Author Sita Brahmachari‘s latest book is Car Wash Wish, her second novella for Barrington Stoke, a UK publisher who specialise in making books accessible to struggling readers, with a special emphasis on dyslexia. It’s an inter-generational story … Continue reading ... →
Excuse the light-heartedness. It's Spring after all. So pop the champagne corks, blow the party hooters… today a picture book story I wrote 15 years ago is being launched at The Illustration Cupboard in London. The timing seems right. Everywhere I look there are giraffes galore – in the windows of Kath Kidson, in the Louis Vuitton ads ...
... but best of all on the cover of my new book, Zeraffa Giraffa.
In my notebook I found the date when my story started taking shape – August 1999.
I’d just read the historical account in Michael Allin’s book Zarafa of the giraffe that was sent to Paris by the Pasha Muhammed Ali in 1827 – the second giraffe ever to be seen in Europe. But my fascination with giraffes began as a teenager when I’d come up really close to them in the wild on horseback in Zimbabwe – that graceful walk, their necks stretching out above the tree-line like exotic flowers, their lolloping gallop, their bizarre stance when drinking and their stares of curiosity.
So why did my manuscript take 15 years to be published?
Take heart those of you who have texts in your bottom drawer. Some stories are often just not right in a certain market – the perfect illustrator can’t be found… the economics don’t work. Then in 2004 I saw the magnificent life-size puppet performance of The Tall Horse based on the same story I'd written, produced by the Handspring puppet company in South Africa (it went on to tour in the US and Europe as well). The Handspring is the same company who much later produced the horse in War Horse. Their 5 metre tall giraffe of my story was made of carbon fibre rods, with two puppeteers on stilts inside the body frame, operating the turn of the head, the twitch of a tail or ear and the swaying, graceful gait. I was so mesmerized by the poetic performance that I still have the program and ticket. I can tell you that on Thursday 9th Sept 2004, I sat in seat N1 at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town. |
| the giraffe puppet from the production The Tall Horse |
Her palette is strong, her colours intense, the detail sublime – tiny dots of gold highlight the texture on the giraffe’s horn, a sinuous, long, black tongue entwines the curls of the equally black French railing, an inquisitive monkey on the dhow, strange boxes with Arabic font and measurement ... what do they contain?... scraps of maps embedded in the sea suggesting the journey – wonderful, tiny, visual codes that will be picked up by an astute child. (perhaps even by an adult?)
While I was writing Zeraffa Giraffa, I went to the Jardin des Plantes alongside the Seine in Paris to see the building of La Rotonde where the giraffe was housed together with her keeper, Atir. He slept up on a platform close to her face and remained with her for the rest of the 18 years she lived. I tried to imagine the bond that must have existed between them … two exiles from Africa… a boy who had never been further than Khartoum and a giraffe who had lost her savannah ... both alone in this strange, foreign city. What memories did they hold on to?
Then a few days ago I saw an article in a newspaper about Mario, a zookeeper who has a brain tumour and can no longer walk, whose last wish was to see his beloved giraffes he’d looked after at the Rotterdam zoo. He was taken there by the Ambulance Wish Foundation. The newspaper shows a photograph of a tall giraffe bending low over a fence and nuzzling the face of the zookeeper as he lies strapped to his ambulance stretcher. What greater bond than that?
If you visit La Rotonde on a quiet day, close your eyes and perhaps you’ll feel the hot wind of Africa and imagine yourself standing there with Zeraffa and her keeper Atir, while he whispers stories to her of a land far away. My giraffe and I have been on a long, long journey together. The giraffe’s journey took two years, mine took fifteen. Thank you Jane you’ve made the story come alive. Let’s pop those corks and blow the party hooters. Perhaps like the bakers of Paris, we might even celebrate with giraffe biscuits!
Zeraffa Giraffa, by Dianne Hofmeyr, illustrated by Jane Ray, published by Frances Lincoln, April 2014, translated so far as well, into Danish, Swedish, Korean and Afrikaans.www.diannehofmeyr.com
 |
| Fabulously serious logo by Sarah McIntyre |
I got back from my summer holiday last night. I went to CWIG, which is not an obscure Welsh village, but the Society of Authors Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Group conference. It happens every three years in different cities, and this year it was in Reading.It was called 'Joined-up Reading'. Is that 'joined-up reading' or 'joined-up Reading'? Who knows. Maybe both.
