I’d be remiss if I didn’t give this upcoming event at Edinburgh International Book Festival a bit of a signal boost here. So HERE IT IS, duly shouted from the virtual rooftops of the algorithmically manufactured Subcitadel. Or is Substack more of a haystack standing proud in a vast cornfield of similar-ish stalky collections? And is my presence here, one stalk in billions, of any possible use given the ongoing horrors unfolding abroad? Big feelings with Debi Gliori. Apparently I’m going to talk to lots of very small children about “what makes us happy when we’re feeling big, sad emotions”.
Oh, boy. I have many thoughts on this subject. I’m definitely feeling big, sad emotions but I have no idea where to put them. I sign petitions, I send money, I make art to sell for fundraisers, I buy tahini and dates and cook Middle Eastern dishes, I try to not turn away from the horror in some kind of perverse solidarity with my fellow humans who are living ( and dying) it, but in the end I feel completely helpless. In the face of such a man-made cataclysm, my days feel like utter dissonance, as if I’m cleaving in two trying to hold space for all the misery alongside trying to get through a working day in publishing. Big feelings.
Back to August, Edinburgh 2025. It’s that time of year when my anxiety ramps up to the red end of the fret-o-meter and I tie myself in knots over the question of whether anyone will notice the disconnect between what I actually am going to talk about and what the programme says I’m going to be talking about. Fortunately, most 3-5 year olds will not have read the programme, and are unlikely to take me to task for straying off-script. However, they will shred me if I bore them, and that’s where the FEAR begins.
It’s been a while. I’m Edinburgh-rusty. I have twenty-odd lanyards to verify having survived two decades of treading the literary festival boards, but there has been a gap of a few years since my last Edinburgh, and now I’m a beginner all over again. I’m delighted to be invited to take part, but my delight is tempered with anxiety.
What a complete wuss, you’re probably thinking. And you’d be right. I am. I’ve taken part in book festivals from Melbourne to Jaipur, from Tokyo to Texas and a whole lot more, but when I step up to the microphone, I rarely feel as if I’m in command of my material, my gobby mouth or my runaway thoughts. Littlies are notoriously unpredictable. Tech goes wrong. Every venue is different. Brain fog sweeps in like haar and I struggle to balance answering children’s random questions1 while keeping my narrative thread going. I cue up the next slide and think - what the hell, why did I put that there?- and find myself having to improvise a connection which lands like a sack of wet concrete. I look out at the sea of faces and think - they’re bored, they hate this, I’m losing them - and all the while, I’m trying to tell a story, or the story behind the story or simply be entertaining enough that there isn’t a mass stampede for the exits.
We writers could write volumes about the things that can and do go wrong. About the many slabs of humble pie we’ve choked down. The panic attacks, the clammy skin, the elevator tummy, the unplanned rush to the bathroom before going onstage. In the green room afterwards, we swap horror stories and commiserate about the Dark Side of the profession. Our laughter is tinged with hysteria, our systems flooded with adrenaline and horrible coffee. Am I even allowed to say this? Reading some ebullient accounts of events my fellow writers have survived enjoyed, I wonder if I’m just incompetent, or maybe unlucky, or just totally unsuited to this part of the profession?
Or, perhaps, all three?
Regardless of my abilities or lack thereof, I have been around and around this particular block more times than I care to count. I love my job, could never imagine doing anything else but I still come up against the pointy end of public appearances every once in a more often than not. So. Here, for your entertainment, are some hi-lolights from over three decades of festivals I’ve taken part in around the world.
The Feckless Mummy: The small girl who threw a major ( and I mean MAJOR) wobbly halfway through a picture book event. Ran to the front howling - I don’t like this story! I don’t want this story! I want my Mummy! - on repeat. Mummy wasn’t in the marquee. Mummy had effed off to listen to somebody else in a distant marquee, leaving the Book Festival staffer and I in loco parentis.
The clip-on radio mic of Doom: Tech help clipped it onto the elasticated waistband of a pair of antique Moroccan harem pants I was wearing to accommodate my two weeks postpartum midriff. Tech help in those days did not operate in the relative privacy of the green room. Tech help did their thing onstage, in front of your audience.
To my horror, the vintage embroidery round the waistline of the Moroccan harem pants could not support the weight of the radio mic and together, they fell to my ankles. To. My. Ankles.
The Vengeful Grandmother: It was all going so well. To my delight, here I was, at a major festival, doing a sold-out event, and not only that but I’d made it through the first tricky ten minutes and was beginning to hit my stride… when an elderly woman stood up in the middle of the audience and began to berate me.
‘This, this “show” is not suitable for children. It’s much too adult. Far too much talk of nappies and dogs. ( It was a talk about ‘Witch Baby and Me’, in which, to be fair, there was a lot of dog and nappy content) I’m going to complain to the management’ - at which point, another audience member stood up and said ‘How RUDE! Be quiet! You’re spoiling it for all of us. If you don’t like it, leave.’
Elderly lady left, dragging her poor little grandson behind her. Quite hard to pick up and seamlessly carry on, but carry on I did.
