By Patricia Gallant
“Paaar-adise...Paaar-adise! It’s bluuuue skies...lovely, lovely breezes...” When Mem Fox describes her beachside home in South Australia, her flair for drama converts her words into a vibrant picture. In fact, vibrant describes the woman who is talking with me: spiky red hair, engaging eyes framed by black rimmed glasses, genuine smile, wearing a white blouse bursting with red, orange, and yellow flowers. Passionate describes her life as an author and activist for literacy and peace.
Fox’s passion for words grew out of a childhood infused with daily opportunities to hear and recite high-quality language. She describes “an incredibly fortunate road towards children’s books” that began on a mission in Africa, where she grew up “bathed constantly in the rhythms of the King James version of the Bible” and also “made to learn stories by heart and listen to them told by heart.” From the African mission, she entered drama school in England, where she continued three years of “learning things in English by heart.”
Passion for language did not, however, inspire her first children’s book. Possum Magic grew from a 1978 children’s literature class, in which she enrolled as a 31-year-old young mother who became “absolutely immersed in children’s books” by reading to her young daughter Chloe.
Nearly 30 years later, she still recalls feeling horrified by the seemingly simple assignment to write a children’s book. When she wrote Hush the Invisible Mouse, a four-and-a-half-page story, to fulfill the requirement, however, she discovered that writing children’s books was far from simple.
She tasted initial success when her instructor urged her to submit it for publication. It took five years, nine rejections, and multiple revisions, however, (including changing the main character from a mouse to a possum) before she finally published Australia’s most popular children’s book of all time, Possum Magic, in 1983.
In hindsight, Fox realizes how her language-rich background directly influenced her first book. “To read aloud the story of Ruth, the King James version, the cadences are perfect, perfect—and I could not have written the first paragraph of Possum Magic had I not known the Story of Ruth by heart. It’s matched, syllable for syllable and intonation for intonation. I came to the realization about six years after I had written the book. It’s startling, the similarities.”
This revelation helped her understand that “it is about language, not just about good story. It’s about where the words are put.” According to Fox, “where the words are put” creates an important rhythm in picture books for young children. “If you can’t create a sense of verbal rhythm, you can’t write a book that reads aloud well. There is a flow of language that makes reading aloud easy and that also enchants children.”
She warns, however, that achieving this flow can be agonizing for a writer who “needs perfection between the capital letter and the first comma and the next comma and between that comma and a period at the end of a sentence.” She describes her recent and popular picture book Where is the Green Sheep? as “very rhythmic like an extended nursery rhyme that you simply can’t read any other way.” But the process of writing made her “furious, frustrated, and fed up” at times. Its 342-word eighth draft had the makings of a good picture book, but her sense of language was not satisfied until she persevered through countless more drafts to create its final 190 perfectly-placed words.
How does she decide what to change? She uses her “innate feeling” for choosing language. Can others without such language-rich background experiences gain this ability? “Unless you’ve experienced verbal rhythm, you can’t recognize it,” she explains. Parents and teachers can create experiences to “hear the utmost classics, like Ferdinand and Corduroy and Where the Wild Things Are and Owl Babies. The rhythm is there, the character is there, the trouble is there, the pacing is there. Perfect! Read those great books over and over again aloud to get, not an intellectual exercise, but an innate feeling about what is good.”
Fox grabs every opportunity to promote the importance of reading aloud so that children hear wonderful language from the beginnings of their lives. “When anyone asks me to give a speech about the importance of reading aloud to children, it may be librarians, teachers, teachers of teachers, child-care workers, social workers, child nurses, reading associations, I am there.”
Her website contains “Mem Fox’s Ten Read Aloud Commandments.” It also contains an audiotape of her mesmerizing voice reading Koala Lou, Sleepy Bears, and Tough Boris—models of the cadence and lilt she intended young children to hear when she crafted those books.
Reading Magic, an adult book about reading aloud to young children, “has caused a major stir” in Australia. She stresses that it is not an academic book like Radical Reflections, “the best book I’ll ever write for teachers.” Yet it holds the potential to reach a larger and significant population of parents, prospective parents, and prospective teachers.
“Reading Magic is my major contribution to the world, certainly my major contribution to Australia,” Fox says. “Every child in Australia should have this given to their parents before the child is born. Really. I can’t beat around the bush about this one. It is THE most useful book, in terms of changing the world.”
Fox believes that parents and teachers reading good literature aloud to young children might change the world. She also feels a passionate obligation to take a stand when it comes to the politics of literacy, and she often does. “I would have worked until I literally died to halt similar policies to No Child Left Behind in Australia,” she states emphatically. She fears that current policies may lead to practices that take joy out of learning to read and write. Because “reading and writing are a joy and a necessity, we need that necessity to be taught so that it is a joy.”
But the politics of war worry her more. The war in Iraq, and indeed any war, devastate Fox, a lifelong activist for peace and racial tolerance. She worries about war’s effects on children—“the terror and absolute inability of children ever to be relaxed, ever to feel safe, losing parents, losing siblings, losing their own sense that the world will support them.”
Fox delivered her powerful “Peace Speech” at a huge anti-war rally in Adelaide, South Australia in 2003. Four years later, however, she laments, “Nobody took notice.” She has published two books for children about war and racism— Feathers and Fools and Whoever You Are. Perhaps spreading the language of peace will make a difference.
“I’m 61 years old,” she ponders as we discuss the future, “and I really don’t ever have to write any more because I have eight new books coming out.” She is not at all tentative, however, about her future activism for peace. “I will never, never stop speaking about the terror of war. I will always be up front.”
So imagine Fox, reading aloud to change the world, with her enchanting voice and perfectly-chosen words from Whoever You Are:
But remember this:
Joys are the same.
Pain is the same,
and blood is the same.
Smiles are the same,
And hearts are just the same—
wherever they are
wherever you are
wherever we are.
Patricia Gallant is an assistant professor of education at the University of Michigan-Flint and the vice president of the Michigan Reading Association.
Memorable Mem: Author and peace activist. (August 2007). Reading Today, 25(1), 22.
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