A Quick Word... On Roald Dahl

Yesterday, Roald Dahl would've been 95. 2011 also marks another, even more important landmark in the Dahl dynasty though - it is fifty years since the first of his famous children's novels, James and the Giant Peach, hit our shelves.

To celebrate this anniversary, I had the pleasure of running two sessions of games and activities based on his work at Stories Bookshop in Launceston.  Interspersed with readings, we played games about 'snozzcumbers' and glued fragments of macaroni and broccoli onto our own wearable version of Mr Twit's beard.

Revisiting Mr. Dahl's work sent me back to a world of long forgotten memories.   When going to a scholarship interview as a child, I remember being asked what I wanted to do in my future.  I told them I wanted to write books, for kids initially. "I see!  Like J.K. Rowling then?" one of the panellists asked me.  I replied, "No. More like Roald Dahl."  While in the years that followed I would soften even more to J.K Rowling's deeply dense and engrossing world - for sheer imagination, enjoyment, and power across a broad range of books, I knew exactly who I wanted to be.

Reading the books again, I was surprised at their power to shock.  James's horrible aunts 'Spiker and Sponge' are crushed to death in James and the Giant Peach, lying 'ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book.'  A few children gasped with horror as Jack's mum was crunched up by the giant in Revolting Rhymes, another terrible parent with a propensity to hit her child (with - what could be meaner? - the handle of a vacuum cleaner!).  I myself can remember many sleepless nights over The Witches - a terrifying book that I read it again and again regardless.

Roald Dahl's early career as a taste tester for Cadbury's (as if a famous children's writer isn't enough!) is no surprise.  Dahl knew that a little bit of something bad for you doesn't hurt.  In his books the evil meet their come-uppance, and the good triumph through kindness, generosity, and a love of all that is right in the world (which usually includes reading!).  Who can forget the polite and quiet Charlie, who waited patiently while a macabre farce of greed was played out on Wonka's factory tour?  Or the gorgeous Matilda, pushed aside and mistreated by everyone, and yet finally given a chance to restore some balance?

Roald Dahl knew how to make children squeal with delight and horror.  He was entirely unafraid of exposing the desperately horrible world that other writers often feared to touch - the cruelty of adults to children, and the power of children facing overwhelming odds, simply to be themselves.  He was unapologetic, daring, and funny beyond measure.  Like Mr. Wonka's famous Whipplescrumptious delight, Dahl's books feel bad for you - all enjoyment and no nutritional value.  The catch is of course, they are so, so good for you.  Really, they're some of the best there is.

A Quick Word... 'Welcome To The Bookshop' (Clarion Writing Piece #2)

This is my second piece going up for the Clarion Write-a-thon.

If you'd like to buy a piece yourself you can do so for $5 (all funds going to charity).

Read about it and donate here.

This one is for Rach.

WELCOME TO THE BOOKSHOP

(Picture courtesy of Flickr: gadl)

Hello! Yes, come on in. Watch your step there, that bit can be a bit… oh and you'll have to twist and pull for that door.

That's it. Right. Yes! Welcome! The economic winds have been turning in the industry, but there are still a few customers left who like to wander and look at real dead-tree

books, and we're still happy to sell them, so we're a little down, sure, but not out yet.

It is a nice place isn't it? That new book smell makes me dizzy. There's a good team here too, so I think you'll fit in just fine.

...

What was that? Did you say relaxingl? Ha!

Sorry. I didn't mean to be so rude there… with the 'Ha!' and everything. It's just -

The problem with working in a bookshop, the really annoying thing that you will have to deal with every day, is that people can't imagine that selling books could be any more difficult than reading books. They will deny that they think this, but if you tell them you're working in one, they will almost certainly picture you behind the counter with your feet propped up on the desk flicking through an old Penguin Classic like Bernard Black.

What they probably won't picture are the day to day necessities of the industry. The trawling through stacks and stacks of new arrivals out the back because you are sure you saw that book somewhere today. The ordering, the pricing, the allocating, the posting. The invoicing and shipping of mountains of books which sends brave individuals to the computer for days on end. Clicking, clicking, clicking.

They won't see the idiots - perhaps because they sometimes are the idiots. The people who want that book with the green cover by the guy whose name sounds like "netherfield" but isn't actually "netherfield". Or a picture book about a girl who finally uses the potty after screaming at her mother, and amazingly, through sheer skill you find three of them before: "Oh, the girl's name has to be Monique. It's for a girl called Monique, so it's gotta be Monique."

