Interview of Cassy Polimeni by Haylee Hackenburg
Cassy Polimeni writes stories that matter. Her books strike that rare balance of sweet, fun stories for kids that also inspire the kind of critical inquisition that makes the world a better place. With themes of science, the natural world, friendship, family and the environment, Cassy’s books – The Garden at the End of the World (illustrated by Briony Stewart) and the Ella series (illustrated by Hykie Breeze), deserve space on your shelves. I chatted to Cassy about stories of awe and wonder.
What inspired you to write The Garden at the End of the World and Ella and the Amazing Frog Orchestra?
If these two stories have a common thread, it’s a sense of wonder at nature and science. I’m a sucker for true stories that feel like magic. The Garden at the End of the World is a picture book about a girl who finds a rare seed pod near her home and travels with her mother to the Global Seed Vault to deliver the seeds for safekeeping. I was inspired to write it after watching a documentary about Svalbard while I was at home during the pandemic. To me, everything about it felt magical – a treasure chest of seeds hidden in a frozen mountain for the good of humanity, surrounded by polar bears and northern lights. Researching and writing it was a balm during lockdown.
Ella and the Amazing Frog Orchestra is about a girl who moves house and feels a bit lost until she discovers a secret frog pond in her neighbour’s backyard. When the neighbours renovate and the pond disappears, Ella has to figure out how to save the frogs. It was inspired by long hours spent listening to frog song with my daughter in the bush park near my home. The series continues with Ella and the Sleepover Safari – Ella and her friends have a slumber party at the zoo for Ella’s birthday, and end up on a late-night search for an escaped animal. My daughter was about a year old when I started writing the series, and is now six, so the stories are becoming a lot more relevant to her life in terms of school and the highs and lows of friendships, so it’s been fun to share the journey with her.
So far, all of your published books have had a strong environmental focus, was this your intention when you began to write for kids?
Not consciously, for me, the first and most important thing when deciding what to write about was a sense of wonder. I have always found being in nature soothing, so that is probably a big part of why these stories spoke to me but I never want to be didactic. I came across a great quote when I was researching the Ella and the Frogs series that really resonated with me. It’s by the American environmentalist David Sobel, who said: ‘Give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.’
The Garden at the End of the World is based on real life. What was the research process like?
I wrote this book during the pandemic lockdowns when we weren’t allowed to travel more than five kilometres from home in Melbourne, so it was researched entirely online. These days only scientists and engineers are allowed inside the vault but there are some videos online from a time when media were allowed. There’s also a 3D virtual tour you can do. The Crop Trust website also has a lot of great information, they are one of the organisations that manage the vault. I spent some time in Norway many years ago but have never been to Svalbard – although the book has! I found out about a couple with a professional fascination for seed vaults who were travelling there and cheekily asked if they could take the book with them – and they did! So that was a thrill, particularly after so much remote research.
Ella and the Amazing Frog Orchestra has become a series, which is super exciting. What has inspired you to write junior fiction as opposed to picture books?
Still pinching myself about this! There will be four books in total, all illustrated by the amazing Hykie Breeze. Each one begins with a frog-related fact that mirrors something Ella is dealing with (for example moving house/habitat loss) and ends with an activity kids can get involved in, like making your own frog bog at home or school. With picture books, the challenge is finding a way to distill entire worlds and story arcs into a handful of words (usually around 500 in modern Australian picture books). I’m generally more verbose than that so in a lot of ways junior fiction came easier to me! For me, the idea dictates the form. A junior fiction chapter book felt right for this story.
Finally, if you could choose to have written one book yourself that is already published, which would you pick?
Such a good question! I would love to have a mind capable of dreaming up The End of the World is Bigger Than Love (Davina Bell). It’s such a gorgeously written, thoroughly original, mind-bending story that stays with you long after you’ve finished and begs for multiple readings. It’s about identical twin sisters Summer and Winter who are stuck on an island at the end of the world with only each other, their mother’s impressive book collection and their father’s stash of tinned food and Bon Maman jam for company. Then a mysterious man/bear called Edward shows up and everything changes. The story alternates between each sister’s perspective and you get a strong sense that they are both unreliable narrators. It’s so clever and ambitious and magical and memorable.
