Betty Gilderdale Award 2014
Spring Lecture
Christchurch, New Zealand
28th November 2013
Late in 2013 I received the Betty Gilderdale Award for Services to
Children's Literature in New Zealand, presented by Storylines Children's Literature Association. Award-winners are asked to present the Spring Lecture: "a presentation that can be about any aspect of
your life and work associated with children's literature." Tessa Duder presented the Betty Gilderdale Award in Christchurch on 28 November 2013. Below is the text of my speech on 28 November 2013.
The
Reviewer Reviewed,
by
Trevor Agnew
Let’s start with Betty Gilderdale herself. (At Margaret Mahy’s 70th birthday
bash in Auckland, I found myself sitting beside an elegant lady. “What’s your
name, young man?” she asked, “I’m Betty Gilderdale.” It was like sitting next
to God. At the same celebration, a lady came up to me with a huge hug and a kiss. It
was Diane Hebley, who was grateful for my review of one of her books. There is not much money in reviewing but it does
have its rewards.)
Getting back to Betty Gilderdale, I was talking
about her to a bunch of after-school tutors the other day – mostly mathsy-sciencey
types. I told them Betty Gilderdale had written A Sea Change, a history of NZ children’s books, and how it was my
bible as a book reviewer. Not a flicker. Then I added, “And she writes all the Little
Yellow Digger books.” Boom! They all sprang alive. Instant recognition.
That is the power of children’s books!
It occurred to me then that Betty Gilderdale wears
lots of different hats. She has been a
key figure in the Children’s Literature
Association, which we now know as Storylines
– a founding mother. In her children’s
literature career, Betty Gilderdale has been a teacher, a training college
lecturer, a researcher, and an historian. She has reviewed books in newspapers magazines
and on the radio. Above all she continues her career as a published author, a
beloved writer.
When I got word of this award, I looked up the
website to see who else had won it. It began in 1990 as an award “for
Services to Children’s Literature,” then was renamed to honour Betty
Gilderdale in 2000. I wanted to see if any of the 22 people who have received
it had been book reviewers. I got two
surprises. One was that almost all of the people – just like Betty Gilderdale,
wore lots of hats – so many of the award winners had indeed been book
reviewers. The second surprise was that
I knew of each winner. They had each, in some way, influenced me. I had read their work, admired their ideas or
benefitted from something they had done, which is the great thing about
children’s literature. There’s no money
in it, but lots of things are done for the joy of it and there are some really
nice people involved
1. Early reading
and Libraries:
My interest in children’s literature began young. I
could read Chicken Little before I
went to school at Sawyers Bay, and I still the treasure the memory of the
teacher, who let me borrow Winnie the
Pooh for the holidays. I read it by candlelight at my grandfather's farm-house in Wickliffe Bay.
The Whitcombe
and Tombs Readers series were boring. The School Journals were more fun but they were also used to test our
reading-aloud ability, which made them a little worrying. The real excitement came with the huge wicker
baskets that came regularly from the National Library, full of treasures like Moomintroll and Dr Dolittle. The only New Zealand book I read was Edith Howes’ Silver Island where the houses had red
tin roofs and there were black currants and long grass down the garden.
Sawyers Bay School didn’t have a library, so my
father took me in on the bus to the Port
Chalmers Mechanics’ Institute and Library, an old wooden building on the
corner of Scotia Street, where the wind lifted the linoleum on the floorboards.
Later, the library was moved to the stone Town Hall building in Beach Street.
You were only allowed in the Children’s section from 3.30pm and you could only
borrow one book at a time, but you were allowed to sit on the big stone
windowsills outside. (There were metal spikes to prevent adults sitting on the sun-warmed sills but we youngsters fitted in between.) There were no New Zealand books. They let me use library
interloan to get some Jules Verne stories – The
Secret Island arrived as a three volume set. I read all Captain W.E. Johns’ Biggles books, and when I’d finished
them, Gimlet and Worrals. It didn’t take long to read every book, even Mary Grant
Bruce’s Billabong series and the Twins series by Lucie Fitch Perkins.
