Big Fat Fibs and the Big Fat Fibbers Who Tell Them* - John Dougherty

It’s going to be an unashamedly political post today, folks; but before I begin here are a few pictures from my recent visit to Delhi for the Bookaroo festival:

Big thanks to Jo Williams and the Bookaroo team for inviting me and for organising such a great festival, and to the British School in Delhi for sponsoring my events!

But while I was having such a terrific time in India, hanging out with the 2 Steves and making some lovely new international author friends, events were moving on apace with the campaigns to save our libraries.

Campaigners on Judgement Day

As you may know, on 16th November Mr Justice McKenna ruled in the High Court that Gloucestershire and Somerset County Councils’ plans to drastically cut our library services were unlawful on equalities grounds. “Hurrah!” we all said, as the judge quashed the plans, and told the councils they had to go back to the beginning and start again.

So, what’s the problem? Well, here in Gloucestershire the council’s statements about the High Court judgement have been somewhat austeritical with the truth.

On the day of the judgement, council leader Mark Hawthorne told Channel 4 news that the judge had ruled that the council had not breached its duties under the 1964 Libraries Act - an assertion he repeated on BBC local radio the next day. He has also been widely quoted as saying that “the most important thing here is that the judge said that there is nothing wrong with our plans to transfer some libraries over to communities”.

Nice for the council if it were true. In fact, as explained here, this is based on a misreading. All the judge was saying was (a) it’s for the Secretary of State, not him, to decide whether the council’s plans comply with the act, and (b) since community libraries fall outside statutory provision, they’re not relevant to the act. You can have 100 libraries handed over to communities, or none: the question is, do the council’s own libraries meet the requirements?

Okay; but we can see how that mistake might be made, yeah? I mean, it’s not as if Gloucestershire County Council has its own expensive lawyers to advise them on what the judge meant… Oh, it does? Well… well, maybe they were busy, or at lunch, or at A&E after banging their heads against a wall following the judgement, or something. It’s still a bit harsh, even as a matter of hyperbole, to use the word ‘fibs’ - isn’t it?

No, I don’t think so. You see, in the same interviews, Councillor Hawthorne also claimed that the council had lost only because it had been tripped up on a very small technical point. I’ll repeat that, in his own words: “What we’ve been tripped up on here is a very small technical point.” You can see it around 2 minutes 10 seconds into the Channel 4 video.

Let’s compare that with the judge’s words, as quoted in The Guardian:  the breach of equalities duties was "substantive, not merely a technical or procedural defect".

Hmm… Judge McKenna: “substantive, not merely a technical or procedural defect.”
Cllr Hawthorne: “a very small technical point”.

Who’s telling the truth here, reader?

Here’s a clue: the judge also described the council’s plans as both unlawful and “bad government”, said it was “important to the rule of law” that they be quashed, struck out those plans, refused the council permission to appeal, and awarded full costs against the council.

Councillor Hawthorne may not have been deliberately lying; but he certainly wasn’t telling the truth. And there’s no evidence that he’s retracted his assertions - in fact, all the public statements I've seen from the council suggest to me that they see the High Court judgement as a minor inconvenience, a “small technical point” to be worked around.

So the question I’ve been asking is: is this man really fit to be in charge of our public services?

I have no problem with someone making a mistake. I can forgive someone who makes a huge mistake and then sets about putting it right. But our public servants should respect the rule of law. And the evidence suggests to me that Councillor Hawthorne does not.

*We don’t have a legal team here on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, but if we did I’m sure they’d want me to make clear that today’s title is (a) hyperbole for comic effect, and (b) a whimsical and extremely tenuous reference to Al Franken’s book about something completely different. For the record, I’d like to state that I have no evidence that anyone associated with Gloucestershire County Council is either big or fat. Oh, and I acknowledge that it’s quite possible that they actually believe all of their statements, even those which are demonstrably untrue.


As per our disclaimer, all opinions expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other member of the team, including the site owner.

John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com.
He's also now on twitter as @JohnDougherty8, and consequently will probably never do any work ever again.

His latest books include:

Finn MacCool and the Giant's Causeway - a retelling for the Oxford Reading Tree
Bansi O'Hara and the Edges of Hallowe'en
Zeus Sorts It Out - "A sizzling comedy... a blast for 7+" , and one of The Times' Children's Books of 2011, as chosen by Amanda Craig

BLACK, WHITE AND JUST RIGHT - Malaika Rose Stanley

Mixed-race people have existed ever since our ancestors first set out to explore and wage war - and today, the UK has one of the largest and fastest-growing mixed race populations in the western world. Partly this is because of the greater number of people who choose to define themselves as mixed-race on census forms and elsewhere and partly as the result of more mixed marriages and relationships and more blended, adoptive and step-families.

