NetSupport Radio is honoured to chat to children's author, Michael Rosen!
Russell Prue chats to none other than children's author, Michael Rosen! Michael talks about his upcoming book and presentation at Bett 2023, which will feature his book 'Write to feel right' (all about writing for wellbeing) and reading some of his poems.
He discusses what the education system can do to improve the state of writing for young people – stopping the narrow focus on labelling the grammatical elements and trying to fit them all in and instead expose students to many styles of writing to inspire creativity.
On reading, he comments that reading was invented for pleasure (not simply for the purpose of exams) and that it is important to allow young people to choose books they are interested in.
NetSupport Radio is honoured to chat to children's author, Michael Rosen!
Russell Prue chats to none other than children's author, Michael Rosen! Michael talks about his upcoming book and presentation at Bett 2023, which will feature his book 'Write to feel right' (all about writing for wellbeing) and reading some of his poems.
He discusses what the education system can do to improve the state of writing for young people – stopping the narrow focus on labelling the grammatical elements and trying to fit them all in and instead expose students to many styles of writing to inspire creativity.
On reading, he comments that reading was invented for pleasure (not simply for the purpose of exams) and that it is important to allow young people to choose books they are interested in.
Russell Prue: Listeners, I'm thrilled, nay, super excited to be live with the fabulous, the national treasure that is Michael Rosen. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Rosen: Well, thanks for having me.
RP: Amazing. How are you?
MR: I'm good. Covid did not knock out my left eye, my left ear and made my toes numb. But apart from that, the rest of me seems to be pretty good.
RP: You've continued writing and you've written amazingly well since – we've had some great titles from you as well. What does the future hold generally for you? I know you're here to talk– you've got a keynote presentation that we're all really looking forward to. What can folks expect from you there?
MR: The future? Blimey! Er, right. Well, there's a couple of books coming out this year. There's a book about a bear, a little bear that's worried whether it's kind of run out of dreams when it goes to sleep for hibernation. And then there's another story that's actually not by me; it's told by a dog. And it's a French dog, so it's called Gaston le Dog. Gaston le Dog is on a kind of odyssey to get to the beach. For some reason or another, he's pretty fixated about a beach. And he meets up with some pals – there's a hedgehog who all those of you who speak French will know, is called Hérisson. Yes? And also meets up with a cat – a cat that might be quite familiar to people, a little bit like Puss in Boots. But anyway, this cat lives in– of course, you know, in French, a cat is called 'un chat'. So, of course, it lives in a château. Yes, you've got there. And so, that's right: Gaston le Dog, and the château. Also a very wise old serpent, and a hippie yack that collects flotsam and jetsam from a river. So, plenty there. That's coming out in the autumn.
RP: Amazing. We can't wait for that as well. You're speaking of the show here, what can folks expect on the stage from you today?
MR: Well, I did a little booklet for schools called 'Write to feel right'. And it's about writing about emotions and writing for your own well-being, if you like, your state of mind. I'm drawing on my own experience of writing about trauma and bereavement and illness and loss. And so I draw on that without loading the children with that in the book. But today I'll be talking a little bit about that book. I'll read from it. It's a little booklet, a school's booklet. And then reading some of the poems that I've written about being ill, all various things to do with my family, remembering or trying to understand what happened to their relatives in the Holocaust and also the loss of my son. So I'll be reading some poems about that and talking about why I wrote in the way I did. I think.
RP: Yeah, it's an amazing book as well. It's just an amazing title and I love the collection of photographs. That really kind of touched me in an enormous way. Really exciting. What do you think colleagues can do to improve the state of writing for our young people?
MP: The things we can do? Well, I think we should stop chasing them about these expected levels. The idea that there's a special kind of writing that is good on the basis of the fact that you've ticked objects some boxes that come from the grammar, punctuation and spelling, test, to me, seems to be completely absurd. It's–– to be crude about it. Well, I won't be crude about it, but it's the wrong way round. I think people know the various expressions to describe that and so, I just think it's really absurd. I mean, I can remember going as a parent for open day with one of my children, and the teacher said, they're very pleased with his writing because he's embedding his relative clauses and expanding his down phrases. And I just remember thinking well yeah, but I mean it doesn't actually make good writing. Good writing can be– sometimes you can just write without even verbs. You know, think of great poems, think of– well, even very clever adverts. If you stand on the Tube and see, 'See it. Say it. Sorted,' you know, there's no expanded now I'm phrases there, there's no subordinate clauses, there's no relative clauses. It's very direct. And in fact, it's, even in grammatical terms, incorrect: See it? Yeah, full stop – that's great. Say it. Yeah, full stop – that's great, though in fact, GPS would say you have to have an exclamation mark there because it's a command (that's how absurd it is). And then we've got 'Sorted' all on its own. Well, that's not a sentence, says GPS. Well, of course it works very well. Well, look at me – I'm not reading that off a piece of paper. I know it's off by heart. So there was a slogan that really worked that wouldn't pass SATs. Well, what does that tell us? That tells us that writing for a purpose is much more important than thinking how it suits these formulaic writing-by-numbers principles. So I think– I know it's very difficult for teachers; you've got to do it, you've got to make sure that the children are coached for SATs in effect. But you must find some other times and some free time some space where you can write where you're inspired by other literature apart for anything else and by the children's own experiences.
