Joy Cowley published her first novel, Nest in a Falling Tree, in 1967. Since then she has published hundreds of novels, picture books and readers. Here is an interview she gave in December 1998. It originally appeared in Magpies Magazine in March 1999.
Photo of Joy Cowley in action at Storylines, Christchurch, August 2010
Toad in a Tiger Moth meets Icarus
“She has French perfume and fine lace underwear, an Edwardian dress of yellow silk with mutton chop sleeves and tiny pearl buttons, a picture hat covered with veiling and gold silk roses, and she is riding through the town on a BSA 650 Gold Flash.” –Joy Cowley, The Machinery of Dreams, in Summer Book 2, Port Nicholson Press, 1983.
As well as being responsible for four children,
nine grandchildren, eight cats, and a flock of sheep, Joy Cowley has also produced
short stories, adult novels, picture books, children’s novels, spiritual
reflections, hymns, poems and over 400 beginner readers.
Although amazingly busy, she is also amazingly
helpful to others. Joy Cowley Trevor Agnew
1. I like that passage about the motorbike because of its
very specific details. In your writing,
the descriptions of things like eel catching are often detailed.
Do
you do this in order to convince readers?
Does it involve you in lots of research?
Or do you keep one of those mysterious notebooks?
Writers seem to work mainly one of two
ways. Some are auditory. They write as though they are taking
dictation. Others, like me, are visual. I spend a lot of time with plots and
characters, expanding them, asking questions of them until I know them so well
that I can see the details. Writing,
then, is simply a matter of describing what I can see in my mind.
I like reading stories with specific
detail. I think that it is detail which
connects with our own experiences and hooks us into a story. I also try to be selective with description,
using it for pacing, for light and shade in a work, and for general leitmotif
effect.
Do I keep a notebook? Yes.
New ideas will gatecrash a work in progress, and without consideration
or respect, yell, “Look at me! Look at
me!” I have found that the most
effective way of getting rid of them is to jot them down in my notebook. The idea might still be active a year later
but then again, they might be dead. It
doesn’t matter. My notebook serves as a
clearing station for intrusive material rather than a source of inspiration.
2.
Is humour an important part of your writing/story-telling? I
notice the almost slapstick humour of much of your writing, like Starbright’s
taking a solo bungy jump without working out how to untie her feet in
‘Starbright and the Dream Eater’. How
do you feel humour should be used in writing?
Especially writing for children?
You bet!
It is an important part of life.
Yet few writers take humour seriously!
I am appalled at the lack of humour inmost of my early adult short
stories and novels. I can only say that
I am glad these works were aimed at adult readers who have choices, and not
young people. In real life the masks of
comedy and tragedy are rarely far apart.
It sounds flip to say “the darker the shadow,
the brighter the light” but life really is a oneness and the balance seems
always there. Some of the funniest
things happen at funerals. That is the
wholeness of being. Look at Frank Court
3.
Does the humour sometimes conceal pain?
The joke about cutting off fingers in
‘Gladly Here I Come’ made me wonder. Is
black humour an effective tool for your style of writing?
I am not aware of using “black” humour or
employing humour to cover pain. I simply
try to reflect the world I live in. At
the same time I am very aware of laughter as therapy, especially for children
whose authority is not always recognised in an adult world.
Humour has been an important ingredient
in my early reading books. These stories
began in the 1960s, when I was working with my son Edward
and then other children who could not read.
Many were arbitrarily labelled dyslexic but I noticed that their
right/left confusion and disability did not extend to those activities they
enjoyed. Most had simply “switched off”
learning to read, unwilling to put themselves at risk of further failure. Their body language was explicit of a frozen
attitude to the printed word.
These children taught me that early
reading materials need to be easy, exciting, meaningful. They taught me that an engaging story was
important, even at the lowest levels, and they showed me that no one can be
tense while they are laughing. With the
all-important humour, there developed a tendency to put a twist at the end of a
story. This was a bit like pudding after
vegetables. It encouraged a child to
read to the end of the book.
4. Do you have anyone in mind when you
write? In other words, do you write for
a particular, person, audience, reader, when you are working on something?
Not any one person. I am keenly aware of the age and reading
level of my intended audience and this awareness tempers my writing.
For beginner readers, the focus is the
acquisition of reading skills. This
means a very simple graded text with much of the plot detail going into the
illustrations, so the page-by-page notes to the illustrator are very important,
especially if the illustrator has not had a lot of experience in working at
this level.
Books for fluent readers have more
language content and here is where I try to push the limits in expanding a
young person’s awareness of the richness of the English language and ways in
which it may be used. (“Once upon a
mousetime, two little squeaks went cheesing...”)
It is always a delight to find that
teachers have used the book as a springboard for the student’s own creative
writing.
5.
The spiritual as a part of everyday life seems a regular theme in your
work. I am thinking of the mussels on
p.24 of ‘Bow down Shadrach ’ or the trees in ‘Gladly
Here I Come’. Then there’s your hymn
“Sacrament of the Seasons” (No 77 in ‘Alleluia Aotearoa’) “Jesus comes to me as a springtime tree…”
Your
characters even discuss religion, and have spiritual beliefs (e.g. ‘Starbright
and the Dream Eater’). What are your
views on the mysterious behind the mundane?