The BBC’s recent Mixed Britannia series told some of the stories behind the headlines and statistics and stirred up quite a few personal memories of my own. As a result, I decided to try and compile a list of children’s and YA books which feature mixed-race and mixed heritage main characters and I began by asking friends, colleagues, social network contacts and UK publishers to let me know what’s out there.

I didn’t particularly want to politicise the idea but, of course, it is political. For some people, racial mixing represents the hope and positivity of a multicultural society whilst for others, it undermines national and cultural identity.

Simply asking the question raises some tricky issues because the mixed-race (or bi-racial, multi-ethnic, mixed heritage or whatever you want to call it) experience is so varied and complex. Whether someone chooses to identify themselves – or the characters in their books – as mixed-race depends on who’s asking – and why. Is it The Office for National Statistics, a National Book Week event organiser or the British National Party?

Self-definition is crucial and in my experience, physical appearance, familial influence (or lack of it) and racism all affect how mixed-race people identify themselves and this can change at different points in their lives.

                      

            

For me, as the daughter of a Jamaican father and an English mother, I sometimes felt rejected because my skin was too fair and my hair was too straight and sometimes because my skin was too dark and my hair was too frizzy. ‘Mixed-race’ was definitely preferable to the labels of half-caste or coloured that I had dumped on me as a child growing up in care in the 1960s – and to the names I got called at school and in the street.

In the 1970s, complete with my Angela Davis style Afro and radical pan-African and feminist politics, I was shouting it loud: I was black and proud! I was black and beautiful too, although my skin colour was actually rather more beige.

My sons were born in the 1980s and that was when I realised that the lack of diversity in children’s and YA books had persisted from my childhood to theirs. Racial identity has never been the problematic issue for them that it once was for me, but we still had to search hard to find kids that looked like them in the pages of books and it was one of the reasons that I started writing myself. My sons are now both in ‘mixed’ relationships – one with a beautiful young Hindu woman and the other with a beautiful young woman of Irish and Jamaican descent. And if I’m ever lucky enough to have grandchildren, they’ll need books too.

Of course, most families encourage their children to be proud of their cultural heritage, but what happens when, for whatever reason, children do not have access to these family connections?  What happens when mixed-race and multi-ethnic children do not see themselves reflected in books – except possibly as the ‘best friend’ or ‘trusty sidekick’ or in gritty tales of so-called social realism and the tortured search for identity? Where is the magic, the romance, the comedy?

As the mixed-race population has increased, in the media at least, ‘brown is the new black’. Mixed-race people have been appropriated as the supposedly more acceptable and less challenging face of diversity. But that’s not the whole picture. Although mixed-race people are highly visible in some spheres of life – we can model haute couture, win F1 Championships and BAFTAs, and even become the President of the United States - in some fields like educational policy, we are often ignored. Is the same true in children’s and YA publishing?

I contacted the publicity departments of 18 UK publishers – and heard back from only three! Sadly, one of these had no books with mixed-race characters, but OUP sent Catherine Johnson's Face Value - a murder mystery set in the London fashion world - and Barrington Stoke sent James Lovegrove’s The 5 Lords of Pain – a series of fast-paced stories about saving the world. So let’s hear it for models and gangsters and for martial arts, magic and demons from hell! Of course, I have to mention Tamarind – publisher of several picture books and middle grade fiction titles with mixed race characters, including my own Spike and Ali Enson – a story of inter-planetary alien adoption.

I am grateful to everyone who took the time and trouble to let me know about their own and other people’s books: Sarwat Chadda, author of Devil’s Wish and Dark Goddess, featuring ‘bad-ass’ hero, Billi Sangreal; Catherine Johnson, screenwriter and author of ‘enough books to prop up several tables’ including the historical Nest of Vipers and the contemporary Brave New Girl; Eileen Browne, illustrator of Through My Window, now back in print but first published in 1986 when ‘it was the first ever picture book in the UK – and the USA! - about an interracial family, where ethnicity wasn’t part of the story’; Zetta Elliott, author of A Wish After Midnight and networker extraordinaire; and so many others, too numerous to mention.

I hope the final list, now hosted by Elizabeth on the Mixed Race Family website (click here), will be a useful resource for families, children’s centres, schools, etc. Many of the books are quite dated and many are US publications which may be less easily available and less reflective of the British experience, but I felt it was better to leave people to make their own choices and draw their own conclusions. I am happy to correct errors, add omissions and include new publications.

It’s a short list – and not in a good way - but in the end, isn’t quality always more important than quantity?

