I wanted to share with you some quotations about writing that really make my heart beat faster and my eyes fill up with tears because when I read them I think, ‘That’s it! That’s the truth! So I’m not the only one feeling all the pain of this writerly calling that I have, this passion for words that is so full of pain. At long last I feel understood.’

Here they are.

That is so true. Sometimes when no one else will listen (for instance when I’ve been talking about how much I love quotations that are written in wobbly blurry black writing) I bend over my piece of paper and I whisper things into its tiny little ears.

I was saying this the other day to Wilbur (Wilbur is my butler), I was saying Wilbur, you are so lucky to be able to just go on holiday two days a year and forget about all the rest. I just can’t. I can’t. Not. Work. It’s all work work work work and no play ever. It’s hell. And all these thoughts almost always involve thinking of a sepia picture of a typewriter. NO other way to survive. Absolutely NO WAY. Like even if I eat healthy good food all day and take walks and am rich and have no disease, there’s NO WAY NO WAY to survive if I don’t write. I just DIE for goodness’ sake, I DIE every single FLIPPING TIME. I’m so happy someone’s finally voicing this survival impossibility thing.

OH GOD don’t you hate it when you’re writing in your dreams and someone removes the pen you’re holding in reality which is the pen you’re writing with in your dreams? It completely ruins everything you’re writing in your dreams and your dream book doesn’t get written. Then you’re late on your dream deadline and your dream editor gets so furious! I had to pay back a whole dream advance like that last time because the boyfriend had removed my pen from my hand (‘It was going to stain your pyjamas’ SURE). Such a shame you don’t ever get a dream pen and all this dream writing is conditional on your holding a real pen THANK YOU UNCONSCIOUS.

I think he doesn’t mean really bleeding, I think it’s a metaphor of some kind, but it’s so true because when you write it hurts so much it really feels exactly like someone’s cut your veins open and all the blood is gushing out. It really hurts physically like that. It does. But it’s nothing at the same time, nothing. We endure it, we have to.  Seriously, it’s nothing. Don’t worry. It’s nothing. Ouch… o the pain.

That really strikes a chord with me. I know people who are not writers and it must be strange not to feel desperate all the time. It’s funny to think that we’re the ones who have this burden, this calling, this thing in us that makes us so desperate… Why us? I hope it stops one day because there’s so much despair, but at the same time I don’t want it to stop because I wouldn’t be a writer anymore… Oh I just don’t know.

I like the definition of courage that’s implied in there, because some people would say that courage is, like, jumping into a house on fire, or facing up to someone who’s a horrible racist and misogynist, or finally breaking up with a partner who emotionally manipulates you, but no one ever, ever mentions the courage that you need in those moments when you have to write in a way that scares you a little.

YESSS!!! I mean, YESSSS!!! The sheer number of people I meet who will just tell you offhandedly, ‘Writers’ idea notebooks aren’t important to them’. It’s extraordinary, it’s like you can’t have a normal conversation with anyone without them bringing up that topic. And the effort it takes to convince them otherwise! Next time I’ll just give them this picture and they’ll understand with the broken glass and fishnet wire that we mean it.

I hate those simultaneous yet contradictory delusions. They happen all the time, for instance if I’m tweeting ‘Difficult day with characterisation #amwriting’ and no one retweets or replies, and I think ‘Is that because 1) they don’t care 2) they haven’t seen the tweet 3) they never have this problem with characterisation 4) they’re scared of admitting they have the same problem 5)…’ At least this quote reminds me I’m not alone.

This one is my top number one favourite of all. I couldn’t agree more. Break-ups, deaths, illnesses, genocides, sun death – there are things out there that sound like they could cause agony of a kind or another. But to me, nothing, nothing can ever be equally agonising as the knowledge that I have a story in me that isn’t told. It’s the Platonic idea of agony; everything else is a replica.

I hope you’ve felt inspired too. I’m glad we’re all suffering together, though I still think I suffer a little more.

Yes, yes, I know, I’m one day late for the results of the Book Giveaway for Scam on the Cam! sorrysorry. I’ve been really busy with revisions to an article. And the Cambridge Literary Festival, which was this weekend and was aweeeesome. Awesome like this (thank you Sabine and Caitlin for the pictures!):

Learning to draw Claude with Alex T. Smith!

