When I grow up…

I was slow with words as a child. My father and mother read me piles of bedtime stories (and bathtime stories and lunchtime stories and ‘I don’t have time for stories right now’ stories) but when it came to actually learning how to associate the squiggles on the page with speech, I had real trouble. I was one of the last in my class to pick up reading. I remember my mother telling me that she was beginning to get really worried – and then something just clicked. It was like I’d been blindly stumbling my way through a soupy word-fog and suddenly stepped out into the bright sunlight. Once I realised I could do it, I couldn’t get enough of it.

It occurs to me that, in a way, we’re conditioned from the beginning of our lives to consider employment and personal fulfilment in the same breath. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ For the first twelve years of my life I answered that question by saying, ‘I want to be an artist’. (My brother James: ‘A Collingwood football player and train driver.’ My friend Eloise: ‘A pony. I also remember throwing money into a fountain and wishing to be Lady from Lady and the Tramp.’) I remember very specifically making a decision in Grade 6 that given the choice between artist or writer it was actually going to have to be the latter. Not because I felt some deep calling to the power of the written word, but because I thought I was more likely to be able to make money from writing (I know, right?) which would enable me to do it more often. It wasn’t the activities or materials themselves that hooked so far under my skin; it was the freedom they gave me in their own ways to venture past the restrictions of reality and into the endless possibilities of the imagination.

The ArtPlay events at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year offer parents a chance to give their younger children ways to engage with stories that go beyond just reading and writing in a colourful, enthusiastic atmosphere. In ‘Traditional Stories from Around the World’ kids can listen to stories from Indigenous, Sudanese and Chinese communities. Author and football enthusiast Michael Panckridge will be talking about sport and stories on August 30, while author and illustrator Briony Stewart (who was ‘either going to be an entomologist or the next Picasso’) will be encouraging kids to be brave on August 31.

For those budding young authors, Deborah Abela is hosting a Mystery Writing Workshop on September 3, and later in the afternoon, Gabrielle Wang has a bunch of stories she needs help to get finished in her Story Starter Workshop. And for those kids who just can’t get enough of the whole process, there’s The Book Factory: a three-hour start-to-finish interactive workshop that allows kids to get a taste of being writer, illustrator, reader and publisher of their very own book that they can take home at the end of the day.

See here for the full list of events at ArtPlay and here for all of MWF’s children and young adult programming for 2011.

Parley with Andrew McDonald

Andrew McDonald

While all you ‘Main Program’ goers are working, sleeping, making pineapple sundaes or whatever it is that you do on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, MWF’s Schools Program is bringing readers together with their favourite authors. Andrew McDonald, author of The Greatest Blogger in the World, is one of them.

Your session ‘Nerds, Blogging and the Art of Cool’ will involve
capturing the attention of a whole room full of literate kids who may
or may not have consumed red cordial. How do you intend to do this?
I have thought about promising to bring out ‘special surprise guest J.K. Rowling’ at the end of the session if everyone is patient and listens to me considerately first. But that idea could end in a room full of kids physically attacking me for lying to them. So I’ll probably just swear at the start of the session to win them over instead.

‘Nerds’ and ‘cool’: please explain.
I would like to think that the words ‘nerd’ and ‘cool’ are starting to mean the same thing. Nerds used to be kids who would sit in front of a computer all day long and drink Dr Pepper. Thankfully the Dr Pepper craze went away but the number of nerds using computers has grown by the gazillions.
So as more and more people go online to play games, start blogs, tweet, read the Miley Cyrus Wikipedia entry – or whatever you do online – the nerdier we all become and the cooler it becomes to be nerdy. That’s my latest theory anyway.

The characters in your book seem to be quite sartorially adroit. Charlie’s little brother wears a tuxedo to school, and Charlie’s crush – a girl called The Boots – wears knee-high boots. Were you a nattily dressed child?
I will demonstrate the absolute unnattyness of my childhood dress sense by naming all the styles of pants I wore as a child – cord, cargo, vinyl, lycra and happy. Those happy pants really were the stunners of the schoolyard circa 1990. I truly believe that some people can pull off happy pants. And should never put them back on again.

You work at a bookshop. Have you ever engaged in surreptitious rearranging in favour of your book, ‘The Greatest Blogger in the World’?
I have never rearranged my book to stand out from the rest in the kids’ section. That’s far too obvious and would be grossly unfair to all the other, brilliant children’s books. But I can tell you that my book is selling very well from the psychology, natural history and romance sections of my bookshop and of every bookshop I’ve visited this year.

How do you become the greatest blogger in the world?
All you have to do to be the greatest blogger in the world is to be recognised as so by the most authoritative voice in all the land – Google. I only wrote the book so that my name would come up when you Google ‘the greatest blogger in the world’, thus confirming me to be said greatest blogger.
The only way anyone else could take this title off me now would be to write their own book, also name it The Greatest Blogger in the World and get it to google better than mine. Now that I think about it, The Greatest Blogger in the World would be a great title for a psychology book or a natural history book or even a romance book.

You can read about goat skulls at Andrew’s blog.

Estelle Tang, 3000 BOOKS
Festival Blogger