Innocent Until Proven Experienced - Charlie Butler

One of my favourite New Yorker cartoons depicts a nursery worker explaining her establishment’s ethos to a pair of prospective parents. “We teach them that the world can be an unpredictable, dangerous and sometimes frightening place,” she says as toddlers play around her feet, “while being careful not to spoil their lovely innocence. It’s tricky.”

That combination of mutually-exclusive demands – teach our children about the world, while keeping them innocent of the world – is one that children’s writers also face, from parents and others. When I talk to adults about children’s literature one of the qualities mentioned most often is that of “innocence”. Books that represent innocence, and especially books that work to preserve innocence in their young readers, are to be applauded. Books that raise unpleasant subjects, or include taboos such as death, sex, violence and abuse are to be treated with suspicion. For teenagers, maybe – but for young children? At the same time, there is a demand that books should have some kind of educative value, teaching children about the world in which they live and preparing them for adult life.

As a matter of fact – and this may seem an embarrassing admission for a children’s writer to make – I’m not at all sure what innocence is. It’s usually discussed as if it were a positive quality, but the only ways it seems to be commonly defined are in terms of a lack: lack of experience, lack of knowledge, lack of adult responsibility, lack of cynicism, heedlessness, perhaps even heartlessness. Perhaps innocence is like Captain Hook’s “good form”: you’re not allowed into Pop until you can prove that you don’t know you’ve got it.

I think that there are two contending ideas about childhood here, ones that go far beyond children’s literature and early-years education. They can be represented by two Biblical texts:

Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Mark 10.14)

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face. (I Cor 13.11)

Jesus and St Paul seem here to be singing from different hymn sheets. What are we to make of it? Is growing up a fall from grace, or a consummation to be wished? It may be relevant to remember that St Paul, who I think rather liked the idea of being able to mix it with the Greek philosophers, was addressing a Greek audience. For Greeks such as Aristotle children were simply incomplete adults. Human development was teleological: it had a direction and a goal, that of being a mature (and preferably male) human being. In that context it makes perfect sense to put away childish things, and to associate children with poor spiritual vision. After all, they’re only half finished.

But this Hellenic vision of childhood seems quite incompatible with the one articulated by Jesus, which reverses the direction of travel and says that one must become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven. These opposing visions have coexisted uneasily throughout the last two thousand years. You can watch them contending in all sorts of places. For those of us interested in the history of language, it’s enlightening to see how individual words can become a battle-ground. “Silly,” for example, is now a pejorative – but in Elizabethan English it means something much closer to “inexperienced”, while in older forms yet it means “blessed” or “holy” (as modern German selig still does). That particular word, we might say, has fallen prey to the Pauline vision of childhood. “Innocent” is at the centre of a similar tussle. We like children to be innocent, and in law innocent is the desirable opposite of guilty; but no one wants to be considered an innocent. That would be to be thought ... well, silly.

As the nursery worker said: it’s tricky. But it might help if I had a better idea of what innocence actually was.

We warned you this would happen - John Dougherty

I make no apologies for being angry.

If you haven’t already read or watched the excellent second annual lecture to the Reading Agency, delivered last month by the equally excellent Neil Gaiman, please do. You’ll find much to think about and much to agree with, and perhaps you’ll learn something new, too.



I learned something new. I learned this:

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".

The youngest age-group in question is 16-24, and I’m fairly sure I know why they’ve done so badly. You see, it was 16 years ago - when the youngest in that group were babies, and the eldest were only 8 - that the government began to micro-manage our children’s literacy learning.

Oh, there’d been political interference before then, and increasingly so; but it was with David Blunkett’s appointment as Education Secretary that Her Majesty’s Government became so arrogant as to think that some bloke in Whitehall whose sole experience of education was having gone to school was better placed to decide exactly how children should be taught than were trained, qualified, experienced teachers who actually had those children in front of them.

Blunkett introduced something called the Literacy Hour. Teachers protested: it would inhibit creativity; it would bore children; it would dampen enthusiasm for reading. Tough, said Blunkett, you’re doing it. It’ll raise standards.

Well, Mr Blunkett, it would appear you were wrong about that.

I was a supply teacher in those days, and I remember groans from the children when I announced it was time for Literacy Hour. I remember seeing the light in children’s eyes go out as I cut them short, wanting to hear what they had to say but knowing that I had no choice but to keep to the government-imposed clock. I remember coming home to my wife and saying, “When we have children, I don’t want anybody doing to them what I had to do to those children today.”

But however much teachers complained, the response from government was always, “We know best.”

They didn’t. They really didn’t.