I’ll replace Alex T. Smith one day clearly

And giving a (sold-out!) talk to lots of children and their parents about Sesame! (let me reassure you, the parents were very well-behaved). The children were completely made of amazingness. Quite a few of them had read the first one or two Sesame books and were asking for more, which is probably a good sign. They invented a brilliant Boat Race mystery involving tying an umbrella to a boat to slow it down, and poisoning rowers with potatoes. Maybe they then put it into practice and that’s why Cambridge lost that same afternoon. Hmm…

Pied Piper Sunday

And meeting many other cool authors, including The Dark Lord himself, Jamie Thompson. Here we are posing with our name cakes. I’ve changed, I know. And he looks a lot like me.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun and it was also extremely exhausting.

The good news is, too, that Scam on the Cam is beginning to be reviewed here and there and also there and readers generally seem to agree that the book isn’t completely toxic and may help facial gymnastics in the sense of lifting the zygomatic bones (the zygomatic bones are the bits of cheek that go up when you laugh, or something like that, I’m not a doctor, I mean I am, but not one that knows about bodies.)

So you see, happy winner of the BOOK GIVEAWAY whose name I shall give below, you’re a really lucky sort of person today!

Let’s see. I wrote down all the names of the sports-events-crashers:

Then I put them inside the book at a strategic place (if you read it you’ll know why)

And I shook the book!

SHAKE SHAKE

SHAKE SHAKE

(dearly hoping only one paper would fall out first)

Well two did.

So I guess I could have been mean and picked one of the two, but you know what? I’m feeling generous today. Irene and Claire, you’ve both won a copy of Scam on the Cam! I hope this fills you with intense joy. Email me your addresses at clementinemel at hotmail dot com and it will be in the post soon!

But for the unlucky of you who didn’t get picked: the great Jim at YA Yeah Yeah is running a giveaway for the THREE Sesame books! All the details are to be found there.

Happy reading everyone!

Clem x

The first part of this blog duology (right there) mostly revolved around the publishing and writing of politically committed children’s literature. But what I was most interested in in my thesis were theoretical conclusions to the analysis of such texts. Here are a few of them (necessarily abbreviated and simplified):

What is the implied child reader of committed children’s literature like?

The child reader addressed by politically committed children’s texts (the ‘implied reader’ in Wolfgang Iser’s vocabulary) is primordially someone who would be receptive to the text and its implications – and who would consequently be both willing and able to act to improve the world following his or her reading. This ideal reader would thus be so struck by his/her reading that s/he would attempt to convert these ‘intangible’ encounters with sociopolitical change into ‘real’ actions.

To put it in Sartrian jargon, such texts ‘call’ for a reader who, ideally, would take up the difficult task of accepting responsibility for the world, and contributing to change it. This task is shared between author and reader.

OK, so basically, it’s an implied child reader who would do exactly what the author asks?

Well, actually… no. At least, never straightforwardly, and especially not in the most complex examples of committed children’s literature, where extremely interesting things can happen.

Let’s take for instance the example of The Tooth, a seemingly simple, but actually beautifully profound picturebook by Avi Slodovnick and Manon Gauthier. This is the story of Marissa, a little girl who has to have a tooth extracted. Her mum tells her she can put the tooth under her pillow, and she will get a coin in exchange for it. Instead, though, the little girl decides to give her tooth to a homeless man – quite logically thinking that he needs a coin more than she does. The man smiles, but the narrator closes the story by saying: “Now all he needed was… a pillow.’

The implied child reader in this picturebook is, as said previously, someone who would actualise the values in the text. But it doesn’t mean that the reader is invited to follow Marissa’s actions. In fact, the text is softly but seriously critical of Marissa’s behaviour. By giving her tooth to the homeless man, she didn’t change anything to his material situation. Of course, she’s not a bad person: symbolically, she did good, and the man thanks her with a smile. And she did notice that this man needed money.

However, her action is hollow. Marissa is at the centre of a web of adult-woven fictions. She believes that the Tooth Fairy exists and gives money in exchange for teeth. She also tacitly believes that everyone, including homeless people, have pillows. She is wrong, and the picturebook is explicit as to the latter belief at the very least: the last page in the picturebook shows an empty bed – a bed in which the homeless man will not sleep tonight.

The young reader is forced by the iconotext to detach him/herself from Marissa and is thereby confronted to a vertiginous wealth of new questions. If giving her tooth was ‘useless’, what should we do? If it’s not enough to notice that there is poverty in the world, how should we act? The picturebook remains silent as to those matters. The young reader is ‘dropped’ there, exactly at the moment when s/he would need an adult ‘guide’, some kind of prescription, some kind of answer… but there is no answer.

From those silences, the ideal young reader of politically committed children’s literature is asked to become, more fully, an actor of his or her nascent political commitment.

But does the adult know what to do?

