Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans
[0:06] and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today I am joined by two titans of the fantasy field. I am joined by Anna Sampson who is an experienced editor and author of anthologies that often skew towards poems in the world of fantasy. And also by hardly needs an introduction by Chris Riddell who, is there are so many things I could say about Chris but let's just say he's previously the UK Children's Laureate in 2015 to 17, and he's won a huge number of awards he has a very distinct style that if I just mention the front cover of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard book or indeed.
[0:58] Chris's series is the edge chronicles written with paul stewart the edge chronicles you'll probably instantly be able to know who i'm talking about and if that wasn't enough he's also a political cartoonist and no doubt is very busy with the world's politics at the moment oh yeah yeah welcome both to the podcast we are talking today though about this new book which is published by Macmillan called Heroes and Villains, Poems About Legends.
[1:33] So before we start talking about this particular collection, I was wondering, as you're collaborating on a poetry compendium together, do you have a particular poem that you came across as a child that you've carried along with you in your own little anthology inside your head. I've got one which I can share with you, but let's hear what you come up with. Well, I've got one instantly, and that goes back absolutely to my childhood. And that is possibly the greatest fantasy poem ever written. And that is The Jabberwocky.
[2:14] At the beginning of Alice Through the Looking Glass, there it is, read in mirror writing. And what beguiled me completely was the fact that it seemed to make no sense, and yet I understood it. And it was that sort of alchemy that fascinated me as a child. "'Twas brillig and the slidy toads did gyre and gimmer." Just wonderful, evocative words that sort of didn't mean anything, except maybe in an imaginative way. It spoke to me as then a young child who enjoyed drawing. It spoke to my visual imagination. I think fantasy often does that. The creating of worlds we wish to inhabit, we want to visualize.
[3:03] That, I suppose, began my illustration journey that is perfect i imagine you must have drawn the waffle blade going snicker snack or in the old books yeah how about you anna um obviously you know huge numbers of poems now but what was the one that you thought of when you were younger that you know logical imagination as soon as chris said jabbawockee i realized that of course all of the alice poems are there Yeah, really from very early. I mean, will you walk a little faster instead of waiting to a snail? You know, I say that to my kids all the time when they're walking very, what I consider to be very slowly. So definitely the Alice poems. But I think the one that I really remember is The Lady of Shalott. Oh, yes. She just seemed so kind of beautiful. And I think I was very excited that it was very long. I must have read it at an age when, you know, that seemed like genuinely a sort of epic, that seemed like paradise lost to me. It seemed very, Very long. And I think the idea of Camelot comes so beautifully to life from that. The other one, and it's not a fantasy one, is the Robert Louis Stevenson bed in summer, which I think of every year around this time. Winter, I get up at light dressed by yellow candlelight.
[4:22] I was just thinking about The Lady of Chalot, which appears in your collection. Yeah, I've got to write. It's so visual, but it's also so much about the sound. Like one of the perhaps less famous lines, whenever I see a breeze going through willow trees, willows whiten, aspens quiver, wherever our bees is dusk and shiver, it immediately clicks in in my brain. I agree. These are such great poems you've chosen. And if anyone listening hasn't read them, immediately stop. Put paws on and go and read them ah thank you chris for those of you who are watching the youtube version again it might well be worth following this particular episode on the youtube version because we're going to have chris doing some illustration for us and he's showing the beautiful uh illustration for the i think it's an extract isn't it of the latest extracts yes we couldn't fit it all in yeah which i was a shame anna but but you gave me the absolute best bits And we had a very brief conversation before
[5:24] we started recording about lockdown. And I suppose the Lady of Charlotte is the ultimate sort of person in lockdown.
[5:33] And she sort of sees the world, as many of us do and did during the lockdown, through the prism of, I would have thought, a screen. For her, it's the mirror. and so she sees people coming and going through the mirror, from the outside world and it's only when she finally breaks free and the mirror in that wonderful line sort of cracked from side to side, and she emerges and then we have the ultimate final line delivered by Lancelot that's so beautiful so it's a deeply romantic poem.
[6:14] As well as being deeply gothic I think Yes, there's so much mystery in it we don't know how she ended up there or why she's there there's so much happening around the frame of the story in the poem, She left the web. She left the loom. She made three paces through the room. I mean, it's all in the head, just ready to come out. I better stop because there's a lot more in there.
