We are delighted to welcome George Kirk to the blog to discuss her exciting debut picture book Bessie’s Bees.  George is a teacher, librarian and author living in East Lancashire with a passion for creating normative representation of neurodiverse characters in books for young readers. Her first picture book Bessie’s Bees published by Templar, is a neurodiverse picture book with an ADHD girl at its centre.

You know the saying …

“We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there too.”

I bet you do. I bet you love it.

But I don’t agree with it!

Now don’t get in a fluster and certainly don’t flap. Let me explain, and to do that let’s start at the beginning…

‘George’s head was full of bees, absolutely buzzing with them …”

I didn’t know when I wrote my first draft of Bessie’s Bees that it was a neurodiverse picture book- I suspected, but I wasn’t sure.

Having a head full of bees was something I just used to say. One of those things I thought that everyone felt sometimes like ‘having your head in the clouds’. Only for me it wasn’t just some of the time, it was all the time.

I was that girl who grew up covered in bruises and scabs, whose laces were always undone and whose hair was always in knots.  The girl who could never sit still, ever be quiet and certainly didn’t fit in, apart from one place… the library.

I grew up so close to my local library I wasn’t very old before I was allowed to start taking myself.  It was my first taste of freedom, walking in by myself, choosing whichever books I wanted and escaping into them. I could write you a long list of which books I chose right here, right now, but there just isn’t time, so let’s skip ahead to…

My secondary school, an old-fashioned pile something like Hogwarts that sadly didn’t have the library to match. Just a little room of books that had been long forgotten about so long you needed Indiana Jones to find it, or my friend Oggy. Oggy offered to revamp and run it for the lower years and quickly roped me and a few others in. Before long we transformed it into a vibrant hub of activity and creativity. We raised funds to buy fresh stock so now I wasn’t just choosing books for myself, I was doing it for others too.

It was the first time I felt really connected to a group of like-minded people and it inspired my first attempt at a serious novel. ‘Og the Librarian’ followed the misadventures of Og, pupil librarian driven to madness by overdue books who took on a life of human cannibalism… I never did find a publisher for it.

Aren’t words brilliant? In just a few I can transport you 15 years into my future, through university, quite frankly dodgy early lessons of a career in primary teaching and propel you to my days as a parent of babies and toddlers. It was isolating, I was trying and failing to connect again so where did I go?

The library!  But now I wasn’t satisfied with just reading stories, I wanted to tell my own too. And the library let me, encouraged me, they even let me be… GASP… LOUD!

Now, if you have been keeping count you’ll know there’s one more to go. I left teaching, I loved it, but it didn’t love me. My mental health was suffering, and I was struggling to do the one thing I felt driven to do, write. So, when 8 years ago the job of Library Manager came up at my local Grammar School I jumped at it, and thankfully they seemed pretty happy to catch.

Yet again I found myself building up a lively community of young people, creating a space where anyone and everyone who wanted could fit. Many of them had neurodiversions, and I was recognising my younger self in them more and more. I was beginning to suspect that maybe not everybody did have bees in their head after all. So, as I poured this idea into a story, I put myself forward for assessment and discovered I didn’t just have bees, I had ADHBEES! Or coexisting Autism and ADHD to be precise.

I was now sure beyond a doubt that Bessie’s Bees was a neurodiverse story. In fact it was the one that I had needed to read when I first stepped into the local library by myself all those years ago.

So, remember that saying? The one you love?

This is how I think it really should go…

‘We lose ourselves in books and we find ourselves in the library.’

A big thank you to George for a fascinating guest blog!  You can follow George on Instagram @GeorgeKirkTales.