The September Nutshell

Jen Storer, portals, and the other kind of reluctant reader

Sep 30, 2024

Dear Reader,

Thank you!

I’ll begin by thanking you for your engagement with last month’s newsletter — I love seeing which links readers click the most (don’t worry, I can’t see who’s clicking what, and besides there are 750+ of you now). From the August Nutshell you went on to explore:

Author & school librarian Karys McEwen’s energetic and expert new Substack, I Read A Lot, a newsletter dedicated to children’s literature
The New Yorker piece in which Dorothy Parker takes down Winnie the Pooh
My 2023 podcast interview with Nina Kenwood about writing comedy for young adults

I like Voracious being a useful portal; a wardrobe made from a tree grown by a Narnian apple seed . . . or something.

Another Magical Portal

Next I want to thank and recommend Jen Storer for her brilliant teaching. Jen is the author of many books for children, including the Truly Tan series, the middle grade fantasy novel Tensy Farlow and the Home for Mislaid Children (shortlisted for several awards), and some wonderful picture books like Clarrie’s Pig Day Out and Blue the Builder’s Dog. She makes online courses for creators via Girl & Duck, and Jen’s course 4 Weeks to Write a Picture Book was the portal to a book contract I signed this month.

Quick origin story:

I took Jen’s picture book course in 2021. I’d been feeling flat and craved instruction — I wanted to feel like a beginner again. Jen is a wonderful nurturer, encouraging playfulness and experimentation, but also the structure and thoughtfulness that children’s books demand. I didn’t come out of the course with a story that was ready to sell but I had something — a few rethinks and revisions later, I multiplied that story into several more and my excellent agent (Annabel Barker) has sold it as a young junior collection. It is a character-led, illustrated collection for 3-7 year olds. As it will be a while til it comes out I’ll save the details for another newsletter.

Main point being: Jen Storer. Let her teach you, whatever stage you are at.

This Month on Voracious:

My curiosity-slash-dread about where ChatGPT could take us is ongoing, so I had a good old-fashioned spiral in a post called Scam and Spam.
In The Secret Garden Game (speaking of portals) I shared how a dead-of-night anxiety crisis podcast led me to reflect on what gratitude could look like to the midlist writer. The post contained a few of the hauntingly beautiful illustrations from the 1914 edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, drawn by Charles Robinson.

I’m not currently open to new paid subscriptions but if you haven’t used up your Voracious freebie yet, perhaps one of those posts is of interest to you.

For new subscribers, here are a couple of older (free) posts you may like:

How To Make Plot Decisions (or The Time I Killed / Did Not Kill The Dog)
Two Children, Two Reading Journeys (observations from a parent and bibliophile)

On That Note (Reading Journeys)

You’ve seen my bookcase (you haven’t? oh, go to Instagram then), which is roughly fifty percent children’s / young adult, so you can imagine that my children did not want for a bedtime story — multiple bedtime stories, and every-other-time-of-day stories, with and without funny voices. I read my heart out every day and can confidently say they loved it. But I can’t ignore how much they adored it whenever my partner — not a bookish man — reluctantly agreed to do the job in my place.

He was the best (worst) reluctant parent reader in the world. And it was the most wonderful (galling) thing to witness.

Not only did he create a kind of feverish excitement about the prospect of him reading them a story by, well, hardly ever reading them a story — he also made it his own by absolutely destroying the way each picture book expected to be read. Instead, he read them comically, like a man who’d been forced to do it, which he had of course — he leaned so far into the truth that it became an intoxicating act. He changed the words, pretended to skip pages, and showed absolutely no respect for the story or the art.

The kids loved it.

Their dad’s act made them scream with laughter. Where with me they’d sit quietly either side, holding my arms, they would clamber and crawl over their dad in delight as he hammed it up more and more. Bedtime with him meant hysteria. As I listened to him butcher our much-loved picture book collection, I loved and hated it equally. “More!” they’d demand when he reached the final, completely made-up ending. “No more,” he’d say, and he’d shut the book. He meant it. “Go to sleep.”

In that state, he’d leave them. Guess whose storytelling the kids remember now that they are 20 and 17?

Yes, they remember his storytelling nights vividly. But I am certain that deep in their bones are all the nights I was the narrator. I suppose the point being that you don’t need to be an expert to read aloud to children or to leave a gleeful mark of book sharing. Children love the interaction either way.

However, for those of us who are deeply enamoured by the picture book, I can recommend a useful new bible.

The Grown-Up’s Guide to Picture Books, written by Lara Cain Gray, illustrated by Timothy Ide and Lorena Carrington, is a beautifully produced A to Z (in a picture book format) that essentially teaches or re-teaches us about the possibilities of picture books.

In this guide, B is for Baddies, E is for Endpapers, I is for Illustrations, L is for Language, and so on, and we learn how to be good caretakers of picture books, how to interact with them fully, alongside one or many children. I’d recommend it for amateur aficionados like me, for teachers and librarians, and anyone looking for a useful entry point.

I was reading an article about Julia Donaldson, who was asked: what’s your blueprint for a bedtime story? She said:

“The best thing about picture books is that they can be anything you like. They can be a joke, or help you come to terms with the death of a grandparent or a pet, they can revel in language or use no words at all. In that sense, there's no blueprint. But people have this idea that children are a peculiar race who like things that are different from what grown-ups like. Everyone likes a good, exciting story with a character who’s out of their comfort zone, and they like an underdog who wins in the end, and a happy ending with a twist, so you're not sure how it's all going to be resolved. Everyone.”

Others books you may enjoy alongside The Grown-Up’s Guide to Picture Books as seen above: Children’s Picturebooks: the art of visual storytelling (originally published in 2012, which also contains a very useful bibliography), the recently published The Haunted Wood: a history of childhood reading, and Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.

3 Recommendations To Finish

I’ve taken up enough of your time. But here are 3 stories that left their mark on me this month:

A 9-part podcast series called Wild Boys, on The Binge (link goes to Apple Podcasts). The first episode is a free listen and the rest is a subscription. I found it diverting and there’s a trove of true crime-esque series to explore on that channel. Wild Boys is about two brothers who emerged from the wilderness and were taken in by a small Canadian town. The younger of the two was so emaciated from his strict diet that he had to be hospitalised, while the older one controlled the narrative of where they had come from. This is a true story from 2003 that was picked up again and resolved twenty years later.
Last year’s memoir Graft by Maggie MacKellar — a year on a Merino wool farm in Tasmania. “You will love this,” said my friend and co-writer Nova Weetman — it’s all birds and animals and motherhood and finding a home away from home, she said, not in those exact words. And I did love it, it’s beautifully crafted. Other September standouts for me: All Fours by Miranda July, sometimes breathtakingly accurate and original, a perimenopausal hero’s journey; and Limberlost by Robbie Arnott, a poetic back-and-forth kind of coming-of-age story set in Tassie — after Graft I wasn’t ready to leave.
Deadly yellow books: there is an ongoing project to analyse old cloth-bound books for the presence of toxic dyes. You can read about it in this article: That Book is Poison.

Thank you for reading Voracious.

So long, September; here’s to October. X