In my view, no – the adult doesn’t know. The ‘hidden adult’ * of committed children’s literature is above all an anguished, unsure adult, dispossessed of any means to act. Those texts testify to the adult’s disempowerment.This disempowerment is such that it leads to a subservience to another authority, an authority-in-becoming, that of the child.

But of course, no one likes to feel that one’s authority is being threatened. The ‘hidden adult’ of committed children’s literature is no exception (I hope it’s clear that I’m personifying an entity that isn’t ‘really’ a person here). As a result, those texts are also in places extremely prescriptive and authoritarian.

So we end up with a double discourse of the adult in politically committed children’s literature: on the one hand, a discourse of hope and adult disempowerment, on the other hand, a discourse of authority and prescription. This double discourse, it seems to me, can never be simplified into one or the other, though some books tend towards one rather than the other.

*I don’t have the space here to explain Perry Nodelman’s complex concept of ‘the hidden adult’ in children’s literature. Very briefly: it is the adult authority ‘in’ the text, not necessarily coinciding with any adult character, narrator or author; it is the synthetic figure of adulthood extractible from teh text.

So is committed children’s literature by nature utopian and unrealistic?

Yes, but only more explicitly so than other types of children’s literature. Children’s literature addresses children, and children are, for adults, fundamentally beings-in-becoming and therefore future-bound and hopeful (this is, again, the perspective I adhere to, shared by some children’s literature scholars but not all).

They are therefore fundamentally unpredictable. Since they are unpredictable, they are beings who could still be anything. The adult authority therefore seeks to make them adhere to certain positions, and to let them create their own positions.

However, politically committed children’s literature exacerbates this utopianism which is present in all discourses addressed to children. This is, firstly, because of the themes it frequently tackles: it is a literature which talks a lot about the future, about the impact of human actions, about hope, and about children’s ability to do better than adults. Secondly, it is also due to the fact that such literature often focuses on adult imperfections: the shortcomings of the adult world, of adult sociopolitical systems. As a result, the motif of the child and its logical counterpart – the adult-in-becoming – are glorified.

Such a literature is utopian, unrealistic, or at least idealistic, because it explicly ‘counts on’ the child reader: it depends on the child reader. But, I think, in all discourses addressed to children there is a similar request from the adult – a similar desire, a similar anguish to be listened to.

Any discourse targeting children is always in part an acknowledgement of failure by the adult. This acknowledgement is accompanied by a demand, a prayer. Committed children’s literature is a corpus of texts which makes those acknowledgements, demandes, prayers more visible perhaps than other types of children’s literature.

I’ll stop here!

Clem

I thought I’d write a little bit about my PhD thesis, which I defended last year, as I’ve never actually said much about it on this blog or elsewhere. So I’m going to write two blog posts on the matter, for those of you dear readers who might be interested in the relatively unfashionable topic of politically committed children’s literature.

rainbow thesis

In brief: my thesis was principally concerned with children’s literature theory. My starting-point was the currently quite strong theoretical strand of children’s literature which supports the idea that the adult authority, in such texts, is presented as the norm, and/or as more powerful, and the child as other, and/or as less powerful (see list of works at the bottom of this blog post!). My PhD focused on politically committed children’s picturebooks to attempt to nuance this theorisation.

In this first post, a few observations on what politically committed children’s literature looks like today.

Who writes and publishes committed children’s literature these days?

Not a huge amount of people. As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, France is currently in prey to a pathetic wave of paranoia about committed (feminist/ queer) children’s literature, but in fact most children’s literature internationally remains – in the words of Sartre – ’embarquée’ rather than ‘engagée’, namely ‘carried along’ passively by its values rather than actively ‘committed’. Children’s literature that explicitly either attacks or defends an ideological position is rare.

Plus, some countries are keener than others to publish and to value politically committed books for children. Some, including France, the US, Scandinavia, and some Central and South American countries seem to have a strong tradition of and love for committed children’s literature. They also have a number of small or independent publishers for whom political commitment is an editorial line and commercial strategy. It’s not currently the case in the UK.

Aren’t politically committed books just politically correct?

No. Of course, ‘political correctness’ doesn’t have a fixed definition, but it is extremely unfair and reductive to claim that politically committed works for children are just saccharine, bohemian-bourgeois texts attempting to show that everyone can be happy together if we would only stop noticing that he’s Black and she’s a lesbian (and all save the Earth by turning off the tap when we brush our teeth).