And they still don’t. You see, this is not a party-political complaint. Things are no better now that New Labour is but an old memory. Now we have the coalition. We have Michael Gove ordering a one-size-fits-all phonics regime. We have the top-down imposition of a phonics test that is not fit for purpose. We have teachers pressured into the sort of behaviour recently observed by Marilyn Brocklehurst of Norfolk Children’s Book Centre:

Just sat in and watched a phonics lesson. Child was corrected for reading 'ing'. No Joe, you must say i...nnnnnn....ggggggg. Hmmm
— Marilyn Brocklehurst (@MarilynBrock) November 8, 2013

We have so much evidence to tell us that if our children are going to achieve in literacy - and in school, and in life - they need to learn to read for pleasure. To read for fun. And we have a growing body of evidence to tell us that for this to happen, politicians must not be allowed to micro-manage any aspect of their learning.

But what can we do? Nothing. The Secretary of State for Education has assumed the powers of a dictator - literally; there’s no way of holding him, and it usually is a him, to account. Experts who challenge him are dismissed as, well, whatever is the political insult du jour - at the moment, it’s Marxist - whilst their views are misrepresented way past the point of parody.

I began this piece with the wild-haired Neil Gaiman. By the end, I’ve come to the wild-haired Russell Brand (language warning).



Maybe he’s right. Maybe the whole system is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was.

______________________________________________________________________

John's next book:  

 Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers, illustrated by David Tazzyman & published by OUP in January 2014

Have your name shouted by a badger and get a signed book by bidding online in the Authors for Philippines charity auction. 
Well over 200 other items, including many from Awfully Big Blog Adventure contributors.

The arts - who needs them? Sue Purkiss

Somerset, where I live, is a very beautiful county. (See picture of Glastonbury Tor for example of beauteousness.) It's also very rural. Its only city, Wells, is a pocket Venus, with a population of 10 500. The county town, Taunton, is just that - a town. It is one of the few counties which doesn't have a university. (Bath and Bristol are nearby, but they're not in Somerset.)

So it doesn't have the usual springboards for the arts; it doesn't have very much money. Despite this, there are several small theatres, in Frome, Taunton, Street and Yeovil. There's a group called Takeart, which takes drama round to schools and villages. There are stacks of amazing artists and craftspeople, drawn by the magical landscape of the levels, the hills, woods and streams of Exmoor, the Somerset coast, the Quantocks. And there are writers, of course.

Up until now, the County Council has helped to support the arts. The amount of money involved wasn't huge: £159 000, or 0.0004% of the total budget. (There has never been enough for luxuries such as a literature development officer.) But two days ago, the Conserative led council voted not just to cut the budget by 26% over four years, as had been anticipated: with a fine sweep of the pen, they have decided to cut the arts development budget completely. The only arts projects which will have any support are those which will be able to show a direct economic benefit for the community. Imaginative as they are, organisations such as the theatres and Takeart will find it difficult to plug the holes in their budgets - difficult to persuade other hard-pushed organisations such as the Arts Council to take up the slack.

This seems to be part of a general drift towards a society where the arts are valued only for their direct contribution to the economy. So - universities are to be encouraged by means of funding to favour science over the arts. Students are to pick up the tab for their studies because, after all, they will get a better job because of their degree. There seems to be a notion that artists and thinkers are a luxury, not a necessity in these difficult economic times. Well, I don't believe this is so. Let me quote this, from www.takeart.org:

In Somerset we believe in the transformational power of the arts, their capacity to fire the imagination, their ability to give meaning to our lives and our relationships with each other, a language to enable us to celebrate our common bonds – they empower and enable the 'Big Society'. We also believe all groups in society should be able to access the arts, such as those living in isolated, rural communities or children and young people living in difficult financial circumstances.

Wednesday was a sad day for Somerset. Maybe it's worth considering: why do we remember Ancient Greece? Worthy and important as they no doubt were, is it because of the tax gatherers? Probably not...

I'm proud of it too - John Dougherty

Just for the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen this yet:




Well said, that man.

Whose Serenissima is it anyway? – Michelle Lovric

Last weekend I had the pleasure and privilege of sharing a stage with the wonderful Mary Hoffman at the Ilkley Festival. We were talking about the different ways in which we fictionalize Venice. And one of the questions that came up was this: ‘How do you both feel when you see yet another novel about Venice hitting the bookshop shelves?’

Neither of us owns Venice. We both earn our right to write about Italy novel by novel. But we did admit to a flicker of annoyance at books that cynically employ the undeniable commercial lustre of Venice to gild their lily – or to put a velvet bow on their dog.

Now I have returned from Ilkley to Italy … only to discover that Mary and I have both been thoroughly trumped in our attempts to write a properly Venetian Venice … perhaps. For a Venetian gondolier has just been and gone and published a novel.