Normally, we writers and illustrators spend our days, doing what we want, bossing around people who don't exist and skiving work to chat on Skype/Facebook/twitter about the work we should be doing. We're not used to being with other people all the time, or doing as we're told. We're not used to having to get dressed before working, eat at regular times, use a knife and fork nicely or sit quietly without telling a bunch of lies. But a conference is a proper organised thing with set mealtimes, talks to attend and other people to interact with.
So why do we go? Holiday!
CWIG is a delight. Full of old friends and potential new friends, a chance to gossip, eat, drink and whinge. If any snippet of useful information leaks in, that's a bonus.
 |
Nicola Davies, unfazed by being
elbowed by a giant ghost - all in a
day's work for us |
CWIG is just writers and illustrators - it's not somewhere to look for an agent or publisher. And so no one has to be impressive, there's no point in showing off, and we can all just relax. It's a time for singing silly songs and drinking the bar out of wine. (We did that on the first night; the last time I was party to drinking a bar out of wine was in Outer Mongolia in 1990 on the day the Iraq War started.)
I loved it. But like all the best holidays, it had its grumble-points. The food was poor, the bar was hopeless, the cabaret compulsory (hah! we laugh in the face of compulsory!), the coffee undrinkable (that's serious) and the microphones non-functional. The Germans took all the sun loungers and there was tar on the beach. Oh. Hang on.
But we don't get this stuff every day, unlike, say, manager-type-people who are forever going to conferences and staying in the Scunthorpe (or Dubai) BestWesternMarriotHilton hotel. Indeed, most days we don't get interaction with another human being who actually exists. To be in a whole room of around 100 people, none of whom can be given green hair or three arms on a whim, is quite a novelty. CWIG is a weekend away in the real world.
 |
Only our invisible friends were
skiving outside |
But look - we can play in the real world, too.
We talked about the state of publishing (in turmoil), of what the hell the government thinks it's doing with libraries (wanton armageddonising), of the progress of e-books in children's publishing (mollusc-like in its rapidity) and whether Allan Ahlberg's glass contained red wine or Ribena (who knows?) And heard the usual disingenuous comment from a publisher that there's never been a better time to be a children's writer.
Now for my holiday snaps. Don't shuffle like that. You might like to visit the real world one day.
Here is our venue: a very plausible-looking Henley Business Centre at Reading University.
We had proper signage, just like real business people. Well, perhaps not
quite like real business people.
Just in case we didn't know where to walk ...
.... and where to dance, there were some stick people drawn on the floor.
(Obviously the nice people at Reading know that all writers - and especially illustrators - speak fluent stick.)
We know how to dress. Alan Gibbons and John Dougherty, as usual, wore shirts chosen to burn out the eyes of Ed Vaizey. I won't dazzle you with those. Sarah McIntyre chaired her session in the best conference hat I have ever seen.
[What do you mean, 'what's a conference hat?'] Allan Ahlberg brought his teddy.
And he had a drink on the stage, though his wasn't see-through, like they usually are when you see conferences on TV.
We all transacted our own little bits of networking and business. I secured a promise from Catherine Johnson to translate some text into Jamaican Fairy and asked Jane Ray if I could commission a dodo from her.
So you see, we
do know how to do it.
I had a wonderful time, but holidays can't last forever and it's time to settle be back into speaking stick and bossing around a steam-powered autamaton and an orphan in a boat. Sigh.
(If you would like to read a more informative account of what happened at CWIG, you could turn to David Thorpe. I'm sure more will appear, and I'll update this list later in the day/week/millennium.) Anne Rooney(
Stroppy Author)
Written & illustrated by Jane Ray
$16.99, ages 3-6, $16.99
In this beguiling edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas, a suitor woos his love next door with a series of gifts that reflect his deepening affection.
The suitor, an elegant man with twinkling eyes, watches his gifts arrive from his window until the last one is delivered, and he feels brave enough to a walk over and declare his love.
As the first of 12 gifts come, tiny puffs of snow float down outside a row of color-washed houses by a canal. A postman knocks at flat #4 and the woman, her hair swept back with a ribbon, answers the door and gasps with delight.