In the year I started high school, 1957, I won a
year’s membership of Dunedin’s private library, The Athenaeum. They had the
complete Billy Bunter series, and
when you’d finished that, the Bessie
Bunter series. The Dunedin Public Library had the children’s library in its
linked terraced houses on Stuart Street, with masses of books for young people,
including American titles. The big brick
Carnegie library for adults, round the corner in Moray Place, was a joy to
borrow from, although they only had three science fiction authors: Arthur C.
Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Brian Aldiss. I often encountered A.H. Reed there.
Later I took great pleasure in The University of
Otago Library –which was still jammed into the picturesque clock tower building
– lots of tiny attic rooms, with a splendid cast-iron spiral staircase down
into the magazine shelves in the Lower Studholme. In the 1960s the Hocken Library was still in
the Otago Museum building. Dr Gordon Parsonson used to take our MA History
class into the stacks there – which was an amazing experience of books,
manuscripts, maps and pictures.
Today I value our libraries more than ever,
particularly the marvellous Christchurch Public Libraries, where they have battled
to provide information services, with branches moving from building to building
as damaged libraries are pulled down. The showpiece of the new Square is going
to be the Central Library, which gives us great hope for the future.
2. Professional
experience with children’s books:
My
40 years as a teacher coincided with the golden age of NZ children’s books. Our
English class sets, when I was at school, and when I started teaching in 1968,
were all British or American stories. By the time I left teaching in the new
millenium, well over half the novels, short stories, plays and poems that we
were studying in class were from within New Zealand. Even better, so was much
of the recreational reading.
The
golden age started pretty much as I started teaching, with the three Graces:
skilled writers, all achieving international success with great stories. Margaret Mahy’s A Lion in the Meadow (1969) and Joy Cowley’s The Duck in the Gun (1969) were triumphs, but for me - teaching at
Hillmorton High School in Christchurch - it was Elsie Locke’s The Runaway Settlers (1965) that gave
life to our local history. Our school badge was Cracroft Wilson’s tiger and his
two famous houses are quite close. Mrs Small’s grave is in the churchyard at
Governors Bay but Elsie Locke brought her back to life.
A steady stream of NZ novels, picture books and
short stories followed. In my History and Social Studies classes, as well as in
my English teaching, I used Joanna Orwin and Eve Sutton’s great stories about
New Zealand’s early history. Hillmorton
High School had a brilliant library because of two very able women, Dr Helen Hogan,
who is still writing books and the late Thelma Easton, the only school librarian
I know who has had a library named after her.
When I did my
country service at Central Southland College, in Winton, I was made
teacher-with-library responsibility. My 15 years there made me aware of what a
valuable resource a school library can be. It also made me aware of how
difficult it was in rural areas to keep up with new books. The School Library Service was a boon. When I wrote a history text book, the
publishing editor was the wonderful Ann Mallinson, who gave me a great insight
into the role of the publisher, which was confirmed in her case with her later publication
of Lynley Dodd’s Hairy MacLary
series.
Living in Southland there was a bonus. I don’t get
car-sick, so on the long drives north to visit our families, I would read
stories aloud to my four daughters. As
they grew up we worked our way through The
Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit
and The Never-Ending Story. A generation later, living in Christchurch,
I found that Jack Lasenby’s Uncle Trev
stories are exactly the right length for reading to grandchildren on a drive between
Papanui and St Albans School. (It should
be pointed out that my wife Jenny was driving.)
In 1986, the Education Department trialled a scheme
with full-time trained teacher-librarians, and I was one of those chosen. They were all highly qualified, experienced
teachers in primary and secondary schools. Gwen Gawith ran the course at the
Wellington College of Education, where we were known as the ‘stunned mullets.’
As New Zealand’s first full-time trained
teacher-librarian – they gave the certificates out in alphabetical order - I
returned to Hillmorton High School in Christchurch. It was a marvellous
teaching experience; the teacher-librarian worked with teachers and classes in
all subjects, using the library as an information centre, guiding resource-based
learning, using not just books but all sorts of information sources like
magazines and information files. Computers were just coming in to schools and
we began using the databases.
