Sally Rippin - Hook into Books

Music. Sally Rippin, welcome to Totally Lit. Hi, thanks so much for having me.

I am all a flutter because I feel like I have kid lit royalty with me today. I'm so thrilled to be able to chat with you. You, this year, are the Australian Children's Laureate. You're on the Writing Australia Council. Also, you'll come over to my house as winner of the Dance Awards.

I feel like you and I have a little bit in common that we love literacy and we love diversity that's very exciting to me you are the author of Billy B Brown School of Monsters 15 years congratulations for Billy B Brown yeah it's a it's pretty exciting time a lot longer than I than that I have actually been a writer and illustrator but certainly the last 15 years seems to be when things really took off. Amazing. And that something that has come from your brain is now out in the world.

It's an incredible thought, actually. It's a really good way of putting it tight because as a lot of your listeners will probably relate to, I've been lucky that I've always found reading easy. And we grew up in a house of books. And I used to make my own books from when I was very young, but it just always felt like it was the most fun thing to do. And the thought that I could actually make a living from something I love so much.

And not only that, like you say, sit around in my pajamas and have the ideas in my head go out into pages that fall into the hands of children who then connect with my stories. It's like I need to pinch myself on some days. You're living the dream. I am.

Now, I was scrolling on Facebook the other day and I came across this beautiful post that you shared about the impact that your Billy Book has had. Would you like to share a bit about that with me? I'd love to, Kai. Thank you. I receive a lot of messages and I'm working with an old friend, Jennifer Keen, at the moment who has been helping me balance my workload a little bit since I've become laureate. And so a lot of the messages now come through Jen.

Thanks, Jen. Thank you, Jen. And sometimes she will answer on my behalf and she'll forward them on to me. You know, she'll say, oh, hi, I'm Sally's assistant and I'll make sure she gets the message.

But this one in particular she said oh Sally when you read this it's going to make you cry and she was right it did because there was a mother who wrote about a daughter who's on the spectrum who's always said she's hated books and reading and was there for school refusal and a lot of other big challenges coming up for the mother and it was actually her librarian at the school that handed her a billy book and apparently after having according to the mother

not read two words She sat down and read the whole book, which, of course, to any parent out there who's seen their child struggle to engage with reading, there's nothing, I think, more worrying for a parent to see a child disengage with school. And I think any child that disengages with reading, that's a big connection there because so much of what we do at school requires reading.

So both Jen and I were so moved by this letter in particular that I thought, oh, you know what i get all these beautiful letters and have done over the last 15 years since the first billy book came out why don't we see if we can put some together and maybe pitch a little article and i think it's probably okay to say now because it's put in motion one of the people who contacted me when i put this little call out anybody who's got

a story of growing up with billy or your child growing up with billy one of them is now a journalist for a major newspaper right and she said, I grew up on your books and I've still got a signed book and you came to my school, which of course made me feel very old.

But we're going to work on a piece together and we're just collecting some stories just of not only people's stories who maybe have had a Billy book affect them in a way, in a positive way, but also, I guess, in my observations of how our reading habits in children have changed since the first Billy book came out.

Because as you mentioned, I've been invited to join a council for Writing Australia, which is about really researching what we can do to ensure that we're supporting our readers and writers and book creatives to ensure that it's an industry that continues to thrive because the stats are looking a bit dire and we really need to pay some attention there.

As an author, well, before I wrote a book, I did not imagine the interaction with readers in that I was writing my story, wanting it to get published, and now that I'm on the other side, I've discovered this beautiful story, emotion, getting to go out to schools and be at libraries and interacting with the kids and getting messages saying how much a book has impacted a child.

Nobody tells you about that before you get published, but it opens up such a wonderful world where you can really do some good, promote literacy and connect with the kids. And this year I've been lucky enough to connect with Life Without Barriers and be an ambassador for their Hooking to Books program. And I had reached out to them and said, oh, I've got a podcast. I can interview somebody for you to promote the program.

And the last thing I expected was for them to come back and say, how about you interview Sally Ripon? I was like, wow, that's exciting. So here we are chatting about Hooking to Books. So do you want to tell me a bit about the program? Yes. And so as we were turning a little bit off before we started the interview, so yes, to give you a little bit of context for any listeners out there who aren't aware, I'm the Australian Children's Laureate for this year and last year.

And part of the laureates, the time that we get to be a laureate is that we get to choose our mission statement. So every laureate comes with an idea or something that they feel passionately about, and that becomes part of their campaign supported by the Laureate Foundation and a fantastic program manager.