Sad to tell, Angelo Tumino’s novel contains nothing of moonlight, romance or lapping waves. Invasione Negata takes the form of a diary of a widowed retired engineer who finds himself living in a condominium in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by immigrants who speak other tongues, cook foreign foods – and persecute, rob and attack the native Italians.

Tumino, 36, claims that he is a gondolier only by economic necessity: his true calling is as a writer. He’s hoping that Invasione negata will lift him away from a life at the oar and into a properly literary existence in front of a computer.

Instead, the slim volume has so far propelled Tumino into controversy. The author claims that the book’s intention is to document the most profound fear that strikes the rich nations of the west – fear of the foreigner. He claims that the politicians are incapable of solving the problems and it is the ordinary citizens who pay the costs of clandestine immigration.

‘I would say it is a tale of metropolitan conflict,’ says Tumino.

What he not saying – according to La Nuova newspaper – is if he’s a member of the right-wing anti-immigration Lega Nord. But that’s not stopping others from labelling him that, and worse. The Indymedia Lombardia website has written a profile of Tumino entitled ‘The Nazi Gondolier’. And describes his work as ‘di chiaro stampo hitleriano’ – ‘of a clearly Hitlerian stamp’. But the site has been much criticized for the intemperance of its coverage, and in other places the novel and its writer have been highly praised.

Tumino protests that the character depicted in the novel is not a self portrait. He adds ‘Reading Stephen King, one might think that this is an author with psychological problems. But in fact he is a totally normal person.’

Invasione negata had its official launch at the fish market in Venice on October 12th, as its author (still) serves on the traghetto between Santa Sofia and Rialto.

In Tumino's top drawer are two other books – a collection of comic short stories – The Gondolier without a Gondola and American Gondolier, a science fiction story set in a Venice that has been bought up by the Americans and is inhabited by android gondoliers.

So is it still safe for Mary and me to go in the water, with our historical novels about Venice and Italy?


LINKS

Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series starts in Venice, with City of Masks. The latest book in the series, City of Ships, is just published by Bloomsbury

Michelle Lovric's latest novels about Venice are The Book of Human Skin (Bloomsbury) for adults, and her children’s book, The Mourning Emporium, the sequel to The Undrowned Child, out on October 28th

Angelo Tumino’s website
gondola photo by Debbie Patterson

Entering The Gay YA Debate - Lucy Coats

"YA Authors Asked to 'Straighten' Gay YA Characters" said the headline in the Guardian on 14th September. I already knew that this story existed from the Twitter #YesToGayYA hashtag, but reading that a (then unnamed) major literary agency in the US would only represent two well-respected authors "on the condition that [they] make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation" really shocked and horrified me.  Malorie Blackman, in the same Guardian article, is quoted as asking the question, "Are we still not over this nonsense?"  Well, aren't we?  And if not, then why not?  We damned well should be. 

Since the original article by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown in the USA, there has been much debate on the subject in the blogosphere and on the social networks, with all the differing viewpoints and arguments brilliantly summed up HERE. You may ask why I'm adding my two-penn'orth, when so much has been written already.  I am not gay (although I have many friends of both sexes who are), and I have not (so far) written a gay character in any of my books. What qualifies me to comment then?  Well, I am a writer.  By definition that means I can and do write about things well outside my own experience.  The novel I have just finished is YA fantasy, set in present-day London, but in my time I have written about pirates, dragons, fairies, mermaids, bears and a long list of mythical beasts and gods.  I also write male teenage characters. I have no actual empirical experience of being any of these things, (although I live with a teenage son, which perhaps allows me to claim a little observational expertise in that area at least!).  If, in my next YA book, one or more of my characters tells me they are gay, I will write their story too--and I'd like to be able to do it without a little nagging voice of censorship in the back of my head telling me that I shouldn't, because 'the market won't buy it'.

The truth is that many teens are gay in varying ways--LGBTQ is the umbrella acronym. Many are confused by this and ashamed, hiding their true natures from their peers, their parents (and even themselves).  Only this week there was a report on the teenage suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer in the US--bullied for being gay, who was told (and this is only one of many dreadful comments) that one of his peers "wouldn't care if [he] died. So just do it. It would make everyone WAY more happier."  Jamey himself wrote just before he killed himself that "I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens.  What do I have to do so people will listen to me?" Amongst a large number of teens, 'gay' is a perjorative word, and being gay is something to be mocked--despite the many PSHE lessons and talks on tolerance and diversity they will have had.  However much we don't like hearing this or don't want it to be so, (and however much some of those teens' opinions or attitudes may change, broaden, become more tolerant as they get older), this casually brutal attitude to gayness is an unpleasant fact of teen life.  Another unpalatable fact is that gay teens are four times as likely to attempt to commit suicide as straight ones.