There on the step is a potted pear tree, each branch perfectly positioned as if espaliered, and a partridge with mottled feathers perched on a limb. A tag dangles from another branch addressed, "To My True Love X."
Every day greater numbers of things arrive on her stoop, each more whimsical and grand than the last.
On the fifth day, five children in hats and mittens run by the woman's door, rolling golden hoola-hoops at their sides, and on the tenth day, ten lords-a-leaping, dressed in pinstriped pants and top hats, shuffle about on the roof swinging their arms.
Jane Ray's pictures are sumptuous, delicately ornate and folkloric, with gilted stars, sleek birds that glide into scenes and perch, and charming details, subtly adorning the page.
When the nine ladies dancing arrive on a boat in the canal, shimmying in fur-lined coats, a banner curves between masts that's as playful as the man's glances. Hung among triangles of fabric are socks and pantaloons.
Every spread captures the magic of young, new love. Houses have a rosy luminous glow that ties in with the blushing cheeks of the woman, and the air sparkles with possibility.
Ray even flirts a little with readers. On the first spread, s
Back at the start of the month I wrote a post all about activity books for kids, why I like them and why we’ll be using some during the summer holidays (which have now officially begun in our neck of the woods).
Photo: *L*u*z*A*
Then I started thinking about the free resources that are available; many illustrators have activity sheets on their websites and if you have a printer (or can use the printer at the library) you can make these up in to your own activity books.
Over the course of the next six weeks I’ll be pointing you to a wide variety of free activity sheets created by children’s book illustrators (in between “regular” posts). I hope some of them appeal to you and your kids and that they give you all a few minutes happy drawing / scribbling / creating together!
Jane Ray has illustrated over 30 books including The Lost Happy Endings (which we reviewed here) and Can you catch a Mermaid (which guestposter Cathy from Nurturestore included in her selection of books here), as well as many fairy tales.
On Jane Ray’s website you can find…
colouring in sheets for mermaids, washing lines and mythical beasts
Book plates for you to cut out, decorate and stick inside your favourite books
Carly Hart‘s first picture book, Don’t Dip Your Chips in Your Drink Kate! won Highly Commended Picture Book and Community Libraries Favourite Book at the Sheffield Children’s Book Award in 2010, and the Children’s Bookseller Magazine has described her as “a rising picture book star”.
On Carly’s website there are lots of activity sheets including…
Designing a seed packet to grow your own dinosaur
A tutorial for making your own rhyme machine
Alex Milway has written and illustrated
3 Comments on Free activity sheets from Jane Ray, Carly Hart and Alex Milway, last added: 7/23/2011
THE STORY MUSEUM – Oxford
A freezing day in Oxford saw a group of authors become engineers at the stroke of a hat! You’ll recognize a few faces as we tried to interpret the spaces that will become the new Story Museum. The outing was devised by Jacky Atkinson and Kim Pickin, Director of the Story Museum, as part of the National Kids Lit Quiz day held in Oxford.
Herded across a snow-stewn courtyard by the enthusiastic Tish Francis, former director of the Oxford Playhouse, through a maze of winding passageways, rooms, halls and vast galleries of the old Oxford Telephone Exchange and finally up to the attics complete with resident spiders, peeling paint taking on the shape of unknown continents and fireplaces that must have once warmed poor starving artists… our imaginations were running wild. Towers could be added! Secret passageways! Peepholes! Escape shutes! A hoist in the courtyard was already in place to act as a gallows!
The spaces are ripe to create magic in. The Story Museum won’t be so much a static ‘museum’ as a living, active place to share story and creativity. All the latent engineers can’t wait to be invited back here to be part of the action in creating a story-rich society!
http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD – London
A few freezing evenings later (London didn’t quite reach the same scale of freezing as the rest o
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By: Zoe,
on 11/18/2010
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**Don’t forget to enter the giveaway for a pair of beautiful Moomin Mugs!**
This year’s family Christmas production at an art centre near us is an adaptation of the short story
The Lost Happy Endings by Carol Ann Duffy (the UK’s poet laureate), originally illustrated by
Jane Ray. After the success we had taking M and J to see
When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat I thought we’d also get tickets for this magical tale. With our trip to the theatre now only a few days away
The Lost Happy Endings has been our most-read book this week and definitely one I’d love to share with you today.