Many politically committed books say very disturbing things about, precisely, our ability to live together peacefully. They don’t say it’s easy, they sometimes doubt it’s possible. This is the case for The Island, by Armin Greder, for instance – a picturebook in which an immigrant is treated atrociously, and then thrown back into the sea, by an insulat community. Or Le Peintre des drapeaux, by Alice Brière-Haquet (The Flag Painter), which ends with the death of the main character who’d been painting flags for war-torn countries…

Going back to Sartre: such books can truly stage the extreme difficulty of living among others; the fact that we’re thrown against one another, with so little explanation, so few reasons to get on, that we’re always at risk of making terrible decisions.

But yes, of course, there are also many politically committed books that promote tolerance, friendship, diversity, in naïve and utopian ways. Such books are another facet of the same phenomenon: they try to solve the same anguish. But they do so by giving simple answers rather than asking tricky questions.

And there isn’t one ‘good’ category and one ‘bad’ category, but a spectrum of different books which are all (at least, so I theorised) ideologically ambiguous, even the most ‘simplistic’ ones. It’s this ideological ambiguity that intrigued me.

Does political commitment sell books?

Not to a very wide audience. Politically committed children’s books target very specific groups of people and committed publishers have precise strategies as to which customers they should be approaching. They rely a lot on mediators. They lean on communities of committed reviewers, booksellers, parents and teachers, and on blogs and websites rather than the general media.

Nonetheless, they are overrepresented in major book awards, some of which explicitly value books which lead child readers to think about social and political questions.

Is political commitment the sign of a bad book?

‘Quality’ is a hugely tricky topic, but it’s not justified to state categorically that books which have a ‘message’ are by definition bad books. Publishing houses which focus on such works are in fact generally very keen to focus on aesthetic quality of text and pictures, partly because they know that the books will not sell to a wide audience and that, as a result, the books must seduce mediators and win awards.

Yeah right, but the text and pictures might be beautiful, and the book extremely didactic! No?

Yes, of course. And those texts are clearly prescriptive and pedagogical. They attempt not just to entertain, but also to interpelate the young reader as to the state of the world. This pedagogical function is there by definition.

But before shouting that they’re therefore rubbish since art should be for its own sake, it’s good to think about two things:

1) Supporting politically committed literature isn’t a stupid ideological position. It might sound weird, but it bears repeating. It’s a literary and ideological position which has had quite eminent defenders, from Voltaire to Sartre. Many Nobel Prize winners are ferociously politically committed writers. The opposite trend – ‘art for art’s sake’ – appears in favour these days, at least in ‘adult’ literature. But already in 1963, Roland Barthes was lamenting the ‘exhausting’ alternation of ‘political realism and art for art’s sake, between an ethics of commitment and aesthetic purism’. The seemingly ‘natural’ reaction these days (‘books with a “message” are bad’) is reductive. Political commitment in literature is an amply theorised position which can (and indeed should) be analysed coolly and reasonably (of course I’m saying that because… that’s what I tried to do.)

2) Children’s literature is always-already didactic. Not everyone agrees about this, and many people (especially authors) hate being told that, but for many children’s literature scholars and sociologists of childhood, it’s inescapable. Adults and children are not in an equal relationship with one another. The adult’s ‘mission’ is to socialise the child, whether s/he likes it or not. It’s not a ‘problem’, it’s not a ‘scandal’, it’s not necessarily ‘bad’. Children’s literature is by definition a socialising and acculturating literature, a literature that educates into a society and its values.

It doesn’t necessarily make all adults horrible child-eating monsters

Politically committed children’s literature is a highly prescriptive type of text which reclaims its socialising ‘mission‘ and puts forwards social, political and cultural values in the hope that they will influence the child reader in his or her future life.

Does that mean that politically committed children’s literature manipulates the child reader?

The words ‘manipulation’, ‘indoctrination’, ‘propaganda’, etc. recur among detractors of committed children’s literature. Again, I think it’s a simplistic reaction. ‘Manipulation’ can occur implicitly or explicitly, actively or passively. Feminist critics of (not-committed) children’s books might reproach them with ‘manipulating’ the child reader into associating the presence of one or the other type of genitalia with specific modes of behaviour or types of personality.

Of course, very many politically committed books for children are equally guilty of presenting particular opinions or values as objective and fixed when they are, in fact, debatable and variable.

I’ll stop now, and next time, I’ll share thoughts that are more related to children’s literature theory and the adult-child relationship.

_____________________________________________________________________

Some key works in the area:

On children’s literature theory and the adult-child imbalance

• Gubar, M. (2013). Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 38(4): 450-457.
• Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1994). Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1998). Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature. In K. Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (pp.1-28). London: Macmillan.

