For those who don’t know, Aye Write is an annual book festival held in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow where I normally volunteer. This year, due to various things I’ve been involved in, I could only be at 3 sessions in the Royal Concert Hall, the Mitchell is being refurbished, for 2 of them I was stationed at the green room and didn’t get a chance to take in any of the events, however, I was able to sit in on Stuart Coscrove‘s talk about his latest book Hey America!, The epic story of black music and the White House, it was a very interesting discussion with loads of humour as Stuart reminisced about his discovery and love of soul music.
The highlight of the festival, for me, and many other volunteers is Wee Write, the part of the festival for children and young people, six days of inspiring, fun-packed events for little people with big imaginations. I managed to fit in a few sessions for this. The first one, on Monday, was at the Mitchell Library with Alan Windram, highlighting his latest book “One Button Benny and the Dinosaur Dilemma”. This was a fun-packed session, the group of first-year primary kids had great fun joining Alan as he sang, danced and joked his way through the story, it was wonderful to see them all so enthusiastic about the One Button Benny books.
The afternoon saw me heading along Sauchiehall Street to the Royal Concert Hall to help out there while Brighton based author and illustrator, Steven Lenton brought the latest of his “Genie and Teeny” books to life. the primary 3 kids had a ball of a time as he took them through the story with loads of jokes, then held a drawing class with them to create their own version of Teeny, it was great fun., and all of their drawings were very good, but I think they like the little jokes best, especially the naughty ones.
I was scheduled to volunteer at a session today (Wednesday), by Tom Palmer, another children’s author, but unfortunately, the session was moved out to a school and there was no need for volunteers, I was a wee bit disappointed as I had great fun at the previous sessions. I can’t wait until next year.
Jim's travels 