbelievers or the faithless incredulous, me on a snowskithingy during my WORK trip in the Alps:

And we're back!

So we are, after some very intensive but very fantastic time up in the French Alps. As mentionned before, I was invited to a book festival and fair in Ugine in Savoie where I also had the opportunity to visit no less than 10 classes in different schools.

Said schools are planted on the side of mountains with views you wouldn't believe (which is why I photographed some of them) and are usually quite small with a couple (sometimes literally) of multi-level classes, which seems to suit everybody.

We chatted books, writing, ideas, cats, chocolate and fantasy for two days and a great time was had by all (I think).
And yes, there were some local cheeses, snow bikes and snow shoes involved too. Sadly, I can't find the pics for those...

;)

Busy month

This is a busy time of year for the kidlit-minded in general and me in particular. The Bologna Ragazzi Fair is just round the corner, while the Paris Book Fair is practically upon us (opens on Thursday). As for myself, I will be in Paris (for a bit of literary shopping) and then in Ugine in the French Alps for a couple (12!) of school events and a two-day festival involving signing, crosscountry-skiing and perhaps a spa.
Busy, I tell you!

TV star (ahem!)

It would appear that while I was away doing serious research into the Scottish children's books market, a strange woman with stranger feet was spotted on the French TV channel TF1. It's in French and lasts for a whole glorious minute and nine seconds. It's all about, you know, books, how they're made, you've seen it all before...

Stand and Deliver 2: Reading and Q&As

We then went on to discuss the all-important matter of Reading and the dreaded Questions and Answers...


3) READING FROM YOUR BOOK
Ask the teacher to read the book in class, but only to a certain point. Then when you come in, read the remaining chapters, making the best of the suspense created, interrupting your reading with questions to the children (what do you think is going to happen next? Will I read on or will I stop here?).

Stop your reading at any point to let the kids have a go: they can guess what will happen next or comment on the action.

Give the kids some detective work to do during the reading. Enda gave the example of an excerpt she read from The Silver Notebook in which she uses an element from a well-known fairy tale and asked the children to see if they could spot it.

Here too, try and tie in your reading with the wider writing world (does it remind of other stories/books?) and to the kids’ work (on the book or as displayed in the classroom).

Enda suggested to split the reading in two halves, with a pause in between. The reading shouldn’t exceed 10 mins.

As Sarah Webb said during the first Stand and Deliver workshop, you are not tied to your text. Sarah suggested you could slightly rewrite or cut an extract to better suit the needs of a listening audience. Enda encouraged ‘flicking’. You can read very short, punchy bites from you book and jump from one to the next, skipping entire chapters.

4) Q&A
It can be a good idea to enunciate the golden rules of Q&A right from the start: 1) listen carefully and you’ll find that some of your questions will be answered before you ask them; 2) put your hand up if you have a question.

If there are no questions from the kids and the teacher/librarian doesn’t volunteer any, ask the children some: where do you read? What do you read? Etc. That should hopefully spark off their curious minds and get the ball rolling.

Leave them on a high. If you feel that your time is nearly up and that you’ve given a particularly satisfying/inspiring answer to a question, stop right there.

5) POST-VISIT
Make contact with the organisers again for feedback.

Attend events by other writers/illustrators. It’s a great source of inspiration and fun!

***
After our separate sessions, the group was reunited for the real attraction of the afternoon (meaning the Scary Bit), where each of us had 3 minutes to launch into their spiel: Hi guys, my name is Juliette and I’m here to talk to you about my book…
The tailor-made feedback was fantastic and the range of styles and talents pretty impressive. Moving stories were told and incredible props produced, from scrapbooks to wigs to shrunken heads. Intrigued? You’ll just have to wait for these writers’ new titles and events in the coming weeks and months…

Stand and Deliver, 2: Before your visit and Engaging with your audience

For this sequel to the Stand and Deliver workshop, Children’s Books Ireland and the Farmleigh Writer in Residence programme invited poet Enda Wyley and Conor Kostick (novelist and writer in said residence) for an intensive afternoon in Farmleigh’s Old Kitchen last Saturday.

The group of about 15 new writers was split in 2, according to the age-group for which they write. Being a younger-audience person, I joined Enda and half a dozen others to discuss tips and tricks for organising, delivering and surviving meetings with children.
First of all, let's remind ourselves of the whole point of meeting with young readers as a writer: The main thing is to leave your audience with the desire to read any book and with a sense of the writing world. Right, so now, how to achieve this? It’s a long way, so I’ve divided it up in 5 steps. (And 2 posts)

1) PRE-VISIT
Ask the organiser of the event a few key questions: how many children will attend, how old will they be, where will the event take place, will the kids have read the book in advance, etc. If you’re uncomfortable with anything, feel free to make suggestions to the organisers.

