Julia Wakefield

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It’s never too late to Emerge

I wrote in my blog a while ago that I’d just started writing a middle grade novel, after decades of telling myself that I could only write and illustrate picture books. I actually finished that novel and found a publisher, but for various reasons the publication didn’t go ahead. So I’m still looking for a home for that one, but in the meantime I started researching my second idea, which I had at about the same time as the first idea. It was such an enormous task that I wondered if I’d ever get around to writing the story. I needed a carrot to get me started, and some TLC from someone who believes in me to keep me going. I don’t respond to whipping or cajoling: I just need someone to lead me to a starting block and to say: ‘You can finish this!’

So I was both amazed and overjoyed when I was granted the Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship by the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust. I fitted the criteria – I was an emerging Middle Grade writer, with no published books in that genre. My topic definitely connects with Australian themes. I was a little worried that I was a South Australian – surely they were looking for applications from other states? But I was told that SA residents are always welcome, and not enough of us have been applying!

Members of the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust at the welcoming dinner they gave me. I’m the one in the middle with glasses, sitting between May Gibbs Trust Patron, Mary Wilson, and children’s author Elizabeth Hutchins.

Now that I’ve spent almost three weeks living in the Burrow, I fully appreciate having had the opportunity to live close to the city centre, just 10 minutes’ bus ride from Writers’ Week, where I spent the first week, and the State Library, where I’ve spent half of the other two weeks. My real home is 40 minutes away by car, with all the nightmares of driving through traffic and finding a park. So I’ve had no excuses to prevent me from fully immersing myself in my topic. This month has been the driest and hottest March I can remember, so I was delighted to discover that the Burrow lives up to its name – it’s cool and dark, and surrounded by green tunnels – streets lined with leafy trees. It’s also quite close to some beautiful parkland, which I managed to walk to when the weather finally cooled down.

Until today, however, I’ve been feeling a little like a drowning sailor, with all the information gathering I’ve been doing. I’ve been trying to pull all the threads together to create a coherent story. Writers’ Week was both inspiring and a little disconcerting. On Children’s and YA Day I gleaned tips from super-organised writers who advised us to give your protagonist a goal, list the problems that will be encountered, and have the ending worked out before you start writing. But later in the week, some of the adult fiction writers declared that they never knew in advance what they were going to write, and just let the ideas flow, employing vague structural ideas such as symphonies, or ‘having faith in the form revealing itself’.

In the end I found all the conflicting advice totally liberating – there is no recipe for writing a book. But as I’m writing a historical novel, I have to get my facts right, so that is the biggest hurdle. First I need to find the information, then I have to decide how much of it I need, and then I have to mould it into my story. I am now at stage 2, and that is quite a high bar to have reached after less than two weeks of intensive research. In addition to having the run of the State Library collections, I’ve been granted the privilege of viewing some of the original botanical specimens that were collected on two of the early exploratory voyages around the Australian coastline.

Lindl Lawton, publicist at Adelaide Botanical Gardens, and botanist Helen Vonow inspect the specimens collected by early Australian explorers, which are housed in the State Herbarium

I’ve been able to chat to several specialists in the history of the early Australian navigators, who revealed so much more information that my head began to throb with the weight of it all. Danielle Clode is an inspiration – she adds creative imagination to all her histories, writes fiction as well, and is as versatile as some of the early scientist explorers, who couldn’t afford to be specialists when there were so many tasks involved in a voyage such as manning a ship, tending to the sick, mapping the coastline and recording discoveries. With the help of the State Library staff and local writer/historian Anthony Laube, who is a member of the May Gibbs Foundation Board, I discovered I was able to consult historical journals, view original engravings and purchase a giant copy of the French explorers’ map of Australia, which has helped me to picture the voyages much more clearly. However, I also needed to draw a map of my own in order to fully understand the timelines of the voyages, and the immensity of the undertaking that both explorers faced.

A copy of the original map of ‘Nouvelle Hollande’, created by Louis Claude Freycinet, which was published in 1808.

My messy timeline, using an outline based on the map of ‘Terra Australis’, created by Matthew Flinders and published in 1814.

I still have to pay a visit to the Maritime Museum, where I will be able to dive more deeply into the challenges of shipboard life. I’ve already had a bit of a taste of this – I volunteered for a while on the One and All Sail Training Ship, and I spent two wonderful – and relatively sleepless – nights on Nightwatch on the Endeavour Replica, when she came to Port Adelaide in February 2016.