And so mine is very much about ensuring that my mission statement is all kids can be readers which sounds like a very lofty aspiration but what i mean by that is that i want to use my time as the laureate and this platform one to be engaging with kids as you and i love to do kai but also to be talking to parents teachers change makers about what we can do to ensure all our kids become readers.

And so All Kids Can Be Readers means that, first of all, we need to, for as much as we can, ensure that our kids are learning to read. We've got a little window to do that. And if we fail to do that, we need to also ensure that they can still access stories. So there will always be children who fall through the gaps. And that's where I promote the idea of lots of ways that we can still share stories. And so it might be through audio books. It might be through Braille.

It might be through comics. It doesn't matter that we can't let children not access all the benefits that come from sharing stories. So one of the things that's so fantastic about Hook Into Books is that we have a lot of things that we both feel passionately about. You know, my particular individual campaign as the Laureate and the Hook Into Books campaign.

In a way, they come at it from a slightly different perspective and that a lot of it's about promoting reading for pleasure, whereas a lot of what I look at is working towards, I guess, talking to people about how to support and recognize neurodivergent kids in the classroom. And so I think they're both two really important parts of what it is that we must do to create a reader.

So there will be the adults in the child's life who are there to support their literacy and the adults in the child's life who are there to support the pleasure because they both need to come hand in hand. If you grow up in a household that loves and appreciates books and reading, you'll be more likely to want to learn to be a reader. That doesn't make you a reader. You still need to be taught. And so I'm a very passionate advocate of ensuring that all kids become explicitly taught reading.

So the Hook in the Books campaign is fantastic because they want to ignite passion for reading in children. Part of the way that they do this is through book donations and exchanges in schools and libraries and community centres, But other really wonderful things too, like all the visits and storytelling sessions, competitions. Workshops for educators and parents.

So I really love what they do is not just connecting with children, but also like what I've been aiming to do, working with the adults around the children to ensure that we bring up a generation of readers. It can be as easy as having 20 books in a home to promote educational engagement and outcomes for kids, whether it's borrowing from the library, going to the bookshop. There's so many ways to connect.

I'm a mum of two boys that are neurodiverse. And one challenge I had as being a natural reader was learning how to adjust things. To two boys who had great difficulty reading and adjusting my expectations and understanding what their learning levels were as well, using Where's Wally books, using comics, attempting all sorts of things and even as they went through high school getting excited when they were reading Romeo and Juliet, which backfired on me because they were not interested at all.

But it can be a real challenge to get kids to engage with with reading and literature so i'm excited to be able to chat to you and also promote hook into books because it's my passion just because i love to learn but also now that i've had the experience as a parent with children with challenges to see that even when they have a thirst for knowledge there can be barriers to actually acquiring the knowledge if they're having challenging learning to read.

Absolutely. And we know that there's a couple of periods in a child's life where we can catch them and where they're most likely to drop off. So in the first years of our child's schooling, so potentially prep to grade three, is the window that we want our children, if they're going to be proficient readers, to be explicitly taught.

Because those first three years we're learning to read and after grade three onwards we're reading to learn and so it's not fair to expect teachers to still be catching kids up with literacy so the number one thing is to get them in that little window but then an area that I have less to do with but is also a really important area it sounds like it's closer to the age of where your boys are at which is when they get

to high school and a lot of boys drop off reading kids drop off reading in general there's so much competition often they associate reading with not something pleasurable maybe it's something they have to do for school like, oh, we have to do Shakespeare. And so... I think that's where we need to get really creative as parents and educators and think about how do we keep kids engaged with the fantastic things that are in this text. I mean, there are so many credible stories that Shakespeare has.

And when my son was going through high school and he was trying to do an essay on Shakespeare and he's very dyslexic and has ADHD, so there was no way that that was going to happen for him. But I was trying to explain to him that a lot of the Shakespeare stories are a lot like the hip hop songs that he listens to.

You know they're about gangs you know coming up against each other and if they could just see the language like a code that they could break down or break into whether it's watching a Baz Luhrmann film with them or whether it's giving them the graphic novel any way creative way that we can come up with it with engaging them with these stories that were written centuries ago but are still relevant today I think is such a challenge but also

such a gift if we can give that to our children and you see really creative teachers doing that kind of work all the time but we need to do it at home as parents too they need to be seeing us reading boys need to see their dads reading and we can still constantly find creative ways to engage them with stories whether it's watching the movie with them which sounds you know kind of i guess against all the ideas of very snobbish people around books would

say but i think whatever it takes to get your kids engaged in that story this is what we've got to do put on a podcast listen to the audiobook version watch the movie, if that's going to help them get into the book, do it with them. Get into it. And I think that's also like. The interaction between parent and child when you're sitting down reading a book together is such a lovely time.