What is mundane? Everything has a particular beauty. Everything is a facet of the mysterious.
I have always known an “otherness”. Most children have that knowing. I am sure they bring it into the world with
them. For me, at a young age, the
knowing had simple self-evident truths: that everything was connected to
everything else; that good and bad described how we thought about things and
not the things themselves; that there was no such event as death – things
simply turned into other things.
There was also a strong sense of another
greater reality somewhere very close. It
was as though this life was a dream and I was very close to wakening. I remember that as a young child I felt very
old. Not just parent-old or grandparent-old,
but as old as a mountain. I have spoken
with many children who have the same feelings.
Naturally, when I was young, I tried to
place these feelings where they could be affirmed, but there was no explanation
for them in the religious or scientific beliefs of my childhood. My views earned me beatings from my mother
who believed the devil was in me. (My
parents were fundamentalist Christian and their divided world always seemed
alien to me.)
These days there have been huge shifts in
spiritual awareness as people discover the metaphysical outside of the old
religious structures. Part of this shift
is supported by new physics and by the sudden expansion of knowledge that has
come with micro-chip technology. But we
still tend to talk to children about religion in demeaning and meaningless
ways, which are remote from their own spiritual experiences. So, yes, I do write about child-centred
spiritual experience. I believe it is
not separate from other life experience, merely an extension of it.
6.
I was interested in your views on fantasy in the Introduction of ‘Beyond the
River’, where you wrote, “Since the
beginnings of communication, people have used fantasy to express truths which
could not be contained in a factual account.”
Are you myth-making for the 20th Century? Are you entering a new science
fiction–fantasy field with ‘Starbright and the Dream Eater’ and ‘Ticket to the
Sky Dance’?
Starbright
and the Dream Eater and Ticket to the Sky Dance were inspired by quantum physics, and they
did involve a bit of research.
I’m a lover of plots. I like stories to work like intricate
well-oiled machines.
Fantasy is not apart from reality. It is reality pushed to the edge, and it must
work logically. Fantasy should always be
real to the reader. I like to read
science fiction but am disappointed when plots are illogical or when they rely
heavily on coincidence.
7.
What are your views on settings of children’s fiction? Your New Zealand settings and descriptions in
e.g. ‘Gladly Here I Come’ are very sharp, right down to, say, the smell of
eels. There seems to be an American
setting in ‘Starbright and the Dream Eater’.
Was this your idea, or the publisher’s idea?
I believe that every work needs a sense
of place and, because I’m a visual writer, place is always specific and
important. Much of my writing has been
set in New Zealand. Some books have been
located in Australia and could not be anywhere else. The two fantasy novels are set in the
USA. In both Ticket to the Sky Dance (California) and Starbright and the Dream Eater (Wisconsin) we have situations which
could not have taken place in a country with a small population. The only densely populated country, that I
know reasonably well, is the United States, so I chose localities there.
In 1953 I was the children’s page editor,
known officially as the NFC lady (News For Children), for the Manawatu Daily Times. There is a pre-story to this. My parents suffered poor health. My mother had schizophrenia and my father’s
heart condition prevented him from working.
I was the eldest of five and it was always understood that I would leave
school and work to help the family. We
lived at Foxton at the time and I travelled by bus each day to Palmerston North
Girls’ High School, where a wonderful group of teachers conspired to keep me at
school. In 1953 they found for me this
wonderful job at the paper, plus board with a family near the school. Half of my wages paid for my board, the rest
was taken home to my parents at the weekend.
This was a very happy arrangement.
Every day after school I spent two to three hours in Broadway at the Manawatu Daily Times.
I had an office typewriter on a small
table, in a windowless room that smelt of old smoke and printers ink, and as
long as I got my copy to the type-setting room by Friday afternoon, I could do
what I liked with the Children’s Page.
Under a bare, fly-specked light bulb, I hammered out an identity for
myself as a self-important, middle-aged, world-travelling editor who had a dog
called Crackers. When I was out of the
country, Crackers took over the typewriter and gave the readers another, less
dignified image of me. We became popular, Crackers and I, and sometimes I would
have a high school student a year or two younger than I, coming into the office
and asking to see the NFC lady. Of
course, I always said that she was out.
This was heady stuff for a sixteen year
old. At the end of the year, I was
offered a cadetship with the paper, a position usually reserved for males. More heady stuff. My rejoicing was short-lived, however, when
my parents refused permission. Reporters
were a lot of heathens, as far as Mum and Dad were concerned, and I had already
been too much under their influence. No,
I would be apprenticed to our local pharmacist and that was that.
The last day of school was a sad affair
but, as I was walking out the gate, my English teacher ran after me. She had a favour to ask. Would I please give her my essay book? She wanted me to promise her that I would
keep on writing. I promised. And it was largely that promise that made me
buy an old typewriter three years later and start writing short stories. It was another three years before I had
anything published.
8. Why do you visit schools,
and take part in workshops? Is it
after-sales service?