So the great thing about literature is it exposes us to the possibilities of different ways of writing. And different ways of writing. And different ways of writing reminds us about our own experiences. So you have an interchange, a lovely, lovely interchange between your own experience. And these incredible varieties– this incredible variety of ways of writing – expose the children to that and they will fill in their own experiences in their own imaginations. You must trust them and it'll happen.
RP: Of course. We'll know that before are writing we need to get them reading more as well. What else can we do to encourage a greater or a higher level of reading in young people?
MR: While the key thing we have to remember about reading is that it was invented so that we have pleasure. That was why I was invented. It wasn't invented in order to give us exams or tests or to find out whether it was good for us or not. You know, when Homer wrote the Odyssey, it was in order to excite us and amaze us and make us wonder about this person and his failings and the adventures and whether it be able to cope with the clashing rocks and whether what trick would he manage to think up in order to be able to listen to the sirens but not dive into the sea and then get destroyed. And we are in awe of this and we love this and then we wonder whether he will ever get home and then if he gets home, will it be okay? All this. That's why, you know, we invent literature. So that's over 3,000 years old and we've been doing that ever since. And whether it's comics or stories or poems or drama, opera, you know, this is all ways of writing. And we do it for pleasure so school should be a place for pleasure writing and reading too. So the idea that, you know, we can make reading for pleasure at the centre of the curriculum. We know that, if children read for pleasure, they access education more easily. So if you want to then add on to that, they achieve more, they attain more. That's true. But they will find it easier to access education if they read more and if they read for pleasure because they'll find their ways to different texts that excite and interest them and that's the way.
RP: What can parents do, because a lot of the reading can be done at home and colleagues would say that if a child is not from a reading household, they're at a disadvantage. What advice could you give to parents to encourage their children to get stuck in?
MR: Well ideally, if there's a library near you go to that; if there's a book shop near you, go to that,. Give the children the choice. Let them choose. The internet is a fantastic source of books and writing of all kinds. It does take a little bit of navigating, but if you put in a title– let's say you've got young children and you put in a title, like nursery rhymes or you put in Hansel and Gretel. You'll find lots of lovely versions of it, whether in writing or in video form with lots of lovely pictures and so on and you can start exploring. So, I know some books that are old are quite difficult for children to access but you know virtually every book that was written before 1900, or I think even before 1920 now, is actually up there on the internet somewhere. And so you can play around with these things. And also go to authors' websites and see what they show because, quite often, authors put up bits of their books and so on, on their websites. I put up– I've got over 200 videos of my poems –for example, I'm not the only one – I put up new poems on my website. So if you if your child says, well they like Julia Donaldson, go to Julia Donaldson's website, find what she's talking about and sit with your child and help them navigate. That's what I'd say.
RP: And do you have a favourite author at the moment?
MR: A favourite author. Well, I read a wonderful book for adults. This is by man called Colin Grant. And Colin Grant's parents came from Jamaica. He was born here and brought up here and he wrote a book and called, 'I'm black so you don't have to be'. So it's– and that's a quote from his, an older relation of his, who was a pioneer really for him. And he said, 'well, I did the black bit and now you don't have to be.' So, it's a lovely wry, clever, funny, brilliant book about his Caribbean heritage and how he navigates around his relatives. I interviewed him for the London Review of Books. You can see a little video of me, interviewing him and I just think it is a wonderful, wonderful book.
RP: That's an amazing there. Do you have a particular children's author apart from yourself that you would recommend to anyone?
MR: Children's authors? Many, many. I mentioned Julia Donaldson; I think she is a pure genius. I think we are, so, so lucky to have Julia Donaldson. In years to come, people will go, 'Oh, she was amazing', just like the people say, 'AA Milne? Goodness me, how amazing! JRR Tolkien? How amazing!' People will say that. They should be saying it now; she should be somehow in the centre of the national conversation about literature and books. She isn't, because we diminish and don't value children's– So if you write for children, this is somehow thought of as like a bit childish. But so far from it. This is somebody who is a genius with words and literary form and we have her in our midst. We should be treasuring her. So, Julia Donaldson.
RP: That's a brilliant recommendation. It's a pleasure as ever to speak with you. Michael, thank you so much. The very best of luck for your keynote presentation and I may well see you later on in the afternoon. For the moment, thank you so much and God bless you. Thank you.
MR: Thanks very much.