It can be challenging though, like for instance, with my two boys sitting down to read a picture book, they were running around in circles around me and me sort of nearly gritting my teeth going, we're trying to read this book, boys. So for some parents, engaging with literacy can be such a challenge.

But I think acknowledging that there are, different ways to read and different ways to connect with literacy and that it's okay to try like technology even though we're saying technology is bad really it's the learning that we want to encourage and that I guess that feeling of closeness that you have with your child when you're learning to read with them or reading a book to them that's something you can't be bought really that experience.

I think that's the key to it and I was chatting with an author friend this morning and what research has shown is that it's not so much that screens are bad. They're here now. They can be a really useful tool. Certainly social media, for better or for worse, is a unique way for people who've never had a voice before to have a platform. So we actually now have no excuse not to know the stories of people living with disability or neurodivergent people because they're out there now and they're

telling you what their lived experience is like. So this is an incredible opportunity we had to develop empathy and understanding. So what they're saying about screens, especially with young children, is it's not screens are such a bad, but that it's the scrolling and it's the really short attention span that's problematic.

But if you want to sit down and watch an episode of Bluey with them, or if you want to watch a movie that has a whole story arc with them, the key is if you can to do it with them. Obviously, for most parents, it's actually when they get their break, because then they put the child in front of the screen.

But what they've shown is that it's less problematic to just hand your child an iPod and let them have unfettered access as opposed to giving them something that is of quality, has a storyline, story arc and then if you can have a chat with them about it as well because then it becomes like you say another point of connection. Maybe there's a book afterwards you know if your child loves Bluey there are lots of Bluey books out there that you can share with them.

So I think we have to understand the screens are here. We're responsible for moderating how much and how they're used But let's think about that in a really creative way as well. You know, I think we can't say it's just books or screen or we're going to lose children to screens. We have to find ways of using screens to encourage them back into books and reading.

And are you working on any more inclusive books now? Moving forward? Yeah, look, I hope to continue working with my good friend, Eliza Hull. So, Eliza is a wonderful friend of mine who has a disability. And when she was growing up, there were periods of time she would need a wheelchair to get around. And she's an incredible musician. She does podcasts and all kinds of amazing things.

And she said when she was growing up, she never saw herself represented in kids' books and asked if I'd co-write a book with her. So we wrote Come Over to My House together. Some of you listening may remember the Dr. Seuss book called Come Over to My House that I grew up with in the 70s. And I loved it as a child because you're visiting houses of people all across the world and understanding how they might use different beds or eat with different equipment.

And so we wanted to create the same kind of world, but this time we're invited to the houses of people living with disabilities. And some of these might be disabilities that are easy to see, and some of them are hidden disabilities to the way that we think of neurodivergency as a more of a hidden disability. So we do have a child with autism and his father represented there. I know certainly my son having ADHD has been a disability for him.

But the second book that Eliza and I have worked on together.

Both of them illustrated by Daniel Gray Barnett, is much more about the social model of disability, which is the way that we don't want to focus on changing the person, which is what the medical model is the person is perfect what we want to look at is changing the world around around them so every person can thrive and so so our two characters they're children and they come up with this fantastic playground where all kids can access it because there's

so many things unless you're with a friend who has a disability that you might not notice yourself and so what we hope to do with these books is just become conversation starters and even saying things to kids like when you're out in the street oh I wonder how a child in a wheelchair might access this playground it would be tricky wouldn't it because there's a little step here and just becoming aware that there are more kinds of people in the world than just ourselves and the other really

interesting thing that Eliza has said in an interview that I listened to on radio is that it's the one thing we will all come up against every single one of us at some stage in our life will have a disability We will lose our hearing, we will lose our sight, we'll lose our mobility. So why not create the world now that works for everybody? It doesn't make any sense. And so hopefully we'll do more books together because I love working with Eliza and Daniel's a fantastic illustrator.

We have just had the two so far, but I think there's plenty room for more books. Profiling families with disabilities, just encouraging and engaging. And it's so important for our kids to see themselves in books as well. So I'm so pleased that you have more coming. Now, a lot of my listeners would be writers.

Do you have any advice for any of the aspiring and emerging kid-lit writers out there? There was, so you may not be aware, but before my Billy B. Brown books, I already had lots of books published. So I actually started out mainly as an illustrator, illustrating for other people. And it wasn't until the Billy B. Brown books were published that my career kind of really took off.