It was the most enjoyable and satisfying teaching
I’ve ever done. Teaching kids to locate and use resources, rather than just
copying out words. The right book in the right hand. (In hindsight this was the
perfect training for a book reviewer.)
It was a great system and a NZ Council for
Educational Research report found it “efficient and cost-effective.” So, of
course, it was abolished. Hillmorton,
I’m proud to say, kept me on at the same job until I took early retirement for
health reasons.
We all wear different hats. During my teaching career, I helped found the
Christchurch Friends of the Library,
and was involved with the NZ Reading
Association (now the NZ Literacy
Association) which awarded me the Nada Beardsley Award “for services in the
promotion of literature” in 1993.
I was also part of the School Library Association, now known by its initials as SLANZA; in fact I’m still a
member. Many of the members I only know
by their letters on the SLANZA website listserve; it wasn’t until I met Gerri
Judkins that I realised she was a woman.
3. How I became
a reviewer:
I
was at a book launch right here in the Children’s Book Shop a while ago and a
lady said to me, “What are you doing here, Trevor? You’re ‘television,’ not
‘children’s books.’ I must admit I have
published TV reviews in every decade since the 1960s; it’s been my hobby.
When I was living in Winton (population 2000), I was
not only Cyclops the TV columnist for the Southland Times, I was also the
paper’s stringer at the Borough Council meetings, paid by the inch. The Deputy
Editor – Max Newton, a lovely man – found me reliable and gave me some books to
review. You didn’t get paid – but for a hard-up teacher, a free book was good
bait. Max trusted me so much he let me choose my own books from his closely
guarded book cupboard.
I learned a lot about book reviewing. When a local
MP published a book, my review was denounced in his political column and a
softer review was published as a paid advertisement. But generally life was quiet. When Peter
Bromhead created a political fable, The
King and the Dragon in 1978, Robert Muldoon spotted that it was a lampoon
of him and went ballistic. Down in Southland, we missed the whole controversy,
and my review was published, with all of us blissfully unaware that Muldoon had
made the publisher pulp the whole edition.
When I got back to Christchurch, I picked up some
book reviewing work from The Press
but there were very few reviews of children’s books. Those that appeared were inconsistent and not
much use for teachers. In my school library work I had relied heavily on School
Library Review put out by the National Library from 1980. It was a good
survey of books for the young, even if the judgements were occasionally dodgy.
(In 1980 Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain
was denounced as “an unsatisfactory,
self-conscious fantasy…superficial and of transitory interest.”) When the School
Library Review was killed off, we got by with New and Notable, a review
list put out by Karen du Fresne and a group of dedicated Auckland teacher
volunteers for about ten years.
Oddly enough the most useful source of book reviews
and articles for teaching purposes was an Australian magazine, Magpies
(Subtitle: Talking about books for
children) which we used a great deal as teacher-librarians. Before long I was asked to write some of the
New Zealand book reviews. The
publisher-editors of Magpies were Ray
and David Turton and by 1997, they were featuring so many New Zealand books
that they introduced a regular 8-page New Zealand supplement, edited by Julie
Harper of Auckland’s Jabberwocky Bookshop.
When I took early retirement for health reasons – my
hearing problems had made teaching difficult – I started freelance writing. I
began by carrying out author interviews for Magpies. Joy Cowley was first and she gave such
marvellous answers that I was later commissioned to interview such talents as
Vicky Jones, Bernard Beckett, Peter Gossage, Margaret Mahy, Janice Marriott, Vince
Ford, Jane Higgins and Jackie French.
I wrote some travel articles, began writing a weekly
TV Column for the Christchurch Press,
and was commissioned to write some New Zealand biographies for an American
reference book, the Continuum
Encyclopaedia of Young Adult Literature.
For this I was paid by the number of words, which meant I was trying to
write more, and the editors were trying to keep me more succinct. The result is
an interesting (and completely misleading) sliding scale for our writers. At 250 words Bernard Beckett brought me in
$5, Fleur Beale and Maurice Gee were worth $15 each and the top earners, at 750
words, were Gavin Bishop, Joy Cowley, Jack Lasenby, Elsie Locke and William
Taylor, at $25 a head. (There’s no money
in children’s literature but you knew that.)
