The poem that became a shortlisted book

It is one of the quiet ironies of my life that I wrote my first picture book without ever intending it to be a book. I wrote it simply as a poem (it had eight stanzas of four lines each) and it was originally published as a double-page spread in a children’s magazine (The School Magazine, November 2009). It carried a single (and wonderful) comical illustration by Gus Gordan that stretched across the two pages.

Although I had had a bunch of children’s poems published by that stage, I have to admit I was still a frustrated poet. I really hoped a book publisher would want to publish a book-length collection of my children’s verse. (It would be a diverse collection, because I wrote on a variety of subjects, and in quite a variety of poetic forms—perhaps that was the problem!) But no book publisher had yet seen the light enough to want to offer me that sort of deal.

As part of my little “campaign” to get a poetry collection published, I printed off ten copies of a 36-page manuscript of “Sample Children’s Verse,” and sent it off to ten Australian children’s book publishers. The campaign didn’t work in the way I had envisaged, but, all things considered, I suppose it was quite successful. Six of the ten publishers wrote back to me, even though my submission had been, as they say in the industry “unsolicited”. Of those six, four gave me positive feedback, though stopping short of accepting any of my work yet; and one—

Little Hare Books—offered me a publishing deal for a picture book based on my “Aunty May” poem!

To say that I was surprised would be an understatement. I had never thought of the Aunty May poem as a book in its own right. But writers, I suppose, have certain gifts, and publishers have others. The team at Little Hare could “see” this poem as a picture book. The poem needed to be enlarged by three more stanzas, they told me. They asked if I could write three such stanzas—which I duly did—and, as it happened, they loved the result. Little Hare commissioned Andrew Joyner to illustrate the book in his wonderful comic style, and in 2012 the book appeared under the title What’s the Matter, Aunty May?

In 2013, the book was named a notable book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and was later shortlisted as one of just four children’s books in the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. It also received some great reviews from children’s literature reviewers, and in 2014 was translated into Simplified Chinese. It’s been quite a ride so far.

Part of the irony of all this is that I have written a bunch of actual picture book manuscripts over the years, none of which have (yet!) been picked up by publishers. Yet this poem, which I hadn’t envisaged as a picture book, became one. It was about a kid who, blissfully unaware of what he was doing, tried to help his Aunty May clean the house, and created chaos. A simple concept, really, but it worked, thought of course I had to work hard to get the rhyming verse tight, as well as comical.

Genres are rarely interchangeable in literature. In fact, children’s poetry and children’s picture books are about the only exception to this rule that I can think of. They overlap, because picture book texts are almost always short and punchy (like poems are), and sometimes picture book texts rhyme (just like rhyming poems). And if both carry a story, they can overlap.

By the way, if you’re interested in the Aunty May book, it is available from general bookstores or from the publisher. Otherwise, to buy What's the Matter Aunty May on Amazon click here.

And of course the book remains a prime example—to me and others—of how even a simple poem can eventually transform into a book.