Children’s Book Week: A Coffee with Julia Donaldson

Julia Donaldson Interview (Part 2).

When Julia Donaldson, celebrated author of favourite children’s books like The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo’s Child, A Squash and A Squeeze and The Snail and the Whale, answered our email questions for Julia Donaldson Interview (Part 1), we asked if we could meet up in a cafe to ask a few more. She invited us to her house. Investigative reporters, RosyB and Eve, went round for coffee…

Julia Donaldson’s house is a delight. It exudes creativity: books, flowers, puppets, strange objects made out of cardboard or foam that turn out to be pieces of set from her popular stage-shows.

The reason Eve and I – roving reporters for Vulpes Libris – are here having coffee in Julia Donaldson’s kitchen, is because, although we have already interviewed her over email, she is keen to show us the other side of what she does.

“The performing is as much of what I do as the writing,” she explains.

Reading and Performing

The puppets and masks and foam objects all over her house are testament to someone who puts a lot into entertaining her fans: believing kids coming to book festivals don’t want an hour of straight reading, but something a bit more entertaining and interactive than that.

In fact, she adds, she is not sure why schools are so keen to have her visit for the very youngest age-groups. To be honest, she explains, any fun and enthusiastic adult would do; at the age of five, the children have no real concept of what an author really is.

“I will say – any questions? And they’ll be like ME! ME! ME!” (She puts her hand up, craning in demonstration.) “And then they’ll ask something like, “Why are you wearing funny shoes?”

As a child she wanted to be an actress. Now, she says, she has the best of both worlds. She gets to perform on stage and have the exclusive experience of hearing her own words chanted back at her from an adoring and fanatical audience –a rare privilege enjoyed only by the most popular of rock musicians. As she points out ruefully, it’s a bit of cheat in some ways: the audience already love her books, so she is never really judged too harshly.

She hauls down a binbag of stuff – producing a worm (“who’s he?” she wonders aloud, turning him over) and some shells from Sharing a Shell. The familiar face of the Gruffalo himself, with his scary horns and his sharp claws, gazes down at us from the top of a high shelf next to a bird that could be a penguin, possibly a crow.

Different needs of different children

2008 has been a busy year for Julia, having written a startling 14 books already. “But twelve of them are very short,” she reassures us. “They’re add-ons to a phonic reading scheme which I’ve already written.” With a cheeky grin she admits that she was determined to be totally in control of this scheme, which is called Songbirds and is part of the Oxford Reading Tree. She was initially invited to contribute just a few books, “but I knew from past experience how frustrating that can be. You come up with an idea for, say, a dinosaur story, only to be told, ‘Oh, sorry, one of the other authors has just written a dinosaur one’. So I told the publishers I wanted to write all the books.”

“But that’s 48 books!” they said.

“Yeah,” she said, “so what?”

Having the ability to plan a whole series allows Donaldson the freedom to create a range of books for different kinds of children and it is evident from our meeting how passionate she is about reading and learning. She is conscious of the “very different needs of different children”, and returns several times during the course of our visit to the theme of how children learn, what excites and motivates them to pick up a book and read. The Songbirds series allows her to devise a strategy, deliberately setting out to write books in different styles and subjects: nonfiction, rhyming, fantasy, factual; the aim is that there will be something there for every child.

Career in song-writing

Picture books require strict forms and structures and her skills in rhyme and rhythm have been honed by years writing songs for children. “I think any writing has a puzzle side to it,” she explains. “Even a novel.”

She even met her husband, Malcolm, busking round Europe.

“We sang songs from ‘Hair’ and ‘Oliver’ plus lots of Beatles songs, mainly on café terraces in the Champs Elysees. We got spotted by a recording manager who asked us to write a song, so we set a French poem to music. (No contract ensued, but I did get the song-writing bug.) Later, when Malcolm and I were more than ‘just good friends’, we would take his guitar and the big straw hat on holidays, and pay for all our expenses by busking. I would write sometimes write songs in the language of the country – for instance, there’s an Italian one all about pasta! So the busking really was the start of my song-writing career, which later led to the books.”

When she was 22 she sent a tape of her songs to the BBC and for years (“decades actually”) she wrote songs for BBC TV Children’s programmes with a typical commission consisting of a Song about Smells with, “One verse on smelly socks, one verse on smelly cheese and one verse on smelly vegetables.”

The market for TV songs has rather dried up now, but Donaldson still writes songs to accompany her books.

Her very first picture book A Squash and A Squeeze, started off as a television song and would have stayed that way were it not for one mum who listened endlessly to the BBC tape with her child. A decade later this mum still remembered the words, and decided they would make a great picture book. Luckily she happened to be working in publishing.

Rhyming, nonsense and a way of sharing emotions

Julia fetches a large pile of battered picture books which her own children loved, and we sit and leaf through them for a while. There are old favourites of mine like The Tiger Who Came to Tea: a fantastical event in an otherwise ordinary situation. Donaldson herself is particularly attracted to books that revel in language, reading out chunks of Quentin Blake’s Mister Magnolia with affection.

“The words are so exuberant, they are just fantasy and fun, the joy in the language, revelling in nonsense and sounds of words,” she says. “There is something moving in something nonsensical,” she says, looking almost embarrassed.

She is a huge admirer of the rhymes of Edward Lear, Hillaire Belloc and A.A. Milne. I talk about my deep love of Winnie The Pooh and the way I could recite the whole of the first book as a small child. Eve then entertains us with a recitation of King John’s Christmas (with Julia joining in).

We are all getting a bit carried away by this point…
But is all part of the shared experience that Donaldson, as a writer, seems always to be trying to capture in her work.

“Picture books can be a way of expressing a range of feelings and of sharing emotions with your children.”

She cites Michael Rosen’s Sad Book as a good example of how some of the more difficult emotions can be explored through text and pictures. Eve tells us what an important role that book plays in her house with her own children, being ceremoniously brought down from the shelf at times of stress or difficulty.

Julia’s husband, Malcolm, buffing up some shoes before he leaves for work as an external examiner that day, asks, before he leaves, if he may read aloud the manuscript of Julia’s latest story for us.

Inspired by an illustration on the front of one of Malcolm’s medical magazines, Paper Dolls is a lively rhyming piece dealing with memories, bereavement and the cycle of life (and by implication, death) – fun, beautiful, but also very moving.

She looks away while he reads, obviously shy. But he does it with gusto, and pride, before picking up his shoes and making his goodbyes. (It has to be said that both Julia and Malcolm are utterly charming.)

I look over at Eve who is awkwardly wiping away a tear. “Don’t mind me,” she says. “I always cry. The kids think it’s funny.”

I realise that Julia Donaldson sees no limits on her genre: as far as she is concerned picture books can deal with everything, all the important things in life: fun, humour, excitement, the surreal, love of language, deep emotions, loss, sharing and sadness.

It makes you feel like picking up your rhyming pen and having a go yourself.

“I think picture books are just wonderful,” she says.

That says it all.

Further links

Julia Donaldson’s website

Interview with Write Away about one of her latest books Tyrannosaurus Drip

Artlink Central, the charity of which Julia Donaldson is patron, that enables a wide range of marginalised and special needs groups to work with experienced professional artists on arts projects in the Stirling, Falkirkand, Clackmannanshire areas of Central Scotland.

*Photograph of Julia Donaldson and her husband, Malcolm, dressed as a crocodile and a pirate for one of their children’s shows.