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It is a massive
pleasure to welcome Nicola Davies to
the blog.Nicola studied zoology before
going on to work at the BBC Natural History Unit.Nicola is a multiple award-winning author of
numerous books including poetry, non-fiction and stories.Nicola’s latest book Skrimsli is the second
novel set in the same world as The Song that Sings Us where animals and
humans are able to share their thoughts.In this far-reaching and thought-provoking blog, Nicola reflects on four
decades of working with children and young people.
I’ve been talking to children about nature for all of my adult life, at
first as an enthusiastic undergraduate visiting primary schools to talk about
conservation, then as a TV presenter and as an author. The first thing I have
to report back from four decades of encounters with young people is that all
children want to know about nature, unless they are in the grip of deep misery
or trauma; even then, many children seem to find news from the natural world,
outside their current difficult experience or hospital window, welcome and
cheering. That’s something that hasn’t changed at all in all those years.
But some things have changed. The biggest is that many children no
longer have direct access to nature. There are fewer gardens and parks and many
children, their parents and even grandparents, have grown up without the
ordinary contact with worms and ladybirds, robins and blue tits, that almost
everyone had when I was a kid. The result is that nature is something remote,
almost fictional. The children I meet today may know about lions and sharks,
but they almost certainly couldn’t name a dandelion or a dunnock.
The other big change is children’s level of anxiety about the
destruction of the natural world and climate change. Some children are being
given good quality information about the environmental crisis, and they have
some understanding of the problems, what caused them and what the potential
solutions are. These children, although gravely concerned about the future, are
not so much anxious as angry at the adults in charge who are jeopardising their
futures. I don’t worry about these well-informed kids; anger is a useful and
appropriate response and it will, when they get to adulthood, mean that they
will start to implement change.
The ones I do worry about, are the ones whose grasp of the facts around
climate change and biodiversity loss rests on a project on endangered animals
that they did in year 4. The dire predictions, gloomy warnings, the news of
forest fires and floods filters down to them from adult media all around. They
have no way of placing all this in a context or really understanding what its
all about. All they know is that it is frightening and their response is either
to shut it all out and not want learn about it, or to be paralysed with
anxiety.
I feel very strongly that we have a duty to children to tell them about
climate change, the biggest problem humans have ever faced, and how it’s going
to influence their lives. But we do not have to present this as the unavoidable
apocalypse, because it isn’t. What we do have to do is to tell them is that
running our society on fossil fuels is the past and the future is all about
changing the way we do almost everything. Not just how we power our homes and
grow our food, but how we distribute wealth, how we treat those driven from
their own lands by conflict and climate chaos. It’s about prioritising people
over profit, community over material wealth, about sharing. It is, in short,
about making the world better in every way and children, with their
innate sense of fairness and right, will grasp this idea very readily.
I know that some people will find this tricky. Some still believe that
speaking about climate change is a political matter. But I trained as a
scientist and I deal in facts. Climate change is a fact and so are the actions
we need to take to combat it.
It’s essential that we adults
talk to children about climate change. I know that’s difficult but here are a
few things that may help
1.Clarity. Clearly
presented factual information explained in a way that’s accessible and
intelligible.
2.Action. We all know how miserable feeling powerless is, so
share with children ways in which they can be part of the solution. This might
include protest. In fact it probably should for the sake of children’s mental
health.
3.Time. The battle against climate change won’t be won
overnight. It’s a long job so it’s worth telling children how no European
cathedral was built inside 300 years. Part
of being a human today is being a good ancestor
4.Allies.Children need
to know that natural ecosystems like forests, kelp beds, sea grass meadows and
soil are our allies, soaking up large amounts of Co2.
5.Comfort. As always nature can be a comfort; not the nature on
TV is all its beautifully filmed ,slow-motion gorgeousness, but the dandelion
in the pavement crack, the blackbird singing from the rooftop. The biggest
favour you can do your children and yourself is to reconnect with the simple
nature outside your door- learn its names, notice its beauty and learn from its
resilience and fearlessness.
A big thank you to Nicola Davies for the blog and to Firefly Press and Graeme Williams for the opportunity.
Youth Libraries Group South West are offering a bursary to attend this year's conference. Details can be found below.
This
year the Youth Libraries Group National Conference will be held at The Quays
Hotel in Sheffield, from Friday 16th September to Sunday 18th
September. This year's theme is Reading
The Planet: Libraries in a Changing Climate. The conference will also include the gala
dinner for the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals making this an unmissable
opportunity for all interested in libraries and children's literature.
