Hangry by Kathyrn Wanless
Ever wondered what inspires authors to write picture books? Our blog today welcomes Kathyrn Wanless chatting about Hangry and how this book came to be!
INSPIRATION FOR HANGRY – Kathryn Wanless
Three years ago, I graduated from the wonderful MA Children’s Book Illustration course at Cambridge School of Art. It was a fantastic experience which really stretched me as an artist. However, my first love has always been writing stories and things really began to click for me on the MA when we were asked to create our own narratives with our drawings.
Hangry developed as a project based on the idea that children can sometimes have overwhelming emotions which appear to take over their personalities entirely. When our youngest daughter was very small she would regularly have moments throughout the day where she would seem to transform into a completely different – and very difficult – creature. It took us some time to understand that she is a child who needs snacks, and her ability to regulate her emotions is impaired when her blood sugar drops. She didn’t understand that she was hungry, and neither did we. I am ashamed to say it took even longer for me to realise that I am just the same.
For several years I also worked in preschool education and I had daily evidence of the overwhelming power of emotions. Often in little ones, these have a physical trigger, such as hunger or tiredness. In my story, I wanted to show that it is important to understand our emotions and our bodies and how to respond to them. I felt the best way to show dramatic feelings was by transforming my main character, Evangeline, into a monster. It was fun to play with the idea that our feelings can sometimes take over and make us act in “monstrous” ways we wouldn’t otherwise. Whilst I created some original illustrations for the dummy book, I was never satisfied that they worked as well as they should. When Templar Books contacted me with the prospect of publishing the story with Fred Blunt as illustrator, I was thrilled. His work had precisely the hilarious energy the story required.
I grew up in a family where my mother regularly read aloud to me as a child. I remember visiting the library together to find picture books when I was very small, and every night she would read chapter books to me at bedtime. I learned to treasure the joy of listening to stories and when I started to write my own stories, I knew I wanted them to be fun to read aloud. The first line of Hangry dropped into my head while I was in the shower one day, and I had a sense of the rhythm of the book before all the words fell into place. I would say that I didn’t necessarily intend to write in rhyme, but Hangry wrote itself that way. I am glad, as some of the best books to read aloud with children are those written with a rhyming pattern (Dr, Suess, Julia Donaldson and Alan Ahlberg, to name a few). Some verses required a little reworking before everything flowed well, and I am grateful to my editor Amelia Warren for her input on this.
Finally, I think it is significant to acknowledge that whilst I intended the story to highlight the challenges of parenting small children, I ended up having to own up to my own shortcomings as a parent. In my story there is a funny reveal where Evangeline realises her mummy also struggles with feeling hangry sometimes. Parents are human. We get tired, we get cranky, we make mistakes. I believe we need to do our best to show children how to listen to our bodies and our feelings, but also to show kindness to ourselves and others when we don’t get it right. I hope that children and parents alike will empathise with Hangry and enjoy reading it together – preferably with a snack!
