Q&A with Polly Ho-Yen
We were so thrilled to be given the opportunity to ask Polly Ho-Yen a few questions about her newest book, The Boy Who Grew a Tree. Her answers are just perfect!
This is a book that immediately sings to any nature and book loving person! Are you an advocate for libraries and reading? What do you think we can do to protect them?
I love libraries! They’re very special places in my opinion. How many spaces do we have in our society that are completely free to enter, are truly for all and also inspire curiosity, learning and connection? And we can all do something very simple to help to protect them – use them, enjoy them and encourage others to do the same.
Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
The Boy Who Grew a Tree comes from my passion for nature, public libraries and one particularly awe-inspiring child I once taught who had a deep and unshakeable love for growing. I knew this kid working in an inner-city London primary and despite him not having a garden or a balcony and his home being surrounded by busy roads, he sought out nature and took great care looking after plants. He just loved growing! I wondered whether a character inspired by my young student could find a tree that was growing in the wrong place, and what lengths he would go to tend to it.
As a former teacher, what ideas or activities could teachers use alongside this book?
It would be fantastic to grow from seed in the classroom and for students to create their own gardens. There could be much experimental work in discovering what conditions affect growth of seedlings and plants. The seedling seems to me such a jumping off point for both observation but also for imaginary work for students. Where might they find a tree growing that would be ‘a wrong place’? What might their tree do or lead them to? How do they imagine it could grow, if they let their imaginations fly?
It would also be brilliant to look out for nature in their local area – even just in the playground. In fact, the more unexpected places, the better.
How can we combine nature and reading for our future readers?
I think reading in nature is an enriching thing to do and there’s also something important about care-taking that reading in a natural environment encourages. At the end of the story, I imagined my kind of ‘perfect’ library. It was such a liberating and wonderful exercise to do and Sojung Kim-McCarthy’s magnificent illustration of it in the last pages of the book is absolutely what I envisaged. I imagined a tree at the centre and children surrounding it, reading and spending time. The tree was being looked after just as the library and the books were. If we’re caring towards our environment, which nature inspires in us, I feel that we will also encourage care towards everything else – our stories, other people’s stories – essentially, towards each other.
Did you have any favourite books or stories when you were growing up?
One of my very favourites was ‘The Diddakoi’ by Rumer Godden and also ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ by Dodie Smith. I recently wrote a piece about my top children books which lists my favourites from childhood right up to the present.
https://www.thenovelry.com/blog/top-twenty-childrens-fiction-books
You have another middle grade book coming soon, is there anything you can tell us about it?
‘The Day that No One Woke Up’ is my next middle grade book and I had a huge amount of fun creating a story around this simple premise: what would happen if you woke up one day and no one else was awake? I hadn’t been able to shake the experience of being in the empty streets in the lockdowns we’ve all just experienced and I wanted to explore that odd, quiet world which had been our reality for a while. But then I had to work out why everyone was sleeping and the story really took off! It is essentially an adventure story with a big mystery at its heart.
Do you think it is easier or more challenging to write a shorter story for children?
Can I cheat and say it’s both? In one way, it is easier because it’s a smaller world to hold in your mind but, in another, it’s more of a challenge because there’s nowhere to hide. I feel like each word counts much more and I tried to make sure that every one earned their place.
The Boy Who Grew a Tree is written by Polly Ho-Yen, Illustrated by Sojung Kim-McCarthy, and is published by Knights Of.