[6:40] So that was the child version of you and your relationship with poetry. And Chris, you said that you found that the Jabberwocky kind of helped you become the illustrator that you have since become. But for someone listening who is wanting to follow in your footsteps what how did you get there what what were your what what happened to that little boy to get him to be such a well-known illustrator oh my goodness well well who knows is is is the unhelpful answer to that um i suppose a more helpful answer is that um i was an inveterate reader and so i read tolkien and i read c.s lewis and I read Ursula Le Guin, and I read a lot of fantasy that was just perfect for illustration, and I attempted to illustrate the books that I read. So I remember drawing the Battle of the Five Armies when I was in year six, having read The Hobbit and being inspired by it. The other thing I did was I went back to the illustrated books that I loved and would find illustrations that really spoke to me, and I would attempt to copy them.
[7:52] Sometimes copying gets a bad name, but I think it's a great way to analyse how images are made, and particularly illustrations in books can tell you a lot by careful perusal and certainly by attempting to recreate the effect that the illustrator has got. I used to almost obsessively draw the white rabbit from the frontispiece of Alice in Wonderland, because there was something magical about the way the artist, John Tenniel, conveyed both the character of the rabbit without losing the essential rabbit nature of the character. So there was this, and it was something about the eyes, something about the stance. And I would draw this, and then I would discover the tolage in the background. I would discover the way that Tenniel drew the folds in the jacket.
[8:48] And this just entered my visual imagination. And the great thing about copying is that once you've copied, you can then put that away, but it lives in your visual imagination. So it's a great way to learn. And so I would say, go along to a gallery, get one of those little stools that you often see by the reception. I see far few people of doing this, but take a little stool, take it to your favourite exhibit, sit down with your sketchbook, copy something beautiful just for half an hour, and you'll find you'll take that away with you.
[9:22] And what I find really interesting about that idea of copying is that there is a stage in writing about that too. I think Anna will probably agree with me that certainly young writers at school, but also new writers who as adults, there's no harm at all in doing your fan fiction or your homage to, I don't know, Doctor Who, whatever it is, because you are learning how plots are put together. You're learning voice, you're learning style, you're learning characterisation. What could happen to this character? No, that's outside what they would be like. You're learning colouring in, in a sense. But it's such a huge... I was going to say, Anna, isn't that how poetry anthologies work, in exactly that way? Yes. I mean, the idea is that you have a buffet of poetry and you sample all of those different styles.
[10:16] And you can go away obviously and explore them more fully if there's something that really strikes a chord with you but I mean I do think for any kind of writing I think everything starts with reading I'm always incredibly shocked when you meet someone who says oh I've written a book and then you say oh and you know what do you like reading and they say oh no I don't really read and you think your book is bad I'm sorry you know we know that it's sort of everything starts with experiencing how other people put words together um on the page and and you're right the nuts and bolts of plot and character and those kind of things and i think when people i i certainly remember going through little periods of writing like dh lawrence when i was doing my a levels somewhere there are presumably a lot of pages of a terrible kind of ripoff dh lawrence writing somewhere in a drawer at home yes that might be quite unintentionally funny if I'm just thinking about this lush lushness but just going back to this question of the role of a verse compendium it is an absolutely gorgeous book and it reminded me of the kind of books that school libraries must have on the shelves and local libraries and I was thinking of what compendiums I knew about I was thinking, of course, the first one I thought of was the Rattlebag with Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
[11:44] But also, Anna, you've already done, and with Chris, Gods and Monsters, mythological poem. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Now, coming to this, what was your mission, should you choose to accept it?
[11:59] What was your quest in putting together this particular selection? Yeah. Well, so Gods and Monsters was mythological poems, of which, of course, there are so many, you know, such an embarrassment of riches. And I sort of thought, well, we've done myths, we need to do legends. And then, of course, my editor said to me, wonderful, what's the difference? And I had to get away and look it up. And of course, the difference is that a legend has a grain of truth. But we have, I think it's fair to say, stretched that definition quite far. So perhaps there are real people like saints and kings and queens and villains and highwaymen at the centre of the stories.