• Nikolajeva, M. (2009). Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory. Neohelicon, 36(1), 13-24.
• Nikolajeva, M. (2010). Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. New York: Routledge.
• Nodelman, P. (1992). The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17(1), 29-35.
• Nodelman, P. (2008). The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
• Rose, J. (1984). The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan.

On politically committed, or ‘radical’, or ‘subversive’ children’s literature

• Abate, M.A. (2010). Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

• Mickenberg, J. (2006). Learning From the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Mickenberg, J. & Nel, P. (2008). Tales For Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature. New York: New York University Press.
• Reynolds, K. (2007). Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. London: Macmillan.

I’m starting a new research project!

fascinating, I know.

OK, it’s the project for which I obtained my Junior Research Fellowship from lovely Homerton College, and said Fellowship started in October, so it was high time I began working on the new project. But I’ve had a monograph to write, as you may remember (yes, it’s almost done, yep, oh, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you, we’ll talk about it again when the peer-readers get back to me saying it’s a huge pile of rubbish), and courses to teach, and essays to mark, and books to read.

So the project had been pushed back until NOW. And NOW it’s really got to start because, well…

… because I’ve been invited to present some results from it at a symposium, erm, next, erm… year term month week.

WHAT?

YesIknow. ButIhaven’thadtime. Andwhoareyoutojudge. Anyway, that symposium is on a tiny part of what the new project entails. SO THERE.

My new project as a whole is about cultural and literary representations of child precocity. Nope, it’s not narrower than that yet; I haven’t even reached the narrowing-down stage, it’s that early. But I know it won’t be solely a children’s literature project; I’ll be foraying into other discourses (aw no don’t cry, I’ll still write about children’s books sometimes). I want to be able to jump from Matilda to Ada in the same sentence.

So how do you start researching something so vast? Frankly, I’m not completely sure. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and though thinking doesn’t technically count as research, it organises it. I’ve settled for a number of areas I need to investigate first to lay the foundations of the project.

Some of them I’m already familiar with (children’s literature, philosophy of childhood and education, sociology of childhood); others, less so.

One of them – psychological and sociological research about actual ‘precocious’ children – is completely outside my comfort zone. I don’t generally look at anything to do with real children (why on Earth would anyone). But I need to be able to analyse the discourses of these two fields of study, because scientific studies, discoveries and texts surrounding things contribute, of course, to social, political and cultural representations of those things.

Another one – ‘straight English’ scholarly research about representations of precocious children in literature ‘for adults’ – is, on paper, outside my current field, but I’m comfortable with it. The only danger I face is lack of legitimacy in the eyes of ‘straight English’ researchers, since most of them don’t think children’s literature scholars can actually read anything else than children’s literature (in fact, some doubt that we can even read children’s books). But my study will remain firmly within Childhood Studies, not English.

Finally, there’s another field I’ll need to get acquainted with – visual culture, which ranges from cinema to fine art. No biggie, right? I might eventually discard visual representations of precocious children if the task becomes too daunting, but it would be a shame, because there are so many of them. Again, it’s not my field at all.

Those disciplinary boundaries are a pain, because despite the emphasis laid on multidisciplinary research projects by universities, I don’t have the feeling that they are very popular among academics – especially people in very canonical disciplines. Philosophers, English Literature scholars, Historians don’t like it very much when other people dare to ‘do’ interdisciplinarity with ‘their’ discipline.

(They might look at your funny little hybrid subfield and tell you things about it (that you’ve known for twenty years), but the other way around is more controversial.)

Of course there’s always the danger that you might look like the person who pops into another office in the Ivory Tower and says ‘Do you mind if I borrow that tool of yours for a minute?’ having barely read the instruction manual, so the tool breaks, and whatever they were trying to operate with it breaks, and worse, they don’t even realise anything’s gone wrong.

Fingers crossed this won’t happen (too much) with this project. I have three years (well, two and two-thirds now) of full-time research that I can use to study those areas seriously and methodically, and acquire the legitimacy to branch into other fields of childhood studies (as well as, of course, to get to interesting conclusions about the whole of existence.)

Starting this new research project is looking a bit like walking into relatively hostile countries on a more or less forged visa, and pretending not to notice the locals’ suspicious glances. I’ll let you know if I manage to earn their trust while stealing their treasures.

I’m turning 25 today!

Therefore I’m officially a quarter of a century old, and, as Simone Weil politely told me this morning in my serendipitous current reading, “at twenty-five, it is high time to leave adolescence radically behind oneself…”

I think I’m fine with that, thanks – I hated being a teenager, and I was delighted to leave that bit of existence aside as soon as possible. But I thought a twenty-fifth birthday warranted a lightly self-reflexive blog post on the things I knew and didn’t know I’d do, at the then very old age of twenty-five, when I was a little girl.

