Interview #9: Julie Fulton

Julie Fulton has Mersey Sound poet Brian Patten to thank for setting her on the path to becoming a published author.

In 1974 when she was ten he chose a poem she'd written for inclusion in a small anthology of children's poems for the Little Missenden Festival, in Buckinghamshire, where she lived.


Julie Fulton with a protective arm around her first
book, Mrs MacCready Was Ever So Greedy



"It was called I Like... and I got to read it out at a big presentation and meet the famous Mr Patten himself. I have had a love of poetry ever since and still tinker with the odd ode to this day."

These days, Julie is the recently published author of rhyming picture book Mrs MacCready Was Ever So Greedy. Her publishers, Maverick Books, are so pleased with her work they've asked her to create a series of 'Ever So' books, all set in the fictional village of Hamilton Shady. Tabitha Posy Was Ever So Nosy is the next one, due to be published on January 28 next year. Julie hopes she will write one a year.

Although she is these days known to the world as a writer, Julie's background is in music and teaching.

She studied music at university, became a school teacher and eventually became a self-employed music teacher.

She had always loved writing and stories, and took great pleasure in reading to the children in her class when she was a school teacher.

Julie's first book

Once you realise this it's easy to see why she's drawn to rhymes and rhythms. Her influences are timeless rhymesters Edward Lear, Dr Seuss, Ogden Nash, Hilaire Belloc and Spike Milligan.

"I've been told my stories are like Belloc's - they have a subtle, underlying moral. I always loved rhymes and poetry and I've always written rhyming poetry. I really enjoy rhythm."

Of Mrs MacCready and her breakthrough as a published author, she said: "I thought it was just a nonsense poem. I wrote it for a writers' group homework. I don't know where it came from, it all tumbled out in an hour. But someone said it's a picture book."

She decided to send it to publishers and was picked up by the second one on her list - Maverick Books.

...and the second in her 'Ever So' series, which will be available next January

The publisher commissioned Jona Jung, a Polish artist, to do the illustrations. It has proved a remarkable collaboration as Jona does not speak English. "She uses Google Translator when she emails me, which makes for some interesting emails! I don't know whether she translates my stories the same way or not. But her illustrations are wonderful and she adds something extra of her own, too."

The book is aimed at children aged four-plus. It's the tale of Mrs MacCready, of Hamilton Shady, who likes to eat. And eat. And eat. Until, eventually, she... well that would be giving the end away. But it's certainly unexpected.

Julie entertains her young fans

One of the things Julie loves more than anything is going into schools to give readings to children and help them to do their own writing. She has a ready-made audience, too, at her local village primary school where she frequently pops in to 'road-test' works in progress.

"It's really useful to be able to do that," she told me. "I always try to put a long word in. In Mrs MacCready it was 'succulent'. The editor wanted to take it out, but I put my foot down."

And so the word remains in the text...

Mrs MacCready was ever so greedy
she did nothing else but eat.
Fish fingers and chips, apples with pips,
plates full of succulent meat.

Julie has narrated Mrs MacCready for the Nook, an e-book reader for the North American market. "I absolutely loved doing it!"

A page spread from Tabitha Posy

I asked Julie if she wanted to write novels for children and, sure enough, she told me she was currently editing a book for children aged eight and over. It's set during the Second World War and is the tale of an 11-year-old evacuee named Susan. Julie has not been able to place it with a publisher yet and she's even considering self-publishing.

Whatever direction Julie Fulton's writing takes in the future I'm sure it will succeed as she's 'Ever So' talented.

* Many thanks to Julie for talking to Bookengine about her work. Her website is here. Visit the website of her publisher, Maverick Books, here.

Childlike writers who escape reality

Writing is a solitary activity. Not all, but many writers are shy, retiring people who best express themselves through the written word.

A lot of children’s authors have used their stories as a way of insulating themselves against the real world. Many never really grow up, despite their seemingly sober, grownup outer appearances.

Perhaps this is the main quality that connects our greatest children's writers. 