[12:47] But some of them, for example, King Arthur, we think perhaps he wasn't a real character. But his legends have been believed and been felt to be true for so long. He gets a pass so we can have Guinevere and the knights. And we have dragons and beasts because an awful lot of these, you know, there were some beasts like the minotaur who I don't think that people ever genuinely believed were real and in existence. And you might meet them around a dark corner. But dragons, of course, legends of dragons have come up in cultures all over the world, perhaps because of the fossil records of dinosaurs being discovered. You know, perhaps perhaps that's why. And we have mermaids, which I've allowed us because, of course, sailors might have seen the tales of seals and at a distance after a few too many tots of rum, a different kind of legend grows up. So either things that have that germ of truth to them or things which have sort of taken on the ring of truth over the centuries. I was interested as well that you often put in two poems around, or even more, I think the Mary Celeste, Baudisseur, Boudicca.
[14:04] Sometimes they were an older poem. I could recognize it was an older poem with a more modern interpretation, but not always. Is that, I mean, I can guess why you might have done it. You tell me why you did that. Sometimes I do think, oh, we could have got an extra legendary figure in there, but we've got two Boudiccas or two Mary Celeste. I just I love the way poems talk to each other and I love showing to readers the ways in which different people, particularly if they're writing perhaps centuries apart, have written about the same subject or the same feeling or the same story or the same legend. And I think when you're putting together an anthology on myths and legends, it's really something important to get across that we can climb inside these stories and sort of use them in different ways. And they have been used in different ways and they have been retold with new sidelights on them over the centuries that they've been popular. So I think with myths and legends, it's particularly important to have perhaps more than one voice.
[15:14] I think also, Anna, what I enjoy about your anthologising, if I may sort of coin it, is the way in which poems can sort of collectively take you on a journey. And so I love the proposition of heroes and villains. So throughout this collection, I was sort of surmising, you know, this is a villainous character. This is a hero. This is a situation I wouldn't want to be in because of this character. This is a situation that is entirely wonderful because there's a saintly figure doing something great. So it was the way in which the different figures come together. I turn this page, for those watching on YouTube, there is a wonderful poem called Hush for the Forvey Witches. And it has two sisters who have obviously been ostracized by the puritanical authorities in Scotland in the 16th century.
[16:16] Now, heroines, heroes, yes, to a certain extent. But sort of the situation they're in, I think, is fascinating in this passage of the anthology, the way that one goes from witches to Earl Cassilis'
[16:34] lady to a wonderful one of a wise woman turning into a hare. So these are different ways to look at heroes and different ways to look at villains, I think, through the poetic forms. I think that, for me, overall, that was the thought journey I enjoyed the most. Although I did enjoy finding saints mixed in with them all, because so many legendary heroes from the past were saints, and we tend to, on the whole, drop them out of the discussion because of, you know, multi-faith world and all that. It's easier to talk about King Arthur. And the one, is it St. Kevin? And his blackbird. And his blackbird. I mean, that's just a fabulous premise. Seamus Heaney, I think, isn't it?
[17:18] But it's going to be really tough, Anna, but do you have a favourite poem that you'd like to share with us? I mean, I never choose a favourite. Never. One that you'd like to read, then. I always resist that. And Anna, I must ask you to give me a page number as well so I can turn the page.
[17:39] Everybody go over to YouTube because it's really a treat. should we do let's do should we do if page 242 and if we all turn to our textbooks yes that's right i've always wanted to say that so on page 242 so this is in the beast section it's one of the dragon poems of one of chris's absolutely gorgeous dragons and this is called if by james carter i choose this this is my daughter's favorite she is an aspiring paleontologist So she thought this was wonderful. If dinosaurs were real, then maybe dragons were as well. And perhaps one day they'll find a skeleton beside a craggy cliff, far inside a cave, a backbone and a tail, a jagged skull, and those branch-like bones where the wings would have been, or even a whole dragon, perfectly preserved in Siberian snow, grey, green and scaly, those two top canine fangs just jutting over the jaw, the raging fire of the beast long lost to the deep sleep of the dead, those saggy eyelids closed forever. Wonderful. Wonderful.
[19:04] So just before we move on to the illustrations, I just wondered if there was, because it's not just you knew all these already, presumably, you had to go and research your subject. Was there a sort of research gem that you found during that? So many. I think I always start an anthology with a little list of things, and I think, oh, well, we must have that. We must have that. But it's always such a pleasure to discover new things. A lot of the contemporary poems were new to me. And I also just love discovering older poems that I just hadn't come across before. There's a lovely, quite grisly Macbeth poem by Walter de la Mer that I found for this, which I didn't know. And The Earl Casalice's Lady, which Chris mentioned earlier by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I really, really love that. And I love the illustration that Chris has done.
