It is a pleasure to welcome award-winning author Stewart Foster to the blog.  Stewart is the author of numerous books including The Bubble Boy which won the Sainsbury’s Children’s Book Award and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.  Stewart’s acclaimed novels tackle emotionally sophisticated subjects with an honest eye.  His books have been included in the Reading Well and on Empathy Lab lists.  Here Stewart discusses his motivations in writing his latest novel, Pieces of Us, and why talking about eating disorders, particularly with young males is so important .

I once told a friend that I was scared about writing any articles about Pieces of Us, for fear that my words would be picked apart by medical experts or those in families where eating disorders have become an issue. This ‘fear’ is mostly generated by a post I placed on social media a couple of years ago, where I asked if there were any books on the subject of eating disorders, out there? That evening I received maybe thirty replies, mostly along the lines of, it’s a subject that shouldn’t be discussed in Young Adult fiction for fear of triggering behaviours and also, stick to writing fiction because you don’t know what you are talking about.

I sat scrolling the replies, thinking, oh shit, what did I just do? Perhaps it is a mistake, just doing this post, but then I got a direct message from another author, an author whom I’;d spent three hours waiting for a train in deep conversation with, after a literary event. And his message said, ‘Stew, I get why some have reacted the way they have, but if anyone should write a book about male eating disorders, it’s you.’

I was, am, and always will be, so grateful for that message.

Because I totally get how sensitive the issue of male eating disorders is… I kept mine hidden from my friends and family for far too many years. I know the hurt, the pain and the shame the sufferer feels, I also know the feelings of frustration but mostly worry that it brings to a family. And how helpless both feel. And the inability, the shame, the sheer ‘It’s so stupid’ the stigma, that stop us talking about ‘It.’

That’s why I wrote Pieces of Us, so it will be on a table or a shelf in a bookshop or a library, or in a reader’s hands and someone will ask, ‘What is that book about?’ And I hope the reply will be that it is about a beautiful friendship between two boys and the problems they faced together as they grew up. The type of friendship I was lucky to have in my late teens and the ‘problems’ we both had. So when I have those worries about not having deep medical knowledge of eating disorders, I can at least say I do know what I am talking about, because I have been there, still am to a great extent. Experience and being able to write, is my main qualification. Getting people to talk about it, is my main motivation.

From the age of thirteen I would never be seen outside of my bedroom without a shirt on. Wore baggy jumpers all through six weeks of the 1977, heatwave. Went for walks on my own rather than go in the sea on holidays. So uncomfortable with my body.

There’s a scene in Pieces of Us where Jonas is out walking before an impending summer thunderstorm. His best friand, Louis, tries to get him to take off his jumper, screw it into a ball, so he can put it back on, dry, when the storm has passed. Jonas refuses because he knows his t-shirt will stick to him and the rain will show the folds of his skin. That scene was true…me and my best friend when I was sixteen.

Two years later and that discomfort with my body grew into making myself ill in order to lose weight. ‘It’ and ‘It had a name, bulimia. I didn’t know. There was no internet for information then.

No one to talk to about it. No one I thought would understand.

You look fine.

You’re fine.

What are you worried about?

But I did worry, almost every minute of every day, even though I absolutely loved school. Was popular I guess. Good and sport, talked lots, wrote poetry about classmates to make them laugh. Same in sixth form, but all the time my body was changing, changing into a shape I hated. Laughter would fade as my friends peeled away from me on the walk home, replaced by a sadness that I never understood where it came from, This happy-go-lucky kid, making other laugh all day, avoiding tea with his parents, making himself sick when the house was quiet. Momentarily happy, for all of ten seconds, before the shame and guilt kicked in.

And now I think back, would it have helped to have had someone to talk to? There was a chance, once, on my own at the doctors, when I had an infection caused by not drinking enough liquid, because liquid was the first thing I’d notice to affect the scales. Was everything okay? Everything alright at school? Yes. Yes. That’s all I could say because my mum was there.

Years on, I may no longer do ‘It’ but everything else is still there… the uncomfortable body, the constant exercising, the relentless battle with the scales. But I cope, and for the most part, cope well, but I know I was 77.2kg last night. 76.3 this morning. But I know longer weigh ten times in between. And I talk openly about it with my daughters as we go back over old family photos sometimes pausing if ‘Dad doesn’t look well there’. And me looking at same photo’s thinking, I look so thin when I thought I was huge.

Another friend of mine, my best friend, often tells me that I can’t help all of the people all the time. This will often come after I’ve been on a visit to a school, met someone, been told something and then telling that person that they need to talk to someone, someone they trust. But then when we are in that position, we can’t think who that person would be. And the trouble is, to me, and maybe their friends, that person can appear to be least troubled person you are likely to meet. Outwardly confident, good at sports, plenty of friends. But then the pressures of social media influencers, perfect people with perfect bodies having perfect lives. The constant barrage of images of people we are supposed to be. And we are all consumed by those images on our screens, where text messages have replaced actual real conversations.

