Attack of the book-writing kids

Ninety books written, designed and illustrated by Dublin children are on display at Trinity College as part of a project that encourages them to create their own worlds

‘WE HAD A lot more zombies in the beginning,” says writer Emer Martin. She’s talking about the story ideas that the fifth-class boys of Our Lady of Good Counsel school, Drimnagh, initially came up with for Bookmarks, an outreach project run by the Trinity Access Programmes (Tap).

Perhaps it’s not a complete surprise, too, that toilets proved a popular portal to another world among these 10-year-old boys. (“We told them it couldn’t be via a dream,” says Martin.) Other portals include fridges, tunnels, being knocked unconscious or, as in Jamie McGratten’s opening sentences, a basket: “I was sitting in my house bored out of my head, so I just put a basket on my head for the craic. I took it off five minutes later and ended up in a strange world.”

Glenn Byrne’s arresting story is about a giant machine-gun-toting rabbit called Buster Bunny and a robot, which is used to cook sausages on. His page borders are all of blood-tipped bullets, and heads on stakes. “This place is an abomination,” he has written of his world. Where did he get that word from? “I just thought about this auld fella I know, who’s always saying everything is an abomination,” he says. “It means not nice.”

Adam Smith has illustrated his story, Up the Stairs of Horrorville, like a cartoon strip. His imagined world, full of description, is one where, he writes, "the sky was always purple, the seas were always wine, the land was jet black".

“You need to make things more interesting, so you have to describe them more,” he says. “One of my hobbies is writing stories. I’m thinking of one right now. It’s about a gem that gets robbed from a museum at night.”

For the past five years Tap has been working with primary schools across Dublin that the programme deems to be in disadvantaged areas. For the Bookmarks scheme it has worked specifically on projects that guide each child in a class towards writing and illustrating his or her own book. The books produced then go on display to the public in the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin. This year the Bookmarks theme is Journey, and, since February, Martin and artist Hannah Maguire have been working weekly with children from three schools: Our Lady of Good Counsel Boys’ National School; Scoil Eoin, Kilbarrack; and St Brigid’s, Haddington Road.

Martin and Maguire, both of whom were first-time facilitators on the project, came to the schools with a clear plan as to how they were going to extract a narrative from each child. “First of all we made them do some meditation,” Martin says. “They needed to be quiet, so they could get into their heads and start thinking about the story. In the beginning it was a challenge, and then they started asking for it.”

The facilitators assured the children that each of them was going to write and illustrate a book, and that all books would go on display to the public for a fortnight at Trinity. This meant the level of interest was kept high, and the project was entirely inclusive.

“We had to have a structure to the narrative, otherwise we’d have had no stories,” Martin says. She devised a narrative system whereby each child had to imagine a way of getting into another world, then overcome a series of obstacles, aided by helpers, before getting through to a conclusion. “The girls all wanted lots of helpers, but the boys didn’t want any.”

The main difficulty she came up against, Martin says, was that so many of the boys’ stories were straight from video games, with accompanying zombies, machine guns and gratuitous violence.

As part of the project all the children were taken to Trinity for a visit, and shown the Book of Kellsand the Long Room. One of the aims of Tap is to get children to start thinking early on in life about the possibility of a university education. The trip to the library also meant that Martin was able to talk to them about copyright, and how unimpressed the university would be to see their books copying elements from other stories or video games. "We had fewer zombies after that," she says.

The stories were written straight into copies or typed up, edited and then written or pasted into mocked-up concertina-type books, along with rough drawings and a plan of how each of the pages was to be laid out. “Each page has a border,” Maguire says. “We insisted on that, because even if some children couldn’t draw very well they could still make fantastic borders.”

When Martin and Maguire were happy with the stories and mocked-up drawings Maguire made each child a concertina book in beautiful Italian paper, and they made their final versions in that.

Each story is between seven and 12 pages long, and the pages of each book are a blaze of colour. It’s clear that the children have worked hard on them, both in the weekly workshops, and in class time with their teacher, Mark O’Brien.

As it is the last day Martin tells the class about dedications and biographies, and asks everyone to write one. Five minutes later she reads one out: “Hello, my name is Cillian Foley. The nickname’s Cillo. I am 11 years young. I live in Drimnagh. I play football every day.” Cillian’s dedication is to himself: “I need to give myself a treat.” The children howl.

Going around the room it’s evident that every child is incredibly proud of his or her book. They should be. Even an adult would be daunted by the task of designing, writing and illustrating a story in six weeks.

Each year, Trinity offers to take the books and archive them in the library’s collection. To date, they have not received any books, because, unsurprisingly, the children want to keep them.

The 90 books made by the children will be on display in the Long Hall, Trinity College, until April 5th