During Anti-Bullying Week 2020 (16 – 20 November), we are delighted to welcome Helen Harvey to the blog to talk about the power and pervasiveness of words.  Helen’s book Emmy Levels Up published on April 1 2021 and was the winner of the United Agents Prize.  A big welcome and thank you to Helen for discussing such an important and personal topic with us.

I’m Helen Harvey, the author of Emmy Levels Up which will be published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. Emmy Levels Up is a book for 8+ readers about a gamer who beats her bullies with the skills she learns from video games.

As a writer and library worker, my life revolves around the power of words – their power to communicate and inform and enthral. The type of bullying I write about in Emmy Levels Up, verbal bullying, also rests on the power of words, how words grant power and take it away.

For me, it was really important to show verbal bullying, without any physical element, because this type of bullying is so common but so hard to understand from the outside. After all, if someone says something mean to you, you can just ignore them, right?

In my experience, no you can’t.

When I was in primary school I was bullied…

No one ever hit me or kicked me or tried to trip me up. There were no physical marks, nothing I could point to and tell a teacher about.

My bullies said my clothes were ugly. They called me names and swore at me. They asked me questions and, whatever answer I gave, they laughed. They did it relentlessly, every day, until I felt like an alien in a human suit, who didn’t belong and would never fit in.

Eventually I told my teacher. I’ve never forgotten what he said…

“Helen, every day I want you to look at yourself in the mirror and say to yourself: I am clever, I am beautiful, I am me.”

I’ve never forgotten his words because they were so useless. My teacher thought he was giving me words of power, but he wasn’t, because all my power had already been stripped away. It didn’t matter whether I thought I was clever or beautiful, all that mattered was what my bullies thought. My teacher had the power to tell my bullies off, to tell them he knew what they were up to and it wasn’t OK. Just with words, he could take some the bullies’ power away and give it back to me. If only he had.

This powerlessness is what I wanted to show in Emmy Levels Up. Emmy treats her bullies’ tactics like levels in a game. She just has to figure out the trick or puzzle, and she’ll beat them. But each time she thinks she’s got it worked out – she just needs to learn their dance routine or change her clothes or use their own insults against them – she finds it doesn’t work. Until eventually she decides there’s nothing she can do. She’s completely powerless.

I wanted to give children going through verbal bullying a way to explain it to someone else: “Look, this book is me, this is why it hurts.” Books have the power to reflect our experiences, and the power to communicate other people’s experiences.

Of course, Emmy finds a way to beat her bullies in the end, and it’s gaming that helps her, after all…

For Emmy, gaming is an escape…

It’s a place where she gets lost in a story, becoming a mighty hero, destined to save the world.

But gaming isn’t just an escape, it’s also a community. Online Emmy is popular and admired for her skills. Like so many people who don’t fit in in real life, her online friends are a lifeline. Ultimately it’s her gaming community that helps Emmy beat her bullies.

The online world is also one of the few places children still get to be independent. This is especially true now that we’re all stuck inside. The online world is a place where young people can be anything they dream of: community leaders, web designers, TV stars, artists and creators, champions.

When I’m not writing, I work in a public library…

…a place which embodies the power of words. The library has always been there when I needed it. I went there to seek the company of books when I was lonely as a teenager, to print job applications when I was unemployed, and to sit somewhere warm when I lived in a freezing rented room.

Before lockdown, I still liked to write in the library on my days off. I like watching the people around me: teenagers eager to get their hands on a new book by their favourite author, couples rushing to print their boarding passes before they leave for their flight, a little girl throwing a strop because she doesn’t want to go home.

A few weeks ago, an elderly patron spent an hour walking around our newly re-opened library, choosing books. When she came to my desk to check them out, she said, “You’ll probably think I’m weird, but this is the happiest hour I’ve spent since we first went into lockdown.”

She didn’t sound weird at all.

Helen Harvey works at her local library. She completed the Bath Spa MA in Writing for Young People with distinction and won the 2017 United Agents Prize. She lives near Cambridge with her lifelong gaming partner and two furry writing companions. Emmy Levels Up is her first book.

Twitter: @HellionHarvey

Emmy Levels Up by Helen Harvey publishes in April 2021

Oxford Children’s | Paperback | 9+ | £6.99 

Followers of Jaclyn Moriarty's work will know her work by its characteristic, left-of-field humour and the extraordinary sense of character that she builds.  We were delighted to discuss her work and latest book, The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone.  

1.   Can you tell us a little about Bronte Mettlestone and the adventures she is forced to embark upon?
 
Bronte Mettlestone was ten-years-old when her parents were killed by pirates.  This did not bother her particularly.  She hardly knew her parents. Bronte had been raised by her Aunt Isabelle and the Butler, her parents having abandoned her as a baby so they could run away and have adventures.  But now Bronte’s parents have left a will requiring her to travel alone throughout the Kingdoms and Empires delivering treasure to her ten other aunts.  The catch is this: the will has been bordered in Faery cross-stitch which means that, if Bronte doesn’t follow its instructions precisely, her hometown will crumble to pieces. 
 
2.    Precocious beyond her years due to her upbringing, Bronte is an intrepid female lead. Throughout the book, she must visit an impressive assortment of aunts.  Were you conscious of creating a matriarchal society and what were your reasons?

