Following on from my last post about Wigtown Book Festival, two lovely journalist interns asked writer and illustrator Debi Gliori and me to give people a creative challenge, tied in with our latest books, You Can't Scare a Princess! and Debi's The Scariest Thing of All. Here you go! Consider yourselves challenged.
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By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 9/28/2011
Blog: Sarah McIntyre (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 9/27/2011
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JacketFlap tags: scotland, festivals, wigtown, mccaughrean, pspag2, debi_gliori, shoo_rayner, Add a tag
By: Aline Pereira,
on 6/19/2009
Blog: PaperTigers (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Poetry Friday, Eventful World, Stone Soup, Carol's Corner, Foyle Young Poets Award, Godwit Publishing Ltd., Laura Ranger, Laura's Poems, Wigtown, Add a tag
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By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 9/28/2011
Blog: Sarah McIntyre (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 9/27/2011
Blog: Sarah McIntyre (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: scotland, festivals, wigtown, mccaughrean, pspag2, debi_gliori, shoo_rayner, Add a tag
Okay, the endless supply of lobster is not the only reason I love Wigtown Book Festival. But it is one of the reasons.
Last Friday, Stuart and took the train to Carlisle, then hired a car and drove over to beautiful Wigtown in southwest Scotland. Even thought it's a fairly small town, it has something like 20 indie bookshops and is a wonderful, cosy sort of place even when the wind is whipping down the high street. 
We always stay with the excellent Mary and Angus MacIlwraith, and Stuart and Angus have been friends for 25 years. Here's a picture I drew (fairly quickly) of their farmhouse.
I think they were quite surprised when I came to breakfast in full pirate costume, and here we are, posing with Suzy the border terrier in their back garden. Thanks so much to writer Geraldine McCaughrean for lending me her Captain Hook hat! Geraldine wrote the authorised sequel to Peter Pan, called Peter Pan in Scarlet and has been working with the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust, not far from Wigtown, to create a JM Barrie centre in a lovely old house where Peter Pan took it shape. The Moat Brae Trust and Geraldine are hosting a tea party at the Wigtown festival on Thursday at 4pm and I'm very sorry to miss it!
I was very excited to meet writer and illustrator Debi Gliori for the first time and, besides doing our own events, we both gave talks together twice in front of 300 schoolkids. 600 kids is a lot of people when the town's population is only about 1200! And we were both very chuffed to see writer and illustrator Shoo Rayner, who does more school events than almost anyone I know, and has posted hundreds of how-to-draw videos on You Tube (or Shoo Tube, as he calls his channel). We spent a couple hours chatting up in the Writer's Retreat, a beautiful room above Wigtown's most central bookshop, and we got a bit silly. Here's the evidence... (not a video for children, really; sorry about that...)
Here's the actor Celia Imrie with Shoo in an oh-please-take-this-or-my-wife-will-never-believe-it shot.
Lately it's seemed that the first person I've walked into at every festival has been the tweedy besuited Stuart Kelly. I think he moderated something like 14 events at the Edinburgh Book Festival. So I couldn't help laughing when there he was, first person I saw, in the Writers' Retreat. Poor Stuart, I think he thinks I'm a bit nuts, swanning noisily into the room in my various pirate costumes. He inhabits the, ahem, very serious world of books for adults.
But enough of that. Ahoy! Jolly pirates!
Last time I was in Wigtown I met fabulous storyteller Renita Boyle, who can do absolutely anything with a guitar and silly voices, that woman is totally fearless. Here she is, leading the crew in a galloping rendition of I Know an Old Lady W
By: Aline Pereira,
on 6/19/2009
Blog: PaperTigers (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Poetry Friday, Eventful World, Stone Soup, Carol's Corner, Foyle Young Poets Award, Godwit Publishing Ltd., Laura Ranger, Laura's Poems, Wigtown, Add a tag
Can children write poems? Of course! It’s true we don’t normally associate children with writing poetry so much as we do with reading it (or reading it to them,) but children can often display a knack for the language that is fresh and startling. Witness the work of young New Zealand poet, Laura Ranger in this excerpt from ‘Two Word Poem’:
The toad sat on a red stool
it was a toadstool.
The rain tied a bow
in the cloud’s hair
it was a rainbow.
Which witch put sand
in my sandwich?
Laura was seven when she wrote this. Precocious to be sure, the poetry nontheless remains delightfully childish at the same time. I discovered Laura Ranger’s work in a little book called Laura’s Poems tucked away in the back corner of a children’s bookstore in Wigtown, Scotland. Published in 1995 by a small press called Godwit Publishing Ltd. in New Zealand, the book is likely out-of-print and hard to acquire. What struck me about Laura’s book was not so much the precocity of the verse, but her genuinely child-like desire and ability to express herself in words. Laura apparently wrote out her poems in hand first, and then revised them on a word-processor. Computer technology enabled her to edit which then led to her improving on her initial hand-written impressions. And remember this was 1995! Today, many children have ready access to computers or some even with hand-held devices that allow them to record and edit their words should they have a desire as deep as Laura’s to observe the world and write about it.
Does your child like to write poetry? If so, where can they find outlets to see their words in print? Laura published her poems in the American children’s magazine, Stone Soup. And currently in Britain, there is a poetry contest for young writers called the Foyle Young Poets Award with a deadline for submissions of July 31, 2009.
Today’s Poetry Friday host is Carol at Carol’s Corner.
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