[20:04] There's one by Liesl Mueller as well. Mueller, I'm sure I'm saying that wrong, who called Sometimes When the Light. And I love it when I find sort of a poet that I hadn't heard of before and I hadn't heard of her and I discovered that poem and then went and sort of fell in love with some of her other work as well, which wasn't right for this book. It's just an enormous pleasure for me.
[20:26] So yes, there's always lots and lots that I discover. loads of them are always new to me yes and so i mean obviously for people listening it may be we've been talking about this being used in a school context but i would also emphasize that if you're looking for new ideas for imagination new sort of ways of looking at fantasy do.
[20:47] Don't restrict your reading dip into anthologies this anthology and others because, for me i found really exciting the one about the um the wise woman turning into a hair, beautifully hard work yeah yeah it was such a beautifully intensely felt experience i just thought it was great um food would you like to hear it yes i was i'm going to ask you about your pictures um because this is a particularly fine one as well but please read it um nan hardwick turns into a hair i will tell you how it was i slipped into the hair like a nude foot into a glorious slipper.
[21:26] Pushing her bones to one side to make room for my shape so I could settle myself like a child within her. In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing it apart across my fingers to web across my palm. Here is where our separation ends. I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm down the stepping stones of spine. An odd feeling, this, to hold another soul in the mouth like an egg, the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind was simple, full of open space and weather. I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw of gorse and grass, the distant slate line at the edge of the moor. The air spanned diamonds out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet and fly across the heather. The heather thank you that was a Cumbrian witch who could transform herself into a hare in this one this is sort of quite a good example visually for what one can do when one is illustrating a poem it's got beautiful imagery in it it sort of speaks for itself in a sense so what all one wants I think as one is turning the pages is to stop and see a very large hare.
[22:43] A pleasure to draw and I enjoy sort of inhabiting, as an illustrator, the white spaces on the page, and then just getting as close as I possibly can to the text.
[22:57] Nan is represented just as a disembodied foot slipping into the shape of this hair. The foot is emerging from the text, and you see it in a spirit form entering this rather quivering and staring-eyed hair. Compositionally, it allowed both space but also a concentration on exactly what is happening here, the transformation. That's something I think, Poetry can give an illustrator, it can give an illustrator a moment, a distillation of a feeling and a mood. And then the poem does what the poem does, the beautiful words form into images. But as an illustrator, you can just choose a single image to crystallise the thought around, which is very different from what I do in illustrating works of fiction, where there's a narrative thread, and one is drawing characters in different situations throughout a book.
[24:01] And what I'm given in something like Heroes and Villains, Anna just gives me a whole range of moments to crystallize as an illustrator. So it's a real pleasure to illustrate poetry in this way.
[24:15] It reminds me again of our discussion of Alice in Wonderland because the Mouse's Tale poem feels very much like that with the emphasis on shape. Chris I was just going to ask you because a lot of them are open illustrations in a way they feel they're going to be on the page but occasionally you'll also box out the text so on page four in Mappamundi you've got I'll hold it up on my screen we've got there we go, we've got the poem boxed up is this very much led you're not told what to do I presume but you're led by subject matter and cartography completely completely i i always think of the sort of book as as a an object uh something that that you know one is going to hold in one's hands and the the experience of the reader turning turning pages um and i think visually one wants to just invite the reader into you know onto a page and to sort of focus on what this might be So it's variety. I mean, having a poem that is completely boxed by my illustrations in a very formal sense, almost decorative, gives a certain mood. And then you can turn the page and have a much freer, open composition, where a figure is running across a vast expanse, maybe.
[25:39] Ozymandias, a huge disembodied head, desert sands drifting away into the distance, gives you that sort of desert-like, arid sense that the poem conveys.
[25:52] And then you can turn the page and have a very different sort of environment. On the next page. And it's that sort of progression through.
[26:01] And it can be as simple sometimes as saying, right, let's have a lot of drawing on this page, and let's have just a little bit of drawing on this page. Always, it's the primacy of the material. It's what the poem is saying that's most important. And my attempt, I think, is to find a moment in a poem. And an example, I suppose, in this collection would be the poem about Merlin, where by, I think it's David Harmer, Anna, you can correct me, but a wonderful poem about Merlin, where there's just a single line about Merlin riding a griffin. There's lots of other things in the poem. It's full of detail, but it's a single line. And I thought, well, that's what you want to see on the page. You go wow that's a wizard riding a griffin um you know wings spread across the other side of the page there it is uh you i define one not to stop and go i wonder what that's about and then find all the wonderful imagery within the within the poem completely so there's i've got one serious question for you both um which is because we're dealing with the matter of fairy tales and legends that obviously a lot of the content is basically there's a lot of marital abuse, child cruelty, neglect, terrible treatment of the world, and also some very bloodthirsty moments.
