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And yet, this city’s kid-lit scene offers big rewards for five Calgarians who’ve chosen to write and illustrate books for the next generation of engaged readers.

When he was a young boy, David A. Poulsen noticed that all the books he loved to read had a photograph of a person on the back cover. It was then he realized that there was such a thing as a writer. “Those people created those stories. When I discovered that I said, ‘That’s great. I wonder if I can do that.’ ”

Turns out he could, and here in southern Alberta, he was not alone. There is no shortage of local authors penning books for young readers. Calgary’s kid-lit scene boasts a disproportionate number of award-winners and bestsellers for a city our size. The authors who make up this vibrant community come to the genre with their own motivations and via a unique path. Poulsen, for example, is a cowboy, a rodeo announcer and an ex-rodeo clown. Clem Martini is a university professor and playwright who teaches drama to troubled youth. Shenaaz Nanji is a mom from Mombasa, India. Renata Liwska is a graduate of  the Alberta College of Art and Design; Carolyn Fisher taught illustration at the Calgary post-secondary arts institution. But while Liwska was drawing in her sketchbook on her mother’s kitchen table in Poland, Fisher slopped pigs on her parents’ Alberta farm. Perhaps the only thing these writers have in common is the relative shoe size of their readership.

Poulsen started writing when he was a child himself. He remembers tugging an orange scrapbook around the family home that he filled with stories and songs, but he had to wait until 1984, after he graduated with a French degree from the University of Saskatchewan, to become a “real writer.” Poulsen put to paper a version of a story his mother used to tell about welcoming home soldiers from the Second World War. She was a little girl at the time and recalled seeing the young men, broken by Dieppe, step off the train at the station in Swift Current. Poulsen fictionalized the story, changed the point of view from a young girl to a young boy, and added some hockey. The story won a provincial short-story prize and Poulsen, suddenly, was getting calls from publishers. In 1987, his own photo graced the back cover The Cowboy Kid, his first book.

Poulsen has since written 11 more young-adult novels, along with an adult novel, a book of short stories, two sports biographies and a cowboy cookbook. However, he reserves his greatest zeal for his first audience. “I’ve never deviated from the idea that I would write for kids,” he says. “I still read a tremendous number of children’s books now. I really like them. And I really like kids. I like the way they look at life.”

Poulsen obsesses about finding authentic voices for his characters, and sees the late Edmonton author Martyn Godfrey as a mentor. Godfrey used to visit shopping-mall food courts and sit down at a table near groups of teenagers. He’d pretend to be listening to music on his Walkman headphones, but really he was eavesdropping on the conversations of the kids nearby. He was a spy, snooping on their slang and recording their turns of phrase in his notebook. The Walkman was a ruse; Godfrey never even turned it on. “The kids would zone him out,” Poulsen says. “But he was writing down the language. The kids in his books sounded like kids.”

Poulsen does the same thing when he presents his books to children in schools. He listens closely to how the students speak. When he can, he goes to the gym and shoots hoops with them just to hear what they say. “I would like to get that right,” he says. “One of the things I am proudest of is when a reader says, ‘Your people sound right.’ ”

However, sometimes sounding right means sounding rough. Kids swear. They swear a lot. Poulsen has to balance his desire for authenticity with concerns about profanity. Poulsen’s Last Sam’s Cage tells the story of a young offender who escapes from his abusive stepfather. “The people in the story are tough,” Poulsen says. “So the language is tough.” Afraid school librarians would refuse to carry the book, Poulsen considered scaling back the language. His editor at Key Porter Books, though, insisted he write it the way it should be written, and, in 2004, Last Sam’s Cage became Poulsen’s most successful book.

Poulsen feels that Alberta is a fine place to be a children’s book writer. The Young Alberta Book Society, or YABS, arranges school visits and author tours for its membership. These can be lucrative gigs. YABS authors command upwards of $600 for a full-day visit, and many writers—Poulsen among them—earn more in a year presenting to classrooms than they do selling books. Poulsen figures he spends about 90 days each year touring schools and holding storytelling workshops for students.

The kids always impress him far more than the pay. “You give them a few things to work on and they take off in directions that I haven’t even thought of.” Poulsen derives so much joy from mentoring students that he recently completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia so that he can teach writing. “I love benefiting the creative process,” he says.