I’ve received plenty of TLC during this first sprint from the members of the May Gibbs Trust. I was welcomed by children’s author Elizabeth Hutchins, who has encouraged and mentored me in such a welcoming manner that I feel we’ve been friends all our lives. And last week, when I met nearly all the Trust members at a welcoming dinner, I felt I was part of one big family of book lovers and creatives.

My current task, the process of simplifying and streamlining history into a children’s novel, is just as challenging as including all the facts would be for a historian – and it will probably take just as long, but at least I’ve made a start! As for the story – you’ll have to wait until it’s finished!

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Combining words with pictures to record your Covid stories

A workshop to stimulate your creativity, and maybe a recipe for survival in these uncertain times.

As I enjoy writing as much as I enjoy creating pictures, I always love having the opportunity to talk about both, and how one sparks off the other. When my friend and fellow-poet Maria Vouis asked me if I’d like to take part in presenting a life-writing workshop for SA Health, utilising prose, poetry and pictures, I jumped at the chance.

Maria, 2022 winner of SA’s Satura prize for Poetry and MC/fellow co-coordinator of our musicians/poets’ open mic Southern Poets’ Interactive Network (SPIN for short) and I have received funding from SA Health – Ageing Well Grants to run four whole-day workshops to be held in outlying areas of the city, as well as in two rural districts, enabling local residents to take advantage of a facility that is rarely available within their community.

Viral Lines encourages participants to combine poetry, prose and visuals to capture their personal COVID stories of struggle, survival and victory. It uses poetry and prose as memoir, combined with visual storytelling such as drawing and photo-collage, to explore this testing time in collective and personal history.

When I looked at my own coping strategies during the worst of the lockdowns, I realised that I was using Instagram to record my daily thoughts, both to offer a little solace to those who were suffering far greater privations than I was, and also to derive comfort from communicating with others who were experiencing anxiety similar to my own.

I created a very silly cartoon strip on Instagram called Rat of the Year 2020 that ran for precisely four episodes before I ran out of inspiration. But boy, was it a good way to let off steam! I also wrote a few haiku, some of which turned into haiga. Here’s an example:

During the workshop I will be talking about these and other ways to combine words and pictures, both as a coping mechanism and as a way to explore new pathways in creativity.

The workshops are aimed at seniors but they are open to all ages and all levels of experience. For teachers, social workers, counsellors and other professionals, we offer a Professional Development Certificate.

‘Life Writing’ is a powerful voicing tool that focuses on and integrates profound and challenging experiences. We would love to hear, read and look at your stories. The workshop provides a forum for sharing, empathising, and strengthening social relationships, thereby helping to forge resilience and reduce isolation in the community.

There will be four workshops, starting with Seaford, SA on Saturday August 6, 10am – 4pm, followed by Whyalla on Saturday 27.8.22, and Goolwa on Saturday 17.9.22. The fourth workshop date and location is pending.

The workshop cost is $30 or $25 concession, and includes morning tea.

If you’re interested in booking for one of the workshops, please contact me via my contact page.

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A new year, and a new direction

When I started this blog I thought I was going to talk mainly about picture books. I had no idea that after a year of studying picture books, writing and illustrating my own picture books, and submitting multiple times with no tangible success, I would suddenly be inspired to write a middle grade novel. I’m still not sure how it happened, but maybe it was because I’d started to read a lot of recent middle grade novels, and I found I was enjoying them as much as any adult novel. And then I heard that publishers were looking for middle grade novels. And then I had an idea for one.

I’m still at the early stages of my novel, but I’ve already discovered that a) I love writing for this level, b) it’s extremely hard work but I don’t mind a bit, and c) all that hard work I put into learning how to write picture books has been an enormous help. I am still determined to get my picture books published, but writing for middle grade is easier in one respect: I don’t have to think about leaving imaginative space for the pictures! That means I can have enormous fun describing scenes and characters.

I have some favourite middle grade novels, dating from a long time ago right up to the present day.

When I was a child, there was no such thing as a middle grade novel. There were books for children that had a few pictures, and books for older children that had no pictures. Middle grade novels are aimed at 8 to 12 year-olds, and the children in the stories are usually aged 10 to 13. I’m not sure how old Moomin and his friends were supposed to be, but I lapped up the Moomin books when I was 8 or 9. I also enjoyed the Wind in the Willows, The Borrowers, The Little Grey Men (that made me cry) and the Hobbit, but none of these books were about children just like me.