And so, when I was a little girl…

When I was a little girl I would never have thought that, at twenty-five, I would be an academic.

I never imagined, until very, very late, that I’d become an academic. First I wanted to be a primary schoolteacher, then I wanted to work in publishing. I hated school. I told my mother, when I was ten or eleven years old, that I would quit school as early as the French system allowed – sixteen years old.

Fourteen years after that inflexible promise, I was out.

Even in my undergrad years, when I’d suddenly discovered, thanks to the UK system, that I loved studying, I didn’t think I’d stay on to do a Masters. Even during my MPhil, it took my supervisor to tell me “Just apply for PhD funding, you never know…”, and the aforesaid funding, for me to realise that this was indeed what I wanted to do more than anything else.

When I was a little girl, I would never have thought that at twenty-five, I would be childless(/free).

Until very late – 21, 22 years old, pretty much – I was convinced that I wanted to have children very early. The idea of being a young parent appealed to me greatly. I’d decided 23 was the perfect age to have a first child. Yep, 23. No idea why, but the arbitrary age was a firm decision.

As you may have noticed, I rarely talk on this blog about my two-year-old toddler. It’s because no such person exists.

Not only have I not fulfilled this youthful oath, but the idea of having children has never been farther from my mind than it is now. Complete change of heart, due, I think, to a variety of factors – some quite interesting, but matter for another blog post.

When I was a little girl, I would never have thought that at twenty-five, I would be constantly in touch with hundreds of people.

As a child and a teenager, I was quite solitary. I used to think I wasn’t very sociable, but I didn’t mind at all – I enjoyed the feeling of self-sufficiency it afforded me. I didn’t think I often met people with whom I felt on the same wavelength. I’d never have thought, of course, that with Facebook and blogs I would have the opportunity to meet and talk to hundreds of people who shared my interests, people with whom I would interact everyday, even though I might never meet them. On the French side, this is exactly what is happening, and I love it. These friendships and acquaintances are only virtual in their manifestations – not in their status. You learn so much, and are enriched so much, when you get in touch so easily with people who think about the same things as you do.

When I was a little girl, I already knew I would be a writer. But not exactly like this…

I always wanted to be a writer, and I never wanted to be a full-time writer. That’s done, but of course when I was a child I imagined something else. Immediately successful books, showers of awards and instant film adaptations. That’s normal for childish daydreams, I think.

But more importantly I never imagined that there would be this weird feeling of inadequacy regarding the books you publish, the constant, nagging impression that they’re not-quite-right, not what you meant – at all. Your name is on them and you sign them to people. But. There’s always something missing.

When I was a little girl, I already knew I’d always be interested in children’s literature and in childhood.

My interest in children’s literature and in childhood were always a part of my life. Even as a child, I was fascinated by childhood as a concept, even though of course I didn’t formulate it in that way. My own childhood, that of others. The passing of time, the end of childhood. Younger children fascinated me, too. I always devoured children’s books, regardless of age guidelines. As a teenager, I wanted to be a school teacher, but then I understood it was the theory that interested me. Not real children, but why adults (and me) were so obsessed with them, and with childhood. As I said, I’d never have thought I’d become an academic, but I knew that what I would do would be linked to childhood.

 When I was a little girl, there were lots of other things I didn’t think I’d do at twenty-five years old.

Living in the UK, of course I couldn’t have foreseen that as a child – but as a teenager I started becoming interested by the English language and Britain. And other things were unexpected. I didn’t think I’d become so engrossed in philosophy one or two years after leaving France, where I’d received rigorous teaching in the discipline but also the impression that it was a dry and cold subject.

My personality has changed, of course. I’m more sociable and more accommodating now than I used to be. I feel much more balanced, less irritable, and less close-minded. But also much more stressed by the passing of time, the urgency of writing, reading, transmitting, learning, creating. I get bored less quickly, but each empty moment is oppressive – I’m more impatient than when I was a child.

And I hope the next twenty-five years are just as full of new opportunities, new discoveries, new books to read and to write, new friends. And at last my own home and an actual job (please!).

As well as more projects, which I see for now as fusing into ‘one’ project, that of thinking in different ways about childhood, always – that concept which still fascinates me even though I left childhood quite a while ago now, and that I’m less sentimental than I used to be about mine and that of others. If anything, it’s made it much more interesting.