Write up a script for your session. Think of it in blocks of time. How long for the intro? How long for the reading? The Q&A? the activities?...

Make sure you have everybody’s contact and if necessary a map of where you’re going.

Bring your stuff: from notes, to props and bottled water. And don’t forget your book!

2) ENGAGING WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
With kids of all ages, two traps (equally dangerous) await you:
1) the Lull: when a restlessness sets in, it’s a hint: they’re getting bored
2) the Over-Excitement: when a restlessness sets in, it’s a sign: they’re hyper.
In both cases, a change of rhythm is called for: insert a calm-down session or a wake-up call. Get them to sing a song, recite a nursery rhyme, wriggle their toes, shout the three rules of Vampiracy (only if you’re Justin Somper and have actually invented said rules, but you get the point), etc. This should hopefully reboot the whole machine and allow you to continue.

Ask them questions and praise them for good answers.

Be definitive. You know your book, you know how you got to this stage, show it. Your audience will then feel confident that you’re the person to answer their questions at the end of the session.

Bring props if you have them. From your personal notebook where you jot down ideas, to the first story you ever wrote aged 7. Show the kids how a book is made, from A4 sheets of text to lay-out to cover illustration proposals to the finished product.

If you can, imagine activities around your book. Get the children to draw something (Patricia Forde has a great technique to make them draw a collective monster), to read something (Jane Mitchell asks them to read aloud real testimonies from children soldiers), etc.

The personal stuff can be very engaging when relevant. Tell them if it was a struggle becoming a writer. Tell them about that spooky house you visited when you were 10 and wrote a novel about when you were 30. Tell them about working in a fish factory during your summer holydays. Tell them stories. About yourself and your book.
(Read on to the next post for Reading from your book, Q&As and Post-Visit.)

Stand up and Deliver, 1

Back in February, Children’s Books Ireland and the Ark invited new writers to attend Stand and Deliver, a workshop on how to survive meeting young readers. For those of you who wished they’d been there and haven’t read my account of that fantastic day in the last Inis, here's a shorter version:

First off was writer and theatre-practitioner Mia Gallagher’s workshop on vocal skills and performance technique. Through a series of physical games and vocal exercises, Mia showed the dozen volunteers how tension manifested itself in their bodies, from sweaty hands to weight shifting to the side to a crowd of butterflies in the stomach. Mia suggested that all performers (including writers going to meet their audience in the flesh) should take the time to do a gentle warm up of the voice before going ‘on stage’. This, she said, helps loosen up tension and all the ‘kinks’ in one’s body, so that the voice can flow more freely and connect with every part of the body.

The first session of the afternoon was led by Oisín McGann and Sarah Webb. ‘Devising your own events strategy’ was a very informative and practical presentation inspired by both writers’ experiences.

Kicking-off. How to kick off your session in a non-awkward manner? Oisín’s simple but effective answer was put into practice with the participants as guinea pigs: get your audience to talk first, ask them a question, and that’s enough to get the ball rolling.

Style. Sarah’s approach is more intimate, based on her own life and experience of becoming a writer. She describes her talks as a ‘Show and Tell’ that relies a lot on props (photos, toys, diaries, old school reports...). Oisín focuses more on his craft than his character, ‘using storytelling skills to talk about writing’, showing the children what a book looks like before it’s a book, producing notebooks full of writing ideas, etc.
The key is to use your own background to give your session its flavour and its theme. Are you an illustrator as well as a writer? Did you have an interesting job before you turned to children’s books? All this can be brought in to shape your presentation and make it your own.

Acting. Both speakers insisted on the importance of treating the performance as an hour of acting, Sarah highlighting the practicality of wearing something comfortable as well as the impact created by wearing something colourful and memorable, while Oisín suggested playing with your voice, learning breathing and drama techniques. Props also feature heavily in the two writers’ arsenal of tricks: they give you something to do with your hands and they are a great help in case of a blank. However, both Oisín and Sarah warned against using any amount of technology (Powerpoint in particular), as the venue might not be kitted out for it.

Practise. Both writers revealed that they practise their talks beforehand and that they time themselves. They divide their material in blocks, each covering a certain amount of time, so that they know what they can linger on or drop entirely if the situation requires it.