I read some of the classic stories about children such as Tom’s Midnight Garden, the E Nesbit books and the Narnia books, but none of the children in these stories seemed contemporary.

These days there are more and more books that seem to be exclusively child-centred, and address a wealth of modern childhood problems from bullying to gender identity. There are fantasy books, sci-fi, magic realism and historical adventures, but most of them seem to feature child protagonists.

I have listed below some of my favourites so far. I don’t intend to cover all the genres, as I prefer semi-fantasies that are rooted in the real world over pure fantasy or realism. But in two of these books the real world is more dominant than in the others.

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. Every middle grade author seems to love this one. It’s realistic, but the children invent a fantasy world to escape into. The realism is almost too hard to bear, but we know the hero will come through the experience and become a stronger person.

The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon. This is another book that contains harrowing realism, but there is a more ambiguous streak of fantasy in here that gives hope even in the darkest moments. The writing style is brilliant.

The Last Bear by Hannah Gold. The realism becomes a little far-fetched when the heroine goes with her scientist father to stay on a remote island in the Arctic circle, and then befriends a polar bear. But somehow you’re compelled to believe it all. And the bear is so lovable.

The Unicorn in the Barn by Jacqueline Ogburn. It’s very easy to believe in unicorns when a pregnant one turns up in the vet’s barn. But magic is not necessarily that helpful when you’re dealing with real life. This is a clever mixture of facing up to real problems and a magical adventure that nearly goes terribly wrong.

I will add to this list in future posts. None of these titles resemble the book I’m writing, but I found them all inspiring in different ways. I’d love to know if you have read some of these books and enjoyed them too. And can you recommend some to me?

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Mentorship part 3: Overcoming Impostor Syndrome.

My PB#chat mentorship finished at the beginning of December last year, when I had to upload the first 100 words of the manuscript and four of the illustrations to a showcase that took place during the first week of December. Agents and publishers from all over the USA were invited to view. Unfortunately I couldn’t show my dummy book – which I was quite proud of – but I figured that if an agent was interested in the story I could send them the dummy when they contacted me. I felt I’d finally clambered out of the uncanny valley between making Elton too human-looking and making him too realistic. I was also satisfied with my sample illustrations, which were carefully selected to reflect Elton’s character, some of the other characters, and the landscape he lives in.

Then I sat back and waited for the offers to come rolling in.

But it didn’t quite happen the way I’d expected it to. No comments at all! I noticed that some of my fellow mentees were getting anything up to seven or eight comments from agents and publishers. By the end of the week, only a few of us had received no requests for a submission. What was wrong with us? I wondered if they didn’t like my illustrations. I wondered if they didn’t like the way the story was going. When you write and illustrate a story it’s very easy to feel impostor’s syndrome three times over: ‘Am I a lousy writer? Am I a lousy illustrator? Do I suck at both?’

I looked again at what was currently being published. I consulted my fellow mentees and together we discussed what the agents had been looking for. I concluded in the end that – plain and simple – my story just wasn’t the current flavor of the month.

So I picked myself up off the floor and did what all rejected creators have to do – I got on with another story. This time I didn’t illustrate it – I wanted the story to make it on its own. This story has had plenty of approving peer reviews, and Brian also had a quick look and liked it! So it’s up on the SCBWI Winter Conference Manuscript Showcase (viewable only to agents and publishers) right now, from Feb 19, for 2 weeks. And I put three illustrations for another story that I’ve written into the Winter Conference Illustrators’ Portfolio which you can view here. I’m somewhere near the end as it’s listed alphabetically. Look for the three blue ones. Wish me luck, but I’m not stopping there. My mentorship with Brian Lies has given me the confidence and determination to keep sending off my stories, with and without illustrations, to agents and publishers in Australia, the US and the UK where I grew up. Some time, somewhere, someone will like my stuff and offer me a contract! Some day my ship will come!

One of my images from SCBWI Winter Conference Portfolio

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Mentorship Part 2: the story evolves

Almost two months into my mentorship, and Elton’s Ears is taking shape in new ways that I’d never anticipated. The story is just about resolved at last: Raven is merely hinting at a way that Elton might find his way home, allowing Elton to do all the thinking for himself. So the next stage is to make sure the characters are consistent. In the process of developing the layout I ended up with some very sketchy drawings and some more finished ones, so I needed to get them all looking as though they belonged to the same book. The image above was my first sketch for Elton trying to stand up for the first time. The image below is the more refined version. I’ve lost some of the spontaneity on the way, but Brian reassured me that that happens to him too! Especially once the colour is added, children (and some adults) will need a more finished image in order to ‘read’ the action. Plus, in the process of transforming the drawings, I decided to give Elton a triumphant expression in the last picture.