Photo: daskerst
A young girl, Jub, lives in a dark forest. She has a terribly important job – every night she must take the sack full of Happy Endings, climb to the top a huge oak tree and then scatter the endings to the wind to ensure they find their way into homes all around the world where parents are telling bedtime stories to their children. She’s good at her job, and enjoys it, spending her days reading and visiting neighbours whilst the Happy Endings fly back to the forest to hang from the ancient silver birch, ready to be collected and distributed each night.
One evening, however, a wicked witch, with “fierce red eyes like poisonous berries” steals the girl’s sack. With no Happy Endings, children in bedrooms everywhere go to bed that night in tears. Cinderella’s foot is too big for the glass slipper. The Big Bad Wolf gobbles up Little Red Riding Hood.
Photo: ((brian))
Jub is distraught. Her heart is “as sore as toothache“. Exhausted by despair, she eventually falls asleep and (appears to) dream of a Golden Pen which can write on the night sky itself. She takes the pen and uses it to re-write her own story, to create her own happy ending, ensuring the witch meets her comeuppance and once again the Happy Endings can find their way into your home, my home and every home where bedtime stories are told.
Duffy has created a fairy story par excellence – mysterious, slightly menacing, with one foot in our world and another in a rather more magical world, a magical world that you nevertheless want to believe in when you read this story. The tale is beautifully told, with so many phrases where each word seems perfectly chosen, where it is hard to imagine a simpler yet more evocative way of expressing a given emotion or situation; Duffy’s first calling, as a poet, really shines through.
Jane Ray&
Adapted and illustrated by Jane Ray
Candlewick Press, 2009
$19.99, ages 3 and up, 10 pages
Reading through Ray's 3-D adaptation of the Brothers Grimm's Snow White evokes the same wondrous feeling as peering into a dollhouse through a miniature window.
Designed to look like a theater, this fascinating book is made up of six two-page spreads that resemble a stage in different acts. The reader is the audience, sitting before the stage, looking into scenes angling back to the fold and following text by flipping open red curtains to either side.
Ray creates a sense of depth similar to that of dioramas in natural history museums by allowing the spreads to open no further than a 120 degree angle. This allows two layers of delicately cut trees, beams, walls, windows and people to appear on the stage against a scenic backdrop.
At first it's awkward not to open the book flat and you struggle to find a comfortable way to read it in your lap, but the more you gaze into Ray's magical scenes, the less focused you become on the book's restrictions. You find yourself transported into the fairy tale in a way that flat images may suggest but normally can't show.
The first act, staged to look like a winter wonderland, sets the magical mood of the book: with the queen standing at a stone balcony adorned with bare vines and ornate columns as snow falls in the woods and birds look on from icy perches. Staying true to the 1857 fairy tale, the queen pricks her finger and wistfully wishes for a child with lips as red as the drop of blood that falls from her finger.
The queen, as we know, realizes her dream but dies soon after Snow White's birth, and in the second act, we leap ahead in time to find Snow White, now a young girl, playing on the floor of the castle with her cat. Across from her on stage right, her wicked stepmother, the new queen, glowers at her magic mirror on the wall, which has just informed her that Snow White is the fairer beauty.
In act three, the story shifts to spring; trees are bursting with leaves and blossoms, and squirrels are scampering from tree to tree as a deer wanders into the scene. The huntsman, unable to follow through with the queen's orders to kill Snow White, is seen departing with his bow and arrows, as Snow White runs deeper into the forest toward a brick cottage where seven dwarves are busily tending to chores.
By act four, the queen has already made her sinister entrance into the forest, dressed as an old peddler woman. As we look over a picket fence and through trees, we see Snow White standing at a cottage window, as the queen cinches a belt to her waist. Behind the curtain on stage left, we learn that the queen eventually pulls the belt so tightly that Snow White can't breath. But fortunately the dwarves discover Snow White passed out in time to revive her.
