Today the rather brilliant children’s poet JOSHUA SEIGAL joins me in The Reading Realm to talk about his new book I TELL MYSELF I’M AWESOME, which is illustrated by CHRIS PIASCIK…

Before we settle down in The Reading Realm for a chat, what’s your drink and snack of choice? 

If it’s before noon, I’ll have a cappuccino. No snack. If it’s afternoon, a Coke with plenty of ice. Maybe some kind of pastry too. 

Tell us about your book I TELL MYSELF I’M AWESOME in three sentences and then three words! 

It’s a book about mental health. It’s funny but also reflective. It has lots of interesting and unusual words, because I am a vocabulary geek.

Three words: fun, reflective, sesquipedalian. 

If one of your characters could come to dinner, who would you invite and what would you cook them? What do you think you’d talk about?

I write poems, so lots of the characters are basically me, or some version of me. So I would invite myself to dinner, cook myself a giant pizza, and talk to myself about how weird it is that I am sat there talking to myself. 

What’s the funniest word you know that always makes you laugh?

Ooh lovely question! Quibble. I love the word quibble. I would never quibble with someone who said their favourite word was quibble. 

What’s the silliest or strangest thing you’ve ever researched for a story?

Again, I write poems, rather than stories in the traditional sense. I tend to write quite a lot about animals, so I do lots of research about that. I once wrote a poem about collective nouns, which ended up being published in my book I Don’t Like Poetry. I found out that the name for a group of weasels is a ‘boogle’. The name for a group penguins is a ‘parcel’. That was very fun research!

Do your characters ever surprise you? 

Yes. My mum often says she doesn’t want to be in a poem because she ends up as the butt of jokes. My wife gets nervous about being in a poem, even though I write lots of love poems for and about her. This surprises me: if you don’t want to be in a poem, don’t marry a poet!

If your writing desk could speak, what would it say about you? 

My laptop would say, “Please clean me! You’ve had me for ten years and I am absolutely filthy!” I am talking of course about the laptop itself, not the writing I do with the laptop!

Did you like reading when you were a child? If so, what?

I did like reading, but I didn’t like reading fiction. I loved atlases, encyclopedias, trivia books. I loved books about history and religion and different countries and cultures. I loved books you could just dip into, like the Guinness Book of World Records. I didn’t really start to enjoy fiction until my teens, and despite enjoying some poetry when I was little, I didn’t ever consider writing it seriously until I was into my early twenties. 

What’s your favourite book that isn’t yours? 

The Trial by Franz Kafka. 

What book do you wish you could read for the first time again? 

The Adrian Mole series. One of the few books that have ever made me literally howl with laughter.

What’s the funniest thing a child has said to you? 

A child once asked if my cat was married. 

If you weren’t an author, what would you be?

In another life, I would be in a punk band. I actually was in a punk band, when I was eighteen. I sang (shouted) and played bass. We were called Communication Problem. Look us up on the YouTubes. 

What BAD advice would you give to someone who wants to be a writer? 

I would say try to write more than you read. 

SPEED ROUND:

Cake or biscuits? Biscuits.

Dinosaurs or unicorns? Dinosaurs.

Pirates or astronauts? Pirates.

Museums or theme parks? Definitely museums. I hate theme parks.

Cats or dogs? Cats for cuteness, dogs for friendliness.

Summer or winter? Summer. Are you mad?

Aliens or robots? Alien robots. Or maybe robot aliens. 

THANK YOU Joshua for joining us in The Reading Realm today!