J M Barrie

For many, J M Barrie is the epitome of the children's author who never wanted to leave childhood behind. He, after all, created Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Perhaps Barrie's psyche was scarred when his older brother David died aged 14 and he tried - in vain - to replace him in his mother's affections. Was it from this tragedy that sprang the idea for the boy who never grew up?

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen was another childlike and naive man. He never married and was uncomfortable around women. He was essentially a child in an adult's body.

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame wanted life always to be like his childhood growing up close to the river in Cookham, Berkshire, where he had first learned to escape the harshness of the real world (his mother died young and Grahame and his siblings were sent to live with their grandmother). He became a bank worker, rising to become Governor of the Bank of England, a respectable and, dare I say, dull post? Was this an act of escape for the man who based the timid Mole upon himself? Despite dramatic and tragic incidents in his life - he survived a shooting incident at the bank and his son committed suicide - Grahame did not seek adventure, forever wanting to inhabit the cosy, safe world of Mr Toad, Ratty and Mole in the Wind in the Willows.

Lewis Carroll

Some authors – Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss – seek refuge further by hiding behind pseudonyms. For them, does the creation of this extra layer, a protective skin, provide another way of keeping reality at bay?

Dr Seuss – Theodor Seuss Geisel to give him his real name – was certainly very bashful, with a pathological fear of speaking in public. On the rare occasions he did give public addresses, he resorted to reading a comical rhyme – albeit touched by Seussian magic – in place of a speech. There is a short, but very revealing video clip on YouTube of Seuss smiling at, but saying nothing to, an interviewer late in his life in San Diego.

He never lost his childlike playfulness. Many stories abound of his childlike naughtiness, recounted in the excellent book by Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr Seuss and Mr Geisel. One particular favourite of mine was the time he went into a shoe shop and switched all the stickers indicating what size of shoes were on display.

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a brilliant, reserved and reticent Oxford mathematics don. He was a man with two sides. On one hand he was Dodgson, the quiet, shy, reserved Victorian gentleman bachelor, a genius in his field. On the other he was Carroll, the dazzlingly creative author of Alice in Wonderland, possessed of a quicksilver wit shot through with a bizarre and darkly comic imagination. The pen name Lewis Carroll clearly allowed the mild mannered mathematician and logician from Cheshire to release his wild and childlike side while offering him the ability to return to the quiet, dusty world of academia when it all became a bit too crazy.

Roald Dahl's writing hut

One could never describe Roald Dahl as shy and retiring. He was the opposite - belligerent, opinionated, domineering. Yet he never lost the ability to recall what it was like to be a child and this is evident in what he wrote.

Nevertheless, like these other authors, he had the desire to escape into his writing. How else do you explain his desire each morning to seek refuge in his little whitewashed, yellow-doored shed at the bottom of his garden where he would sit in an old armchair and swaddle himself in an old sleeping bag so that he had created for himself a womb-like workspace?

There are other authors, of course, not all children's writers - here I'm thinking of P G Wodehouse and Charles Schulz - who escaped into their own childlike fantasy worlds.

So, who would you include in the list?

Words of wisdom from the good doctor

Dr Seuss made every word count. And what words! Once read, they bounce around inside your head like a bagatelle. There's the story of how Ted Geisel (his real name) was receiving an honorary degree from an American university and the graduating students all stood up and recited from memory every single word of Green Eggs and Ham in his honour. What a tribute.

But those words didn't come easily, as Geisel explains:

You can fool an adult into thinking he's reading profundities by sprinkling your prose with purple passages. But with a kid you can't get away with that. Two sentences in a children's book is the equivalent of two chapters in an adult book.
For a 60-page book I'll probably write 500 pages. I think that's why it works. I winnow out.

(quoted in "Dr. Seuss's Green-Eggs-and-Ham World," by Judith Frutig, The Christian Science Monitor, May 12, 1978)


He called this process 'meticulosity', a lovely Seussian word. It sums up the process of writing and a writer's need to expect the highest standards of himself, not accepting second best.
Plenty more to read, here.