Katy: So many of your books make me laugh out loud and yet they still deal with serious themes. Your books strike an effortless tone of humor mixed with equal parts poignancy and irreverence. You channel that childlike voice so naturally that it feels inevitable you became a children’s/YA writer.
Clémentine: I think I’ve always been one. Even as a child, I said I wanted to write for children. I distinctly remember my mother telling me, “Why not just be a writer?” And I said, “No, no, no, I want to write for children.” I was fascinated with the form and aesthetics of children’s literature. Today, I’m also an academic in children’s literature, and I feel that I’m still elucidating the mysteries of that form.
Katy: How has your passion for young people’s literature inspired your professional journey and research?
Clémentine: A lot! My research is in children’s literature. My reading is in children’s literature. I write it as well. I call myself a “maniac of children’s literature.” I think there’s something about the concept of childhood, or more the feeling, the existence, the nature of childhood that I still find captivating. Particularly, the way to aesthetically render that experience.
The million paradoxes inherent to that question continue to animate my research and thinking, so it’s more than inspired. I am a writer and an academic in the same way an apple can be round and green. It’s not even two sides of my life. It is my life as a whole.
Katy: So, how exactly does your work as a university professor and translator feed into your fiction?
Clémentine: My work as a university professor feeds into my work as a translator and writer because it means I’m constantly reading and engaging with ideas. And I’m someone who loves practice. The practice of writing, of translating, of doing reading in translation for children. But I’m also someone who enjoys abstract ideas, so I read articles and monographs of theory, and it feeds my thinking. Then that translates into practice. I do need that input. Equally, my practice rebalances those kinds of abstract temptations I can have. So, it’s more of a circle than a one-way flow.
Katy: When it comes to your writing practice, what do you think brings the most joy in crafting your stories?
Clémentine: That’s a really nice question. People don’t often ask that. I love writing dialogue; it comes to me quite naturally. But what gives me the most profound joy is the moment at the very beginning when you catch the spirit of the book you want to write, when you’ve discovered how to tell the story that you had in mind. I’ve had this for almost all of the books I’ve written. It’s a really big sugar rush because you suddenly feel like you’re on top of the world, and that you can write this book and finish it. Then after that comes the sugar crash, when you’ve realized after a few dozen passionate pages that you really have run out of steam, and then you have to invoke a discipline, a perseverance and sometimes tears to continue. But the beginning is really exhilarating.
Katy: Do you write in both French and English?
Clémentine: I write my academic research mostly in English. My fictional writing is mainly in French. Recently, I wrote a book of poems in English which isn’t out yet, but I normally write in French. It’s as much a matter of ideas that come to me as the fact that the publishing system in France seems to me a bit more daring and pliable to experimenting with form and genre. I quite like that on the French side.
Katy: My toddler son adores your picture book Hello, Monster. We have read the story countless times and he marvels over Maisie Paradise Shearring’s illustrations. I’m personally a fan of the mid-grade Sesame Seade mystery series [about an eleven-year-old girl who’s a self-made supersleuth on skates]. The books have me falling out of my chair laughing, they’re so funny. Which age group do you enjoy writing for the most?
Clémentine: I enjoy writing most for end of primary, what you sometimes call junior fiction or mid-grade. The 8- to 12-year-olds. I also love being around children that age. They are still full of creativity and imagination and not inhibited. They have this ability to marvel and wonder and imagine, but they’re also able to do some articulated thinking. Very young children are capable of sophisticated thinking, too, but don’t find it easy to express or encounter in written form. Whereas, that mid-grade group is the Goldilocks of the bunch. They have a mind ready to tackle big ideas in an organized way, and a mind to see the world as a space for adventure and imagination.
Katy: This is a fun age and an impressionable one! I was 9 when I first “met” Anne Shirley and Jo March and decided I wanted to be them. And I actually became like them in some ways, especially in the sense of growing up to teach and write. They each inspire me with their boundless imagination – as do you. Speaking of which, I’d like to know where your ideas come from.
Clémentine: I get my ideas from everywhere. They can be from the news, from other books. For example, with Hello, Monster it’s a somber part of my own autobiography. My aunts were constantly asking me to play with children I didn’t know, and so you see this childhood trauma play out in the book ha ha. With Sesame Seade, I was walking around Cambridge and thinking how amazing it would be to be a child who’s having detective adventures there.
Katy: So, when your ideas are ready to be written down, what is your process? How do you protect your writing time?