My ex-PhD supervisor (who, by the way, is currently writing an amazing abecedary of children’s literature theory and criticism on her own blog) always says to her young Padawans that they must always ask themselves ‘So what?’ about everything they write. Ask yourself ‘So what?’ at the end of your article on ‘Representations of octopi in adventure stories for boys, 1870-1912’, for instance. If the answer is, ‘Well… octopi! in adventure stories!’ then your article is useless and you might as well have spent a month and a half painting the borders of your nostrils with glittery felt-tips.

The implication, of course, is that by asking ‘So what?’ you will attempt to truthfully decide whether your piece is parochial, petty and only concerned with what it attempts to describe (bad) or has wider implications, for the study of children’s literature for instance (good).

This is even more important in actual published work than it is in MPhil and PhD theses. As William Germano says in his book From Dissertation to Book (helpfully recommended by Philip Nel), one of the main differences between a PhD thesis and a monograph drawn from the PhD thesis is scope: while a PhD thesis investigates a tiny aspect of Problem X, the monograph should attempt to make claims about the whole of Problem X.

This was never a problem for me, however, because I am blessed with ridiculous theoretical arrogance. So my self-questioning always went along those lines:

Q. Piece of work finished. SO WHAT?

A. So, existence.

Q. Another piece of work finished. SO WHAT?

A. So, meaning of life.

Q. Another piece. SO WHAT, this time?

A. So, everything about everything.

Q. We are so nailing this ‘so what’ thing!

A. Yeah!

When I had my PhD viva, however, the questioning went along those lines:

Examiners: When you say ‘existence’ here, don’t you mean ‘that little aspect of existence that may or may not be there for everyone’?

Me: No, no, I do mean the whole of existence.

Examiners: Are you sure?

Me: What will happen if I say I’m sure?

Examiners: You’ll probably fail your PhD.

Me: Ah then I guess I’m not sure. In fact, I probably do mean that tiny little aspect of existence that may or may not be there for everyone.

Examiners: And when you say, there, ‘this is something which concerns the whole of children’s literature and in fact every instance of every address to a child, anywhere in the world and for the whole of history’, don’t you mean, ‘this is something that concerns some children’s books’?

Me: No, I…

Examiners: Think of what we just talked about.

Me: Yes, I mean that’s something that concerns just a few books here and there.

Examiners: Good. Do you promise not to make all these grand claims again in your monograph?

Me: Gnnhh.

Examiners: Swear on the life of J.K. Rowling.

Me: Gnnh.

It wasn’t the first time this happened. All my articles rejected from academic journals are generally accompanied by comments along the lines of ‘This is clearly the work of a deluded and vaguely despotic individual who makes hilariously grand claims about everything from the analysis of two lines of an obscure picturebook.’

So now that I’m working on the monograph, I’m going through it all and thinking about whether my answers to ‘So what’ are still absurdly grand or whether I can get away with them. Unfortunately the demon of grand theorisation often wins over the angel of scrupulous criticism.

that angel is so dumb #sodumb

And I do believe in those grand conclusions that I’m now editing down or rectifying. I didn’t just put them there as a forced reply to the question ‘So what?’. I honestly think that I have good reasons to be making those claims, and if these reasons aren’t clear to the reader, it means I’ve failed at explaining them, not that they weren’t there to start with. So I endlessly edit the explanations so they lead more clearly to the Theory.

I can’t help it, I have much more patience for grand systems, grand theories, outrageous hypotheses, than for microscopic examinations of quite interesting properties of some texts. At least the former can fail spectacularly, whereas the latter will only ever achieve an uninspiring sort of success.

Well, that’s what I like to think, anyway. I wouldn’t recognise myself in a piece of work, however conscientious, that wouldn’t have those grand answers to that ‘So what?’ question.

No, I wouldn’t recognise myself, and that’s why this ‘So what’ question pertains to so much more than just research. I can’t just ask ‘So what?’ of individual pieces of writing. I also need to ask myself ‘So what?’ about the relevance of that writing to my own life. So what? Why am I doing this? What is the point? Is my existence being transformed by what I’m researching and writing? It very much is and very much has been, as I think it should.

‘So what?’ isn’t just a professional question about the impact of your research on the rest of the discipline. It’s a private question, one that interrogates your life project. What you research is a part of yourself, so what? So it must have an impact on you. The boundaries can’t ever be clear between the personal and the professional, between what you work on and what you are.

Well, so what?

so, existence.

Thanks so much to all the participants! So many buildings!