Seeing I was reliable, they gave me some of the
Brits, like Susan Price and Terry Pratchett, and then some science fiction
writers (Robert Jordan, Piers Anthony, Frank Herbert). Finally I was trusted to
try some Americans. They had been let
down by a contributor doing the Ws, so I got Patricia Windsor, Beth Nixon
Weaver, David Westheimer, Ellen Emerson White and William Wharton. It was lousy money but very good training in
research and precis. I made good use of
the Canterbury University Library and the College of Education Library.
Meanwhile the Turtons visited Christchurch, so I
discovered that Ray was a woman – her real name is Rayma- and David’s
wife. They made me an offer I couldn’t
refuse. They had a website called The Source, which is used by Australian
schools and libraries. It has entries for all Australian children’s books, all
detailed and annotated so that you can locate books, not just by author and
title, but by the genre and - best of all for teachers - by their subject
matter and themes. They asked me if I
would write the New Zealand book entries, I remember thinking a couple of
hundred books, no problem.
That
was before I found this involved writing detailed entries for every title,
specifying subjects, main themes, book types and genre, as well as an overview
of the plot and characters.
Last
week, I added the 2,700th NZ children’s book to The Source.
The
Source also has short story sections, so over the years I’ve added all the
stories of Frank Sargeson, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and all the classic
Maori myths and legends. With The Source, you can not only locate the story but
you are also told which anthologies it appears in. The same goes for poems,
songs, and even the various All Black haka.
It’s
a lovely website and quite a few NZ schools and libraries have it.
As
well as new books, I also entered previously published titles and author
biographies. This mean that I spent a lot of time up in the Margaret Mahy Collection
of New Zealand children’s books in Christchurch Central Library – the building’s
gone now but they saved the books.
For new books, I would go to the Children’s Bookshop
in Victoria St - another building lost in the earthquakes - and the owner, Sheila Sinclair, would let me sit quietly down
the back making notes. After a while the
publishers started sending me review copies of their books.
Meanwhile I had joined Storylines: Children’s Literature Foundation. I still remember the lady who took my
subscription saying, “Oooh, I’m not sure if there’s anybody in Canterbury who
is a member. Veda Pickles perhaps and Bill Nagelkerke.” Luckily there were a
lot more, and I became involved with the Christchurch branch’s Storylines Family Days. These are wonderful open days when children
can meet their favourite authors and illustrators and take part in all sorts of
activities – free. I usually worked at the Reading Aloud section, where such
writers as Vicky Jones, Ben Brown and Kyle Mewburn read their stories, and
artists like Helen Taylor and Gavin Bishop show how they create their pictures.
Until you’ve seen someone like Margaret Mahy or Joy Cowley interacting with
their audience, you haven’t appreciated the power of narrative. It used to be
held in the Town Hall and we could fill one of those huge rooms with rapt kids. Post-earthquake, the Family Days continue in
places like the South Library, which is great.
Meanwhile Bruce Rennie, the literary editor of The
Press, had decided to give more space to children’s literature, using Bob Docherty
to review young adult novels and me to do the picture books. Space is always at a premium as newspapers
face shrinking advertising revenue, so this was a brave decision by Bruce. It
also gives me (and Bob) a chance to get continuity of coverage and to emphasise
quality. As a bonus our reviews also
appear in the Waikato Times and the Dominion Post.
Other things were developing A keen group launched Te Tai Tamariki
the Aotearoa New Zealand Children’s Literature Charitable Trust, with the aim of preserving original
manuscripts and illustrations of our children’s books. Again it was a familiar group wearing
different hats who did the heavy work, but I would just like to mention the two
Rosemarys: Rosemary Sladen and Rosemary Bonkowski. (Rosemary Bonkowski is
leaving New Zealand tomorrow, so I particularly value her presence here
tonight.)
Like the people I have been talking about, I find
that I also wear several hats. When The Press commissioned me to interview
Antony Horowitz about his Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk (2011), I was also able to talk to him about his
YA novels, and about his TV series, Foyle’s
War. Unfortunately I also had my historian’s hat on when I told him that
Sherlock Holmes didn’t use his gasogene to light his cigarette. (A gasogene is actually
a soda syphon. Horowitz was thinking of a gasolier.) Horowitz was not persuaded but it was a fun
interview that we both enjoyed and which generated three articles for me.