They will infuriate you. They will send you searching for hours and hours through your afternoon for a particular book before announcing they bought it round the corner immediately after they left. (More likely: "Oh that's the title? I'll get it on Amazon.) The worst will yell at you that The Lord of the Rings was definitely written by J.K. Rowling, and that you are an idiot for even bothering to look it up under a different name. Often you are left wondering whether these people read anything at all. Yet while the customer is not always right, it is certainly never permissible to punch them in the face. A grave flaw in society's commercial rules.

You will come to envy those that work for chains like Woolworths and K-mart - with their uniforms, and regular schedules, and little stickers on their water-bottles to show that they haven't stolen them off the shelves. These will strike you as the hallmarks of simplicity, the signifiers of retail as a machine. These people talk in 'shifts', and 'rosters' - words that you will never use. For you there is only work. There is turning up in the morning when there are things to be done, and there is leaving when they are finished. There are long days, extended hours, and parents sitting in the car out the front, the heater on full, desperately fussing about how they will ever get tea ready in time.

You will be exhausted. You will live in the bookshop, and you will stress about the day's decisions and possible mistakes when you aren't in the bookshop. You may not of course sleep in the bookshop, but do not despair, the bookshop will find you in your dreams. You will spend many nights in the bookshop of night, which is rarely very different from the bookshop of waking.

And here's the absolute worst thing. The truly soul-destroying part. The thing that people will never understand, but which will make it a hundred times worse.

You will do all this because you love it.

As much as it drives you crazy, selling books is the best thing there is. When you pass someone one of your favourites and they walk away smiling, and later return and practically strangle you while demanding the next in the series with bleary eyes and drooping jaw, you will know that this is the best job in the world.

It's there in the old couple who comes in every week, bright and early, smiling and dressed the way you might dress for your brother's wedding. It's the parent who wants so desperately for their kid to start reading that they're begging for that magical book - and you know what it is. It's the look on a child's face, fifty pages from the end, huddled in a corner, when the entire store could explode in streamers and glitter and fireworks, and they would move only to turn the page. These things make the hard work worth it.

Because stress my friend, stress is nothing in the face of bright, shining worlds. Stress is nothing in the face of new friends and life-changing observations about places real, and more than real.

Stress is nothing in the face of magic.

And we booksellers -

We deal in magic.

A Quick Word... From Alessandro Baricco

Who's he? Well he's an Italian author, and if the following passage is anything to go by, probably a pretty bloody good one at that. I must admit this piece was stolen from Jonathan Carroll's Blog, which is a fine and splendid place full of wonderful things to read, this being just one of them. I do recommend you check it out.

Blogging has been slow of late, needing to compensate for that which is happening very fast, namely the end of a job (or two), the end of living in a house (or two), and moving from one city to another, beginning a new and exciting chapter (or two) of my life. Also I'm turning 20 next week. All this will be thoroughly documented of course, but for now there is much to do and much wanting to be done, so I ask that you patiently wait, while I leave you in the hands of someone much more talented than I. Over to you Mr. Baricco:

"He puts down the pen, folds the sheet of paper, and slips it inside an envelope. He stands up, takes from his trunk a mahogany box, lifts the lid, lets the letter fall inside, open and unaddressed. In the box are hundreds of identical envelopes, open and unaddressed. He thinks that somewhere in the world he will meet a woman who has always been his woman. Every now and again he regrets that destiny has been so stubbornly determined to make him wait with such indelicate tenacity, but with time he has learned to consider the matter with great serenity. Almost every day, for years now, he has taken pen in hand to write to her. He has no names or addresses to put on the envelopes: but he has a life to recount. And to whom, if not to her? He thinks that when they meet it will be wonderful to place the mahogany box full of letters on her lap and say to her, 'I was waiting for you.'

"She will open the box and slowly, when she so desires, read the letters one by one. As she works her way back up the interminable thread of blue ink she will gather up the years-- the days, the moments-- that that man, before he ever met her, had already given to her. Or perhaps more simply, she will overturn the box and astonished at that comical snowstorm of letters, she will smile, saying to that man, 'You are mad.' And she will love him forever."

-Alessandro Baricco

A Quick Word... On Scaring Children

I remember once as a kid, going for a holiday drive out to our bush property, and when we got there, finding the windows to the house had been smashed, our farm car had been pretty badly beaten up, and just general damage and destruction had been wreaked right around the place. Nothing had been stolen, but I couldn't settle down for our holiday after seeing what had happened. I was terrified.

I was a pretty impressionable and imaginative kid, and trying to sleep in the house that night was an ordeal that still makes my heart beat a little faster even now when I think about it. Whether it was the fringes of a dream, or merely my own paranoia, I started to hear things outside. The sound of young male laughter. The clank and slosh of a jerry can of petrol. The frantic scratch of a match being lit.