[27:26] The Brothers Grimm playbook, in other words. Exactly. So it's not as if it's the undisnified version of myths and legends. And I just wondered if you, because this is going to be sitting quite happily on a shelf in a school library somewhere eventually, would you? Um what what are your conversations about this so for example saints lives because of the martyrdom of saints they usually end up in really gristly ways and it's often you can go into many a church around the country and see imagery of saints with heads under their arms and all sorts of things in this case in the poem saint margaret of antioch you've got the flying head because that's how she meets her doom um in that particular story what is your i personally think children are fine with this material but i imagine there is some gatekeeping questions you have in your head when you're drawing and when you're choosing so what did you make of that stuff did you even talk about it, I mean, I certainly would. I agree that I think children can be wildly bloodthirsty and enjoy plenty of heads flying across the room and what have you.
[28:36] And I think that that those sort of legendary tropes occur in so many children's stories. I would, for example, with gods and monsters, you know, particularly the Olympian gods are very rapacious towards women. I wouldn't have included anything that was you know very explicit on that on the sexual violence which is you know I mean I would love to do a collection for adults where you could really let rip the darkest and most terrible kind of elements of the myths because there have been some extraordinarily brilliant poems about them but um no I wouldn't I wouldn't include anything very very explicit or particularly gruesome um in a collection for children but on the other hand a lot of the stories are quite dark um and so we don't shy away from what happens to Margaret of Antioch and actually it's also framed in a way where actually it's like a liberation at the end isn't it I don't know if you want to read the last verse of that um Chris have you got it open I've got it open here. And the invitation to draw a sort of severed head sort of flying through the air was irresistible as an illustrator.
[29:55] But it's interesting. One doesn't necessarily have to be gratuitous about it. You don't have to go hammer house of horror. There can be a sort of and sometimes religious art can have that quality a macabre quality a contemplative quality but it can also be very beautiful even when one is sort of describing terrible sort of events.
[30:19] And this is Margaret of Antioch being swallowed by the dragon and so the dragon swallowed me it was like this I'd given myself to God and said no to marrying a powerful man, thwarted my would-be husband, threw me in a dungeon, consigned me to dampened darkness and the devil, who came to me in leathery skin, clawed and fanged, his yellow eyes burnt, his hell-jaws yawned, and belted me into his red gullet. Down and down I slithered until the cross of Christ I held struck him like a holy fishbone and snagged the helter-skelter of his coiling throat. An eye who was sucked and squeezed in that hot tunnel of foul flesh was spat and spasmed and out again, miraculous. Not that I lived to tell the tale for long. They tried to burn me, but I failed to fry. They tried to drown me, and I came out dry. Third time lucky, they took an iron blade and swung it. See how my head takes to the air. Watch it fly. I love that poem by Jan Dean. I think it's one of the tearing poems, isn't it? I think there's a previous poem with Margaret getting out of the dragon, which is rather fun. A very surprised looking dragon.
[31:36] Yes, please do follow up on YouTube because Chris is now showing this very surprised dragon. So Chris, I think you foolishly offered to draw us something. So um perhaps we should ask you to uh draw well can we pick a subject one comes to mind immediately i think um which which is um one of the rather magnificent dragons that uh anna was kindly kind enough to sort of include in the in the anthology and i would invite as i'm sort of sketching here the outline of of one of the aforementioned dragons i'd invite Anna, maybe, to read a dragon poem. Any poem, Anna, of your choice to keep the dragon. And there are a few in this anthology. For those who, whilst Anna chooses her poem, I'm very interested to see that Chris starts with the nostrils. I'd always thought people might start with the eye. No. Not always. It depends, but it's a good focal point. I always like the coil of smoke that rises up from a dragon's nostril.
