Over the course of our call for pamphlet proposals, we'll
have some of our existing pamphlet authors writing about their experience of
having a pamphlet published with us. Kate Wakeling talks about her children's poetry collection, Moon Juice, which won the CLiPPA award this year!
Moon
Juice is a
mixture of lots of different sorts of poems – there are list poems, riddles,
story poems, character poems – I wanted it to feel sort of technicolour in the
mind’s eye.
Lots of the writing is quite mischievous and playful – the book is peopled by
some absurd characters like Skig the Warrior and Hamster Man – but in the midst
of this mischief, I wanted to explore more serious things like obsession,
difficult moods, death, and how it can be important to challenge certain kinds
of authority. I believe very strongly in the need to talk (and listen) to
children about life’s complex and difficult things – but in a strictly
unsentimental way and with a strong peppering of humour. In this vein, my
favourite poem in the collection is called ‘The Demon Mouth’. It explores the theme of
compulsion and the need for tenderness, but in the midst of some rascally
wordplay and (I hope) a rollicking story.
Working
with The Emma Press has been a joyful experience and I feel enormous gratitude
to Emma and Rachel. Emma brought such a fierce energy and vision to the book.
She made me feel like she wanted to invest in making it the absolute best it
could be, and her creative eye on every aspect of the book’s design and
production made such a profound difference. I’m also so thrilled and grateful
that Emma commissioned the wonderful Latvian illustrator Elina Braslina to work
on Moon Juice. Elina is such a skilled, playful and intuitive
collaborator and she had this amazing instinct for seizing on the nub of each
poem, in ways I’d never foreseen but which then felt like the most brilliant
fit as soon as I saw the image.
Then,
as the collection’s editor, Rachel was such a warm, astute, sensitive (to the
poems and to the author) person to work with. I had the wonderful feeling that
there was no way anything could ‘slip’ in the book – that I was in the hands of
a really terrific brain full of artistry and precision, who was ten-times more
likely to spy a wise amendment than me. I am quite an anxious person and in my
other freelance writing work outside of poetry, I have a fairly strict policy of
never looking at anything I’ve written once its out in the world in print. It’s
interesting that I have no recollection of even a twinge of worry when the
first printed copies of Moon Juice arrived on my doorstep. I knew they’d
be OK. And they were.
This
probably sounds a bit much, but
publishing Moon Juice with The Emma Press has been pretty life-changing
for me. The book won the 2017 CLiPPA and has just been nominated for the CILIP
Carnegie Medal (and Elina’s illustrations have been nominated for the CILIP
Kate Greenaway prize: kapow!), and all this has led to some other exciting
things, like being asked to work on some children’s picture books, and
invitations to give all sorts of performances and workshops. The response to
the book has also given me the confidence to begin imagining that I might one
day soon find the chutzpah to set to work on a children’s novel. I am so
grateful to Emma and Rachel for their belief in my writing and for the skill,
hard work and creative juice they put into the book. And I’d urge anyone
sitting on an unpublished poetry pamphlet to take up this call for submissions
and send it on in.
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