Meeting Canadian Writers and Illustrators of Children’s Books
What inspires the writers of the books your students read? How does an illustrator decide what to draw? Is it true that most authors and illustrators don’t know each other? This column features a different Canadian children’s book creator in each issue and shows you the story beyond the covers.
One of my very favourite novels for children is Nim’s Island. It’s a great classroom read-aloud. My grandsons and I watched the movie, which was almost as good as the book. Wendy Orr’s other novels are all great reads as well. I asked her some questions to get to know this Canadian/Australian author better.
Margriet: You were born in Canada and grew up in Canada, France, and the USA. Did your nomadic life as a child influence your writing?
Wendy: I’m sure it did, though it’s difficult to pinpoint factors that influence our writing or lives. The biggest influence was the need to be an observer before settling into a new community and being aware of differences in points of view and customs. It helped me realize that the size of drama and loss in a child’s life may be minimized by adults.
Margriet: Have books always been important to you?
Wendy: Always! They were also important to my parents, so I was not only encouraged and praised for my own writing, given books, had bedtime classics read by my mother, and crazy invented stories told by my father, but also saw adults modelling a love of reading.
Margriet: What prompted you to write your first book—Amanda’s Dinosaur? How difficult (or easy) was it to find a publisher?
Wendy: Many years ago, a colleague said, “Did I tell you I’ve written a book?” I immediately thought, When am I going to do that? I’ve been saying it all my life! So I started. I was working four days a week and had two young children, but I threw myself into it on my day off and as much of the weekend as I could steal. We also had a sheep farm, so, of course, there were many other intrusions on my time! My friend and I shared a subscription to a writing magazine, which was amazingly helpful in understanding a little bit of the world we were entering. I experimented with different genres, but then Scholastic Australia had a picture book text competition. Although I’d never tried a picture book before, my children were at that age, so I was reading these texts aloud. I wrote Amanda’s Dinosaur and won publication. It wasn’t easy sailing after that, but it was a great start.
Margriet: Now you have over 40 books, many of them novels. Do your stories stem from your own life?
Wendy: I’ve occasionally drawn on incidents from my own life. Peeling the Onion is the truly semi-autobiographical one in which I used my own 1991 car accident, injuries, and emotions for a 17-year-old protagonist.
I often carry an idea with me for years but don’t start writing till I’ve discovered most of the plot, can see the characters and crucial scenes, and hear the first sentence. Any poetry is written by hand, as are notes and questions. Sometimes I interview my characters using a non-dominant hand technique. I need to print finished drafts to edit, and I read later drafts aloud, which lets me hear clunky sentences that seemed okay on the page.
Margriet: Is it true that your best-known book—Nim’s Island—is based on your memories of Salt Spring Island, BC?
Wendy: When I was eight, seeing a tiny island from the ferry between Vancouver Island and Salt Spring inspired me to write a story. Many years later, when I was struggling to find the tone of the book that became Nim’s Island, I remembered that story and dug down to find the child who wrote it. My mother saved all my writings, so I have those notebooks now!
I had an exceptionally positive book-to-film experience—the producer and I became good friends, and I was more involved than usual. That intense involvement in the five years between initial contact and the premiere was an amazing life experience. Naturally, things like a Hollywood red carpet are a thrill, but the most moving thing was seeing the characters come to life, both behind the scenes and on screen. When I met the sea lions playing Selkie, I cried so much that Gerard Butler (playing Dad and Alex Rover’s fictitious hero) paused his promo shoot to ask what was wrong!
Margriet: Your Bronze Age trilogy is published in Canada. What kind of research did you do for these books?
Wendy: For the first, Dragonfly Song, the research was online and from books, as well as a culmination of a lifetime of reading mythology and ancient history. For Swallow’s Dance, I was lucky enough to get a grant to
travel to Santorini and Crete to see the sites for myself. I used this background again in Cuckoo’s Flight. As well as the main archaeological sites and museums, I explored the remains of Gournia with an archaeologist who had excavated it and had also experimented with Minoan cooking and building. On reading Dragonfly Song, which she said was the most accurate fictional depiction of Minoan Crete she’d read, she threw herself into helping with the research of the next two books– even diving to get a murex shell, extracting the dye sac and dying a white silk shirt purple. I’m always amazed at the generosity of researchers when I bombard them with weird questions.
Margriet: You were born in Canada and still have strong ties here. But you’ve lived most of your life in Australia. Have you been published in both countries? How is each different for writers?
Wendy: Some of my books have been published in both countries— Pajama Press published the Minoan Wings series. I wrote several books for Annick Press, which were published in Australia as well. The culture is similar in both countries, though I feel that children’s writers are more honoured in Canada. For example, the CBC flew me to Toronto for school visits ahead of the TD Awards when Dragonfly Song was a finalist. However, the Public Lending Right scheme is more generous in Australia and has not had the same struggles with copyright licences.
Margriet: What’s next?
Wendy: Honey and the Valley of Horses, a middle-grade novel I pitched to my Australian publisher as “Nim’s Island with horses.” The first sentence had been floating in my head for years before the pandemic gave me a clue to the story. Having my son and his family of two toddlers live with us for the first ten months of Melbourne’s very strict lockdown, I became concerned about how children would learn to trust people and the world once they were allowed out again. The story is magic realism: a family heads off in a camper and crosses a bridge to a mountain valley, where they live for seven years, watched over by a herd of horses but unable to leave. Until Papa develops appendicitis and eleven-year-old Honey must escape to the wide world to find help. Stay tuned!
Find out more about Wendy Orr and her books here: https://wendyorr.com/
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margriet Ruurs
Margriet Ruurs is the author of over 40 books for children and conducts (ZOOM) school presentations: margrietruurs.com
Enjoy her travel-and-books blog here: globetrottingbooklovers.com
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Spring 2023 issue.
