My background? When I was three years old my parents gave me a toy piano. It was very pretty, but you couldn’t play anything substantial on it and I let them know this. Soon after they bought me a real piano. Music is the one place where I’ve always known what I wanted. My favorite thing growing up was to set action to music. Me at the piano was the soundtrack for the goings-on at my house, which must have been really annoying: imagine having an argument and finding yourself accompanied by rolling bass notes and dissonant highs?
It was Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck” that first inspired me to write music for narrated ballet. It felt wonderful to bring the classic story further to life through music and dance. After “Jemima,” there followed “Jeremy Fisher” and “Peter Rabbit”, and then I set my own stories to music. For years I performed Lucinda Snowdrop as a concert piece, though it, too, was conceived as a ballet. There was just me on stage, acting out the story, accompanied by my own pre-recorded score.
All the while kids and adults kept asking me to make a companion book, and at last, Lucinda Snowdrop, illustrated by the wonderful Magdalene Carson, was published in 2018. The Book Cove launched it and it’s still going strong. Last November, an online Zoom reading of Lucinda was presented by Yellow Woodland, direct from Brisbane, Australia, and the story is part of a lesson plan in a small school in Indonesia! Oh – and then came Claudine….
What inspires me? Life. Compassion. Bugs. I’m onto a new creation before I know how it happened. There’s a kind of twinkle, or flash, and I’m off. I can’t remember the day Claudine walked into my mind, but she did, and I couldn’t let her go until she had her own book, Claudine: A Fairy Tale for Exceptional Grownups, co-authored with T.A. Young. (An extremely, fantastically fun collaboration.) Come on, who could resist a ladybug who wants nothing more than to live in Paris? And who is vain, self-involved, filled with naive expectations, and takes advice from a sometime-rooster who quotes Simone de Beauvoir?
Why I make this kind of work: Because I can; because it’s breath to me; and because it offers people relief, makes them think, and above all, makes them happy. I call those pretty good reasons.