It’s not so much “after-sales” as a
matter of keeping in touch with source and resource. My own inner child is overlaid with so much
adult that I need to maintain contact with the unadulterated -–the children out
there. When I am researching a book, I
talk over issues with school classes.
The results are almost always different from what I anticipate. For example, before writing Bow Down Shadrach I put this question to
children: “If your family pet was very old or sick and had to be killed, would
you want your parents to tell you the truth?
Or would you like them to tell you that the animal had run away, or
maybe gone to a lovely home where it would be looked after for the rest of its
life?” I imagined that all children
would opt for the truth but only older children wanted that. Almost all five-to-seven year olds wanted the
nice story.
Generally, when I am researching likes
and dislikes or anything to do with feelings, I ask questions of children older
than the reading age of the intended work.
If I’m writing early reading books for five and six year olds, I
interview seven and eight year olds and begin, “When you were five…”. I find that children are not usually able to
reflect on their immediate situation but will readily give information from the
past.
Also all my manuscripts are trialled in
schools before they are submitted to a publisher. I have a team of great teachers who help me
with this. Almost always, rewriting
needs to be done as a result of the trialling.
Sometimes the story is discarded.
I’m never sure of the final seasoning until the dish has been tasted in
this way.
9.
How do you keep in touch with the way children speak, their styles
of speech and language? Also, how do you
make up languages like Starbright’s private language?
I realise there is such a thing as style
but, all the same, I try to give each story an original and authentic
voice. Very often this means leaving
behind everything I’ve been taught about “writing” and simply telling the story
on paper in a conversational way. I
suppose writers are a bit like actors in this.
Dialogue?
It’s a matter of listening to young people, noting vocabulary, speech
patterns and inflections. Young children are still engaged with the novelty of
language. They enjoy taking words to
bits and reassembling them in different ways.
They delight in rhymes, rhythm, alliteration, riddles, puns and other
word jokes. They experiment with
language and, often, when they haven’t the right word will invent one – as
Starbright does. I confess that I too
enjoy inventing words. A recent addition
is “flumsy” which is a combination of flimsy and flummery. Very useful.
10. Dreams play a part in some
of your stories. Are dreams important to
you?
Dreams are sometimes important to me;
more often unimportant. I do remember
them whereas many adults don’t. Children
always remember their dreams and they are always important. They always want to discuss their
dreams. Which is why dreams play a
bigger role in my children’s writing than in my adult works.
11. You often mention your own
animals (cats, goose, dog, etc) in biographical notes. Your stories often deal with animals in
trouble (Shadrach, or the turtle in ‘The Silent One’). How do you feel about animals?
12. Maurice Gee once said that
writing children’s novels is easier than writing adult ones. Is this your experience?
I do not find writing for children easier
than writing for adults. It would be
true to say that I write for children as I write for adults, doing the best
that I am capable of, but at the same time staying with the child’s experience
of life and language. In that last point
lies the challenge. Writing for children
means being true to readers of a certain age group. It involves disciplines that don’t come into
adult writing.
When I write an adult story or novel, I
can stretch the wings of language to their fullest extent and soar like an
Icarus. With writing for children, there
are limitations that tether me to a particular audience. No expansive ego trips permitted.
On the other hand, a novel for a young
reader is usually less than half the length of an adult novel, so it is a
shorter course.
I must say that I enjoy the challenges of
writing at all levels, but find writing for early emergent reading the most
difficult. Trying to make an engaging
story out of a vocabulary range of some twenty words can be like trying to
create a crossword puzzle with no black squares. This year [1998], the writing of an adult
novel Classical Music was luxuriously
easy, compared with the work that went into some emergent readers written the
previous year.
13. How do you feel about the
illustrations for some of your books?
Do
they reflect how you see the characters?
Most often I am delighted with the
illustrations, although there have been a few disappointments. Availability of a suitable illustrator is an
on-going problem for writers and publishers.
Many illustrators are booked up five years ahead. I waited for six years to get the Mexican
illustrator Joe Cepeda for Gracias the
Thanksgiving Turkey. Problems also
arise when an artist is not available to do a second or third book in a
series. We have four different sets of
characters depicted on the covers of the two Shadrach novels. The third book in the trilogy will probably
bring more changes. Young readers find
this disappointing and confusing.
In early reading books, much of the story is
contained in the illustrations and I need to write full illustration briefs f
for each page. Both the illustrator and I are under the same
constraints. We are helping the child to
learn to read. But when I write picture
book texts for established readers, I do not dictate to the illustrator in any
way. Rather, I view the illustrator as a
co-author who can expand my original idea into something much bigger and
better.
14. Did you ever get that motorbike? When I first asked you that, in Winton in
1984, you were still rueful about the Royal Enfield 147cc your dad had bought
you, thirty years earlier.
Marriage and children soon grounded me but, even now, I ache at the sight of an old DH-82. I am filled with nostalgia for a contraption of wood, wire and canvas, with a 48 mph cruising speed, just fast enough to whistle the wind under your goggles, slow enough to fill the open cockpit with smoke from the crematorium.
But I should add that there is a
postscript to the motorbike era. My son
James has a beautiful Harley, which I may occasionally ride.
December 1998
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