[32:49] And dragons come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be huge and fearsome, the sort of Game of Thrones dragons that are, quite frankly, enormous and terrifying. But you can also get some small, sort of laconic dragons, the sort of Eastern dragon that might befriend Mulan and sort of give her sort of cryptic advice. And you can also get sort of rather wonderful English folk dragons that sort of, you know, exist in the sand dunes outside a little town and cause problems, you know. And I suspect they're not Game of Thrones-style dragons. They're more sort of, I don't know, Alan Bennett-style dragons who are sort of there sort of causing a little trouble with various sort of locals and it's that sort of breadth I think that I really enjoy and I don't know whether you found a poem I've got I've got The Dragons Are Hiding here which I love perfect Brian Moses, and I really love this one to be born a dragon hunter is somehow to know that once a very long time ago dragons were not just the stuff of dreams It was a way for young men to fulfill their destinies, to ride off on horseback seeking treasure. It was, first and foremost, a measure of their courage, the best sort of quest.
[34:19] It was a solitary pursuit, one-to-one, hunter and hunted, the odds even. Sharp eyes, cunning, and surprise all counted, for a lick of flame would be all it took to paralyze. Dragons knew they were young men's quarry. They became elusive, led secluded lives, slept by day, fed at night, easily fled when challenged. Then down the years, dragons disappeared. There were tales, of course. A mountain in Scotland, a labyrinth in Wales, but the trails proved cold. No smoke-blackened caves, no burned-out villages, no graves of would-be dragon hunters. Yet, recently, there were rumours again. The whisper of wingbeats in darkness, distant thunder from mountains, a tumult beneath a waterfall where roaring could easily be disguised.
[35:15] Any young warrior out seeking dragons should look again in slate caverns and abandoned mine shaft. They should travel to the hidden sides of mountains, look beneath devil's bridges and daringly dig to discover the silent secret spaces where dragons might be waking. For in a darkening Welsh landscape, with evening purpling the hills, it is easy, so easy to believe. How those of us who would be dragon hunters could one day find them again.
[35:51] Yes, definitely. It would be Dragon Hunter in my class. For those of you who are listening to this, what was happening whilst that poem was being read is an amazing dragon has emerged from hiding out of the white space on the page, thanks to the magic of Chris's pencil.
[36:09] So I'm wondering if we could just have a little practical help for those who are wanting to be a creative, or already are creative, but perhaps wanting to
[36:17] make it something which pays some bills. That's the hard part um so anna what you're looking at is people reinterpreting legends in their poetry particularly the modern poems version of this do you have any tips for writers who are looking to use some kind of legend that's already out there be it robin hood or king arthur or merlin what do you think they should be thinking of when they're um trying to do something for our today when they're using existing myths and legends i think with myths and legends the the best advice is not to be frightened of the source material i think because people have been telling and retelling these stories for so many hundreds of years often um that you can get inside them and change the furniture around and and make them your own because so many people have done that before. That's sort of how they've come down to us with a little bit of embellishment from hundreds of different imaginations sewn on. So I would sort of advise people to...
[37:33] Really put their own stamp on those legends. I think they are there to be reinterpreted and reused, and you can discard what you don't need and use what you do, I think. I mean, that's so important, Anna. I think this is what you do when you're anthologising, when you're putting these different poems together. You're giving us perspectives. I think from the point of view of writing fantasy, one of the things I always enjoy is when I get to hear from some of the minor characters who become actually very major in the writer's imagination.
[38:08] Whenever I'm watching, say, an epic dramatization or something, I'm always drawn to the guy at the back who maybe is holding the spear, wondering, I wonder what you've seen going on. I know the king's up there and he's got a mighty quest going on, but what's it like down in the Camelot kitchen where, you know, frost has set in and, you know, quite frankly, this arm is chafing. And, you know, what's the relationship going on between the cook and the sort of, you know, housekeeper? You know, whatever it might be. And I think that's a lovely way in, in some ways. And I'm always interested in a way in when fantasy sort of brings the aspects of our own reality to the forefront. Contemporary issues can be reflected extremely well through fantasy.
[39:04] Maybe fantasy exists and endures because it speaks to some of our primal feelings, whether it be the fear of large and oppressive creatures or embodiments of weather and catastrophe, or the small moments of decision-making and small personal quests that we might go on. It's always a good starting point, I think, the inconvenience of fantasy. What is going on behind the quest? We should rename the hero's journey to the inconvenient journey.