So what can we, as writers for young people, do about it, other than instilling tolerance in our own families? I'm not saying that a YA book, or even several books portraying strong main characters who happened to be gay, would have saved Jamey (although there is much evidence that positive role models and open discussion of things like rape and self-harm in YA help many kids to cope with their own situations).  But what if there was a bestselling gay YA book as big as, say, Twilight? Would that change teenage opinions radically?  Well--it might make a start on doing so--or at least open up the discussion, (though the 'banned books' brigade would no doubt be out in force to prevent that happening). This is going to be a long and hard-fought battle, and it will not be won easily.  So where could we begin to change attitudes in our readers?  Well, for a start, we can and should lose the fear of writing a male character with a boyfriend, a female character who falls in love with another girl--or even a character who is attracted to both sexes.  I am not in any way advocating writing about LGBTQ teens just for the sake of it, (and there will be some writers who don't want to approach this subject for many and varied reasons)--but I am saying, for those who might: think about it, don't discount it. If it comes naturally,  if you can write your characters sensitively and appropriately, and if it adds something real and positive to your story, then go for it. Personally, I'd like my grandchildren to be born into a world where tolerance and acceptance of gays within YA literature (and in the wider world) is a given--as natural as being right- or left-handed.  To quote Martin Luther King, "I have a dream...", but I am only one person.  To make that dream happen, we all--writers, agents, publishers--first of all have to create, produce and sell amazing, gripping, unputdownable stories for our readers which will break down the barriers of prejudice and intolerance.  It is gradually and slowly (too gradually and too slowly--but that's another story) happening with race in YA.  It can happen with LGBTQ too, but only if we are all convinced of  the importance of standing up and fighting to make it do so.  I am.  Are you?

• Lucy's latest series Greek Beasts and Heroes is out now from Orion Children's Books
• Lucy's Website
• Lucy's Scribble City Central Blog (Shortlisted for the Author Blog Awards 2010)
• Join Lucy's Facebook Fanpage
• Follow Lucy on Twitter
• Lucy is agented by Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor Ltd

The Empty Chair - Celia Rees

Every day, authors appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival give their time to stand in solidarity with persecuted writers by reading aloud from their work. The readings are organised by Scottish PEN, in conjunction with Amnesty International. Pride of place at these events is given to an empty chair. The chair represents those writers who cannot be there, who have to have their words read by others because they live in repressive regimes that seek to silence them by censoring their work; subjecting them to imprisonment, torture, or worse, for daring to express their views and for demanding that their voices be heard.

All the writers taking part in this event must feel, as I did, honoured and humbled to be reading from the work of fellow writers who have suffered, and are suffering, for the right to do something which we take so very much for granted. We are free to write what we like, read what we like, say what we like.

I sat in the tent, listening to my fellow writers reading the words of our brother and sister authors, famous and anonymous, imprisoned or in hiding, in China, in Cuba, in Burma and in Bagdad. All around us events were going on, audiences queuing up, readings being given, while back in the yurt, a fair few egos were on display. I thought about how lightly we hold our freedom to take part in this sharing of words and writing and I found myself looking at that empty chair and wondering: would I be prepared to take the risk? Would any of us? As I did so, words came into my head. Words from the hymn, As I Survey The Wondrous Cross:

my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.

If you are attending trhe Book Festival, go along to show your support and solidarity. These events are free and happen at 5:30 every day.

Blood on the Streets - Dianne Hofmeyr

This morning there was a body on the Fulham Road.

The first line of a thriller? Wish that it were. I can’t get the image from my head.

I rolled out of bed, pulled on my yoga clothes, tucked my mat under my arm and set off. As I came around the corner red and white tape sent signals. Before I had a chance to alter my pace I saw the huge pool of fresh blood… more blood than I’ve ever seen in one place. Things were scattered across the pavement. A discarded rucksack. Bits of cloth. A pair of trainers completely soaked in blood.

The body had been placed in a blue body bag. It lay against the wall of a shop like a rough sleeper stretched out for the night… except there was blood escaping it. There was no one there except a single young police woman taking notes and another policeman fixing up the cordon.

It was the blood-soaked trainers that got to me.

I kept struggling to breathe. In the yoga class it was difficult to still my mind and fill my body with life-giving prana.

A skin too thin. A writer’s eye too developed. Visceral imaginings too developed. I was glad it was August and the usually busy Fulham Road was empty of fathers wheeling their bikes next to boys bound for school or mothers tugging and herding sleepy children.