That’s a great question. I didn’t start the book thinking, ‘I am going to create a matriarchal society,’ I just decided that Bronte was going on a journey to visit her ten aunts. (I grew up with six aunts, and I’m one of five girls who’ve all grown up and had children—so we’ve become aunts ourselves. I think this might be why I’m fascinated by aunts.)  The more I wrote, the more I liked the fact that most of the characters were women, that these women had various careers, stories and secrets of their own, and that many were in positions of authority. I also liked the fact that Bronte, like most children, was only getting a tantalising glimpse of the complex lives of these aunts. 
(But the world in which Bronte lives is not really a matriarchal society – there are men in positions of power there too. There’s just a bit more of a balance there than in our world …)  
 
 
3.    A ripping yarn that hearkens back to serialised novels of 19th Century, the novel is also a rites of passage with a sense of Bronte's maturation and emotional growth, how important was it to allow her to tell the story in retrospect for achieving this?

Thank you!  I liked the idea that Bronte was telling the story two years after the adventures took place.  This means she’s still a child with some of the sensibilities of a child, but that she also considers herself a little wiser and more world-weary, thanks to her travels and experiences. There’s a big difference between ten and twelve, and I like the way children are constantly leaving their younger selves behind, and trying out new selves.
  
4.    You've written now for middle grade readers, teenagers, young adults and this year had the adult novel, Gravity is the Thing published, are there ways as a writer you adapt your approach for the age groups you write for?

I’m pretty sure a more sensible approach to a writing career is to stick to one genre and one audience, but I love jumping between them.  Also, I keep changing my mind.  I’m a Libra, so I blame the stars for my extreme indecisiveness. 

I was writing Bronte and Gravity at the same time and this was a deliriously happy time.  In the mornings, I’d go to a café and let Bronte tell me the story of her adventures, and in the afternoons I’d come home and listen to the voice of Abigail, the narrator of Gravity. Mornings seemed magical and full of possibility, and afternoons were more thoughtful and grounded in the emotional reality of grown-up relationships, loss and hope.  I don’t think I needed to consciously adapt my approach because the stories and their narrators, and the mood of the day, did that for me.
 
 
5.    Characters and world-building always feel incredibly compelling in your books.   Does this require significant planning or do both 'grow' and develop organically through your writing process?

Thank you again - you are lovely.  World building seems to vary between books for me.  With the Colours of Madeleine trilogy, I spent years drawing maps and collecting features of the world before I started writing.  With The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone, I wrote each chapter in a different café in my neighbourhood without any planning—I just let Bronte discover her world as she journeyed around it.  (After the first draft, though, I did spend a bit of time trying to make sure that Bronte hadn’t made any mistakes.)
I usually spend a lot of time talking to characters inside my head, trying to get to know them and choosing favourite songs etc for them, but some characters—like Emily Thompson in the Ashbury books, and like Bronte herself—are already completely themselves before I’ve even met them.
 
6.    A sense of magic permeates a lot of your work, whether in the gothic musings of students at Ashbury High in Dreaming of Amelia, in The Kingdom of Cello, the faery cross-stitch in The Extremely Incovnenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone and in the Spellbook that Listen discovers in The Spell Book of Listen Taylor.  Are you attracted towards the magical?

 
That’s very perceptive of you… I am extremely drawn to the magical.  My mother has always made magic seem perfectly possible, and she is still so matter-of-fact about fairies in the garden that I find myself wondering.  My favourite books have always been those that are set in a realistic world like ours, that are emotionally authentic, and that have magic all around the edges.

'This Book will make you Fly, will make you Strong, will make you Glad. What's more this book will Mend your Broken Heart.' 
The Spell Book of Listen Taylor

 
7.    Your dad used to commission you to write stories, do you think this played a part in why you Liane and Nicola all became authors?  Were there any particular books that made an impact upon you as a child and have influenced your work? 

It’s funny because Liane and I are always telling the story of how our dad noticed we loved writing and decided to commission us to write books rather than giving us pocket money—and we talk about how special it was to have our father taking our writing so seriously, and how it gave us the motivation to finish and polish our work, and how it made writing seem like a viable career option, etc, etc—but Dad never commissioned Nicola to write. (She was the youngest and got pocket money for free.)  So Dad likes to take credit for all of our writing careers, and Liane and I like to give him the credit, but I guess it was actually possible to grow up to be an author in our family, without the commissioning …  

Books that had a huge impact on me as child and influenced my work include the P.L. Travers Mary Poppins books, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway books, and E. Nesbitt’s The Phoenix and the Carpet.  There were plenty more, I could be listing titles for pages.

8.    Are you able to give any clues as to what readers can expect in The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars, the next book which published with Guppy Books here in the UK in Autumn 2020?

The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars is a kind of prequel to The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone.  It’s set before Bronte was born, in the time just before the Whispering Wars.  In the town of Spindrift, the Kingdom of Storms, a boy named Finlay lives in the Orphanage, and a girl named Honey Bee lives in an exclusive Boarding School.  Finlay and Honey Bee, like the Kingdoms and Empires around them, are about to go to war.