The
Youth Libraries Group South West regional group would like to offer a full paid
bursary to attend the YLG conference to a delegate who is a CILIP member, and
works in a library role that is associated with working with young people
between ages of 0 to 25 in the South West of England area. The bursary will
cover your admission fee for the full conference programme, refreshments and
all meals including dinner on Friday 16th and lunch on Sunday 18th and access
to the virtual programme. The bursary will also cover up to £100 for train travel
costs (receipts must be provided; standard class only.)Accommodation will not be covered under the
bursary.
If
you like to apply for this bursary, we will need the following information in an
email:
●Full
Name
●Email
Address
●Contact
Number
●CILIP
Membership Number
●Job
Role
●Organisation
Name
●The
county you work in (must be in the South West)
●A
short statement, of no more than 300 words, stating how a paid YLG conference place would be of
professional benefit to you.
Please send your applications by email to
Laura McIsaac-Bailey (Youth Libraries Group South West Secretary) at: ylgsouthwest@gmail.com and in the email subject header
please include the following title: YLG
Conference Bursary Application.
All entries must be submitted by Monday
15th August at 5pm. Applications after this deadline will not be considered.
Please note, if you have been awarded a Bursary from YLG South West in the last
two years, you will not be eligible to apply this year.The Youth Libraries Group South West
committee will review all applications and decide on a winner for the bursary.
The winner of the bursary will be notified by email by Saturday 20th August. We
will also ask the winner to write a blog of their experience of the conference
for the CILIP South West regional website.
All applicant details will be destroyed
after the competition has ended under GDPR regulations.
We
are delighted to welcome Jen Horan, Chair of the Youth Libraries Group to talk
about all things Youth Libraries Group conference.
I
have just been reading an article claiming that “summer FOMO”(that’s fear of missing out, for the kids who don’t
speak acronym) will reach peak levels this year, after two summers of there
being not much to miss out on.I’m
already finding myself envious of social media photos showing beach parties and
cocktail soirees. Gathering together with other people
who share our passions and interests has become such a treasured occurrence
that it enriches our lives now more than ever, and it is something I am valuing
professionally like never before.Now
unfortunately I can’t promise sunshine and sky-high temperatures, but this
September I can guarantee an opportunity to gather together at a live YLG
conference for first time since 2018, and you do not want to miss out on what
we have to offer.
This
year YLG Conference heads to Sheffield, from Friday 16th to Sunday
18th September.Reading the
Planet: Libraries in a Changing Climate will focus on the environment and
climate activism, and we are delighted to be able to offer an incredibly strong
programme, which can be viewed below.Here are just a few of my highlights.
Keynote
speakers will offer a range of presentations including Environmental Activism
in Picture Books, Empowering Young People Through Stories, the Earthwatch
Debate, and Nicola Davis delivering the Robert Westall Memorial Lecture.We have a host of spectacular speakers
including new Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho, who will share his love of
libraries, SF Said, Emma Carroll, Michelle Paver, Sita Brahmachari, Louisa Reid
and Dara McNulty.We are also offering a
great choice of breakout sessions including paper craft and activism workshops,
storywalks, and digital & multiligual storytelling opportunities, giving
you first-hand, practical ideas to take back to your own workplace.
As
always, there will be plenty of opportunities to network, particularly over
book-themed tea breaks and delicious Gala Dinners.Michael Murpurgo joins us on Friday night to
celebrate 40 years of War Horse, and Saturday night hosts presentations
of our 2022 Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal (which may feature the shortlist
shoes that trended on ceremony day Twitter) and YLG Honorary Memberships. And, of course,
it wouldn’t be a YLG Conference without our incredible Publishers’ Exhibition
and bookshop – leave space in your suitcases for all those irresistible
purchases!
Early
bird discounts end on 15th July, so book your place now and leave
FOMO behind as YLG Conference re-ignites our enthusiasm for our profession
after two relentless years.There has
never been a more exciting time to join us. Find out more and book here.
Shaun Tan has been announced as the winner of the 2020 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for his extraordinary collection Tales from the Inner City, a collection of illustrated stories and poems exploring the shifting relations between the natural and human environments and the interconnectedness is suffused through these. Julia Hale, 2020 Chair of judges for the awards describes it as 'a masterwork of illustration'. YLG was delighted to discuss the awards and illustration with Shaun.
The Kate Greenaway is awarded for outstanding illustration, what qualities do you think make illustration outstanding and how important is it for children and young people?