There are unexpected joys in book reviewing. I’m
proud that Agnes Nieuwenhuizen used my reviews of Bernard Beckett’s Genesis, and Thieves by Ella West in her marvellous volume, Right Book: Right Time: 500 Great reads for Teenagers (2007).
I’m also proud to say I once frightened the author
of the Dexter serial-murder novels,
Jeff Lindsay, by knowing so much about him. He didn't realise I'd found most of it on the dust-jackets of his novels.
Orson Scott Card, the science fiction writer, once
frightened me. I walked into the old
Scorpio Books where he was talking to a group of fans. He looked up and said,
“You’ll be Trevor Agnew, the reviewer.” His wife, who picked me up off the
floor, said, “You should have seen your face.”
(It was only later that I realised my daughter, Margaret, then a Press journalist, later one of my
editors, had set it up with him.)
Another bonus was being selected as one of the
judges of the NZ Post Children’s Book
Awards, along with Rosemary Tisdall of the National Library and Ruth
McIntyre of the Wellington Children’s Bookshop.
One surprise there was the number of self-published books sent in by
optimistic writers. A bigger surprise was how awful many of those
self-published books were – slack writing, spelling, grammar and page layout.
John McIntyre says, “Life is too short to review bad books.” He is right, but
studying some of those self-published monstrosities is a valuable reminder of
the importance of the publisher, book editor and designer.
An extra surprise came when Miriama Kamo told us it
was the judges’ job to decide which of the dresses she had borrowed from TVNZ,
she would be wearing for the presentation.
It was a bonus that Miriama mispronounced only one
name on the whole night; she called me ‘Treasure’ Agnew.
There’s another bonus that reviewers get
sometimes. Errol Brathwaite became so
annoyed with one reviewer’s attacks on his New Zealand Wars series that in the
last novel, he gave a soldier the reviewer’s name, then had the character shot
in the stomach and left weeping to die in a ditch.
I was a bit worried when I was warned that David Hill had named a minor character
after me, especially when I found the book was about the Wahine sinking. The
character turned out be a member of the Air Force. I am glad to report that she
survived the shipwreck. [No Safe Harbour,
(2003)]
Best of all was a cryptic heads-up message I received
from Dave Gunson, when his wonderful
picture book, Mr Muggs the Library Cat
(2008) was published. “Look in the
fridge.”
There it is, on page 14 . The refrigerator has a container of “Agnew’s Good
Taste Kiwi Fruit Juice.” Life doesn’t
get much better.
4. How do you review
a book?
I
had a surprise of another sort when the NZ Book Council asked me to give advice
to young reviewers. After forty years of writing book reviews (and fifty years
of writing TV reviews), I realised that I have had no training and no job
description. There is no standards manual and no inspection.
I have had plenty of advice, of course. As a TV reviewer, I remember a TV director
who simply roared, “Bastard!” down the phone at me.
More positively P.D.
James suggested to book reviewers that you should, “Always read the whole of the
book before you write your review.” She
also said, “Review the book the author has written, not the one you think they
should have written.”
[Source: TIME TO BE IN
EARNEST: A Fragment of Autobiography, P.D. James, Faber, London, 1999.
p.92]
On her website, kellygardiner.com, Kelly
Gardiner, author of the lively Swashbuckler
series, offers some intriguing questions that a reviewer should ask:
“Does the book or poem achieve one or more of the
following through its use of language:
• Enchantment and wonder
• Authentic emotional engagement (free from sentimentality)
• Intellectual and educational challenges
• Nourishment for learning development
• Imaginative journeys?”
So, I took their advice and wrote my own suggestions for reviewers:
Trevor’s
Ten Tips for Good Reviewing:
1. Get the facts
straight
Follow the style used
by the publication you are reviewing for. Note their layout of title, author,
publisher, pages, format, price and ISBN. Be sure to mention extras, like maps,
glossary or index. Know how many words are needed. (Your computer will count
them.)