Clémentine: It’s very hard. I now have two children so I don’t work in the evenings, or at the weekend. But in a way that’s quite good. I have 9 hours a day where I’m working, and so I earmark time and write it down in my Google calendar. It’s quite inflexible. I think it’s healthy to restrict your writing time with other tasks and to be fully focused on it when you’re doing it. I really believe in the idea that you should either be working or not working. I take breaks if I need to. I’d rather just close down everything and go out and do something for an hour and then come back, than hover in that glutinous zone of not quite working.
Katy: There’s nothing quite as exasperating as not quite working. Looking beyond the scope of your own work and at the field as a whole, how do you see the future of children’s/YA books?
Clémentine: I’m eternally optimistic about the fact that young children will always love books. That’s very clear to me. Babies, toddlers, young children all adore books. They love being told stories; they love looking at the pictures. I don’t see that enthusiasm waning at all. I think good picture books will always have a future. I also see a bright future for audio books, and it’s not radical of me to say so. Reading out loud is the way forward. There should be and will be more and more people who read out loud not just to their children but, for example, in couples, to their family, in the car.
I’m much more worried about what people call the cliff edge, the moment when young teenagers stop reading entirely. It’s normal for teenagers to stop reading a little bit because teenage years are full of other things; I would be quite worried by a teenager that doesn’t do anything else than read because that’s what I did as a teenager, and it definitely wasn’t a sign of brilliant mental health.
But still, I think it’s quite important that the ability to concentrate on a long text is not lost. I worry about screens having the effect of making that capacity for attention be lost. I worry that reading pleasure is being flattened into something that is immediate; the mentality that either you’re immediately taken into a book, immersed, or it’s not the book for you. There is a lot of very well-meaning discourse around that – like, let’s find the right book for you. But I worry about that because I think the key to preserving an interest in reading is precisely not finding the right books but finding the right way of tackling a new book. If we are to survive as an art form with older children and teenagers, we need to be more rigorous in the way we read, more analytical, and be more active, more curious readers.
I believe in books that do not copy the ways in which other types of media produce pleasure but that are very specifically literary in their efforts to produce pleasure. Now is a time to be more demanding with quality of writing and not less, and more focused on the literary. I think that’s the only way we can survive as an art form. We should place experts back into the foreground. When I say experts I mean librarians, teachers, creatives, mediators, children and teenagers who are very, very good readers, and we should recognize their expertise and make sure they spread the word about how to read. How to create things around books so that reading is not just a passive experience that relies on immediate gratification, but something of rigor that stretches into time.
Katy: What can adults learn from these books? I’ve never left reading children’s/YA books, and I feel I’m a better person for it.
Clementine: I’m sure you are. These books distill things about being a child or a teenager at a certain time, and we never stop being children. Quite simply, childhood is a floating sort of quality; childhood is a number of things that happen all the time. For example, the experience of newness. Children’s literature is full of depictions of new experiences, and newness of course doesn’t stop when one stops being a child. So, the adult who experiences newness will often say something like “I feel like I’m a child again.” That’s what children’s literature does. It gives you that impression again of encountering newness, and newness – while being tied to childhood – isn’t just about childhood. Anyone can experience it and reexperience it. There are lots of things like that in children’s literature that reattaches to a number of existential states that were particularly strong in childhood but are relevant throughout the entire life course, and this particular art form allows us to reexperience and reinhabit.
When you say “I feel like a better person for it,” I think there’s also a moral argument there, not just an experiential argument. Empathy for the condition of being a baby or a child or a teenager is one thing that adults can learn from reading literature that’s intended for them, especially if they read it with the children. I can’t count the number of times when friends of mine have told me, “I was reading this book to my toddler and I thought it was such a stupid book, but the way he reacted to it showed me that it was so profound for him and then I saw the beauty of that book.” That is such an important moment for an adult. We tend to be very dismissive about books that feature, for example, losing one’s cuddly toy, because we don’t recognize in it the incredibly existential universal question of losing something that you’re desperately attached to, which anyone can feel when losing a loved one from the age of zero to one hundred. Adults who make that realization – that it’s not just a story of a child losing a comfort toy, but it’s about a child who was wrenched away from something that was almost a part of themselves – makes you more attentive and empathetic with children and childhood.
To find Clémentine’s books mentioned in this conversation –
Hello, Monster: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780500651704
Piglettes: https://pushkinpress.com/book/piglettes/
Sesame Seade series: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/5SM/a-sesame-seade-mystery/
To learn more about Clémentine –
Her Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clementinebleue/?hl=en
Her interview with France Télévisions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBUItVBJ_x8&ab_channel=LaGrandeLibrairie-FranceT%C3%A9l%C3%A9visions