Gosh, that’s that big question! I guess the word outstanding, broken down, means work that stands out, maybe stands apart a little bit. It’s very hard to put one’s finger on what that is, either in the noise of a book fair or the silence of one’s own desk, but you know it when you see it. It just grabs your attention and demands a second look, then and third, a fourth. Other work may not strike you immediately, but will reward sustained attention, will keep on paying dividends. I think that’s basically the measure of good illustration, if you can keep returning to it again and again, seeing different things, sustaining a certain fire of joy or disturbance, something you could hang on your wall forever and be perfectly happy to see it every morning. But there are no set rules for what that is, it doesn’t even have to be well drawn. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure that out – what makes an outstanding illustration.
How important it is for children and young people? Probably best to ask them individually. But to hazard a guess, I would say simple inspiration. Certainly the feedback I get from most young people involves them wanting to let me know that I’ve inspired them to draw and write. I really appreciate that, because it reminds me of the way I was inspired by other artists and writers as a young person. Just that feeling of mind-opening excitement when certain images reveal a whole new way of looking at the world. I think that’s probably the greatest contribution of illustrated books, especially where the reader is aware that they are created by individuals, people not so different from themselves. It inspires further creativity. Each good book is saying ‘look at what you can do with little more than words and drawings’. It’s an invitation to be an artist, the artist that I believe everybody is, regardless of whether they practice a craft. Just using imagination to test your experience of the world, to see things from other points of view, that makes you an artist.
The mission statement for the awards is to ‘inspire and empower the next generation to create a better world through books and reading.’ To what extent do you feel stories and art are able to act as agents of change?
Good question. I think that basically stories are the way that humans think about complex issues. We are an animal that thinks through story. That probably goes back a very long way, where stories, as a chain of events involving various places, characters and emotions, allowed successive generation to remember very big and complex things. Indigenous Australians are particularly good at this, and have been for thousands of years, understanding an intricate and vast geography through songlines and dreaming stories, connecting narrative directly with the land.
In other contexts, I believe stories have a similar function, they lay down ‘dreaming tracks’ in the mind, provide examples of possible outcomes to possible problems. When faced with a difficult situation, we may well be reminded of an anecdote, a book, a film or any story that suggests a way forward, and the principles to follow – particularly ideas about truth, integrity and empathy. That last one is the most important. Stories are basically about empathy, of imagining what it would be like to be someone else. And then recognising that there is no single story – contrary to fundamentalist thinking – but thousands, well, billions. Lots of different ways that things can go, including ways you cannot yet conceive of. Isn’t that why we read? To see something play out that we could not have imagined alone, to be curious about that, to want to think about it carefully. That’s a very good thing to be interested in. That open-mindedness will help you adapt to whatever life throws at you. And it’s going to throw a lot, the good, the bad, the incomprehensible, the downright depressing. How can you take that all in and still move forward?
You’ve spoken in the past about unease with the term ‘illustration’, are there better or more apt terms?
Of course, the definitions of words broaden out in time, so it doesn’t really matter – and certainly a century or so of children’s book illustration has helped with that a great deal. Anyone who appreciates it well knows that it is not about literal ‘illustration’. That said, the term is still misleading for a mainstream that does not study it closely, and it leads to economic, educational and institutional divisions which tend to favour other art forms over book illustration.
When I was an art student, it was actually considered a derogatory term. But I would then be confused by those celebrated painters who, to my eye, where creating close equivalents to book illustration… When I visited the Sistine Chapel for instance, it looked a lot like commercial illustration to me, albeit for an unusual client. Actually the majority of painters throughout history are illustrators, especially if you look beyond western modernism. When I look at Ancient Egyptian friezes, cave paintings, medieval tapestries, Aztec codices, Hindu temples, I see illustrated, figurative stories, very close to picture books and comics. Images that show things happening, with implied beginnings, middles and endings. So I tend to think in terms of narrative painting and drawing. Some art is about singular impressions, either abstract or figurative, and others are about specific things happening, they are narrative images, or ‘illustration’. I have similar thoughts about science fiction and fantasy, that it seems to me more of an historical mainstream than a modern subgenre. So much of human visual culture is basically fantasy illustration.
In any case, I think a lot of those straitjackets of language and definition are dissolving as more and more artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers cross over, or work in different fields simultaneously. Also, it’s nice to see that the boundaries between children’s and adult literature are often transgressed, and that my own books have come to be regarded as either-or. I think we spend too much time talking about differences between groups of readers and creators, when really those differences are often just statements of convenience. We are not too different from each other when it comes to appreciating good art.