And so there's probably a good 15, maybe 10, 15 years there before the Billy books came, it took off and kind of changed my life and there for a long time I felt kind of like I was I don't know like I was cheating because they came so easily to me they were stories that I was accessing from my own childhood they were in a language that I felt very that I felt very able to manipulate in a way that I was reading a lot of my son's early readers with him

and using that language to create stories that were engaging for kids so there was something about it that just felt smooth like it clicked like I wasn't having to really force something that felt unnatural and my publisher said the kindest thing I'll never forget she said just because it's easy for you doesn't mean it's easy it's just that you found your thing and I think often what will happen is we think about what it's what who the writer is that we want to be

rather than who the writer is that we are and I think it wasn't until I really realized that what I do well is connect to really young readers. And the first books I wrote were very sophisticated, you know, complicated plot lines and complex stories. And I felt very proud of them because they all looked very literary and, you know, everybody was quite impressed by the language and so forth. But what I do really well is write engaging books for really struggling readers.

And I think for a long time I had to let go of my ego and think, oh, you know, people are going to think I can't use sentences of more than five words or words in more than two syllables but i think probably the revelation for me is find what you're good at find the story that only you can tell and find the way that you can best engage with the world like there are so many books out there so many words out there what can you bring

that is unique to you and there's there's something for everybody you know we all have our unique perspective of the world but i think rather than looking at what does the public want? What do my publishers want? What do my readers want? Think about what do I have to give and how can I uniquely connect with a young reader out there? Now, I have a question for you that I have not prepared you for.

Do you have something about yourself that our listeners may not know? Probably lots, I would hope. I think if I hadn't gone into the direction of writing, I probably would have gone into, I don't know if this is relevant or not, into Chinese medicine. I'm very interested. Oh, that's interesting.

I know I don't even know if that's interesting or relevant but I spent most of my childhood in Southeast Asia and I spent my early university years in China and that was the first time I was treated with traditional Chinese medicine and I think what I loved about it so much is that it was so holistic that it wasn't about just treating one issue it was about getting all your body right.

And I guess there's something about creating harmony in the world that you live that's maybe relevant to everybody, but there was something about the idea of Chinese medicine. And it was also very empowering as a young mother of young children to think, if I make these broths, I can make my child well. I don't have to tell them to the doctor all the time. It's not just a question of antibiotics or nothing.

There are things that I can do at home. And I guess potentially as a writer for children, I may be interested in the same things about what can we do at home? It's not our responsibility as parents to teach our children to read. That's a professional's job. But what can I do to support my child's love of reading? I can read with them. There are so many proactive things parents can do to support their child.

There will obviously need to be times that you rely on the experts, which is wholly what good physical health practitioners will say. Sometimes you just have to go to a doctor. But these are the things you can do at home in the interim and potentially maybe I think of myself as a doctor of reading for young children. It definitely sounds like you are a giver and a healer whether it's with words or with Chinese medicine but thank you so much for all the work that you're doing.

When I was looking at all your activities at the moment I was like wow that is a lot so thank you so much for doing that because it's really moving us forward for our children it's amazing I really hope so and I think every talk I give if it connects with one person whether a small child in the audience or a parent who feels less alone in their struggles then I feel like all these talks are worth it so yeah I am traveling quite a bit and juggling a bit but I do love it and

it does feel like such a privilege to be able to be given this platform to you know support parents and support children and support writers as well you know without children's books we don't have an industry because we don't get kids reading we don't have a book industry so everything is interrelated and we're all a big ecosystem that needs to support each other.

And if anyone is interested in your activities this year or your work, what is your website for listeners to check out? So you can go on to sallyrippin.com, which I try and keep updated, or on to the Australian Children's Laureate Foundation. And they've got a fantastic newsletter you can sign up to that they send out once a month. And they are an incredible foundation. They do really good work in Australia.

Every laureate brings their own mission. and so keep your eyes out for who the next laureate will be because it will be a whole different feeling as every laureate brings as I like to think that I come in with, you know, some quite earnest ideas about what I want to do and somebody else will bring something completely different. It's a surprise. I wonder who it will be. And for our listeners that are interested in investigating life without barriers, their website is www.lwb.org.au.

And I just encourage all those authors out there, if you have the opportunity to give back by being an ambassador or a volunteer for literacy organizations, please do because it's amazing. Yeah, it is a really fantastic thing to be able to do. And it is all part of the ecosystem. I think, you know, the more people, the more you give back, the more the ecosystem grows and is supported by all of us. So, yeah, I totally agree with you.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today, Sally. Thanks, Kai. Totally Lit is an independent podcast. You can help support us to continue to chat with wonderful Australian creatives by leaving a review on iTunes or sharing our socials with your friends. You can also make a contribution at www.buymeacoffee.com, backsplash Totally Lit. This will also help with equipment and podcasting platform fees.

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