Anna Wilson has done the difficult thing of crossing over genres. She started her literary career as an editor and then became a children’s book writer, and more recently has moved into writing for adults in the form of the literary memoir. We ask her how she came to write her memoir and how she marries this with her work writing for children. Anna also tells us how having an insight into the publishing world through her job as an editor helped her career, and how her mother’s late diagnosis of autism has helped her become a better writer and teacher.
Anna will be teaching a course with us on Writing for Children & Young People starting in September.
You are most well known as a children’s book writer, but recently published a memoir about your mother, could you tell us a little about how that book came about and what it was like for you to move into such a different literary form?
The memoir – A Place for Everything: my mother, autism and me – took me by surprise. I had started writing a blog, and this slowly took hold and made me wonder if I dared try turn it into a book. I started the blog on 27th April 2016, a year to the day that my father rang me to tell me that his cancer diagnosis was terminal. I woke up that day feeling that I had to mark the date. Dad had already died by then – he passed away on 28th July 2015. A few people remembered that date, but no one, apart from my sister, would ever know the significance of the day in April when Dad rang me from the hospital to say that he ‘didn’t have much time left’. I think I felt angry about the fact that no one would ever know how devastating that day had been. My grief manifested itself in a lot of anger in the early days of losing my father. I have always dealt with the ups and downs of life by writing about it – I worked out as young as seven that if I wrote down how confused or angry or upset I was, I would immediately feel better. So in my grief I reached again for my own version of therapy. I could have chosen to write my memories and feelings in my journal, but there was something about needing to mark the occasion that made me start a blog. It gave a focus to my feelings – I could sit down to write every day about what had happened over the past year. I quickly realised that I was trying to do two things: I was trying to get attention for what had happened, to give voice to it, to make people understand, and I was also trying to understand events myself by giving them a shape in the form of a narrative. I did start to get some attention. Friends read the blog and passed it on to others whom they thought might benefit. I wrote about cancer care and mental health care provision and about my mother’s late diagnosis of autism after my father’s death. It seemed that some of what I had to say was resonating with others. Then friends started asking me if I would turn it in to a book. I didn’t know. It seemed too vast a task. Then they started asking me to do it! It was hard, moving away from writing humorous stories about puppies and kittens and vampires and trying to tell the story of the most painful chapter of my life. But it was also cathartic. And I learned a lot about how to craft real life into a readable form. My editor was instrumental in this – offering guidance as to where a memory or a flashback might come in useful, where to bring the reader into the room – where to dramatise events rather than simply retell them. Sometimes writing these scenes was so hard I resisted it – a scene where my mother beats me for spilling ink on the carpet was not one I wanted to revisit, but my editor gently suggested that it might be necessary to do so. She was right. The result is that I feel unable to write humorous stories for children for the time being. Instead I find myself drawn to longer forms of more in-depth narrative. I learnt so much in writing the memoir that I am loath to put that aside and go back to what I was writing before.
When you were writing the memoir, did you take a break from your children’s book writing, or did you manage to write both at the same time? If so, how was that for you?
I couldn’t take a break! The process of writing the memoir took so long, and writing books doesn’t pay that well for most writers, so you have to keep on with the day job, and much of my day job is writing for children. While writing the first draft of the memoir I was still writing, editing and proofreading the four books in my Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire series for 7-9 year olds. I was also researching and writing a non-fiction children’s book called Nature Month-by-Month, a children’s almanac. I found that I wanted to write picture books again too, for the first time in twenty years; I was drawn to short, lyrical texts which examined themes such as death, loss and our place in the natural world. Looking back, I think that this time was probably the richest time creatively that I have ever had, although it didn’t feel that way while I was living it. I was so stressed with sorting out my parents’ estates and selling their house that I don’t think I was very present in my writing life. I was just using it as a form of escapism.
You started your career as an editor in publishing. Do you think that experience helped you when you moved into writing children’s books? Did you know more about the market that you were working for?