To call Clem Martini a “children’s author” would be to under-represent him. Martini writes plays for adults and plays for children. Yes, he writes novels for young adults, but the University of Calgary professor also writes non-fiction histories of Canadian theatre. His most recent work, Bitter Medicine, is a “graphic memoir” about his family’s history of schizophrenia that he wrote with his brother, Olivier (Swerve published an excerpt in March 2010). “I don’t think writing for children is a separate vocation,” Martini says. “I consider myself a writer.”

As a writer, Martini is drawn to absences in the literary canon, which he feels compelled to fill. The lack of fantasy novels set in Western Canada, for example, inspired Martini to write Feather and Bone: The Crow Chronicles, a trilogy of young-adult novels that tells the saga of a family of crows in southwestern Alberta. Now Martini is working on a novel about the experience of teenage perpetrators of sexual crimes. “There is nothing in the literature that discusses this,” Martini says. “You try to correct. You try to address. And you talk about those things that haven’t been talked about.”

Martini wrote for children before he became a parent himself. He drew on the experiences of his own childhood. “That is the great thing about writing for kids,” he says. “Everyone has remembrances and incidents and a ‘library’ they can check into.” But his writing changed once he became a father. Watching his own kids travel through their childhood challenged his own recollections and, especially, devalued the priority of these memories in his writing. “My own childhood doesn’t necessarily have precedence anymore,” he says. In a sense, having children refreshed his source of material to draw from.

One thing that authors of children’s books seem to share is an enduring reader’s affection for the genre. Martini reads contemporary children’s literature and often returns to the great classics. “I try to figure them out,” he says. Publishers recognize that adults are also reading, and buying, titles written for young readers. According to sales figures, children’s literature ranks among the only genre thriving through the latest recession. Martini doesn’t know why so many adults are drawn to kids’ books, but he suspects parents enjoy sharing the stories with their children. “My youngest daughter introduced me to Harry Potter,” he says. “It is a great way to have a conversation.”

Although he writes in several different genres for varying audiences, Martini derives a different kind of pleasure in writing for children than he does penning work for adult readers. Bitter Medicine, for example, required Martini to persevere through heavy material. But writing The Crow Chronicles was a treat. “I raced to the computer every day,” Martini says. “When you write for kids you tap into, recollect and embrace a sense of imagination that isn’t valued as an adult. A sense of abandonment to an imagined world.”

Like Martini, Shenaaz Nanji started writing children’s books to fill what she perceived to be a gap in the canon. Instead of an imagined world, though, Nanji’s work mines the reality of her background and family history.

Nanji recalls the day in 1983, two years after she immigrated to Canada, when her four-year-old son, Astrum, came home and asked, “Mom, are we Indians?” Nanji understood her son’s confusion. He lived in Canada but was born in Kenya into a family with Indian roots. The boy scarcely knew who, or what, he was. Nanji searched the children’s section of the public library for a book that addressed issues of immigrant identity, but she found nothing. “The books were all about Dick and Harry, but none with our names. None about our community.” So Nanji decided to write her own stories for her children, Astrum and Shaira, and named the characters in her books after them.

At first Nanji didn’t give a thought to publishing, but the instructor of a noncredit creative-writing course encouraged her to pursue her writing more seriously. In 1993, a decade after that fruitless trip to the public library, Nanji’s Teeny Weeny Penny was published, satisfying Astrum, who used to tell his mother, “I won’t believe you are an author until I see a book.” Soon more books followed, many drawing on Nanji’s experiences growing up in East Africa or on the trials of immigrant children adjusting to life in Canada.

Nanji’s latest work, a young-adult novel called Child of Dandelions, tells the story of a teenage girl, Sabine, whose family was forced to flee their Ugandan home during Idi Amin’s purge of the country’s South Asian population. Child of Dandelions is Nanji’s first chapter book, as well as her first attempt at historical fiction. The story’s content intimidated her. She had to contend with an African dictator and didn’t know how best to handle the gory details the plot demanded. More than this, though, Nanji feared writing a dry, political novel. She gave an early draft to Astrum to read. He told her it read like a history textbook. “That caused terror in me,” Nanji says. “I knew I had to make the story gripping.” Nanji succeeded in the rewriting. Child of Dandelions earned her much critical praise and a Governor General’s Award nomination in 2008.