I’d already gathered all the deer drawings together and started to compare them, noticing that in some, Elton looked much bigger next to his Mum than in others, and after studying Mule Deer a little more closely I made Dad a whole lot chunkier and Mum became a little more streamlined.

Brian still pointed out that the antlers don’t look quite in perspective – I may have to construct a model out of pipe cleaners!

I now have to think carefully about the repeated images of Elton in various stages of surprise and panic. He needs to look and act like a mule deer but at the same time he has to appeal to children, so his emotions have to be recognisably similar to human emotions.

In his first encounter with loud noises, he began as a little too exaggerated:

His eyes are just a bit too human, he has teeth like a horse and a neck like a giraffe! Notice also that the text is in front of the drawing. Publishers hate that! So I needed to move the text outside his ears, plus a member of my critique group pointed out that ‘croak’ is the sound that frogs make. After a discussion between friends about the relative noises made by Australian and American ravens (we refer to them all as ‘crows’ in Australia, but in fact most Australian ‘crows’ are ravens) I decided that ‘Karrk’ was the best compromise for a sound made by both species.

So here I’ve adjusted his face so it’s more realistic, but Brian thinks it’s still in that ‘uncanny valley’ which falls between ‘not quite animal’ and ‘not quite human’. I need to make his eyes more deer-like, and less human. I’ve also made his ears smaller, because the story is not about his ears being abnormally large, it’s about the fear induced by the sudden amplification of noises.

I’m still working on varying Elton’s posture, to express panic and fear, speed, delight and relief.

Brian has given me a useful tip: he says if I print out all the ‘Elton’ faces, I can compare them and analyse whether they all look like the same character from different angles. He traces one face and overlays it on the others to compare relative proportions, in the same way as an animator would do.

All this preparation – long before I embark on the final illustrations! But it’s well worth it. I learned from another mentor, the water colourist Alan Ramachandran, that your picture will be 10 times better for every hour you put into preparing beforehand. Next time you pick up a picture book, consider that each picture may have taken between 4 and 40 hours to complete: and that’s only after all that previous preparation undertaken by both writer and illustrator, not to mention the editor and the designer!

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Mentorship, Part 1: Kill your Darlings

When I submitted my manuscript for the #PBChat Mentorship program, I thought I had taken the story as far down the road to completion as possible. That is, I’d shown it to a peer critique group, I’d worked on the dummy book for several weeks, and I’d put it in a drawer for several weeks, then taken it out and worked on it, then repeated the process several more times. But what I hadn’t done was show it to an author/illustrator like Brian Lies who has extensive experience both as a professional creator and as a mentor. And that’s exactly what I needed to do!

Brian and I haven’t met online yet, but he’s already given me a wealth of advice in what he called his ‘first thoughts’ – all three pages of them! One of the most valuable tips he gave was to pay attention to the pacing of my story. Once I have the story laid out in dummy book form, it’s not just all about the page turn. There will be fast-moving parts of the story which need the counterpoint of slower passages, and I hadn’t thought much about that aspect at all. Tomie de Paola compared creating picture books with writing, directing and performing an opera or a musical, because you are engaging your audience with language, rhythm, colour, emotion, story and action all at once – so why not music as well? And just as we need quiet passages in a musical performance, so we need comforting pauses in a fast-moving children’s story.

Brian made several excellent suggestions about the positioning of the characters, such as making sure that your hero is not placed so far away in the picture that you can’t see his facial expression, or you can’t empathise with his situation because you aren’t right in there with him. But he also drew attention to the fact that my hero wasn’t really resolving the situation himself – he was getting too many hints from his helpful companion, the Raven. I needed to make the Raven’s character more subtle so that he didn’t just behave like a schoolteacher, but gave Elton the opportunity to work things out on his own.

I ended up pasting my original layout into a giant storyboard which I joined together from four A4 sheets. I took out two scenes that I felt weren’t needed, and added another spread to slow down the action in the first few pages, which then contrasts with the buildup of momentum in the second half of the story. I downloaded a template for this purpose from storyboardnotebook.com The first spread represents the cover design, which at the moment I have repeated as the CIPdata/title page spread. The blank pages represent end papers, plus a blank in the middle of the book that needed an extra illustration, to represent the calm before the next disturbing event.