Of course, none of those sounds were out there. Whoever did the damage to the place, and whatever reasons they had to do it, they were done now. But I remained terrified just the same.

Fear in children is a powerful and consuming emotion. Children have very powerful imaginations and capacities for belief. While adult fear often presents itself as nervousness, the fear of a child is very different. It has a potency that is so much more obvious to the observer. A child's eyes in a state of fear are very hard to ignore in the adult realm, nothing gets our paternal instinct going like it. And for that reason it is the suggestion of many adults that we are to avoid scaring children, as it is an emotion they are not capable of handling. But this logic denies both the importance and necessary nature of fear, and more importantly, consequently classifies it as a second-grade emotion, and something to be avoided, rather than responsibly embraced.

I mention the issue because the subject has come up recently We'd been planning an evening pirate session for some time now, and decided that as part of the novelty of doing all the activities in the dark we should have a scary story. We came up with a tale about me being a pirate crew member who is taunted by his captain, and later gets revenge by leaving with the loot and allowing my captain to be captured. It was then that my boss suggested that he play the pirate captain, and make the sounds of a peg leg on the stairs near the room we were running the activities in, and shout that he had come back for what was rightfully his.

I thought we'd gone too far. The kids would be terrified, they wouldn't sleep, they wouldn't come back, the parents would be angry. We should just do the activities in a traditional, non-threatening way, and avoid any potential repercussions. Ironically it was my own fear of consquence that was going to stop me doing it.

My boss was adamant it would make the night worthwhile, so the experiment commenced. Later that night after telling the story, we played a quiet card game and there came a rhythmic thumping, and an eerie cough. The kids laughed for a second. Then the man in the corridor began to cackle and yell that he had come back and taken what was rightfully his. Some kids started running round the room, grabbing things for protection. Others sat there wide-eyed and motionless. The more extreme ones screamed at the top of their lungs, while another young boy clutched onto my coat, crying.

The pirate hobbled away, the pancakes were brought out, and many kids began to speculate as to what the stranger might have looked like. Most bounced back immediately, a few others were still tentative and keen to stay pretty close to the adults.

But none had forgotten it. Nearly a week later the same kids are returning to the shop asking me if I have seen the mysterious visitor since. Some are even still wearing the pirate hats they had on the night. Had we done an ordinary pirate activities night, there would have probably been little that redeemed itself in the children's minds. But the fear of the moment had made the entire night unforgettable.

My boss and I were talking to one of the mothers later about our hard decision of whether to include the scary pirate visitor or not. She turned out to be the mother of the crying boy who had followed me around, hands gripped like a vice on my sleeve. He had not slept well that night, she admits, but five days later is still talking about the experience.

I'm not suggesting for a second that we should pass our toddlers Saw IV on DVD and see what they think, but I am suggesting that fear is as important an emotion as any other, and although we shouldn't overstep the boundaries of being frightened, it is important to occasionally experiment with them.

I have been volunteering to visit and perform a reading of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book to local Primary Schools, and one expressed reluctance with what I believe to be the contention that the book was not suitable for its Grade 6 students, due to its opening paragraph which opens with the line 'There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife', and makes it very clear that a family has died in the space just preceding the books opening. The start of the novel is its most frightening part, and although presented with an eye to not being too confronting, sure, it's going to scare a few of the kids. But that fear is useful, by playing with fear in a safe environment, we're teaching kids how to cope with it when they are in an environment that isn't safe. Just as dangerous as a child who takes candy from a stranger, is a child too scared to move, who doesn't run back to mum and dad, but stands there like they have been suddenly frozen in place.

The moment we cover our faces and say "Boo!" to a baby, we are experimenting with fear. A baby laughs obviously, but it laughs as a response to being shocked and surprised. And for some reason we assume that this is the last time a child should feel afraid. But fear is something to be conquered in the long term, something to break down piece by piece and tackle.

Fear is what tells us there is a pirate in the hall, that there is an arsonist outside the bedroom laughing, that there is a monster under the bed. But time and time again we learn that the smartest of souls is not the one that closes their eyes and hopes it all goes away, but the one who bravely turns on the lights, steps outside, and dares to discover the truth.

Gaiman opens his other scary children's book Coraline with a quote from the writer G.K Chesterton: 'Fairytales are more then true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten'. In the same way, fear is not the experience of fright, but the lesson of bravery.

Fear is not there to tell us that the demons and evils of the world lurk around every corner, but instead that even the most terrifying evenutality can be tackled by those that are prepared to take a deep breath and do their best, even against the worst.

If laughter is the expression of feeling released from danger, then fear is the emotion that leads us - from one side to the other - through the danger itself. And for that, it's importance cannot be understated.

Image Source Used By Permission Under Creative Commons License