[39:48] Chris, I had a question for you about the sort of practicalities of approaching a publisher as a team like you did with Paul Stewart but I also want to ask you about your political cartooning so the question about um, I often meet aspiring writers who are also talented illustrators. And I never know what, because not having an illustration background, I never know what to say about whether they should go to a publisher with all of their stuff or allow the publisher to broker the marriage between them and an existing illustrator. What's your gut feeling on that one? Well, it works both ways, I think. um so working with um paul stewart i think was a very the two of us actually met at um we both had sons of the same age uh we were at their nursery and we met sort of you know at the nursery gates as it were um and started to talk about the thing the mutual sort of books that we enjoyed and realized we loved c.s lewis and tolkien and ursula leguin and you know so there was a lot of shared stuff. I think our collaboration really started because Paul was also a fan of the illustrations that accompanied the books, which is not always the case. Sometimes fantasy famously won't be illustrated until maybe it's later iterations.
[41:13] I think it's telling that someone like Tolkien drew his map. He had this lovely visual imagination that accompanied his writing. He was also a poet, so he had that sort of quality in what he did. I think there's a sort of, you know, charming illustrations that Charles Dodson did when he was writing the Alice story for Alice Little all that time ago. So often stories do begin with images, with stories. I'm a huge fan of Gormenghast, where Mervyn Lee drew characters almost as an aide-memoir to give him something to describe in his wonderfully visual writing.
[41:59] So, in some sense, sometimes the words have got to sort of – I think words come first, always. And as an illustrator, the primacy of the text is what I always sort of believe in. Now, if you can meet a writer and you get on well together, I think there's a sort of way in which you can synchronize your efforts. You can feed off each other's imaginations, one visual, one sort of word-based. And then you can develop something quite unique. Equally, a publisher might say, well, what is it? How do we want to package this book? And I believe that beautiful books are incredibly important. And I think in the fantasy realm, even more important in a sense, the book as a beautiful object is something we covet. And I think you have digital forms and adaptation, you name it. But a beautiful book is something very magical about that. And of course, with illustrations, it's a way of celebrating the book as an object.
[43:02] And so I believe also publishers can ask illustrators to come in and lend their magic to what is already a sort of wonderful text.
[43:14] That's not a useful answer for someone's pitching, but I would say to any illustrator, if you see a straight poet or writer wandering down the street, just sidle up and sort of, you know, say hello to them and maybe buy them a coffee and gently suggest that their book with these beautiful white spaces might need some illustrations to go with them. That's a very nice thought. I have to try walking past your house looking desperate and see if you'll invite me in. I have a cheeky question for you, Chris.
[43:46] Which is because we also know you as a political cartoonist and you've been working on this volume of heroes and villains, politics does lend itself to heroes and villains. Have you found things you've been illustrating for Anna creeping into your political cartooning inevitably i mean you know the the visual metaphor i think in in a political cartoon is is is a gift it's a wonderful thing um you know i think vladimir putin sitting on his throne of swords you know sort of saying you know winter is coming you know is is just it just works doesn't it um i think uh i think sort of you know a blowhard sort of Donald Trump is a gift that keeps on giving with his extraordinary appearance and ridiculous utterances. What I like to do every so often in a fantasy context, I think, and this is just for my own personal pleasure, is draw the incumbent prime minister. It started, I think, as far back as David Cameron, but every so often during each administration. I like to draw whoever's the incumbents asleep at night. That oft-asked question, how do you sleep at night?
[45:03] I'd like to address that. A figure, Cameron or Theresa May or Rishi Sunak or now Keir Starmer, lying asleep at night, duvet pulled up close over their chins, and visiting them. In a sort of Christmas carol style, will be the problems of the day, which can be characterised as fiery dragons, or hideous trolls, or appalling figments of Tolkien's imagination, standing there, sort of probbing them with pitchforks, or breathing down their necks.
[45:40] And of course, I do what political cartoonists have done down the centuries. I apply judiciously labels labels are a great sort of tool for the political cartoonist the dragon of winter fuel payments standing menacingly is is an absolute gift and someone once wrote me a tweet i think and said you know you're a cartoonist i bet you label everything i bet you label fridge fridge um and i just tweeted back as one does um i don't often do this sort of thing i just tweeted and say you're right you know i do label everything except on my fridge my fridge is labeled conspicuous consumption um on you go you know it's it's it's that sort of uh thing um yes the visual obviously comes in to what i do um and uh politics is always with us and i think poems often shine a light on contemporary issues rather well, as we started this conversation with the Lady of Shalott in lockdown.
