By Roxanne MacMillan, CSL Editorial Board
Sheree Fitch is an award winning author, a poet, a story-teller, an educator and, most recently, a bookshop owner. Sheree has been a long-time advocate for literacy in Canada, and worldwide, from Nova Scotia, to Nunavut, to Bhutan. She has published more than thirty books for children, young adults, and adults.
Sheree lives in River John, Nova Scotia, with her husband, Gilles Plante. I sat down with her there, at Maple Murple’s Book Shoppe and Dreamery.
Your first book, Toes in My Nose, was published nearly thirty years ago, but your books are as popular with young readers now, as ever. Why do you think they have such lasting appeal?
First of all they are still in print. Doubleday Canada was my first publisher, and my books did really well, but then they were swallowed by a bigger company and stopped publishing picture books. So if Nimbus hadn’t come along and if I hadn’t got my rights back, they wouldn’t be on that sometimes third generation.
But mostly I say teachers and librarians, parents and grandparents, because children don’t come to books by themselves. They come to books because an adult cares enough about them to put a good book in their hand, from writer, to reciter, to the child, and then back again. I’m witnessing this as these children who are now grown and have their own children are reading my books. It is an amazing circle and I don’t think I would ever have seen it if I hadn’t opened up this bookshop.
What inspires you to write? Do you think in rhyme?
I wrote Toes in My Nose between the ages of 19 and 25. I was a very young mother playing with her children and then playing with words and wanting to be a writer. The poems in that book came from a very pure place. I literally sometimes took the words out of [my sons’] mouths. And in the meantime I started taking writing workshops. Then I went on to study children’s literature. I did my thesis on Dennis Lee. I like to think that I was a writer who was trying really, really hard, to do nonsense really, really well. I think I rewrote The Blug in the Plug sixty to seventy-five times. People have no idea.
Some people can’t figure out how someone can write Mable Murple, but also write Pluto’s Ghost, about an angry 18-year-old who can’t read or write, but I had to write that book. I had been working with at risk youth. I knew a lot of kids who couldn’t read and write. I wanted to know who was behind that angry face that was being pushed into the cop car. It was one of the most painful writes I’ve ever done, and I’m also very grateful that I did it because they’re using it in at-risk youth literacy programs. I had a son who struggled with reading. I had to write it.
Do I think in rhyme? No. I think a rhyme does not a poem make. As a more serious poet, I think it has to be as close to the authentic speaking voice as possible, and yet use the words almost as musical notes. You have to be able to love every word and have thought about every word as much as if it was a novel. Not to belabour it, but people should come to the writing of children’s book with as much excellence as they would put into any kind of writing.
How old were you when you started writing?
I was seven. Mrs. Goodwin’s grade two class and she put my poem in a school fair and I was a real book nerd and I saw my words thumb tacked on that little piece of blue felt and I saw people go by and when they read it they smiled. I always tell people that it was like I discovered fire. And it was! Something I wrote made somebody happy! I met Mrs. Goodwin when Toes in my Nose came out and I hadn’t seen her for a hundred years, or at least since I was ten and we left Moncton. She came to the store and she still had three poems I had written for her! She took them out of her purse and said “Look, I have something to show you!”. And she said, “And you can’t have them either!”
Again, it goes back to teachers and teacher-librarians and people who made books relevant in our lives.
Are you working on anything right now?
Yes, I’m trying to finish a novel that I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s called Majorly Weird and Freakwently Wonderful, for Doubleday Canada. I’m a little bit overdue. They’ve been very understanding. My goal this fall is to put it to bed. I know where it’s going but it’s been hard because it’s through the lens of a twelve year old. I want it to be beautiful. I want it to tell a story. And it’s gone in a direction that I had no idea it would take, so I’ve been following that for a while. I’m also working on a couple of other poetry books. Then I’m going to take this year off after this busy season, and I’ve said no to all out there gigs until April. I’m just putting my head down and seeing what comes out the end of my pen. I think I need to write for me. Maybe some poetry, maybe some reflections, maybe some essays, and maybe for nobody but my eyes. I need to write because writing is a healing art for me and there’s lots to heal right now. My son passed away in March, so, yes, there’s lots to heal right now.
You wrote EveryBody’s Different on EveryBody Street for a 2001 fundraiser in support of mental health awareness. When it was published as a book earlier this year, it was clear that the message was as relevant as ever. What kind of feedback have you received from educators, parents, and children about the impact of this book?
You know I don’t like to be didactic. I don’t believe in hammering kids over the head with messages, but I let that poem speak. A lot of nonsense poems… Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll… can be read on many levels. Very, very profound things can be said in verse, but it has to be done with great care and a light touch.
