RUNAWAY SUCCESS:
Kiwi author’s pony books spark an international TV series
Stacy Gregg’s pony books are massive bestsellers and have now sparked a TV series. She tells Emma Clifton about the long wait to have her first book published, why kids love stories that tackle dark topics and how writing helped her come to terms with the loss of her mother.
In a floaty blue dress, in her divine apartment that overlooks the lapping waves of Auckland’s central city coastline, Stacy Gregg is doing very little to overturn the notion that being an author is a deeply glamorous profession. As a former fashion journalist turned bestselling novelist, Stacy, 51, is frank about the fact that it’s not all champagne and caviar.
“If I’d known how little authors made overall – you know, that the average UK author made £2000 a year – I might have re-evaluated,” she says drily, of giving up journalism for writing books. “I’d just assumed I was going to be JK Rowling and get my own private helicopter within a week. I have been very, very lucky that it worked out… minus the helicopter.”
It was after the birth of her daughter Isadora, now 19, that Stacy decided to have a crack at writing a book. “I always found it really hard to juggle parenting and journalism – every time I was trying to breastfeed, I was due in a meeting.”
She started working on her first manuscript while at home with Issie and completed it in three months. She cautions against thinking of this as some kind of Superwoman task. “It was quite a practical thing; every time she went for a sleep, or I knew I had clear hours, I could sit down and work on a chapter – in a way, she timetabled my work habits.” After the high pressure, deadline-driven world
of magazine journalism, there was suddenly a project that she could do at her own pace.
“I wrote the first book having absolutely no idea how to write a book. I didn’t plan it – I just sat down and wrote,” Stacy says. She found an agent and was told that books about ponies weren’t currently the zeitgeist, so the manuscript ended up sitting on a shelf for five years.
As so often happens, the lifechanging phone call announcing that the book winds had changed came during an exceptionally busy time. Stacy was still working in magazines but had also started New Zealand’s first fashion website, Runway Reporter. She was about to fly to Los Angeles for a whistle-stop trip to interview Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld when her publisher made contact, telling her that not only were ponies now very much in fashion, but they wanted to sign her for a four-book deal. She’d also need to rewrite her first manuscript. Now. “I just burst into tears,” Stacy recalls. “I thought, ‘how am I ever going to get this done?’”
But she did, and the first of the Pony Club Secrets book series was born. The books have become, by any measure, a colossal success, selling millions of copies and, now, spawning a television adaptation that will screen in the UK, Australia and on TVNZ. Stacy placed a casting call on her Facebook page for fans of the book to try out for roles in the new series, called Mystic, and has had tens of thousands register their interest.
Writing for an audience of eight to 12-year-olds is a joy, Stacy says, because they are so full of enthusiasm. “They get really fizzy about things they love, and they’re not ashamed to be excited, to say that they adore the books.” One of the biggest differences between writing for “middle grade” and “young adult” audiences is the lack of a love story. Horses, as Stacy says, are the stage before boys. “They’re the original romance.”
Pony obsession
Stacy’s own equine love started in childhood, when she was a horse-mad girl growing up in Auckland’s
Titirangi with two distinctly “unhorsey parents”. Stacy saved all her pocket money so she could buy her own saddle and bridle when her parents finally gave in to the endless nagging and bought her a pony.
Then, doubling the pester power, her younger sister followed suit. Once the family moved to Ngaruawahia in the Waikato, it was all on. The horse world was far more
egalitarian in those days, she says. “But back then you could have quite an average pony and go to pony club and still compete. It was a little more grassroots than it is now.”
Her old stomping ground of Ngaruawahia became the backdrop for the Pony Club Secrets series, although Stacy used some creative license. “I put it all through some sort of weird filter where it became far more dramatic, where there were crimes to solve. And then I threw in all of the heroic stuff I’d watched on TV with [Olympic equestrians] Mark Todd and Lucinda Green.” The UK audience, in particular, ate it up. “I would get fan mail from girls going: ‘I wish I lived in New Zealand, where it’s all green and everybody has a pony!’” The series eventually went on to include 13 titles, before Stacy began a new series, Pony Club Rivals.
But it was her next move, into telling stories based on real-life events that saw her leave the horse world of New Zealand behind. Stacy had held onto a newspaper clipping about Princess Haya of Jordan, a trailblazer for women’s rights in the Middle East and an Olympian-level equestrian. “I thought I would use her as a character in Pony
Club Rivals, and she would be this Arabian princess who would be really posh,”
Stacy says. “And then I thought, ‘that’s not her at all.’ She seemed too big to shoehorn into a series… she’s literally the only person I know whose real life has been more spectacular than any kind of fictional life.”
Born to King Hussein of Jordan and his third wife, Queen Alia, Haya was just three years old when her mother was killed in a helicopter crash. In the years following, she was given an orphan foal to raise and it became a lifeline of sorts, leading to a
“I had absolutely no idea how to write a book. I didn’t plan it. I just sat down and wrote.”
horse-riding career that would take Haya to the Olympics.
Stacy contacted the princess for approval and ended up being invited to Jordan to meet her and see the royal stables in person.
“I was allowed to just float around by myself, gathering up what I needed to do. All these guys were doing high-powered meetings and they’d see me and be like, ‘Oh, you’re that pony girl,’” Stacy laughs.