2. Decide who will be
reading your review:
Look at the publication
you are writing for and its readers. The readers are your audience, and you are
there to tell them about this book you have read and whether they might like it
(or not).
With children’s books a
point that is often missed is who the reviews are being written for. Oddly
enough very few are written for children (although most public library websites
do have well-written reviews both by and for kids). Most of my newspaper
reviews are aimed at parents and grandparents, with an occasional nod to
teachers. The readers of Magpies magazine
(like the users of The Source) are mainly school library staff, teachers, students
of literature and college of education staff, so my reviews for them tend to
include information which might help their work.
3. Read the book:
Whether you have a 16
page picture book or a 3-volume space saga, read the book carefully. You may have to go through crucial parts
several times. Try to see it from the point-of-view of the potential reader.
Look hard at the text, layout and illustrations to see that they’re working
properly.
4. Make notes as you
go:
If any key points
emerge in your reading, make a note. Don’t forget the page number. There’s
nothing worse than thumbing through a novel seeking that perfect quotation you
forgot to jot down.
5. Look for the
positive features:
Writing hostile,
negative reviews is fun and easy. (And in the case of ghastly volumes, like
Madonna’s picture books, it can even be justified). In the long run, however, a
number of talented people have decided this book deserved to be published, so
the least you can do is try to perceive what merit they saw in it. (Also the people who write New Zealand
children’s books are genuinely nice people who are co-operative and helpful.
Don’t zap them without good reason.) If
you seriously hate a book for some reason, it may be wiser to send it back for
some other reviewer to handle.
6. Don’t just summarise
the plot:
Your teacher told you this, years ago, and your
teacher was right. Of course you need to mention the setting of a novel, sketch
in the main characters and describe some key issues in the plot. But don’t
spoil any of the writer’s surprises. On page 104 of Anna Mackenzie’s Sea-wreck Stranger (2007), a simple
bottle completely changes the reader’s view of everything that has happened in
the story so far. The secret sits there ready to explode in a reader’s mind.
Unfortunately, several clumsy reviews gave this surprise away, something I
regard as a crime. Let the readers have the pleasure of finding out for
themselves.
7. Do give reasons for your judgements:
Over the years I must
have read 30 or 40 pony novels written for young girls. I think Amy Brown’s Pony Tales series are the best. It’s not
enough to just write that, however. You have to state why. In this case, Brown
excels in her characterisation, plotting and the standard of her prose. People
may disagree with my judgement, but they’ll have to find pony stories with
superior writing to prove me wrong.
8. Keep it Short,
Sweetie:
It’s easier to write a
2000 word review than a 500 word one. Unfortunately, it’s much more tedious to
read. Summarise. Précis. Edit. You’ll produce a better review.
9. Check and check
again:
Get the facts straight.
Over the years I’ve mis-spelled an author’s name, got a title wrong, specified
the wrong publisher and muddled a few ISBNs. These are all inexcusable errors.
Do check your review for flaws, with the same scrutiny that you’ve given the
book. Get somebody else to read through your review; you may have a blind spot.
I have a wonderful wife, Jenny, who as well as writing brilliant reviews is
also a freelance editor. An editor is a person whose job it stop smart people
making fools of themselves in print. Jenny
has saved me from many a blunder. (I had to wait until she had finished
proof-reading before I could insert this section.)
10. Enjoy it:
There’s that
publisher’s envelope. There’s a wonderful new book in there that nobody has
read yet. And you’ve been chosen to tell people whether they might enjoy it.
Rip open the envelope and…the magic starts again.
For the people involved in children’s literature,
the people wearing the hats with labels such as ‘writers, illustrators, designers,
editors, publishers, reviewers and readers’, I have a simple message:
We all sometimes get that ‘isolated out in the
wilderness’ feeling. My advice is to
change the metaphor from desert to spider-web.
(And be certain that we’re spiders rather than flies, of course.) Imagine that we’re all somewhere on that great
inter-connected spider-web of children’s books and all we need to do is keep
sending vibrations along the strands that bind us together.
Keep on weaving.
Keep on writing.
Keep on reading.
Trevor Agnew
28th November, 2013
