Made in crazy town
Kate De Goldi and Susan Paris are the editors behind Annual 2 ,an anarchic anthology for young Kiwi readers. They tell Jack van Beynen how they put it together.
‘Sometimes it feels like it was made in crazy town – but in a good way!’’ That’s what 9-year-old Daniel Lovewell had to say about Annual ,a children’s book edited by Kate De Goldi and Susan Paris.
Lovewell’s quote is on the back of the book’s sequel, Annual 2, and it became a kind of mantra for the editors while they were working on it.
‘‘Every now and again when we wondered if something was going too far, we’d look at that and go, ‘Nah,’’’ De Goldi says.
It’s not hard to see how De Goldi and Paris might have worried they were going ‘‘too far’’ with their latest collaboration.
Annual 2, like its prequel, is a miscellany, a kind of throwback to what was once a common form of children’s literature.
Sandwiched between its teal covers, a reader can find: short fiction, nonfiction, an illustrated guide to the biscuits and slices of New Zealand, poetry, recipes, a song by Bic Runga, comics, historic photographs from the Alexander Turnbull Library, a board game where players navigate the pitfalls of divorce from a child’s perspective, a Where’s Wally-esque visual puzzle, essays, art criticism, or instructions for making a knitted model of the digestive system.
The book’s anarchic content is kept in line by the deft editing hands of Paris and De Goldi.
The two women are perhaps uniquely qualified to do this kind of thing. Paris has been editor of School Journal for more than a decade, while De Goldi is a celebrated author who promotes literacy and teaches writing in schools around the country. They’re also good mates.
The pair had the idea for the annual series around three years ago when remember the annuals they got at Christmas as children.
‘‘I thought, shoot, we should do an annual, and Susan was potentially the only person really who understood the dimensions of the miscellany, because that’s what she does with School Journal,’’ De Goldi says.
The project aimed to fill several holes they had observed in New Zealand’s literary landscape.
Annual was targeted at children aged 9-13, an age group Paris says sometimes draws the short straw when it comes to publishing. Series by overseas writers tend to dominate their section of the bookstore.
‘‘My boy reads those books, and they definitely have a place, but we felt like there needed to be another conversation going on with what kids would enjoy as readers, Paris says.
De Goldi says the book was also a chance to provide Kiwi writers with a chance to get published. Changes to publishing globally in the past decade have made it harder for up and coming children’s authors to get published.
‘‘It’s harder to get published than it was when I started, at any rate. A lot of the people I meet and have worked with are writing perhaps excellent short fiction for children, but for one reason or another don’t have an opportunity to do a novel yet,’’ De Goldi says.
When the time came to ask people to contribute to Annual, it wasn’t just writers they turned to. Paris and De Goldi also approached illustrators, designers, musicians and visual artists. The age group they were targeting has a ‘‘very sophisticated understanding of visual storytelling’’, so the book needed to be visually interesting to keep them engaged, De Goldi says.
In Annual 2, the editors went for a mix of people known for their work for children and those better known for creating for adults. Poet Bill Manhire and novelist Lloyd Jones are examples of the latter. Jones writes an essay on how to body surf, while Manhire’s piece is a one-sided conversation between a dentist and a young client, in poem form. Giselle Clarkson, who contributed an illustrated guide to classic Kiwi baked goods, is best known in commercial circles.
Each contributor was given a brief; Dunedin poet Lynley Esmeades, for example, was asked to write a poem about waking up in a tent. Paris says she and De Goldi needed to curate the content to ensure the diverse experiences of children in New Zealand were represented as well as possible. At the same time, they had to ensure their briefs weren’t too restrictive.
‘‘We had to try and hit that sweet spot that you supported people enough that they had an idea of what you were working towards, but you didn’t smother their own creative contribution,’’ Paris says.
It’s quite a different experience to commissioning for School Journal, where her briefs are a lot more prescriptive. ‘‘For a long time we talked about Annual being the School Journal unplugged.’’
That’s not to say Annual 2 doesn’t have educational value. Part of the format’s attraction for Paris and De Goldi is that it’s accessible for reluctant readers; they might be seduced by an illustration, game or recipe, and from there flick on to a more traditional piece of prose. ‘‘The reading kind of sneaks up on them,’’ Paris says.
‘‘As a reading experience, an annual isn’t intimidating for a reluctant or anxious reader. There’s so many different sizes of text and there’s visuals, and you don’t have to complete the whole thing, it’s something you can dip in and out of. It doesn’t feel like an onerous reading experience,’’ De Goldi says.
Getting kids reading is something both of Annual‘s editors are passionate about.
‘‘I think it’s fair to say that everything Susan and I have done in our working lives is about that. We’re completely dedicated, maybe even slightly annoyingly evangelical about it,’’ De Goldi says.
There’s a wealth of evidence to suggest it’s a worthy cause; reading for pleasure makes children smarter, helps them develop empathy, and can make them more likely to escape poverty.
‘‘I’m not going to decry the opportunities that screen and technology give us, but I think it would be a very sad day indeed if children weren’t reading as well as doing all that other stuff,’’ De Goldi says.
One thing that makes children more likely to read, or at least, seems to make their parents more likely to buy them books, is kids’ literature by New Zealand authors. Local titles made up 14 entires in this year’s Whitcoulls Kids’ Top 50 Book list - a significantly higher proportion than the three Kiwi titles in the adult Top 100 Books list.
‘‘I think there’s a really massive appetite out there from parents for New Zealand books,’’ De Goldi says.
Annual 2 is ‘‘absolutely incontrovertibly’’ a New Zealand book, she says, but the New Zealand it evokes is, in its anarchy and diversity, quite different to what’s often found in our children’s books.
De Goldi admits she’s a bit sick of seeing New Zealand represented through Kiwiana icons - black singlets, Jandals, kiwi, pavlova - in kids’ literature. ‘‘They’re actually a really thin view of New Zealand, you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.’’
She says good literature should be a mirror of the reader’s experiences and a window onto those of others.
‘‘I think that the mark of good literature is that it is a mirror, because we recognise some aspect of human experience - and it’s particularly important in countries, you know, newish countries like us, we want our own literature to reflect our experience. But I think the window on the rest of the world is a really important part as well, so that children in particular are introduced to other realities, other lives, other experiences.’’
If good literature reflects our culture, then perhaps young Daniel Lovewell’s comment about Annual can be applied to the nation: we’re crazy town, but in a good way.
❚ Annual 2
is available now in good bookstores, or you can buy it online from distributor Potton & Burton’s web site.