The resulting book about Haya’s life, The Princess and the Foal, became one of Stacy’s most popular titles, was translated into many languages and landed her a publisher in Beirut.
The story doesn’t dance around the fact that Haya’s mother died when she was very young, an early example of the dark sense of realism that runs through Stacy’s books – they may be for a young audience, but they do not treat the readers like children. Stacy thinks it’s important that young people are not spared the realities of life. Partly because it makes for a better story (think how many Disney movies begin with the death of a parent) and partly because it’s something Stacy knows well from her own childhood – her mother died when Stacy was 15. “It’s probably one of my strengths as a writer, because
I’m quite interested in confronting death in stories, and I feel like I’m not scared to handle it,” she says.
She describes writing about young girls battling through the death of a parent as a helpful process. “There are two ways you can view being a writer and that’s the pure catharsis where people might decide to spill their guts on the page. I think that’s fine – and you should never expect to have it published,” Stacy says. “I was probably a bit more mercenary with my catharsis… I took my own personal circumstances and used them to my advantage. And by the time I got to the end of the project, of the Pony Club Secret series, it had resolved a whole lot of issues I had with my mother’s death. I didn’t think that was going to be the upshot of it, but it was probably cheaper than therapy… and I got royalties out of it.”
The dark side
As well as not shying away from the harder parts of life, Stacy’s writing doesn’t avoid the darker parts of human history, either. In her latest novel, Prince of Ponies, the realities of Nazi Europe are front and centre for a young character Zofia, who loses both her parents to the regime. “There is a fine line where you want them to understand how devastating a period of time is, but you also don’t want to give them nightmares, or make them so horrified at the thought of what’s going on that they put the book down.”
But it’s also important, Stacy says, to show that even through the darkest times, life goes on. “I think all of us have that in life, when you’re going through brutal, terrible things. During the times in history when things have been really gruesome, there are still moments of joy. There were still nights when people sat around and sang, or it was a lovely day and they went swimming. You have to have those joyous moments without belittling the suffering that’s going on.
“But, on the flipside, kids love that.
They’re fascinated by hardship and suffering and what people went through, and they can imagine it really well – and maybe it makes them a little more secure and warm and grateful that that’s not what their lives are like.”
This taste for the darker side influenced her not only as a writer, but also as a reader. “The other morning I was quoting a Hilaire Belloc poem about
Jim who gets eaten by a lion. I still know it off by heart because I had his book Cautionary Tales for Children. I can’t remember ever once picking up an Enid Blyton and I remember feeling quite allergic to even the notion of her,” Stacy laughs.
Meaningful tales
In her 2017 stand-alone novel The Thunderbolt Pony, Stacy covered a post-earthquake South Island and a lead character suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) as a result of the quakes. “At the time, my own daughter had quite debilitating OCD and we were working with a clinical psychologist to help her develop tools to help her manage it. When I asked about working OCD into a story, she was instantly on board because she knew it would help kids.” It became the most meaningful book tour Stacy’s ever done. “When I would go to schools and talk to kids, it was inevitable that I would have a few kids at the end of the class or session say, ‘Oh yes, I do that.’ They felt quite empowered by the fact that it was being spoken about, through the book, and they could talk about it with their peers and classmates.” It was a lot to take on at times, she says. “It could be quite distressing. There’s a
“I’m quite interested in confronting death in stories, and I feel like I’m not scared to handle it.”
chapter of the book I read during a tour in Christchurch and I started blubbing as soon I started reading it.”
The complex layering of her novels is also indicative of the thought that goes into the plots. “People think I write pony books because of the glitter on the jackets, but what I really write is epic adventure stories that happen to have a girl and a horse,” Stacy has previously said. That’s the biggest feedback she gets from readers – and her readers are more diverse than the glittery covers might suggest. “When I go to schools, I’ve got kids doing Viking sword fights in one area, and I’m talking to them about the Black Plague and the Spanish Inquisition,” she laughs. “The boys will come up and say, ‘We love these books, we thought they were just girls and ponies.’” It’s the literary equivalent of getting kids to eat their greens, she jokes. “They pick it up thinking it’s a sparkly pony book and the next thing you know, they’re learning about the Jewish Holocaust in Poland. I’m not trying to force-feed them history, but it gives them texture. I don’t think I could just write fizzy pony stories with no substance to them, because kids have substance to them – they want something that’s powerful, and meaningful.”
In contrast to this comes Stacy’s The Mini Whinny picture book series about a mischievous miniature pony. These books are a lot less about history and a lot more about hilarity. “The wonderful thing about hanging out with children’s book authors, and that industry of publishers and agents, is that they get so excited about the same things that would excite a five or six-year-old.”
She describes the conversation she was having the other day with her editor about what noise a pony’s fart would make. “I’d gone with ‘blart’, but Penny, our editor, had said it sounded a bit wet. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is my day job,’” she grins. “You never, ever have to stop being 12 years old if you do my job. You can absolutely have a part of you that refuses to grow up, that most people kind of have to quash because it’s not appropriate. For me, that’s something I need to access for work. It’s a ridiculous job, but you take it enormously seriously!”