Gecko Press celebrates the NZ Festival Writers Week

Last night in Wellington at the NZ Festival Hub at the St James, Gecko Press hosted a party celebrating their involvement with the Writers Week. Visiting international authors Ulf Stark (Can You Whistle, Johanna? and the ‘Percy’ series), Leo Timmers (Who’s Driving?, I am the King, and BANG), and Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinsky (H.O.U.S.E. and D.E.S.I.G.N.) mingled with guests, friends and local authors including Elizabeth Knox, Gavin Bishop and Barbara Else.

Gecko Press publisher Julia Marshall welcomed the crowd and introduced Kate De Goldi (below), who spoke about the place of Gecko Press in the world of children’s book publishing.

It was then time to celebrate the release of a new children’s novel by local Wellington writer Mary McCallum with illustrations by Annie Hayward, Dappled Annie and the Tigrish. The book was launched by Gecko Press assistant publisher, Jane Arthur. (Her launch speech follows.)

To see photos from the event visit the Gecko Press Facebook page.
(https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152050155236312.1073741830.310562616311&type=1)

Launch speech for Dappled Annie and the Tigrish

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Jane Arthur from Gecko Press.

For those of you who know me even a little bit, you’ll know I don’t do this. I don’t stand in front of crowds and talk. You’d usually find me at the back of the room in the corner quite happily invisible.

So the fact that I’m standing up here means that this book must be pretty special.

It’s a real honour that Mary asked me to launch Dappled Annie and the Tigrish, because I’m pretty sure she wrote it especially for me, even though she hadn’t met me yet.

This book is truly beautiful, and speaks to my inner child, who is eternally nine years old. I think Mary’s is too, which is why the character of Annie rings so true.

Nine is an important age. It’s the last year of being in single digits. Nine year olds still see things in fresh metaphors, like how when Annie spends time with her dad, “It felt like being wrapped up in a big blanket made of wind and grass and clicking cicadas.”

Nine’s the age when summers are still endless and full of adventure, and imaginations are free from timetables. It’s before you realise that summers merely mark the time between school years, and it’s before they become too short and too boring all at once.

But summer at nine felt exactly as it does for Annie, when time stretches on, and one event becomes “always”, like how her little brother Robbie “always seemed...to be chased by a bull”. Even with the characters of the hedges who are people – or should that be the people who are hedges – and the elusive tigrish (he’s like a tiger, but he’s not a tiger; he’s tigrish) – even with these elements, the book feels utterly true and authentic.

I recognise myself in Annie. Passages like “The quieter Annie was, the more she saw and heard – which suited her just fine.” I mean, that’s nine year old me! (It’s basically me, now.)

Dappled Annie interprets the world in a beautifully descriptive and evocative way. She makes connections between parts of her world with a child’s brilliant intuition. Fantails knit their nests, making the same sounds as Annie’s mother when she knits socks. Another connection I love, between Annie’s school life and her life in nature, is when the character of Mrs Hedge – an actual hedge – says “Ready”... “as if she were writing the word down with a very sharp pencil.”

The physical book is beautiful, too. Luke Kelly has done a perfect design job: we wanted something that looked and felt classic, but not old-fashioned. Annie Hayward’s illustrations are wonderful. There are four colour plates, like books in the olden days, which still excites us. And her line drawings at the start of each chapter turned out even better than we hoped. We used some of them on the endpapers of the hardback edition, and I can’t stop looking at them. (Unity has some of the hardbacks for sale here, as well as the paperback.)

Congratulations, Mary and Annie, for creating this magical world, for it now being forever part of my world, and for allowing it to be part of the world of some new, actual nine year olds. Thank you.