So many people in education say ‘Read. Read. Read.;’ when I wish it was ‘Talk, Talk. Talk.’ If by being in libraries and schools, Pieces of Us can promote conversations/discussions, between students and teachers or just amongst themselves then even though as my friend says, ‘I can’t help everyone,’ I will have done my best to try.

A big thank you to Stewart Foster for the blog and to Simon and Schuster for the opportunity.

We are delighted to welcome author and illustrator Debi Gliori to the blog to introduce her new picturebook A Cat Called Waverley.  Debi studied illustration at Edinburgh College of Art and has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Strathclyde University.  Debi has won the Red House Children’s Book Award and has twice been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal.  Debi will be talking more about the highly affecting and important picturebook A Cat Called Waverley at the Youth Libraries Group annual conference this year – Representations of Place: New Lands and New Ways of Looking.

Some years ago, I visited a library in Glasgow to lead a storytelling session with an invited primary school class. Before the children arrived, the librarian showed me to the staffroom to drop my bags, and apologised in advance for the smell which, she said, was particularly noticeable in the ladies’ bathroom. She explained that in the colder parts of the year, the library was much prized by the local homeless population. She tilted her head to indicate where a few people sat slumped in forgotten corners of the library, dozing behind newspapers in the quiet warmth of the reading room. The librarian added in a whisper, they sleep here all day, waiting for their laundry to dry. Seeing my puzzled expression, the librarian continued; they wash their underclothes in the bathroom sinks, then drape them across the large Victorian radiators to dry. Imagine.

Indeed. Imagine that your life underwent an unforeseen and catastrophic shift. Imagine having to rely on the kindness of strangers for your survival. Imagine being blamed or shamed for allowing such a fate to befall you. Imagine having no agency, no voice, no vote and no sanctuary for when the winter comes. Back then, all those years ago in Glasgow, I chose not to imagine how appalling such a life would be. I had children to raise, books to write and, heavens, a class of seven-year-olds trooping into the library, wrinkling up their noses and loudly complaining about the smell.

Many years later, in an older and hopefully more empathetic version of myself, I met the human subject of my book A Cat Called Waverley; a homeless war veteran called Darren Greenfield. In my desire to devise a way to help him off the streets of Edinburgh without turning him into the subject of some well-intentioned children’s writer’s charity, I wove Darren’s life into a fictional tale of a war veteran and his faithful cat, Waverley. I hoped not only to highlight how easy it is to fall into homelessness, but also to begin a conversation with children, to shed light on this grotesque state of affairs that wilfully allows our fellow-humans to live without shelter on the streets of our cities. I also wanted to say to Darren - you matter. Your life story matters. It is wrong and unjust that you live on the streets while we live in houses, and hopefully this book will help ensure that such inequality becomes a thing of the past.

For many of us, the main point of contact we have with our homeless fellow-citizens is when we see them asking passing strangers for money on the streets of towns and cities around the UK. Or, when leafing through the broadsheet press, we encounter an advert exhorting us to give generously to one of the charities set up to support homeless people. Sadly, when most of us hear the word ‘homeless’ it doesn’t prompt a surge of empathy or engender more than the faintest wisp of fellow-feeling. Most of us have no direct experience of what it means to have nowhere to call ‘home’.

Whether this lack of empathy is a failure of imagination or a deliberate turning away is immaterial; it results in the same thing. We place a few coins in the outstretched hand and walk on by. We take a deep breath and turn the page. We blank out this unpleasant part of the reality of 21stC life. Moreover, we continue to vote for political parties that not only allow our fellow humans to live on the streets, but whose policies appear to actively encourage a moral climate where homelessness is commonplace. We are encouraged to demonise the unfortunate, to categorise people into strivers and shirkers and thus avoid any responsibility for our common weal. It’s an all-too common story, our collective blindness to inequalities and our morally deficient reluctance to step in to rewrite this potentially disastrous story arc.

Darren Greenfield’s story ended on the streets of Edinburgh. After several years he slipped through the inadequate net of social provisions we extend to our homeless fellow-humans. The news cycle paid brief attention. One more homeless person died on the streets of a first world city. Next?

With the ability to turn the world around me into a story, I’d managed to make over seventy books without once touching on the subject of homelessness. Until Darren. Mainly, I suspect, because I correctly guessed that such a book might not only be difficult to conceive and illustrate, but also that it could be tricky to find a publisher for such a project. I am delighted that not only did A Cat Called Waverley find an empathetic and principled publisher, but it also found the best home imaginable with Otter-Barry Books. Some stories do have a happy ending.

A big thank you to Debi Gliori for the blog and to Otter-Barry Books for the opportunity.