You’ll notice that the animal sounds are very large and a little worrying! Brian suggested I make them less distorted, so a child could read them more easily.

In my next blog post, I’ll demonstrate what happened after I started applying some more of the changes that Brian suggested.

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Opportunity Knocks

When I began writing this blog last month I said I would occasionally talk about my own picture books, as well as describing the picture books, both recent and ancient, that impress me. I wasn’t expecting to have any exciting news about my own work for a long time to come, but I was mistaken!

Yesterday I woke up to discover that I had been selected to receive a mentorship with one of my favourite American author/illustrators, Brian Lies. This is a dream come true. I applied for the mentorship through PBChat, thinking I’d be highly unlikely to get anywhere as the competition is US based and there must be a million aspiring US author/illustrators who’d be grasping at the chance. So it was a huge surprise to find I was a winner!

The little fellow in the picture at the top of the page is the one who earned me this privilege. His name is Elton and his story was inspired by my Canadian grandson, who at the time of my second visit to his home in the Rockies, BC, was very afraid of loud noises. Together we sat down and made up a story about a mule deer who had ultra sensitive hearing – which led him into all sorts of trouble! Elton eventually discovers that his ears can be extremely useful, once he knows how to use them.

I’m hoping Brian will help me to hone the story and pictures into something that will be acceptable to publishers. At the moment it’s in the raw state of early conception, and as the weeks of the mentorship go by I’ll be documenting its progress, both story and pictures.

I love the way Brian writes, and his drawings are exquisite. His book ‘The Rough Patch’ moved me to tears. So I know I will learn a lot from him, and I feel very fortunate. To sample the way he crafts his stories, listen to the two interviews that are posted on the home page of his website.

One of Brian Lies’ beautiful illustrations for ‘*The Rough Patch’*

I’m so grateful to Justin Colon, the inspiration behind PBChat. I’m now part of a whole new community of fellow mentees, and I’m determined to make the most of every moment of my mentorship.

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Blog

As this is my brand new website (my old website was getting overloaded with diverse topics that have preoccupied me over the last 20 years), the focus in this blog is going to be on my first, current and future passion – picture books. I have always loved picture books, but I was never as serious about writing and illustrating them as I am now. Having worked as an illustrator, a poet and a printmaker, these occupations have helped me to appreciate the power of words and pictures more than ever before.

I will use this blog to create a library of my favourite picture books, past and present. I will analyse why I like them, what is uniquely special about them, and how they were created.

Just occasionally there will be some news about my own picture books, which I’m constantly working on.

For my first post, I’m going to mention a book that captured my heart a few weeks ago. I subscribe to a wonderful website called Brain Pickings, and this is where I discovered Pinnochio: the Origin Story by Alessandro Sanna.

This is an almost wordless picture book, something which publishers are often very afraid of publishing. They feel that parents and teachers need a story to narrate to the children, but I found this story very easy to narrate to my granddaughter – the pictures told me exactly what to say. They are watercolours, rendered in the brightest colours, using a seemingly effortless technique that evolves with the natural flow of the medium (you can see Alessandro working in this youtube video). The story is on one level just a series of adventures experienced by – a twig. But the beauty of the images somehow gives it greater depths; I compare it to listening to Beethoven’s pastoral symphony, if you can get the Disney images out of your head and concentrate on the power of the music instead. Because we don’t have a didactic narrative, Sanna’s pictures literally speak for themselves.

As to the meaning of this story, my granddaughter never asked me to explain. She simply absorbed the pictures, feeling the emotions that the images evoked, and empathising with the little stick creature. She didn’t know the Pinocchio story and had never seen the Disney version, even though she is totally up to date with the latest Disney epics.

I suggest you read the article in Brain Pickings and then buy the book for your child, someone else’s child, or yourself. You won’t regret it.

I’ve won a signed book!

Illustration by Tim Warnes for *Weasel is Worried* by Ciara Gavin

I seem to be on a lucky streak – I’ve won quite a few books in internet giveaways recently. But my best win so far has been the most recent one – a book illustrated by Tim Warnes, one of my favourite picture book writer/illustrators. It’s called Weasel is Worried, but also goes by the name A Little Bit Worried. I follow Tim’s blog, and you can read all about this book here on his latest blog post. It was published at a timely moment, when we were all deeply worried about the Covid pandemic. But it’s still highly relevant, when so many of us get hyper anxious about events, and children need reassurance more than ever from their caregivers.