Turning to act five, we open the curtain on stage right to learn that the queen has again tried to hurt Snow White, this time by slipping a poisoned comb in her hair, and again the dwarves save the day. On stage, however, the scene is very somber. As we look past a wooden beam hung with hats and shawls, we see the dwarfs crowded around Snow White, who is unconscious on the floor, having bitten into a poisonous apple, the last attempt by the queen to hurt her.
But luckily this story has a fairy tale ending, and turning to the last act, we look through the trees to see Snow White many years later in the arms of a prince who is about to kiss her. Fittingly, as we learn behind the curtains, it wasn't the kiss that saved her, as the Disney version goes. Nor was it the clumsiness of the prince's servants, as the Grimm tale suggests. In Ray's remake, it was a dwarf who tripped trying to lift Snow White's glass coffin who dislodged the poisonous apple from her throat.
The format of Ray's book and her lush scenes really set this version of Snow White apart. When opened on its side to a favorite act and displayed on a dresser top, it's as alluring as a dollhouse. You can't help but peek in and imagine what it would be like to wander through the scene.
For twenty years, Jane Ray has been dazzling the children’s book world with rich and exotic illustrations for stories that include fairy tales, cultural and biblical stories, Shakespeare and more. She’s become involved in promoting awareness of green issues and the inclusion of children with disabilities in books as part of the In The Picture project. In March of this year, Ms. Ray will publish The Apple Pip Princess, her second book as both an author and illustrator.
On this edition of Just One More Book, Mark speaks with Jane Ray about museums for inspiration, exploring the darker aspects of stories and what we can expect in The Apple Pip Princess.
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Illustrated by Anik McGrory
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By: Dianne Hofmeyr,
on 4/1/2014
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By: Jenny Miller,
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Damn! I knew I should have come...but I was at The Globe, a prior engagement...next time...NEXT TIME!
Thanks Anne. Glad you had fun.
Cindy xx
How I wish I'd been there. Instead I was wrestling with Cornish lobsters in the bath. Yes, pretty much literally, this is not a euphemism.
I am booking my holiday at CWIG for three years hence. A lovely account. Thanks!
Thanks for reminding me of some of the lovely moments of the CWIG Conference, Anne, and the pleasure of meeting so many friends there.
Brilliant Anne - great snapshot and so good to see everyone who made it - commiserations to those who didn't.
Love the photos you've taken - the elbowing ghost is superb. And your plea for better coffee - does no one know what writers need to drink?!
Sounds like a right proper writerish conference- wish I could have been there but I was at a wedding, which was lovely, but hope to get to CWIG next time.
It was terrific, wasn't it? Lovely to see you there. And... a shirt to burn out Ed Vaizey's eyes? I shall get googling immediately!
Just one correction, Anne - I think that's Nicola DAVIES who's being elbowed out of the way by the ghost, isn't it???
(Oh - and I quite enjoyed the food. But perhaps you live in a better class of garret than do I...)
John, that's what I had, and then I panicked and thought it was the other Nicola and changed it! Aaargh. But you're right. I'll change it back!
Good luck with the shirt hunt. We'll all chip in...
Lovely to see you again, Anne, albeit quite briefly, when I was complaining about the tonic water (which turned out to be soda water, not surprising it tasted awful with gin). Too many people to see, to meet, but it was lovely to briefly catch up and meet new people. For me it was my first as published author so that made it extra special.
Actually the food was OK if you pretended to be vegetarian.
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My first CWIG conference - and lots of fun to hear such passion and I came away full of ideas and renewed zeal to help save the libraries.
Food really was pretty unspeakable though. Ran out of the veggie options on the first night (maybe because of the refugees from the meat options, Janet) and on the second I ate meat for the first time in over twenty years when what I was told was mushroom stroganoff turned out to be . . . well, beef. Or lamb. Or something. Euch.
Didn't spoil it though!!
Kate - I don't eat meat, but do eat fish, so ate the dried-out, shrivelled salmon the first night as the slices of pastry thing were so HUGE. I'm surprised they 'ran out' though, as they were offering it reheated for lunch on Saturday! When, again, they had no clue which dishes had meat in and which didn't.
John - I think your medals for school visiting are showing. It was school-dinner fare!
good information...
Adventure Holidays to Darjeeling
Cultural trip to Darjeeling
thanks for sharing..