I thought of Gillian’s post about the school visit and the story that began with a body. Three of my novels begin with a body. One is a drowning, one is not really a body but the bones of someone being returned to her ancestral homeland, and the third is a very brutal knifing that takes place in the Temple of Karnak in the first chapter of Eye of the Sun.

It’s to this knifing that my mind keeps returning. Would I have written this scene so easily, so cavalierly, had I seen a real knifing, real blood and real bloodied clothing lying strewn across a pavement before I wrote it?

At the time my 36 year old son said of this passage – ‘Too much information, mum.’

In the moonlight the dagger is sharp and hard and unforgiving. The blade finds the soft spot just below his ribs and angles upward, seeking his heart. Two quick thrusts. Hard and brutal. The blows make him gasp with their suddenness. No words are possible now. He feels the sharp burn of the blade as the dagger is swiftly withdrawn.

I left it. And so did the editors. Why? Was I trying for sensation - as a tabloid might try to draw readership?

But a real life lost, very real blood spreading across the pavement and a pair of bloodied trainers has tripped me up this morning. If my first reaction was … thank goodness there are no children here to see it, why have I been so callous and cavalier in my writing for young adults?

We write of the real world, of knife crime and blood and what commercialism dictates and I don’t want to say I’ll never write of a murder again, but the body on Fulham Road this morning has pulled me up sharply. When I look at the shelves in a bookstore now I must ask, is the shocking reality of brutality too real to fictionalize again and again for the sake of commercialism in a young person’s novel? Are we encouraging readers to be inured? Are we inured?

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Victims of Tokenism? - John Dougherty

When I was young I was a voracious reader, but I never read any books about children just like me. I don’t think anyone had written any.

There were lots of books about children a bit like me. I mean, most of the kids in the stories I read shared my skin-colour, more or less; but they were English. The Famous Five, the Pevensey children, Wendy Darling and her brothers - English, and posher than me, the lot of them.

But that was okay, because all the children on telly were English too. Clearly, people like me just didn’t get to appear in books and on television. Probably nobody from Northern Ireland had ever written a book, or at least not one good enough to go in the shops.

Well, apart from CS Lewis, I was proud to discover; but he didn’t really count - not properly - because according to the potted biography in my Narnia books, he’d only been born in Belfast. Being born somewhere isn’t the same as living there, and it didn’t say anything about him living in Northern Ireland. Maybe his parents had just been here on holiday or something. He’d certainly done all the interesting things in England, like being a professor. And anyway, he’d written a book, and hadn’t I already learned that people who were from Northern Ireland - I mean really, properly from here - didn’t write books? So he can’t have been from here. Not really.

So while I could enjoy books - and I did, believe me; I did - something inside me just accepted that books were about English kids, and written by English people.

To be fair, there were a few non-English children in some of the books I read. There was Prince Paul in Enid Blyton’s Secret series. He was African - although, as we learned approvingly in The Secret Mountain, his behaviour in the face of danger was just like an English boy’s, so that was okay [Note: see correction in comments, with thanks to Saviour Pirotta]. And I think Donald and Jean in Borrobil were Scottish. I liked Scottish people, probably because they were pretty well the closest you got in fiction to Northern Irish - apart maybe from the odd thick Paddy in sitcoms, and they really didn’t count, because they weren’t like real people at all.

Oh, and there was Nico in The Luck Of Troy. He was Ancient Greek.

I did come across one novel about Northern Ireland, when I was a teenager and they were just starting to invent Teen Fiction. It was called Under Goliath, and it was really good. Of course, it was about the Troubles, because the only time you ever saw anything about Northern Ireland it would be about the Troubles. Even if to me it was about being miserable, and bullied at school, and escaping into magical worlds any chance I got, I understood that to - the people who wrote books and made TV programmes - Northern Ireland meant the Troubles.

It was only a few years ago that I came across a series of books about children like me. By that point, of course, I wasn’t a child any more, but my inner child still was, and he was very happy about it. They’re by Sam McBratney, best known for Guess How Much I Love You, and they’re about Jimmy Zest and his classmates. My inner child and I could tell at once that these were children like us, because they said the sorts of things we and our classmates used to say:

“Ah, go on, give us one of your scones.”
“Go and get lost, Shorty.”
“Go away and give my head peace.”
“Just a wee bit, Gowso, I’m starving!”
“Your head’s a balloon, Zesty.”
“Wise up, Zesty.”

None of the children in the books I read as a boy ever said anything like that, nor did the kids on television - even when Grange Hill was invented - but my classmates and I did. These children, my inner child and I were sure, were Northern Irish children. I looked up Sam McBratney on the web; and, sure enough, he’s from Northern Ireland. I just had to be right.