Like her first picture books, Nanji wrote Child of Dandelions with her own children in mind. During the course of the writing, however, Nanji realized that she was writing to herself as a teenage girl in Uganda. Like Sabine, Nanji had three months to leave the country where her family had lived for a century. “At the time, I was dazed,” Nanji said, and writing the novel helped her to address some of the confusion and anger she endured during her last Ugandan days. “In the end, I found hope,” she said. Alongside Sabine, Nanji learned that “the best way to get revenge is to live happy.”

Renata Liwska, who also illustrated this story, creates books for an audience she knows very well. When she finishes a drawing and tells her husband, fellow illustrator Mike Kerr, that “kids would love this,” he knows she is really talking about herself.

As a girl growing up in Poland, Liwska used to sit at the kitchen table and fill sketchbooks with drawings. When she got older, she left the kitchen for the cafes, but her sketching continued. “I would go from coffee shop to coffee shop and just draw. In that one moment when I was drawing, nothing else existed. Just me and my pencil and my sketchbook and my introverted ideas.”

Those ideas spawned pages and pages of drawings. Many of Liwska’s sketches depict animal characters that exude both a tactile softness and a melancholic edge. Even when her characters are funny, they are also somehow sad. “It is my personality,” Liwska explains. “I am very reflective, and when I am drawing out my feelings they come out sombre.”

Liwska’s distinctive style was the perfect choice to accompany writer Deborah Underwood’s exploration of the different kinds of quiet. American independent booksellers and librarians so embraced The Quiet Book that it debuted on the New York Times bestseller list long before the big bookstore chains had even heard of it. The Quiet Book stayed on the bestseller list for another 14 weeks, and the Times eventually named it one of its Books of the Year for 2010. Liwska was nominated for the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature (Illustration) and won a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.

A picture book most often represents a collaboration between author and illustrator—two artists who share the project but may never meet or even talk to each other. Publishers send Liwska manuscripts that might suit her unique style. “I have to read it, and if I see the images right away I know the story is for me. If I don’t, I have to regretfully say no.” When Liwska accepts a manuscript to illustrate, the author might send a list of suggestions for her to work with, but, like most children’s book illustrators, Liwska ignores them. “We all want the book to be the best,” Liwska says, but each creator exercises sovereignty over their own process. “When I am trying to figure out what is going to be on the page I look into my own life when I was a kid,” she adds. “The only true impression comes from within you.”

Illustrators like Liwska, whose artwork is so distinctive, often endure long waits for manuscripts that match their style. Her plush and slightly melancholic images would clash with a story such as, for example, Walter the Farting Dog. Back in 2008, after a particularly lengthy wait for an appropriate manuscript, Houghton Mifflin asked if Liwska could write her own story, which became Little Panda, her authorial debut. On the accompanying website, the delightful littlepandabook.com, Liwska shares the genesis of the story, which began with her watching TV in a cramped budget hotel room in Europe and stumbling upon a news story in which men were trying to coax a panda from a tree. When she arrived home, she became obsessed with watching videos of pandas on the Internet. “With this book,” she wrote, “I hope to give the reader a little taste of the joy I get from observing these wonderful animals.”

In February, Penguin published Liwska’s Red Wagon, the tale of a playful fox named Lucy who embarks upon an errand for her mother that becomes a joyous flight of fancy. And there will be much rejoicing among young fans to hear that the sequel to The Quiet Book, aptly named The Loud Book, will arrive in bookstores in April.

Carolyn Fisher is another illustrator-turned-author. After graduating from ACAD, Fisher worked as a freelance illustrator. Her corporate editorial assignments offered little physical space to work with; at best, a single full-page illustration and maybe a couple of images in the margins. Then Fisher realized the opportunities that lowering the age of an audience could offer an illustrator. “When you look at a children’s book you say, ‘Wow, look at all those acres of white pages that I can fill up with my drawings.’ ” The average picture book includes 14 double-page spreads, usually in full colour. For an artist used to the limitations of editorial illustration, this is a dream.

