At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, I wound up moderating quite a few public events. Moderation is a special skill, requiring a solid knowledge of both the subject and speakers (or doing enough homework before the event) in order to be able to ask them relevant and leading questions, during the delicate balance of making sure every voice has a chance to shine (and also hitting the key highlights you want the session to address). It's a different skill than doing school visits or other public events with kids--one of the other things we creators wind up needing to learn that we may not have expected when we set out on the road to become book creators.
When Lee Wind saw an interview with me in Publishers Weekly a few weeks before the Buchmesse, talking about the Frankfurt Kids Conference, he wrote to ask me to blog about the sessions I would be moderating. While I was at first nervous (since I couldn't really take notes on what the speakers said during the session since I was busy juggling the balance of themes and speakers) in the end I decided that by doing so it would be another way to help make my speakers shine, for those who weren't able to be at the Book Fair this year, which is part of what I felt my role as the moderator entailed.
First up, the very first day of the fair (and coincidentally my birthday!), I moderated the entire Frankfurt Kids Conference, which consisted of a keynote by Cornelia Funke, and then three sessions with three panelists each, followed by a networking session. This was the second time the Conference was held; I had also been asked to moderate it two years ago, when the theme was on diversity and inclusion, which included a keynote conversation with Peter Warwick, president and CEO of Scholastic, as well as sessions on disability, racial representation, and more, with many participants of Every Story Matters, a project funded by Creative Europe.
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| Lawrence on stage and Cornelia Funke on screen at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair, photo by Riky Stock. |
This year's theme of "Paving the Way for the Future: Responsibility in Children's Publishing" was inspired by Cornelia Funke, who I interviewed as the opening keynote session. Alarmed at the rise of right wing extremisms and intolerances, Cornelia had spoken in the German newspaper Der Zeit, wondering "Are we telling the right stories?" During our talk, she modified her position to say that while, yes, it is important for creators to be writing/illustrating more inclusive stories, and even for sometimes other voices to be the ones to tell certain stories, the onus lies not just on creators but also on publishers, to be more active in supporting and nurturing these diverse and plural voices and stories.
Rather than just complain that something must be done, she has converted a farmhouse in Tuscany that she bought into a residence for creators, to help them have the space and time to write some of these necessary stories. She talked about how one such resident, the Ukrainian artist Oksana Bula, helped her see the Russian invasion from a new perspective, one she had lacked from just reading the news but not having any first-hand accounts.
In addition to this new residency program, Cornelia is thinking differently these days when she writes her own stories, which she hopes let children take "shelter" in her words.
Cornelia ended the session encouraging everyone to not wait for someone else to step in and try and fix things, like a fairy godmother, but to try and do something wherever they were, no matter how small.
That is the perfect note to end this entry on, and I hope all readers will put Cornelia's call to action into practice.
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Lawrence Schimel is a multilingual author and literary translator, working primarily in and between Spanish and English. He has published over 130 books as an author, and has translated over 190 books. He has won a Crystal Kite twice, for his picture books Lucky Me, illustrated by Juan Camilo Mayorga (Orca) and Read a Book With Me, illustrated by Thiago Lopes (US: Beaming Books, Singapore: Epigram). His most recent children's book is HaiCuba/HaiKuba: Haikus about Cuba in Spanish and English, co-authored with Carlos Pintado, illustrated by Juan José Colsa (NorthSouth Books) which won a Eureka Honor from the California Reading Association and was chosen by the NYPL as a Best Books for Kids 2024.
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