Scottish Book Trust Project Name



Date: Wednesday 3 March 2010

Author/Interview subject: Michael Rosen

Interviewed by: Janice Forsyth

Other speakers:

JF: Hello there, I’m Janice Forsyth, a very warm welcome to this World Book Day Event, coming to you live from the BBC in Glasgow. This is the second in a series of virtual author events organised by the Scottish Book Trust in conjunction with the BBC. Thank you so much for joining us, obviously if you’re watching now, you are watching from a school somewhere across the land, part of an absolutely massive audience, many, many thousands of school students watching us right now, so thank you for doing that. And we’ve got some real live school students in the studio right now from a great school in Glasgow, Knightswood Secondary School, [audience cheers] yeah, so why don’t you say hello to one another across the airwaves, have a wee wave, and out there in your schools, you can wave back to these lovely people from Knightswood Secondary.

Now, let me tell you, you can actually still submit questions to us while we’re on air, which we may be able to put to Michael Rosen at the end of this. So you’d have to have access to another computer while you’re doing that. Go to the website and follow the link to the questions form, obviously with such a big audience we’re not going to be able to put all the questions, but we’ll do our best so you can still try to do that. So, I mentioned Michael Rosen’s name, we are absolutely thrilled that he could be here with us today, as you can imagine he’s such a terrific writer and performer, he is very much in demand, so it’s very special for us that he can join us here on World Book Day. So all of you out there in your schools and here, a very warm welcome, please, for Michael Rosen [applause].

MR: Hello, thank you very much, Janice, it’s very nice to see you, it’s very special occasion, this, because if you think about it, no one has ever really done this sort of thing before, so this is like television but not television and like the internet but not the internet. I’m a writer, I write all sorts of different things, I write stories, I write poems, I write the words for picture books for people much younger than you like We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, that sort of thing. But I try to use my writing as a way of finding out things, alright. If you think when you write you can investigate, you can explore, and one of the things that I like investigating and exploring is my own family, because families are full of secrets and fibs and things you can never quite find out and you think you will and then you don’t, and all sorts of odd and shocking things happen, don’t they?

So I’m going to start with something that was a complete and utter surprise to me and my brother, and it happened when we were going through the old photos, do any of you go through old photos, old photo albums in your family, have you got photo albums and you look at them and there’s pictures of you as a baby, stark naked? No, not at all, no. Well, sometimes you do and sometimes there are surprises in the photos, you ask a question and you say, who’s that, and the answer is the surprise. Me, my dad and my brother, we were going through the old photos, pictures of my dad with a broken leg and my mum with big flappy shorts on and me on a tricycle, when we got to one of my mum with a baby on her knee and I go, is that me or Brian – he’s my brother – is that me or Brian, and my dad says, let’s have a look. It isn’t you or Brian, he says, it’s Alan, he died. He would have been two years younger than Brian and two years older than you, he was a lovely baby, whooping cough. I was away at the time, he coughed himself to death in Connie’s arms – that’s my mum. The terrible thing is, it wouldn’t happen today, but it was during the war, you see, and they didn’t have the medicines. That must be the only photo of him we’ve got.

Me and Brian looked at the photo, we couldn’t say anything, it was the first time we had ever heard about Alan. For a moment, I felt ashamed, like as if I’d done something wrong. I looked at the baby trying to work out who he looked like. I wanted to know what another brother would have been like – no way of saying. And mum, she looked so happy, of course she didn’t know when they took the photo that he would die, did she? Funny thing is, though my father mentioned it every now and then over the years, mum never and he never said anything in front of her about it and we never let on that we knew. What I’ve never figured out was whether her silence was because she was more upset about it than my dad or less. What do you think? More or less? I’ve no idea, you see, so you solve one problem or you come across one thing and then there’s another mystery, and that’s what I’m interested about writing, is that when you uncover one thing, there’s something else under it that is another mystery, and the great thing about poems, if you write them, is you don’t have to answer all the questions, you know like in stories they kind of finish up, don’t they, everyone ends up happily ever after or if it’s a Shakespeare play they all end up dead. But with a poem like that, you don’t have to answer all the questions, it can ask the questions and leave you to think about it, and that’s why I like poems.

And here’s another one, you know you can always go and see relatives, uncles, aunties, cousins, grannies and so on, and they’ve got these mysteries. Listen to this one: I went to see my father’s cousin Michael; he was born in Poland. When the Nazis came in the west, his parents put him on a train going east and he never saw them again. They died in a Nazi death camp. When the Russians came in the east, he was arrested, put on a train, and sent to one of the Russian camps, but he lived. When I went to see him, he wouldn’t tell me any of this, when he went out of the room his wife said, he can’t bear to talk about any of it. When he came back into the room he said, tell him the story about my cousin [Laotia 06:17], so they told me the story about cousin Laotia. When the Nazis came in the west, Laotia pretended to be a Christian, she put a crucifix round her neck, then she fetched her grandmother’s brooch and took the diamonds off it. She took the soles off the heels of her shoes and put the diamonds inside the heels and put the soles back on. She thought if there were going to be any problems, she’d be able to sell them, then she went west into Germany. In Germany she worked in a factory and no one ever found out that she was Jewish. At the end of the war, she couldn’t face going back to Poland, her parents, all her friends and all her relations had been taken away to the camps and killed. She went to Israel to find her brother, [Naphtali 07:11]. She told him how she had lived right through the war with diamonds in the heels of her shoes. I always knew, she said, if ever I got into difficulty, I could have sold them and maybe paid someone to help me. And here they are, she said, the very diamonds themselves, and Naphtali said, where did you get the diamonds from, Laotia, and Laotia said, from our grandmother’s brooch, so Naphtali said, listen carefully, Laotia, many years ago, our grandmother wrote to me, she said that grandfather’s business wasn’t doing too well and so to help out she had taken the diamonds off her brooch and put in glass ones instead. And they sold off the diamonds. She didn’t tell anyone about it, but she wrote to me to get it off her chest, she went through the whole war with nothing more than bits of glass in the heels of your shoes. And that was a story that my father’s cousin’s family told me. And when he told the story – well, he didn’t tell it actually, his wife told me – there was a long silence and then somebody said in the room, it just goes to show what you can do with a bit of confidence.

So even then that starts up another story, doesn’t it, I love the way these things are linked. So sometimes I write like that, and I call that witnessing, that’s where you see something, you investigate it, you record it, and I try to write it as plainly as possible, but I don’t always write like that, I sometimes like writing things that are maybe a little bit more rhythmic. And one of the questions that I often ask myself, and maybe you do, does your mother love you more or less than your brother or sister. Don’t even think about it, what a terrible question to ask, but I’ve discovered that everybody wonders, even if they don’t know, and they always think one thing or the other, don’t they, doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. You know what I thought, I thought I was a spoiled brat, because I was, because who died, a boy died before me, that was Alan, and so my dear mum, she just thought she had to be terribly nice to me in case I popped off as well I think, so she just, yeah. And my poor bro, my older brother, I think he thought he was a bit on the rough side there. So I wrote something about that, but not in that kind of realistic way, I wrote something different, it goes like this:

You’re thinking that your mother loves your brother more than you, you’re thinking that your father loves your sister more than you, you’re thinking that your mother loves you less than him, you’re thinking that your father loves you less than her, you can prove it, you can prove it, you can prove it, he was asked if he wanted more, he got the present that cost more, no one shouts at her, no one hits her, she gets the smiles, you get the snarls, he gets told he did really well, you get told you should have done better, he’s allowed to do what he wants, you’re not allowed to do anything, you’re thinking that your mother loves your brother more than you, you’re thinking that your father loves your sister more than you, you’re thinking that your mother loves you less than him, you’re thinking that your father loves you less than her, but there’s no one there to see it, there’s no one to believe it, it’s something you know and it’s something you say but they think you’re mad and they say you’re lying, there’s no point in trying to get them to love you because they don’t and they won’t and they won’t and they don’t so you might as well be a pig. [Laughter]. That solves it, doesn’t it?

So there we are, sometimes I like writing those kind of more rhythmic poems, and as you could see from what I was saying earlier, my family’s kind of moved about, I can go back to Poland and then there’s some people in France and some people in England and lots of people in the United States of America, and I often think about people moving, maybe some of your mums and dads and grandparents have moved in life, and so I wrote one to go with that, and maybe you could join in a bit with this, it goes like this:

You know you gotta go, no time to grieve, you just gotta leave, get away from the pain on the move again, you gotta move it to prove it, prove it to move it – you join in with that, you gotta move it to prove it, prove it to move it, take the train, catch a plane, make the trip in the ship, take a hike, ride a bike, go by car, going far, use your feet, on the street, get stuck in a truck, you gotta move it to prove it, prove it to move it, then you arrive and you’re alive, you arrive, you’re alive, what you leave behind won’t leave your mind, but home is where you find it, home is where you find it, say home is where you find it, home is where you find it, whisper, home is where you find it, home is where you find it – lovely, you clap yourself, that was nice, thank you, yeah, [applause] very good.

And I sometimes ask myself, well, where did all this start from, where did I start with the idea of wondering about the family and things, and I go back to when I was a boy and I used to share my bedroom with my brother – how many of you still have to share a bedroom with somebody, no, no, you do share a bedroom with the bed, yeah, the floor, anyway, yeah, that’s right, good, yeah. I used to share my bedroom with my brother, my brother, he used the bedroom as like a theatre, he used to act out being my dad you see, my dad was quite tough on my brother like I said and he would like tell him off. So my dad, if he would tell me or my brother off, he’d have a way of doing it, we’ve all got different ways of doing it, my dad would say, never let me see you doing that again. Tell you once, tell you a thousand times, and his finger drills your shoulder, never let me see you doing that again. My brother, he knew all my dad’s little sayings off by heart, so he used to practice them in bed at night. I’d get into bed, I’d be just dozing off, from the other side of the room I’d hear, never let me see you doing that aga – it was my brother sitting up in bed going, never let me [laughter] see you doing that again, so we used to both sit up in bed, there’s both of us going, never let me see you doing that again, he was brilliant at pretending to be my dad.

Do you know, if my dad wanted you to be quiet, he didn’t say, shush, what does your mum and dad say if they want you to be quiet? Shut up, good, yeah, anything else? No, shush, be quiet, wsht, yeah, any others, yeah, my dad, if he wanted you to be quiet, this is what he did, I promise you, just this, he’d go like this, the noise, [laughter] that’s all he did, it was like there was something really painful going on in the middle of his head and his hand is trying to get to it, you try, we’ll go one, two, three, and we’ll all do it, okay, one, two, three, the noise, [laughter] exactly. And do you know, my brother, so he’d sit there, we’d be larking around in the bedroom, and suddenly in the middle of it all my brother would go, the noise, [laughter] like that, but then he had an exaggerated way of doing it as well, he’d go, the noise, [laughter] like that.

So maybe breakfast, my dad, he couldn’t stand any noise at breakfast, all you had to do was sniff and you’d get the glare, you know about the glare, you know you go like this [laughter]. Why do mums and dads do that, I don’t know, why do they do it, what are you supposed to say, you’re looking, [laughter] what’s the looking about, [laughter] like that. So, okay, my dad couldn’t stand any noise at all at breakfast, he arrives down, plonks himself down on the chair, opens up the newspaper, one minute you had a dad and the next minute you had a newspaper, completely gone, disappeared, apart from one thing, his hand would appear from out behind the newspaper, head off across the table, find the coffee cup, and go back behind the newspaper, the newspaper stayed the same shape, and me and my brother, we used to watch the hand [laughter]. You know what my brother did once, he moved the coffee cup, okay, so there’s my dad and my brother goes, [laughter] my dad, hand, hey, what have you done with the – oh, God, goes back behind there, you see, and then some little voice inside me, some little bad voice inside me said, hey, Michael, you know what you can do now, what, you could play drums on the side of the table with a knife and fork, and I went, no, no, no, I wouldn’t want to do that, it would really annoy dad, no, no, you know you want to, don’t you, [laughter] you know, [drumming sounds], no, no, I wouldn’t do that, he’d get really ratty – yeah, but you want to, don’t you? [Laughter]. Yeah, I do actually, yeah, so I got the knife and the fork and I went, [drumming sounds], the newspaper comes down and my dad’s just about to go, you know how it goes, the noise, like that, but my brother dives in quick with, the noise, [laughter] like that, and my dad’s hand is stuck mid-air going, the – and he’s looking at my brother going, the noise.

So there we are, that was some things I noticed about my dad and my brother, in fact, sharing a bedroom with a brother, I don’t know, can you remember back to that, sharing a bedroom with brothers and sisters, yeah, that’s right, yeah. I wrote about it actually, because you can write about these things from when you were much younger, you know, I can sort of think, I didn’t like sharing a bedroom with my brother, and the great thing about writing, it’s the best thing you can do if you don’t like something, if you don’t like something, some people think the best thing you can do is punch somebody, but it’s probably not true you know, but anyway, I found writing, so I wrote about sharing my bedroom with my brother, went like this:

I share my bedroom with my brother and I don’t like it, mm, his bed’s by the window under my map of England’s railways that’s got a hole in, mm, but his friend Tony Sanders he says once killed a Roman soldier, dah, dah, dah, dah, thump, with a rolled-up Radio Times, thump, my bed’s in the corner and the paint on the wall wrinkles when I push it with my thumb, pht, yeah, pht, yeah, which I do sometimes when I go to bed, sometimes when I wake up but mostly on Sundays when we stay in bed all morning, and that’s when my brother makes these pillow dens underneath the blankets so that only his left eye shows, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, [laughter] and I jump onto his bed going, yippee, piling pillows onto his head going, now breathe, [laughter] now breathe, yeah. Blimey, what have I done? [Laughter]. So I pull the pillows away quick and he’s lying there going, ah-ha-ha-ha-ha, [laughter] because he’s turned his fingers into a breathing tube and he’s sucking fresh air through his breathing tube fingers underneath the pillow so he can play dead, you try that, breathing tube fingers underneath the pillow, [inhales] my brother pulls the pillow, I pull the pillow away, he goes, yeah, I got you, didn’t I, yeah, so sharing wasn’t so bad. So I began that poem by writing, I share my bedroom with my brother and I don’t like it, then I got to the end and I found out sharing is not so bad. So that’s the other great thing about writing, is you discover things. So in the end I decided that writing was really in a way kind of my best friend. It’s not a totally best friend, but I’d like to think that this piece of paper, the space on the page is a friend. Now, some of you read and some of you write, I always think it would be great if you all read and you all wrote, because this can be your best friend, so I wrote this:

The space is a friend, I tell it what hurts, I tell it why I’m not good, the space is a friend, I tell it the bother I’m in, it won’t let me tell lies, the space looks at me, it never says I’m bad, it never says I’m good, it never asks me the kinds of question I don’t know the answer to, the space never shames me, the space never laughs at me, when there’s something in my head making me sad or wild, the space takes it, the space takes it till it’s a space no more, till it’s full of what I want it to say, till it’s full of what I didn’t know I wanted to say, then it’s there in front of me, talking of how I am so the bother or the sadness or the wildness can be quiet for a while. Tell me that’s not a friend, I don’t think so, that’s a friend, that’s a friend. Yes, thank you, that’s right, so that’s a nice thing.

Now, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to stop there, just see if there’s maybe any questions that you’d like to ask before I read you any other things, yeah, I thought I’d do…we’ll have a little question and answer thing, because I know sometimes I come places and people do like to ask me questions. Do you know, I was in a school not long ago and I said, are there any questions, and I’d done a little poem that goes, down behind the dustbin I met a dog called Jim, he didn’t know me and I didn’t know – him, that’s right, and this boy said, well, how did you know his name was Jim then? It’s a difficult question, that, isn’t it, would you know what to answer that? No. What would you say? No, you haven’t got – what? Next question, yes, that’s right, well, look, Janice is going to come and we’re going to do questions for a little bit and then I’ll maybe read you some more things as we find them out, yes.

JF: Oh, it’s difficult going up this chair, isn’t it?

MR: Yes, there you go, Janice.

JF: Oh, certainly at my age.

MR: Yeah.

JF: Thank you very much…

MR: Thank you.

JF: ...so yes, obviously people watching in schools, lots of them have submitted questions, again apologies we can’t get through them all, but we’ll try to do our best, and we’ve got some of the most popular questions, some that were asked by lots of people. So one of the most asked questions was what is the favourite piece of work that you have written, and that comes from Lourdes Secondary School and Clyde Valley High School in Wishaw, so thank you for that question. Your favourite piece of work that you have written?

MR: Well, I think the other great thing about writing is that you can tell lies and nobody’s going to tell you off, you see. So I always think children quite often ask me, particularly younger ones than you, and they say, did you do writing when you were at primary school, and I say, well, no, because we had a teacher who was so strict, you weren’t allowed to breathe in her lessons, she used to stand out the front and say, no breathing, and you’d come in first thing in the morning, [inhales] [laughter] and the weak ones just used to keel over and die [laughter]. You’d hear them going down at the back of the class, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, and there was always a whiny kid going, miss, could I go out and do some breathing, and she’d say, no, you’ve got all playtime to do it in, [whining voice], no.

At the beginning of the week there were 48 kids in my class, at the end of the week there was only five of us left, [laughter] at the end of the day you’d be stepping over kids just to get out the room, oh no, there’s Melanie, [laughter] that’s a shame, she was really nice, I used to like Melanie, oh look, ha, there’s Dave, hard luck, Dave, [laughter] always knew you were a bit weak, Dave. So some of us figured out if you wanted to survive, the way to do it was to snatch a quick breath when she wasn’t looking and we could do that because we used to have desks with lids in the olden days, in the Stone Age when I was at school, and so some of us figured out, so she would stand out the front and say – you can join in, feel free – no breathing, [inhales] the weak ones, kaboom, [laughter] kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, the whiny kid, miss, can I go out and do some breathing, no, you’ve got all playtime to do it, [whining voice] no, these kids with the desk lids holding their breath, making sure she’s not looking, [exhales] [laughter] boom, no, don’t slam your desk lid down, that meant out, school prison, there was a prison [laughter] underneath the school hall where they used to string us up from the wall bars, miss, been up here for three weeks, [laughter] and there’s rats, and they’re nibbling my toenails, miss. So I figured it out, if you wanted to survive, you had to let the desk lid down very, very quietly, so once more, last time, from the beginning, she says, no breathing, [inhales] the weak ones, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, the whiny kid, miss, can I go out and do some breathing, no, you’ve got all playtime to do it, oh go on, no, these other kids, [exhales] [laughter] boom, ouch, school prison, miss, I’ve been up here for…

Aud: Three weeks.

MR: Three weeks and there’s…

Aud: Rats.

MR: And they’re nibbling my…

Aud: Toenails.

MR: Me, thumbs round the edge of the desk lid, hold the breath, [exhales] no sound at all, and that was the way to…?

Aud: Survive.

MR: That was the way to…?

Aud: Survive.

MR: That was the way to…?

Aud: Survive.

MR: Exactly, so that’s one of my [laughter] favourite pieces, because you see the great thing about writing is that you can take something that you think, exaggerate it, and have fun with it, so she was a strict teacher, but she did actually let you breathe, as you might have guessed, yes, that’s right, [laughter] I didn’t need to tell you that. But what if you had a teacher who didn’t let you breathe, and that’s the great thing to ask with writing, what if, you know, you just think anything, you could start with something very ordinary like a game of football, what if the football was someone’s head, [laughter] I just thought of that, and you kick it, oo, or maybe that was awful, that was your person that you loved the most and you’ve ended up – you see, you go, what if, you go dangerous, you go funny, you never know, that’s the fun of writing.

JF: Wow. Well, actually here’s another kind of follow-on question, Michael, from St Margaret’s High School in Airdrie, do all poems have to rhyme?

MR: No, I think you can say things any way you like, that’s the point, it is fun to make things rhyme, I just wondered once what if I was a baby in a buggy, not a common thing, but I was wheeling my kiddie around, you see, and he went, faster, [laughter] and I said, well, actually, I’m going quite fast, I’m one of these old geezer dads – no, faster, dad, [laughter] so I was running along like this and I was going through the shopping mall and wind was blowing in his hair, whoosh, like that, you see, I was going past people in the shop going, neeeeow, and I thought, what if I could be the baby in the buggy and be able to write poems, which I know is not very easy to imagine, but anyway, what if I could, what would it sound like, what would a baby in a buggy who could write poems sound like, it might sound something like this:

I glide as I ride in my boogy-woogy buggy, take the corners, why, just see me drive, I’m an easy speedy baby doing the baby buggy jive, I’m in and out the shops, I’m the one that never stops, I’m the one that feels the beat of the wheels, all that air in my hair, I streak down the street between the feet that I meet, I streak down the street between the feet that I meet, no one can catch my boogy-woogy buggy, no one’s got the pace, I rule this place, I’m a baby who knows, I’m a baby who goes, baby, goes, neeeeow. So that’s a rhymy way to write…

JF: I think we should have a round of applause for that.

MR: Well, that’s very kind of you.

JF: [Applause]. Yeah.

MR: But sometimes you can just think, I wonder if, I wonder what, my children don’t like broccoli, do any of you like broccoli? You like broccoli. Well done, pleased to meet you, ma’am [laughter]. Well, I thought, why is it that quite often children don’t like broccoli, and this is the explanation:

Not many people know that broccoli grows in the armpits of very big green men who live in the forest and brave broccoli cutters go deep into the forests and they creep up on the very big green men and they wait for the very big green men to fall asleep and the broccoli cutters get out their great big broccoli razors and they shave the armpits [laughter] of the very big green men, and that’s where broccoli comes from. Not many people know that, [laughter] just thought I’d let you know. So you see, you can invent anything you like.

JF: And nobody here will ever eat broccoli again, you realise that.

MR: No, that’s right, but it’s an explanation, you see, [laughter] as to why some people don’t like broccoli.

JF: And we’ve got lots more questions, from Cleveden Secondary School in Glasgow, Michael Rosen, what other poets have influenced your work?

MR: Almost every poet I read, because when I read a poem I think, wow, I could write something like that. There’s a poet I like very much, she’s Scots, she’s called Jackie Kay, let me recommend her to you, your teacher to get her wonderful book, Red, Cherry Red, it’s a fantastic book, she imagines things – she writes in Scots, by the way, so it’s quite nice for you here. And one of the things she imagines is what if you were one of those fish that is 20,000 feet down at the bottom of the ocean and you were a fish that was very kind of horrible looking and ugly but you were in love, what if you were that fish and in love, and it is so powerful and moving, yet what a crazy idea, big, ugly fish on the bottom of the sea in love, and yet after about the first verse of the poem you’re thinking, wow, this is so to do with who we are that you think we’re not good enough but you still love people, and she talks about that and it’s so moving. Now, I’m not going to write a poem like that, but that thing of saying, what if you were something, and it’s a way of turning yourself into that other thing. So I love her stuff, but there’s lots of…

Almost anything, I started writing because I read some poems by a man called D. H. Lawrence who wrote a poem called Snake and another poem called Bat, and he goes down to the waterhole and there’s a snake and he picks up a vase which he calls a pitcher and he throws it at the snake but the snake disappears and he says, how mean I was, and I started writing like that. And do you know what happened to me last summer, we go to France and there was a snake in the field just where my children play and it was an adder, a poisonous snake, and I said to the farmer, I said, there’s a snake, he says, it’s alright, go back the same day at the same time, same place, same time, same place it’ll be there. I went back eight o’clock in the morning the next day and there it was. What did I do? What did I do? I hit it? Well, I’m going to write about it, because the point about D. H. Lawrence was he missed, [laughter] and I didn’t. Yeah, I know, you’re looking at me, yeah, [laughter] it’s you know an adder, it was about that big and you know if you get a bite, that’s it, thank you, goodnight, unless you were very, very quick, and it’s a very beautiful thing, a snake, they’re absolutely stunning looking, but then I’ve got a five year old and a nine year old and you don’t want them to be bitten by the snake. So sometimes poems are about problems and then how you feel about it afterwards, and D. H. Lawrence is so brilliant at that, so I thought, I’d like to write like him, I was a bit older than you, so now I’ve got to write a reply to D. H. Lawrence, and my poem’s going to be, dear D. H. Lawrence, you know that snake, well…anyway, you know, anyway, I’ve got to write that one…

JF: But what you’re saying is really inspiring, you’re talking about Jackie Kay and an idea that she started off from that other people if she’d maybe shared with them and they might have said, that’s daft, and I’m just thinking about the folk here and watching online, some of whom will have written poems and others not, maybe that’s good advice, any old idea…

MR: Yes, indeed, yeah.

JF: …get it down, whether you complete it or not, it’s still good to have a go, isn’t it?

MR: Even if you’re in a place that you don’t want to be, I once tried to write about that, the idea that you could be in a place you don’t want to be but still write about it. Here we are, I wrote this, it’s called This is the Place:

This is the place I don’t want to be, but it’s the place where I am, this is the thought I don’t want to think, but it’s the thought that I’m thinking, this is the memory I don’t want to remember, but it’s the memory I’m remembering, this is the person I don’t want to be, but I am what I am what I am, once you said I couldn’t, you said I couldn’t, but I can.

So sometimes you can write about not even wanting to be the thing or the place you’re at.

JF: Yeah. Inspiration everywhere. Now, we have a question from one of the pupils from Knightswood Secondary, she’s going to ask you now, and she is Lauren, hi there, Lauren.

Girl: Hi. So why did you pick writing poetry instead of writing like a script for the TV or a play or writing a book or novel, why would you pick poetry?

MR: Yeah, that’s a perfect question and I often wonder, I genuinely wonder that myself, and sometimes I try to do those things as well, because just because you do opt for one kind of writing, you can do lots of different kinds of writing, and I do sometimes write…I have written TV scripts, radio scripts, I have written stories, I was talking a little bit about that with you earlier, I wrote a story called You’re Thinking About Doughnuts, and guess what it’s the story of, Night in the Museum, it was nicked off me I think [laughter[. And so, yes, I do, I have written…I write short stories and so on, so I try lots of different things, but poems are kind of special because you just start with this single sheet of paper and you can play with it, you know. Once I thought, you know the football results on the telly when they do the football results, they say them in that kind of funny sort of singsong way, but the words themselves you could play with, so I wrote:

Here are the football results, League Division Fun, Manchester United won, Manchester City lost, Crystal Palace two, Buckingham Palace one, Millwall Leeds nowhere, Wolves ate a cheese roll and [laughter] had a cup of tea too, Aldershot three, Buffalo Bill shot two, Everton ill, Liverpool’s not very well either, Newcastle’s heaven, Sunderland’s a very nice place too, Ipswich one – which one, I don’t know, you tell me.

So even just something as ordinary and as dull as the football results, you can take the words, like even the word won means two things, Manchester United won, Manchester City lost, so you can play with words, and that’s…you just start with a piece of paper. So scripts and novels and so on, oh wow, they’re like, you know, they’re really thick, aren’t they, and like so daunting, once upon a time there was or you start somewhere and you’ve got so much to do, but poems, you can sometimes write tiny, tiny little ones. Like imagine a bridge, and it’s very dangerous to cross because it’s made of iron, like the one over the Tweed, you’re going to write a very short poem about it, you’ve only got three words to describe this dangerous iron bridge, don’t trust rust [laughter]. It’s a bit short, that one.

Girl: So would you say that you prefer writing poetry to anything else?

MR: I think so, at the end of the day I like the playing with it, I like the witnessing, I like exploring the sad things that have happened to me and the funny things, and it seems to just…it’s freedom about it really, because if you want to write like something with a form like the boogy-woogy buggy that’s like a rap, or if you want to write like the broccoli armpits one, you can just make it any shape, you can write little tiny rhymes. Down behind the dustbin I met a dog called Felicity, it’s a bit dark down here because they cut off my – electricity, [laughter] would do, that’s good, mind you, I get nervous of that one, I go and see some very young children and I go down behind the dustbin, I met a dog called Felicity, it’s a bit dark down here because they cut off my – and the little ones always go, head [laughter]. I don’t know why they do that. It would be dark though, wouldn’t it? [Laughter].

JF: Thank you for your question, Lauren, I’m just interested, do you write poems, have you written any?

Girl: I don’t write but I read a lot of books.

JF: Right, including poetry?

Girl: I do read poetry, yeah, but I wouldn’t write.

MR: Well, the space is there, [laughter] it’s just waiting for you, the space on the page. And even sometimes I haven’t got the page, maybe all I’ve got is an envelope. Look at that, I didn’t have my notebook with me and when I finished on the envelope I went into what was inside on the envelope which was a little note, and then when I ran out of that, all I had was the little piece of paper that came with my aeroplane ticket and I wrote on that. So you see, you can write on anything, and then afterwards you can write it up and print it out like that of course, and then it can end up in a book. So when you think these days with computers and so on, people have forgotten that actually a little piece of paper and a pencil is a great tool to play with, great thing to do, yeah.

JF: We heard that Lauren there likes reading and we’ve got a question from Lourdes Secondary School, as a child did you enjoy reading books?

MR: Yeah, I loved reading books, also my mum and dad, they read to me, my mum read to me from a very young age and then my dad and my dad read to us in a tent on a camping holiday and he read us a book by Charles Dickens called Great Expectations and he did all the funny voices and everything like that. And I loved it, it was a great inspiration for me, the idea that you could read things and do funny voices, I didn’t know you could do that. And because my dad was born in America and was in the American army, he was very good at American accents, so I used to like him to read American books, and I like it going over to America and meeting my relatives over there, how about this, I got a little surprise last time I went over to America, you know how old my dad’s cousin is? Nearly 102, and he knew my dad’s dad, but my dad never knew him, you with me? My dad didn’t know his own dad, but Ted in America did know him, and while I was over there last time he said about my dad’s dad, who’s called Maurice, he said, did I ever tell you that Maurice had an illegitimate kid? Out of the blue, badoing, it came flying in, [laughter] and then the next thing he said, and did I ever tell you he died in the Mattapan? The Mattapan, what’s that? See these lovely mystery words in families, what’s the Mattapan, he said, it’s Boston’s biggest mental institution [laughter]. So Maurice, mysterious Maurice was suddenly having an illegitimate child and dying in a mental institution, because the 101 year old, nearly 102 year old Ted in America, and then I listened to that voice, did I ever tell you, see that lovely gravelly voice, so I love voices as well, and that came from my dad, reading things like Great Expectations.

JF: Here’s one, what inspired you to write a biography of Roald Dahl, I think this is from St Mungo’s High School in Falkirk.

MR: Not only did it inspire me but I haven’t actually done it, [laughter] so so inspired am I – the idea is is that I’m going to write a book for children about Roald Dahl’s life. Who’s ever read a Roald Dahl book here? Who’s read? Yes? Well, his life, he did tell the story of his life, but like a lot of people like me was very good at fibbing, do you remember the bit about the mouse in the jar in Boy, I don’t know, but anyway, he led a very, very interesting life and they would like somebody to write that about his life and what he did and so on, they’d like me to write that. So I haven’t written it yet, sorry, St Mungo’s…

JF: They’re very good, aren’t they, they’re ahead of the game.

MR: They are, well done, St Mungo’s.

JF: Well done, good detective work there.

MR: Yeah.

JF: Now, I don’t know if you’ve counted them, Vale of Leven Academy, Michael, how many books have you written?

MR: I don’t know [laughter]. That’s good, isn’t it…

JF: Approximation?

MR: …that was quick, wasn’t it? [Laughter]. Yeah, I was good there, wasn’t I, I don’t know. I was actually very good at saying I don’t know when I was a kid, you know, who ate the chocolate cake, I don’t know [laughter]. It’s useful, isn’t it, I don’t know, yeah.

JF: Did you always want to be an author, that’s from Louise Kelly who’s at Cardinal Newman High School.

MR: No, first thing I wanted to be was an actor, then I wanted to be a farmer, then I wanted to be a doctor, [laughter] then I wanted to be a TV director…

JF: Did you try all those things?

MR: I milked a cow [laughter] by hand, anyone here ever milked a cow by hand, no, there you go, you see.

JF: City kids.

MR: What was it, actor, well, I tried, I tried the actor thing when I was at university and I tried the serious stuff and everybody laughed, and then I tried the funny stuff and people went, yeah, well, it’s not really very funny [laughter]. So it’s a bit difficult, but yeah, I did, I used to try Shakespeare, I know you all while uphold – [splutters] [laughter] see, it didn’t work. The doctoring thing, well, I did do the first two years of studying, snipping…

JF: Ohh, no.

MR: What’s that programme called? What?

JF: CSI?

MR: No, the other one…

JF: Before it gets to…Casualty [laughs]?

MR: No, no, no, the one where they’re all dead and they’re trying to find out why they’re dead and there’s lots of dead bodies in it.

JF: I don’t watch those programmes.

MR: No.

JF: One of those.

MR: Anyway…

JF: Bones?

MR: Silent Witness, you’re right…

JF: Silent Witness. You shouldn’t be up watching that at your age [laughter].

MR: Yeah, Silent – well, anyway, yeah, and all that, but then I thought, no, I quite like writing and I wrote a play – there we are, back to your question, I wrote a play and it did go on in the theatre in London, play was called Backbone and, yeah, so I did, I did write a play, but I didn’t carry on particularly…

JF: But it’s good to try all these things, isn’t it…

MR: Oh yeah.

JF: …for example, it’s obvious, isn’t it, that the acting comes in handy with what you’re doing now.

MR: Every one of you could write a play, all you’ve got to do is sit in pairs and impro, you know what an impro is? You could pretend to be your mum or your dad or something awful has just happened or something funny or you’ve got in later than you said you would, you impro it, and then when you impro it, you write it up, you can just do it, just like doing like that.

Once I was in a school in Sheffield and I asked the boys and girls there do they say thee and thou, do they say, hast thou seen it, instead of have you seen it, and they said, well, our parents do, so I got them improing doing it, and they did coming in late and the kids went and said things like, oh, where’s thou been, like that, and they did it and they wrote it up and you could see it on paper and there’s thee and thou which people think died out sort of maybe about 200 years ago, and these kids in Sheffield were still saying it. And that came about just because they impro’d, they were about the same age as you, so you can write plays based on – every one of you could do one, you could just do it, you could do a little impro.

JF: Go and do it, Knightswood Secondary, and everyone else.

MR: Yeah.

JF: Now, we’ve only got a few minutes left, do you want me to go off now or do you want me to stay here asking you questions because we’ve got loads, it’s up to you.

MR: We’ll have more questions and you can ask any if there’s anything you want to ask or I can – yes.

JF: Wait till we get the microphone to you, can I just say while we wait, thank you very much, those last lot of questions came from you while we were actually doing that, so that’s great, and before we hear from you, I just want you to wave, Michael, to – this is a shame, actually, I think it’s for the teachers, Mr Davis and Mr Dunsmore from Hamilton Drama, just to say hello. Hello [laughter].

MR: Do I look like the Queen, I’m just trying…[laughter] maybe not, doesn’t…she hasn’t got a beard, has she, [laughter] no, just – no.

JF: Not as far as I know. Thank you. Okay, here’s a question from…

MR: Yes.

Girl: How old were you when you first started writing poems?

MR: I think the very first time when I wrote a poem because I wanted to I was about 15, and that’s when I was reading the D. H. Lawrence ones, and I haven’t actually told you because I’m a bit ashamed, that I was reading this poem Bat, which is about D. H. Lawrence looking at the Bat, and I thought I’d like to write a poem like that, I hadn’t seen any bats but I had seen a moth in my room. So I thought, I know, I could take the poem Bat and wherever it said bat I could scribble it out [laughter] and write in the word moth and then jiggle it around a bit and hand it in for the school poetry competition. And yeah, [laughter] it did very well and it was printed in the school magazine, Moth by Michael Rosen. Years later I arrived at a school and the deputy head was standing there as I came into the school and he was going, yeah, yeah, and deputy heads you may have noticed don’t usually behave quite like that, but anyway, [laughter] was going, yeah, yeah, and he said, don’t you remember me, yeah, it’s Fowler, remember, we worked on the building site together and do you remember you were up the top like that, you were chucking nails off the top but it was me who got the sack, and I went, alright, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.

Anyway, he took me round, he showed me all the work that children had been doing, he took me into a class, he said, they’ve written lovely things, and there you were, Jason, sitting on the front row as it were and was going, [straining sound] he said, can I see your work, and he handed in the work and it was called Moth. And I looked at it, but it was about 30 years earlier and I didn’t really recognise that it was…I said, this looks very familiar, you haven’t read somebody called D. H. Lawrence, have you, and the kid said, no, you wrote it [laughter]. Sir got me to copy it out the school magazine, and I looked over at him and he said, I waited 30 years for that [laughter].

JF: Ooh. And on that confession…

MR: Yes.

JF: …we’ve run out of time, which is probably – off to the jail with you, Michael Rosen [laughter]. Thank you all very much for being here with us today and thank you for watching wherever you are. If we didn’t get to your question, do go onto the website, bbc.co.uk/authorslive and we’ll have the most popular questions and of course Michael’s answers there. Michael, thank you very much indeed, I should say also to all of you and you watching wherever you are, look out for lots of events for teenagers on the Scottish Book Trust and the BBC websites, news of those coming up, do enjoy the rest of World Book Day, whatever you’re up to, happy reading, and huge thanks again for Michael Rosen, thank you [applause].

MR: Thank you very much, thank you, thank you.

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