[46:48] You know, it's extraordinary, isn't it, when you get a contemporary resonant
[46:53] from a poem that has been around for many, many years. And I think an anthology that Anna's compiled, like Heroes and Villains, does exactly that. It gives us lots of, I think the contemporary term is chills. Yeah, and vibes. Vibes. Vibes and chills, which is a lovely note to end the conversation about this anthology on. But as a bit of fun, I always ask my guests to transport themselves into any fantasy world at all. It can be Star Wars. It can be Beatrix Potter down a rabbit hole up into space. Really, we don't mind.
[47:31] But I want to know where is the best place, in your view, to go for something. And I was thinking well you know we tend to think the villains are the most exciting part of a story very often so where would be the best place to be a villain and so I was thinking where could you have the most fun and get away with it do you think so have you got a favorite Anna should we start with you we got a favorite fantasy world where you wouldn't mind putting on the the black robe or shoes or whatever it is in the fantasy world that is it's very difficult isn't it because they do tend to get their comeuppance at the end no no you're gonna get away with it what's the point of this question if i get away with it yeah i don't mind jardis in narnia sweeping around oh yes being turkish light on my sleigh many centuries of of doing that i think before the pesky fib come along and ruin the whole gig once you get woken up in charn you have you have some good years before father christmas turns back up yes he's come and rearing everything so maybe i'd be her she's she's terribly glamorous very good yes it is a glam a glamorous one that one glamorous uh so we've got some glamour on the table here uh how about you chris have you got a favorite face to go well obviously i mean um i i was on a plane going to the um auckland Writers'.
[48:57] Festival a little while ago, and a nice young man sitting next to me, we struck up a conversation. I said, where are you going? He said, I'm going to the Shire, he said.
[49:08] So he was actually going to the film set in New Zealand. And I had the good fortune to be invited to go to the Weta Workshop in Wellington on my trip to New Zealand.
[49:21] And a lovely chap, Richard, who runs the workshop, just showed me around the workshop. And it was just full of everything you would need to be both a hero or a villain. And I've got to say, I was very, very taken with a life-size, and when I say life-size, I mean a fantasy life-size boot, an armoured boot. And it was Sauron's boot from the beginning of the Lord of the Rings films. And it's huge. They build it sort of life-size. So Sauron towering above with that ring of power on his finger, you know, that was his boot. And I stood and I looked at that and I thought, wow, that is very impressive. So, you know, I think in a contemporary sense, you know, going forward to possibly the fourth or fifth age of Middle Earth, you know, obviously, things have calmed down a bit, you know, you know, tourism has taken over. You can now maybe sort of go to Mordor, and it's been sort of rewilded in the most perfect way.
[50:22] But there have been stirrings, you know. I mean, there have been local sort of civic sort of meetings and stuff. And there's this guy, you know, walking around. He's got a sort of, you know, unconvincing comb-over and tends to wear a baseball cap that says, Make Mordor Great Again. And, you know, things aren't looking good. so yeah we're waiting I think for the I suppose the the final sort of battle sometime in November to see whether the forces of Sauron actually you know sort of resurge or whether we can return to a sort of you know more benign time my money's on Gandalf I can see the next political cartoon being sketched even as we talk there.
[51:06] Just the Hobbiton by the way if you didn't do it is the best day out that I've had my family there in January and even though I live in the Shire literally I live in a village that's like Hobbiton I still enjoyed the Shire.
[51:21] You've both nicked probably my two favourite fantasy worlds but I've got to go different so I was thinking that a really fun place I think to be a villain would be Beatrix Potter's world, um because there is something just delicious particularly my one of my favorite ones when i was growing up was um the tale of two bad mice having the run of a doll's house without that which is intriguing um so maybe a spin as some wild creature with you know evil intent um and i think when you reread for example jemima puddleduck oh yes absolutely so dark and grueling don't talk to strangers yeah you've got a pike with with jeremy fisher you know um not not a villain in some senses because it's just doing what pikes do but but that terrified me as a child.
[52:17] And at my local lake in Norfolk I was just recently asked to draw these giant fish that they fish out of the lake the fishermen hold them as trophies yeah the classic thing and they give them nicknames and I was given a lovely job to actually draw each of these giant carp with their nicknames as a commissioner and I thought of Jeremy Fisher then I can't look at a lake
[52:44] without thinking of Jeremy Poor old Jeremy, yeah. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute delight talking to you both. And I encourage everybody to go and get their copy of Heroes and Villains, poems about legends, and feel inspired, both as illustrator and also as writers. So thank you very much.
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