What to read. Oisín listed the characteristic for the ideal text to read: it must contain a fair dose of dialogue and be lively, it mustn’t involve too many characters or be weighed down by too much description. Sarah went further, by explaining that ‘you can actually rewrite a passage from the book to make it work better for a dramatic reading’. She also mentioned the need to note the different accents and body language of your character, to work them into the reading and, again, to practise them in advance.

Audience management. While both writers agreed that ‘the kids have to know you’re in charge and confident’, Sarah insisted on the role of the teacher who, she said, must be present in the room at all times. She also warned the future performers to be prepared for a very different age group from they may have asked for. Oisín described his own ‘crowd-control techniques’ which feature ‘using the bully’ and ‘going on the offensive with hecklers’.

Wrapping up. Sarah and Oisín insisted on the vital importance of leaving the audience with some sort of memorabilia. While Oisín donates a signed picture to the school (which can then be photocopied and distributed to the children), Sarah has put together a document listing her writing tips, favourite reads, info on competitions to win copies of her books, writing exercises to do in class, and so on. She also has a stack of bookmarks and stickers recapping the books’ details as well as her blog and website addresses.

Business. How to get more readings and what to charge? They advised talking to your publisher, checking out Poetry Ireland’s Writers in School scheme, volunteering at your local library or at Fighting Words.

Finally, CBI’s Mags Walsh and Tom Donegan introduced the group to their ideas on best practice for events. Festivals and one-off events are forever looking for names to put on their programs. CBI has developed a database of writers and illustrators living in Ireland, which event organisers can explore and use to contact the artists. The key is to be proactive.
This session also touched on very practical matters such as child protection and vetting, the Irish Writers’ Union recommendations for fees, invoicing (an invoice template can be found on CBInfo), and so on. Finally, Tom and Mags insisted on the importance of self-promotion (online in particular) and of leaving something behind (info sheets, press releases, teacher packs and other give-aways).

NB: as you can see from the pic above, you don't strictly speaking have to stand. Sitting is ok. Or kneeling or perching or whatever takes your fancy. (Check the desk before perching on it though...)

More happiness

As promised, here is some more art from the children I met in the south of France a little while ago. Or a 5/6 year old's definition of happiness...
From top to bottom, happiness is... 

• 
  
  Maman;
• 
  
  the land of parrots (where you can meet and feed the birds and they become your best friends);
• 
  
  to be with all my family;
• 
  
  to go fishing (Fabio was very specific here: it's underwater fishing);
• 
  
  the land of love.

Let me translate whole text on this last one: ''The land of love: In this land there's lots of love. Mum and Dad's love and my sisters' love. There's also my friends' love. And there's all the love I give them.''

Talented or what?

Back!

So I came back in the end. It was tempting to stay though, what with the nice heat, the big blue skies, the kids chanting my name in the yard (once), that little girl telling me I was beautiful as a princess, those great picturebooks carpeting the bookshops, my grandmother's cooking, the lavender in a pot I was given, the amazing artwork by the kids, the scenic towns, the novelty of having to run a writing workshop with Junior Infants in 20 minutes... Very tempting! But I thought I'd have to come back to tell you about it and now I have.

It was an incredible experience, albeit physically draining (there is such a thing as a Signing Elbow). No matter, I'll do it again. And when I get the chance, I will post some of said artwork, because it's really worth it. In the meantime, you can go and have a look at the photos of the award ceremony here. It took place in an old Roman theatre that could sit 900 (yes, 900 proud and loud parents), with a big stage which was promptly taken over by kids (aged 5 to 7) who sang songs about each of the four books in competition! In the grounds around the open-air theatre, the organisers had arranged some of the things made by the schools for all to see... deadly! So, In Search of Happiness didn't win the award, but a cool book about the many metamorphoses of a lift cabin did. And as it was written by a fellow claustrophobe, I can only say yeah!

On tour

This blog is going to be a bit quiet over the next few weeks as I'm going off to France where A la Recherche du Bonheur (In Search of Happiness) has been shortlisted for two awards in the sunny south. I'm going to meet my readers (aged 5 to 7), who are also my judges. So I've been frantically preparing my visits (4 days in the schools in total) and gathering material. I don't know if I'm really ready to stand and deliver yet (especially after watching that junior Bisto jury video), but I'm sure my young hosts will be the real stars of the show. The other titles short-listed are (don't they look deadly?):