It definitely helped initially in terms of managing my expectations and also knowing how the process worked. I was realistic about rejection as I had been at the table during editorial meetings, so I knew that not only does an editor have to persuade the wider editorial team that a book is worth taking on, they must also convince sales and marketing and then sell the title in to bookshops and supermarkets. It is a tough industry to work in, both as an editor and as a writer. Interestingly, although I was a picture book editor for years, I found writing picture books harder than anything. I thought I knew what it took, having read and edited so many, but when it came to writing them, I found it hard to get my agent on board. I look back and realise I hadn’t developed the right voice for picture books and was more inspired by writing longer fiction for ages 7 and up. Probably because my own children inspired me more when they were that age than when they were babies!
How did you get into teaching?
I had always resisted teaching, mainly because I had a bad experience as an assistante in a French lycée when I was 19! I was drawn into teaching by the persistence of a friend and fellow writer, Steve Voake, whom I met in 2007 on an Arvon course where he was my tutor. I stayed in touch with him and he kept trying to persuade me to do some teaching at Bath Spa University where he was a course leader on the Creative Writing for Children and Young People programme. I kept telling him I couldn’t teach, so he gently suggested I might like to write some manuscript reports for his MA students instead. I found I enjoyed this immensely and so when Steve then had another go at persuading me to teach, I agreed to cover one of his lessons. I did this a few times until finally he said, ‘Come and teach a whole module!’ As it happened, this invitation came just after Mum had died and I suddenly felt the time was right. I ended up teaching two undergraduate modules and was a manuscript tutor on the MA programme as well. As my confidence grew, I took on other teaching jobs, including going back to Arvon as a tutor. I now wonder why I resisted it for so long.
Your memoir is about how you and your family coped with your mother’s late diagnosis of autism, could you tell us a little about how that experience changed your life and how this might also have extended into your career, both writing and teaching?
The diagnosis came out of the blue one day when my sister and I were at a review of Mum’s care just after she had come out of section. There was a psychologist at the review who had not seen Mum before, but everything he said indicated that he was taking more notice of her than anyone else we had met. When he said the words, “Has it occurred to you that your mother might be on the autistic spectrum?” I felt such a huge mix of emotion that it was difficult to process at the time. I felt that we as a family were being heard and seen. I felt full of joy, but equally full of deep sorrow. I felt as though we had come to the end of the huge battle and that we were about to embark on another. I think the experience is still changing me – the funny thing about writing the memoir is that I have become aware that it is never truly finished because, while we are still cognisant, we never truly finish processing or understanding our lives. At the time there was a lot of anger that it had taken all of Mum’s life for her to even begin to be understood. Now I look back and think that everyone was only doing the best they could with the knowledge they had available to them at the time (words that were given to me, in fact, by a wise and loving friend). I think that I have a little more understanding of people’s differing points of view and ways of accessing the world now. This helps with teaching and writing, both creatively and practically. Watching my parents become frail and vulnerable and then die has also made me grow up. It couldn’t fail to really, could it?
What books are you planning to write now? Will we see more children’s books, or more adults’ books, or both?
Both, I hope. I have been writing a novel for adults for the past two years. It started as a non-fiction book about my husband’s grandfather, whose house we moved into two years ago. Then I realised I was still trying to write memoir and it wasn’t working. So I decided to liberate myself and fictionalise the story. It is heavy-going and I currently have more frustrating days than I have good ones, but I am determined to see this through, as it has been an ambition of mine for years to write a full-length novel. I am also updating the children’s nature almanac for 2023 – it will be the fifth edition – and I have several picture books in the pipeline with Nosy Crow and Andersen Press, including one called Grandpa and the Kingfisher which is based on my father who adored the birds and their habitat. It is a story about the circle of life and I hope will be used to talk to children in a gentle way about death being a necessary part of life. Maybe once that is published I will be done with writing about my family. Although somehow I think that is unlikely.
You can book here on Anna’s latest course, Writing for Children & Young People, starting in September.