Best of all, they weren’t Northern Irish children from sectarian areas learning important lessons about tolerance or getting involved with paramilitaries; they were just Northern Irish children being, well, children. Getting into scrapes, falling out, being silly. I loved them.

So when, a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I came across a copy of Jimmy Zest, Super Pest in the library, we borrowed it. But it was a more recent edition - 2002 - than the one I'd read before; and in the illustrations they’d done something terrible.

They’d made two of the characters - Penny Brown and Stephen ‘Gowso’ McGowan - black.

Don’t get me wrong. Black kids are still, I think, under-represented in children’s fiction, as are most minority groups. The tendency in children’s publishing is still to default to white; a few years ago, an editor asked me if, in a story I’d submitted, I could perhaps turn one of the characters - any one - into a black child. To which I replied, “How do you know none of them are?” She’d just assumed they were all white because I hadn’t specified otherwise in the text. And that’s wrong. Where there’s an opportunity to even up the balance in favour of a minority, it should be taken, because all children need to see themselves represented in fiction.

But Northern Ireland does not have a large African-Caribbean population. Take a look here if you don’t believe me. Statistically, it’s enormously unlikely that you’d get two unrelated black children in the same class anywhere in Northern Ireland. Which means that this no longer looks like a book about children from a Northern Irish community.

Jimmy Zest is already about a minority group - a group that’s horribly, horribly under-represented in children’s fiction. And - in the name of equality - they’ve made it look like just another book about English children.

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John's latest book, Zeus Sorts It Out, has just been published by Random House Children's Books, and his next, Bansi O'Hara and the Edges of Hallowe'en, will be published on September 1st.

You can visit his website at www.visitingauthor.com.

I'm going to be away when this post appears on Thursday. If I can get online I'll join in any discussion; if not, I look forward to seeing your comments when I get back! - John

Lyres and Lutes vs Liars and Looters

"Every shop in Clapham high street appears to have been looted. The only shop that has escaped is Waterstone’s.” BBC Radio (via Nick Green)

“This fire he beheld from a tower in the house of Maecenas, and being greatly delighted, as he said, with the beautiful effects of the conflagration, he sung a poem on the ruin of Troy, in the tragic dress he used on the stage.” Suetonius, Life of Nero

“Why read literature? The answer, in a nutshell, was that it made you a better person. Few reasons could have been more persuasive than that. When the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps [...] to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory

“I think elephants are overprotected. But what do I know, sitting in my ivory tower?” Milton Jones

[Nursery teacher to prospective parents] “We teach them that the world can be an unpredictable, dangerous, and sometimes frightening place, while being careful not to spoil their lovely innocence. It’s tricky.” New Yorker cartoon

I’m not going to speculate about the causes of the rioting in London (and now beyond). I learned from November’s student protests and the events in Stokes Croft in Bristol earlier this year, for both of which I was able to talk to trustworthy eye witnesses, that media reports about such things don’t always match reality. This time I’m a long way off and can’t pontificate to any purpose – having said which, I found this post by a London ex-teacher depressing and inspirational in equal measure.

Instead, I want to ask some related questions to which I don’t know the answers. They’re in my mind right now, because when cities are on fire it’s hard not to wonder whether sitting down to write a fantasy is the very best use one could make of one’s time. Am I not fiddling (or playing the lyre, to be historically pedantic) while Rome burns? So this post is really a rather pathetic whinge about what I should be doing with my life, but I’ve disguised it by putting it in the form of a Cosmo personality quiz. No one will notice.

Got your pen and paper? Here goes...

1) Why was Waterstone’s left untouched, when the rest of the street was looted? Is it because:

a) Looters don’t read.

b) Readers don’t loot.

c) Looters do read, and they have such an ingrained respect for bookshops that they would never dream of breaking into them.

d) Books don’t have the same re-sale value as iPhones.

2) If concentration camp commandants can relax with Goethe, and Nero can burn Rome to make an aesthetic backdrop for poetry, is literature:

a) The opiate of the masses and a decadent distraction

b) A tool to help you become a better person.

c) Its own justification.

d) Irrelevant.

3) What’s the most valuable thing that children’s writers can do for children?

a) Teach them the truth about the dangerous world out there.

b) Help them to envisage a better life, and a better world to live it in.

c) Give them experience of timeless pleasures.

d) Make them literate so that they have a useful transferrable skill when they grow up.

Now, let’s see how you scored:

Mostly a): You’re a bit of an anarcho-cynic, aren’t you?

Mostly b): You’re an idealist with a social conscience – books really can change the world!

Mostly c): You’re an aesthete - you might as well be going round with a teddy bear named Aloysius.

Mostly d): You, by contrast, are a philistine who knows the price of everything and value of nothing.

So, dear Abbatistas, what were your results?