Fisher’s illustrative style is the noisy, lurid and nonsensical counter to Liwska’s pensive drawings. But like Liwska, Fisher’s publisher suggested she write a story that matched her illustrations instead of waiting for other people’s manuscripts. Fisher found the writing daunting at first. Composing Art History papers at ACAD was not the same as writing stories for children. “Even though you only have to write 600 words, they have to be the right words,” she says. Fisher joined a writing group and learned the basics of narrative and picture-book mechanics. She learned how to pace a story, how to use a page break to deliver a visual or verbal punchline. And she learned that a children’s book is a hybrid of words and pictures: each element must express what the other cannot.

Her education as a writer resulted in 2002’s A Twisted Tale. She followed it with a non-fiction picture book called The Snow Show that employs an imaginary cooking show, complete with a celebrity snow-chef, to teach how snow is formed. The Junior Library Guild in the United States wanted to include The Snow Show on its official list and purchase 5,000 copies to send out to libraries around the country. However, a fart joke threatened to disqualify the book from the Guild’s list. “They wouldn’t buy any book with the mention of poop or pee or farts,” Fisher says. She produced a new version of the book without the naughty words, but in the end the Guild passed on the book anyway. Fisher put the farts back in. “I got to stick with my principles,” she laughs.

Fisher’s forbidden fart points to an inherent conservatism in the genre on this side of the Atlantic. Filomena Gomes acts as the Alberta representative for the Paris-based children’s book publisher L’ecole des loisirs. According to Gomes, the books coming out of France are pushing boundaries in both form and content in a way that makes North American librarians and school teachers nervous. Some of their reactions are not surprising. When Gomes presented a graphic novel that retold Greek myths and included two tiny nude images, a puritanical school principal accused her of “peddling pornography.” But less edgy books also have a hard time finding shelf space on this side of the Atlantic. Some librarians balk at books that, for example, are written in cursive script, open horizontally rather than vertically, or play with the language in unexpected ways. Books that deal with emotions like fear are deemed off limits for young readers. L’ecole des loisirs publishes a board book called Ça n’existe pas! that ends with a grotesque, big-mouthed fly eating the reader. Kids love the story, but the book is still a hard sell. This is not to say that our authors are writing tame and bland books. Poulsen’s 2008 young-adult novel, Numbers, is about a teen’s relationship with his Holocaust-denying teacher. Nanji’s Child of Dandelions features a real-life villain some accuse of cannibalism. And, in the end, Fisher kept her fart.

Fisher, like her peers, is working too hard to be deterred by small minds—those defined by their lack of openness rather than their age. She still illustrates other authors’ stories (a collaboration with writer Willa Perlman, titled Good Night, World, comes out this summer) and she recently penned a collection of reptile poems for Chickadee Magazine. The assignment came as a surprise for Fisher, who hadn’t written poetry since the fourth grade. But despite her writerly chops, Fisher remains an illustrator at heart. Her home studio—actually a dining room converted into a workspace and fortified by a pair of baby gates to keep out her toddler, Kieran—is piled with ink bottles, sketchbooks, and tubes of acrylic paint. “I love making pictures,” Fisher says. “The more pictures the better. The bigger the better. The more colour the better. I don’t make books for ‘the children.’ I make the books for me. It is not a noble thing.”

Nor is it an easy thing. A common misconception about children’s literature is that writing for children offers less of a challenge than writing for adults. That kid lit is a lesser genre. British novelist Martin Amis recently stirred tempers when he told the BBC, “If I had a serious brain injury, I might well write a children’s book, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of whom you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.” He went on to say that he would never employ a form that forced him to “write at a lower register than what I can write.”

Calgarians do not have to look far to find kid lit that proves Amis’s remarks are, in the words of British children’s author Lucy Coats, “arrogant twaddle.” The proof is in Poulsen’s striving for authentic voices, Nanji’s confrontation of cultural pain, and Martini’s desire to fill in the gaps. The proof is in the quiet emotion of Liwska’s characters and the commitment to narrative amid the frenzy of Fisher’s books. They are to be admired and thanked for allowing our children—and their parents—to understand what true freedom reads like.

Originally published in Swerve magazine on Mar.11.11.

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