You’ve experimented significantly with ideas of media and form from your graphic novel, ’The Arrival’ through to the ‘The Singing Bones’ with its use of sculpture? How do you decide the form and media to use for different projects and how easy is it to garner the support of publishers?
I’ve been pretty lucky to have those opportunities, and to work with very adventurous editors and publishers. Occasionally it’s taken a bit of convincing when the medium doesn’t sound intuitively practical – sculpture for instance – but in each case I would do a few experiments to prove a point, a few complete pages of The Arrival or a few sculptures inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales. Largely to check for myself if they work, particularly because it’s a big commitment to make a book, and I have to fully believe in a style and technique before taking that on. I know when it works when it feels logical or intuitively right, when it does not feel like I’m forcing anything.
The analogy that comes to mind is a puppet; you start by pulling the strings, building and controlling, and if it then begins moving by itself you can cut those manipulative strings. The style and medium is working, movement and feeling flows through it naturally. Good editors can see that too, that is what they are skilled in understanding, sometimes even more so than an artist. Often those experiments don’t work, it feels like you are endlessly pulling strings, masking some falseness, and you start again with something else. The Arrival was very much like that, the final pencilled form is very different from an original, cartoony version, and before that a simplified sculptural version. It was very difficult, and I almost gave up on it, but glad that I kept experimenting until I found a relatively simple solution, albeit a very long one!
Posted By Jacob Hope,
15 May 2020
Updated: 15 May 2020
YLG is delighted to be part of the blog tour for There's a Rang-Tan in My Bedroom.
Libraries have always been about collecting and sharing stories and information. There is a power to this and an ability to achieve change precisely because information and stories help to shape, and so to change us. They alter the way we see the world. It is hard to imagine a more affecting story than There’s a Rang-Tan in My Bedroom.
Perhaps you have seen the Greenpeace video which went viral? The powerful story behind the video was written by James Sellick at Mother London The advert was picked up by frozen food company Iceland for their Christmas commercial following their pledge to remove palm oil from its own-brand products. Richard Walker, managing director for Iceland, commented on the decision:
With palm oil, the urgency of the crisis could not be ignored. We saw a window of opportunity to help organisations like Greenpeace lobby for zero-deforestation palm oil at a time when 146 football pitches of rainforest were being chopped down every hour in Indonesia.”
The video which was produced by Greenpeace was deemed too political for broadcast, but the ensuing discussion and debate around both the video itself and also around socially conscious messages and ideas around censorship helped to make the video go viral.
Hachette bought the rights for a picture book adaptation of the video There’s a Rang-Tan in my Bedroom which published under their Wren and Rook imprint in August 2019. The book features a foreword by Dame Emma Thompson who narrated the original Greenpeace video and alongside the story which has been visually re-imagined by illustrator Frann Preston-Gannon, there is also information about Orangutans – the name comes from Malay words for human ‘orang’ and forest ‘utan’- about deforestation for the production of palm oil and about campaigning for change.
International Orangutan Day takes place on August 19 each year, in the lead up to this, what plans and activities can you make to help share the plight of these magnificent creatures far and wide through your libraries and amongst readers?
Posted By Jacob Hope,
13 May 2020
Updated: 13 May 2020
YLG is delighted to be included in Neal Layton's blog tour for his new book A Climate in Chaos.
It’s easy to underestimate the capacity each of us has to impact on our world. In A Climate in Chaos Neal Layton explores the effects humanity and our actions have upon the environment. It’s an impressively wide-reaching book carefully explaining the difference between weather and climate, the conditions which enabled life to develop on earth and the fragile equilibrium that sustains this.
There is a massive amount for curious minds to discover and explore in the book from a simplified version of the carbon cycle to the threat that climate change poses for various animals and their habitats. It would be easy for a book of this kind to be heavy-handed and didactic in its messaging, but gentle guidance around small actions that can result in big change together with Layton’s vibrant, lively mixed-media illustrations make this an endearingly child-centred which feels both empowering and inspiring.
We all have our part to play in achieving any kind of change and A Climate in Chaos offers an informative and inspiring early introduction to the subject with rich and ample opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning.
Readers who enjoy the book and are looking to explore more may also enjoy:
Jeannie Baker Window
Jess French What a Waste
Neal Layton A Planet full of Plastic
Zoe Tucker, illustrated by Zoe Persico Greta and the Giants
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