(And so many of you are scared of heights! maybe I should have asked another question – it seemed like quite a few of you would have gladly climbed down the stairs to an underground house on Tatooine rather than climb up a building)

We got:

– The Leaning Tower of Pisa for Chris

– The Shard for Sumeep

– Bag End (how Tatooinesque!) for Erica

– The Millennium Dome for Claire

– Edinburgh Castle for Jen

– The Space Needle for Philip

– La Géode for Audrey

– The Sydney Opera House for Annie

– Nothing for Sardine who is officially the most scared of heights

– The Walkie Talkie for Phil

– The Taj Mahal for Agathe

– The Qutub Minar for Rhea

– The Newby-McMahon Building for R.A.

And yes, I had to google some of them…

The Space Needle (presumably useful for sewing up black holes)

The Qutub Minar, thanks to Rhea (pic ©Krupasindhu Muduli)

And the Newby-McMahon, the world’s smallest skyscraper, apparently! (pic ©Solomon Chaim)

I obviously knew La Géode already, since it’s in my city, but if you don’t, you should have a look…

Anyway, here’s the pile of building-climbers in the symbolic form of bits of paper with their names on, before I turned them over…

And thanks to the Deity of Randomness, here’s the person who’s so lucky today that he should immediately go buy a lottery ticket:

Congrats, Chris! You’ve won Gargoyles Gone AWOL! I’m sure this is the single most exciting event of the last five minutes for you.

And your glee will be redoubled when you hear that the book will be signed not just by my delicate hand, but also by Sarah Horne’s, the illustrator of the books, who added her own autograph to the giveaway copy when I saw her the other day at Bath.

So email me your address and you’ll get the book!

Thanks so much everyone who took part. Safe climbing,

Clem x

As a result of all those things not happening, I’m now (unofficially until I graduate) Dr Beauvais. Yippee!

And the two examiners who allowed this to happen are Louise Joy and Kimberley Reynolds, and my supervisor was there, of course, the legendary Maria Nikolajeva, and my mother was there, as well as my excellent boyfriend a., and my lovely close friend and PhD companion Erin. Then we went out to dinner, all of us and another two friends, Debbie (have a look at her funny poem about writing a thesis!) and Oakleigh who has her own viva this week.

So it was all very nice and I got cards saying ‘Congratulations Dr Beauvais’ and now every time I pick up the phone it’s someone saying ‘What’s up, doc?’ and I feel it will get old at some point but for now all is well.

And, related news, I’ve now signed a contract for an academic monograph more or less drawn from the thesis, which will come out hopefully at the end of next year and is provisionally entitledThe Mighty Child: Powers and Temporality in Children’s Literature.

For those of you who might be genuinely interested in what actually happened in the viva: it was extremely interesting and enriching, and not scary. We discussed mostly how what was in the thesis could be converted into acceptable monograph material. There will be a lot of changes, enhancements and cuts necessary, so it was great to be able to talk that through with the examiners. A lot of the comments and questions were about my theoretical framework and my concepts: they were both quite ahistorical, so we discussed ways of making my claims more contextual and more precise. I’ve always had a (probably quite Gallic) tendency to generalise and universe, and my examiners encouraged me to remain aware of historical and cultural differences in conceptualisations of childhood, of time, of power etc; which is what my thesis (and the future book) is all about.

Clem x

Because I haven’t done one of those yet, so maybe I should!  here are the latest news since Sesame Seade Book 1 – Sleuth on Skates came out a month and a half ago…

Sesame at Foyles! (thank you Ed!)

Reviews

We’ve had a touching review from Parents in Touch, a wicked review from Bookwitch, some nice Goodreads & Amazon comments, an amazing review-cum-life-experience blog post by Robin Stevens in which she recounts her own Sesamish childhood, a great review on the ABBA website by Pippa Goodhart, a lovely not-scribbled review on Scribbles Book Reviews.

I also had a guest post on the very cool Girls Heart Books website, where I talk about the genesis of the book and the fact that I like not getting rid of the parents.

Events

I haven’t started doing events quite yet, but I will soon…

Soon being…

– Sunday 7th July: talk + reading at the Christ’s College Family Day, as the Development Office were kind enough to invite me (charity begins at home, hey). Closed event, I’m afraid!

– Saturday 13th July, 11am : talk + reading at Waterstones Cambridge – this one is open to all.

– Monday, 30th September, 10:30 : event at the Bath Kids Literature Festival, scaringly entitled ‘Supersleuthing with Clementine Beauvais’.

Gargoyles Gone AWOL

Meanwhile, preparations for the second book, Gargoyles Gone AWOL, are well underway. I’ve just received the dummy cover for the book, and it’s getting to know the dummy cover for the first book. Soon it will be the two books that will have to share bookshelf space… coming out October 3rd!

Official cover!

That’s all for now! Going back to rerererereading my PhD thesis now – my viva is on Monday…

Clem x