So for me, the fact that it’s now a book… a real book…. is exciting because I feel that this is a really good time in the world to consider the message that everybody’s different on everybody street, but yet we’re all one. I think, on and off through our lives, we all have glimpses that there is a oneness, but it’s easy to forget because there are dualities in the world and we do “us and them” and “you and me”. But at my heart’s core is a very Buddhist – also very Christian – philosophy, that we’re one body.
The idea that “all of us are perfect and all of us have flaws” is a contradiction, and it’s important to have children start to think about how can we hold both those things inside us. Do I know someone who is as mad as thunder? And have I ever been as sad as rain? And, yes, all of us know pain and all of us have dreams. When I read that poem, sometimes I still weep, and I wrote it. But I look at it and I think I’ll never write anything that I believe in more than that! The art of distillation is what versification is. How do you put an elephant in a thimble? How do you distill it so there’s just the essence there? And I think I came as close as I maybe ever have.
You are as well known as an advocate for education and for literacy, as you are a writer. What do you see as the major barriers to literacy, and what can we do to make things better?
It was teachers and librarians who showed me how they could use my poetry in the classroom to delight kids… reluctant readers. Tongue twisters are a safe place to make mistakes and, if you create a safe place with language, then you’re going to entice kids into books. Once I started seeing what they were doing, I realized that what I was doing really had a use.
So the question is, how can we create safe places for kids to read in. How do we make it safer for kids who can read, and how can we help those who struggle? And if they’re older and they’ve fallen through the cracks, then what kind of programs do we have in place for them? Look at how high the illiteracy rate is in our jails, put two and two together and see that poverty is sometimes where it begins, because there hasn’t been a lot of education happening when people are too busy surviving.
So, for me, it’s so huge, the work will never end. There can never be enough ways to bring our struggling readers into a place where they feel they can negotiate school and be successful. I know we have to have to have a standards and parameters in public education, but, again, “everybody’s different on everybody street”, and I wish it could be more about process and less about outcomes. What I hope is that for every child, every year, there is a teacher who makes them feel somehow that they have a voice.
The whole thing about literacy is wondering do I have worth in the world, do I have a voice, am I heard, can I be heard, what do I say? That’s the power of reading and books. It’s all connected to being human. Why do we read? Because we find out what it means to be human.
Mabel Murple’s Book Shoppe and Dreamery…. the word that comes up again and again in reviews is “magical”. Tell us about the magic. Why was rural Nova Scotia the right place for a bookshop? What have you found most rewarding about the experience?
It’s so fun to put books in people’s hands. I thought I liked being a writer, but it turns out I love being a bookseller. It’s in my DNA.
Why the bookshop? See those kids up there? (pointing to a photo on the wall). That was the last group of kids in the River John Elementary School. And the school closed. It was a real community school and I got kind of involved in the last couple of years that they were trying to open [a hub school] so, when it closed, I got mad. I’m joking in a way, but when it closed I said to Gilles, “I just wish I had enough money to open something, maybe rent a little building in the village, and open a used bookstore or something”. Because the bank had closed, the grocery store had closed and then the school closed, and I just wanted to open something in the face of that much closure. And when I said that to Gilles, he said, “Well I could probably renovate the granary” (on their hobby farm Happy Doodle Do). We thought we couldn’t do it, couldn’t afford the overhead, blah, blah, blah, but when he said that I was off and running, because I always loved this building. He had his tractor in it. It smelled like gas. It needed a lot of work. That was 2016, and we opened in 2017. Truthfully, it did seem crazy, but that first year we were blown away. We averaged 200 people a day. But again, that’s teachers and librarians, parents and grandparents. It’s the readers and the kids who’ve grown up and now have their own kids. I couldn’t have done it at a better time in my life. It wouldn’t have worked 20 years ago.
We had made a case for the school that, if we did something for kids and families in the summers, we could attract people and make money, but the powers that be were like “Who’s going to go to River John?” Well, here they are! If you build it they will come. And the more we did, the more it seemed inevitable. I never thought ‘Someday I want to have a bookshop on a dirt road… with donkeys, with cats, with horses, with sheep!’. It IS kind of crazy! But it has been a godsend. For two years in a row this little shop has been a whole lot of medicine.
To learn more about Sheree and her work visit www.shereefitch.com
And you can pay a virtual visit to Mabel Murple’s Book Shoppe and Dreamery at
www.mabelmurplesworld.ca
Roxanne MacMillan is a Library Support Specialist with the Halifax Regional School Board, dedicated to promoting the school library as an integral part of student learning. In addition to twelve years in elementary and junior high school libraries, Roxanne has worked in museum, academic, and hospital libraries. Roxanne began her career as a Library Technician and served as editor of the Nova Scotia Association of Library Technicians newsletter, but, as a passionate believer in life-long learning, she returned to school and recently graduated from the University of Alberta’s online MLIS program.