I’ve always used writing, drawing and painting (and printmaking) as a way to release tension, so it’s a big bonus when I can enjoy using those skills to communicate with others – and sometimes get paid for it. I gather that Tim also uses his creative skills to calm his own mind, and his illustrations are certainly a very soothing complement to the text of this book, written by Ciara Gavin. I love the traditional watercolour technique, which Tim excels at. I haven’t received the book yet, but I can tell from Tim’s blog post that I’m going to enjoy reading it. I have earmarked it for two grandchildren, but I know I’ll have to order another copy to send to the three grandchildren who live in Canada – and then I’ll probably want to keep the original copy for myself, so I might have to order a third copy!

I love Tim’s blog because the books he features always appeal to me. Some of them he writes and/or illustrates himself, while others are books that he admires because they embody the sorts of messages that he tries to communicate in his own work. I’ve learnt a lot from Tim about the most effective approaches to writing and illustrating for children.

And I’ve also discovered recently that there are a lot of people out there who want to write, draw and create collages in the form of handmade books, as a way of coping mentally in this increasingly digital world. The more we communicate via screens and keyboards, the more we yearn to get our hands dirty and put our thoughts down on paper with pens and pencils. So I feel even more justified and fulfilled, when I turn away from my computer and play with pens, paint and paper, especially when I can share my enjoyment with others. There are a lot of us out there!

Here is Tim’s drawing of the delightful Mole, who is far less bothered by the storm than his friend the Weasel. He enjoys the simple material pleasures in life – which include building a snowman.

Tim is giving a book away every month for the next ten months, to celebrate his 30 year career in picture books. Check out his blog posts here!

In my next post I’ll be talking about the workshops I’m giving to help people satisfy their craving for hands-on relief from the digital world.

Migration Themes

How many of you are migrants, descendants of migrants, or siblings, parents or cousins of migrants? I suspect that covers almost everyone on the planet. I am the migrant daughter of migrants, who in turn were descended from multiple generations of migrants. One of my children migrated to Canada. I’ve never had to deal with a second language, but I’ve both benefited from and been slightly disturbed by the change in perspective that migrating bestows on you – particularly when you migrate back and forth five times, as I have! I have been fortunate enough not to have been compelled to migrate – but as a result, I was never sure if I was making the right choice until we made our final decision to remain in Australia. I now feel like a migrating bird, equally at home at both ends of the earth, but also ready to spread my wings when the right moment occurs. That moment only takes the form of occasional holidays these days, but everyone will be familiar with the feeling of freedom that even a short holiday away from home can produce.

I have grandchildren in Canada, and I’m always wondering what to send them for birthdays and Christmas. Do I send them something Australian, from where I live now, or would they prefer a Canadian story? Maybe they’d like a book that is set in England, where their father was born? Or perhaps they’d like a book set in Mauritius, where their mother was born? Actually it doesn’t matter, they’ll love the story wherever it comes from, provided it resonates with them.

Swallows Swirl looks as if it will press all their buttons. It’s probably meant for the age group of my middle grandie, who’s five, but it will be appreciated by her older brother who’s 7 and by her younger brother who’s 2 going on 4, in equal measure. It combines lyrical prose with solid facts and adorable illustrations. It evokes the delight I remember as a child in England when I spotted the first swallow of summer (one is never enough – you need to see a flock before you know summer is here to stay!) but it’s also a sight that my grandchildren will be seeing, just as the swallows here in South Australia are preparing to leave for warmer climes. (Australian swallows don’t always migrate very far, as the winters are pretty mild here!)

The author, Christina Wilsdon, is American, but her childhood memories coincide with mine just as they will resonate with parents and children all over the world. The illustrator, Jess Mason, is English, so her images inevitably evoke English landscapes for me.

If I win a copy, hopefully it will arrive before I metaphorically spread my wings for the first time since pre-Covid days, and board a plane to visit my family in Canada in May. I’ve seen their little town in the Rockies in Winter, Midsummer and early Fall, but this time I’ll be flying with the swallows to find out what their late Spring and early Summer feels like. And if I don’t win one? – I’ll buy one anyway (or maybe two, as I want one for myself)!

For a chance to win a copy of this book, go to Kathy Teaman’s blog: