Brian Jacques was a Milkman (and: I'm Writing Letters to Readers for the Holidays)!
There have been so many things I’ve wanted to write about since my last email:
An author friend who named their dog Dinkus after one of my favorite punctuation marks! Juggling in bookstores, autumn rambles in New York. Zugunruhe, my favorite word - it means the migratory instinct in animals (especially birds) and I feel it whenever the leaves start to change.
The Laurie Johnson Orchestra . . .
And I might write about some of those things one day, but this morning I’m thinking about Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall books (which I loved as a kid and still probably think about once a week and sometimes every day!).
Recently, Rachel told me that the Redwall books were so vivid and descriptive—and they’re famously vivid and descriptive, especially with regard to food—because they were written specifically for the kids Brian Jacques met at a school for the blind (when he was a milkman, delivering milk to the school)!
I must have spent hundreds of hours reading the Redwall books—they’re thick woodland epics and it feels like there are about a hundred of them—but that was new information to me. Granted, I didn’t even know how to pronounce his name until a couple of years ago, so I’m not exactly an expert.
It’s “Jakes,” if you’re wondering—and thanks to the author name pronunciation guide on TeachingBooks.net, you can listen to a recording of Mr. Jacques talking about his name and it’s mispronunciations.
Notably, in the United States, he sometimes got “Brian J’accuse”—which made me laugh (a few years ago, I recorded a little clip on the same site about getting frequent, French-adjacent mispronunciations of my own name.)
I was driving when Rachel told me that origin story for the Redwall books and I literally had to pull over to compose myself—so, hope-hope-hoping that it was true, I did some deep reading about Brian Jacques (who passed away in 2011).
I hadn’t thought much about Authorship or the person behind the Redwall books as a kid—just about mice with swords and blood-lusting badgers—so even though he was one of my favorite authors, and even though I still think about the Redwall books at least once a week . . . this was probably the first time I’d sat down and seriously thought about Brian Jacques as a writer and a person in the world.
And in his obituary in The Guardian, I found confirmation:
“Delivering milk to the Royal school for the blind in Wavertree, Liverpool, brought Jacques into contact with the pupils, and it was for them that he first told the Redwall stories. The needs of this first audience encouraged Jacques to describe his newly created world as vividly as possible; wisely, he retained the same detail and drama when the stories were written down. Their quality was recognised by a former English teacher, Alan Durband, who sent them to a publisher without telling Jacques and secured him a contract.”
The other day I stopped into Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh with my mom, who was visiting for the holidays and had been telling me about a book she wanted me to read (The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson).
As soon as I walked in the door, the bookseller behind the register did a double-take, then handed me a letter that had been delivered just an hour before.
They were a little curious about the letter—I don’t usually have my mail delivered there!—so I opened it at the counter . . . and it was a note from a kid in Texas who must have seen that I live in Pittsburgh and figured that if they sent some fan mail to an independent bookstore in town, it would probably get to me.
And it did, almost immediately!
Which felt like a kind of magic to me, and made me wish I’d thought to write Brian Jacques when he was still around. To look up a bookstore in Liverpool and send him a letter. I kind of did that with Daniel Pinkwater (another one of my favorite authors)—but through a network of agents and favors, not through General Delivery.
Sometimes older readers ask me how I got him a copy of my first book, which he blurbed (very generously) with the most perfectly Daniel Pinkwaterian blurb—just for a taste, he ended it with “what am I, a guru?”
It was through fan mail, really.
I’d heard that my mom’s neighbor’s son (who’s older than me) loved Pinkwater’s books so much that when he grew up, he wrote and invited him to his wedding. Just typing that in black and white makes me feel like I must be misremembering this, because the follow-up to that story was that Daniel very sweetly flew to New Orleans for the occasion—which, if true, strikes me as another perfectly Pinkwaterian thing to do.
How could I not write my own fan mail after hearing that?
If you haven’t read any books by Daniel Pinkwater, my favorite is The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars is a close second.
Context: they were published in the late 70s / early 80s and one day I will finally write my case for Snarkout Boys being the great American novel (this is not that day).
But when I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, I stayed in a building where another children’s book author lived—someone with a name that I half-recognized on a row of mailboxes. When I looked him up, I was (a little over) excited to see that Daniel Pinkwater was one of his favorite authors, too.
I spent nearly two weeks in New York hoping to meet the other children’s book author in the hallway, and that only happened at the end of my trip . . . and in a moment of crisis (he was taking a sick puppy to the vet). But I just Googled and there are 8.5 million people in New York, so it did feel like kismet, a little.
Like maybe there’s a little magic in the universe.
Bringing people together.
In that spirit, because it’s the holiday season: let me send you a letter!
If you’re planning on giving a copy of Snow Struck to a young reader in your life for the holidays, email me with your mailing address and the name of your young reader (and anything it might be helpful to know about them) and I’ll mail you / them a signed bookplate and a short, personalized letter.*
I send signed bookplates and letters to readers from time-to-time, for parents who want to gift signed books—or for kids who’ve forgotten to bring a book to sign at school visits, or in response to fan mail—and (aside from helping me spread the word about my extremely seasonally-appropriate adventure novel for 8 to 12 year olds!) encouraging young readers and writers is one of my favorite things to do.
So, win/win (*while supplies last)!
You can contact me by replying to this email or through the contact form on my site :)
Until next time,
Happy holidays,
Your friend,
P.S. I’m currently booking school visits for next semester and beyond - if you’re interested in having me speak at your event or come to your school (or know someone who might be), there’s more information on my site here: https://www.nickcourage.com/visits/