The wrong age group: Turning up onstage to talk for an hour about my fiction series for ages 9+, I was greeted by an auditorium full of toddlers. Rapid change of plan. Panicked call for a flipchart. And pens. And a copy of one of my picture books. Oh, and the head of the festival programmer on a plate, while you’re at it.
The wrong age group v2.0: Turning up years later, to talk for an hour about my fiction series for ages 9+, I was greeted with a room full of children of all ages from toddlers through to tweens. More toddlers than tweens, but in honour of my tweenage ticket-buyers, I apologised to the toddlers, explained that the book was for the older audience members and sailed forth.
Only to be brought to tears after half an hour by an outraged Dad who stood up and yelled, “Call yourself a fucking writer? I could do better with my eyes shut.” Rude. There was more, but I’ll draw a veil.
The tech that failed: So many instances of this. So many broken promises, dud projectors, lack of tech help, colour values that made my slides look as if they’d been boil-washed with a pair of leaky Levis, glitchy wands that advanced ten slides instead of one, incompatible software etc etc etc. After decades of such let-downs, I bought a data projector, a wand to advance slides without my standing over the projector, a hideously spendy laptop and taught myself how to put it all together in five minutes after unpacking it from a chunky carry-on. I thought I was bulletproof. How wrong I was. I’d reckoned without -
Venues with no wall space to project slides onto.
Venues with no accessible power sockets.
Venues with no power at all.
Venues with everything set up already, but set up to only show slides on a small tv screen in front of 250 children, 15 of whom would have some kind of a sightline to the screen, the remaining 235 would be hot, crushed in the scrum for a view, bored and restive.
Venues where everything was set up already to show slides on one of the 2,000,000 variables of the Promethean Smartboard, a bit of tech that nobody, not even the savviest of janitors, knew how to use.
The Guérilla Derailleur: It was probably my fault. I mean, it was undoubtedly my fault but…I had no idea that I’d done the verbal equivalent of hurling myself into a vat of quicksand. Context: I was talking about a book called ‘Where did that baby come from?’ which is full of ridiculous and great-to-illustrate answers ranging from buying babies in a shop to making them from a kit.
In this spirit of let’s come up with another ludicrous origin story for a baby, I foolishly asked- Where do you think babies come from?
And a small girl stood up at the back of the marquee and told us all, in the spare no blushes tone of an informed five year old, exactly where babies come from. It took about five minutes. She walked us through a blow-by-blow account of daddy’s penis and mummy’s va- va- what is it called, Mummy? - during which every adult ( except Mummy) stared at their laps, the ceiling, their fingernails, anything rather than at the totally nonplussed writer dying onstage in front of them.
The Flipchart of Inadequacy: Sometimes, as a back-up to my over-reliance on tech, I’ll request a flipchart with paper, so that if all else fails, I can at least draw as I talk and that way, even the Smalls at the very back will be able to see something. Holding up my own small picture books to illustrate a point only works for the three children clustered round my knees, while the remaining 247 children would be attempting to decode something the size of a postage stamp.
So, I’ll turn up with pens, charcoal and pastels. I prefer pastels and charcoal, but they don’t work on slippery coated paper which is the kind of paper most flip charts come preloaded with. Time was, I’d turn up with a mahoosively heavy roll of lining paper (perfect for charcoal and cheap as chips) but these days, I prefer to have both my arms the same length. See also: carrying a laptop, data projector, three picture books and an extension cable. And possibly a portable generator.
Usually, most venues can supply a flipchart. Sometimes they’ve been pre-loved, and the work of previous illustrators is displayed on page after page of genius, a series of endlessly brilliant drawings, all perfectly composed, not a fingers-as-bananas to be seen. Seeing the evidence of my colleagues’s excellence sinks me into a state of existential gloom with a light sprinkling of imposter syndrome. My off-the-cuff drawings are lamentably crap. As I say to the children informing me that my drawings are indeed rubbish, it’s really hard to talk and draw at the same time. A lame excuse, but the only one I’ve got.
Imagine my audience’s delight, when following a well-known Scottish writer who’d used the same flipchart I was about to employ, I flipped back the blank first sheet to reveal his immortal words - Debi Gliori is a big poo.
Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, right? Just because several years have passed doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten. You won’t know where, you won’t know when…
And finally, one last thing.
The Perfidious Program: That event I shouted from the rooftops at the start of this week’s newsletter? Big Feelings? It’s got a major error. I wonder if you can spot it?
Some of these are derailing : Are you a hundred years old? Why are you drawing like that? That doesn’t look like a ( whatever it’s supposed to look like)
Some are surreal: Where can I buy my artistic license?
Some are not questions at all : I’ve got a snake. My big brother is in prison. My mummy isn’t here, she went to see another writer. You’re boring. Oh goddddddddd….
and some are hella astute : Were you a hippy when you were young? Dang. Rumbled.
This was a hilarious and chilling read, thank you! I hope that grandma and that dad are both in a prison somewhere together 😂 I have had some grisly experiences doing events, but at least have never been pantsed on stage - a delight in my future perhaps!!
And you have SO many more examples!
But I have attended many a Debi Gliori event that has gone swimmingly - they are never ever ever dull. xxx