Melville House Books

Lawsuits waiting to happen?

“Ninety books written, designed and illustrated by Dublin children are on display at Trinity College as part of a project that encourages them to create their own worlds,” according to this report in the Irish Times.

“‘We had a lot more zombies in the beginning,’ writer Emer Martin told the Times. She’s talking about the story ideas that the fifth-class boys of Our Lady of Good Counsel school, Drimnagh, initially came up with for Bookmarks, an outreach project run by the Trinity Access Programmes (TAP).”

Those familiar with 10-year-old boys might not be surprised to learn that besides zombies, toilets were often portals to another world, along with “fridges, tunnels, being knocked unconscious or, as in Jamie McGratten‘s opening sentences, a basket: ‘I was sitting in my house bored out of my head, so I just put a basket on my head for the craic. I took it off five minutes later and ended up in a strange world.’”

The boys seem to know what they like in a story. The Times report on some of their efforts as follows:

Glenn Byrne’s arresting story is about a giant machine-gun-toting rabbit called Buster Bunny and a robot, which is used to cook sausages on. His page borders are all of blood-tipped bullets, and heads on stakes. “This place is an abomination,” he has written of his world. Where did he get that word from? “I just thought about this auld fella I know, who’s always saying everything is an abomination,” he says. “It means not nice.”

Adam Smith has illustrated his story, Up the Stairs of Horrorville , like a cartoon strip. His imagined world, full of description, is one where, he writes, “the sky was always purple, the seas were always wine, the land was jet black”.

“You need to make things more interesting, so you have to describe them more,” he says. “One of my hobbies is writing stories. I’m thinking of one right now. It’s about a gem that gets robbed from a museum at night.”

TAP is an organization that, for the last five years, has been working with disadvantaged Dublin primary schools. The Bookmarks program was developed such that each child would aim toward writing and illustrating his or her own book. Then the books would go on display in the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin. The Bookmarks theme this year was  Journey.

According to the Times:

The facilitators assured the children that each of them was going to write and illustrate a book, and that all books would go on display to the public for a fortnight at Trinity. This meant the level of interest was kept high, and the project was entirely inclusive.

“We had to have a structure to the narrative, otherwise we’d have had no stories,” Emir Martin says. She devised a narrative system whereby each child had to imagine a way of getting into another world, then overcome a series of obstacles, aided by helpers, before getting through to a conclusion. “The girls all wanted lots of helpers, but the boys didn’t want any.”

The main difficulty she came up against, Martin says, was that so many of the boys’ stories were straight from video games, with accompanying zombies, machine guns and gratuitous violence.

As part of the project all the children were taken to Trinity for a visit, and shown the Book of Kells and the Long Room. One of the aims of Tap is to get children to start thinking early on in life about the possibility of a university education. The trip to the library also meant that Martin was able to talk to them about copyright, and how unimpressed the university would be to see their books copying elements from other stories or video games. “We had fewer zombies after that,” she says.

Valerie Merians is the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.