25 years ago this month

Happenings in Poem Talk was published 25 years ago. The first book that was screen printed on one page - something of a landmark book. Here is an interview, carried out in March 2025, with Simon Spain about how the book came about… We begin by taking about The Greenhouse Effect, another book produced in Hackney, East London, in the 1990s:

V: How did you get involved in screen-printing books with children?

S: It was an extension of my work with children to explore their local environment,

but taking a global issue of concern, discussed by the children with their teacher in

the classroom. It was more about the presentation of a big idea and advocacy of an

idea using the childs’' voice. In the coming years the books I worked on would

become more about the authentic child’;s voice in the moment. Looking back now this

book was way ahead of its time for many reasons, not least its focus on children as

environmental activists and the role of publishing books to give them a real voice in

the world. I think this is something we take for granted now in the context of young

people and climate change”.

V: What was the background to these projects?

S: These books were produced in Hackney, in East London. Hackney was a hotbed

of radical thinking in London in Thatcher’s Britain. The production of these books

seemed possible because there were unheard voices and screen printing, graffiti,

zines and photo copying were all being employed to enable many of those voices to

be heard. There was an openness to these processes to foster the sense of

community cohesion in Hackney. The whole idea of the Hackney Schools Publishing

Project seemed to fit so well within the current way of thinking about children’s

writing and their agency. It was a place and time when this seemed to dovetail into a

broader way of challenging the status quo and modelling ways to amplify the voices

of the communities all around. The fact that this project sat inside the Hackney

professional development centre signalled to teachers that it had external validation.

Although only five books were produced as part of that project, these turned out to

model something that could be easily replicated within other schools by simply

providing the right equipment, and the creative input. The four books, ‘Colours’,

‘Happenings in Poem Talk’ and ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ and its Turkish edition,

‘Yeşil Evin Etkileri’ , together with an earlier experimental prototype – ‘The Living

Dragon and the Magic Things’, became the bridge to finding a place where there

was a natural fit between community engagement, knowledge around literacies, and

the fine art of publishing handmade co-designed books. There was much learning in

those years around what was possible.

V: How was the content of these books generated?

S: Looking at these books now, I think we were exploring different ways of

presenting both the words and the pictures of children. In The Greenhouse Effect,

the typeset text was largely guided by adults but the hand-written writing was the

words of the children. We were also playing with the idea of presenting the children’s

writing purely as it was written - mistakes including crossings out and misspellings. In

Happenings in Poem Talk I was working in a classroom steeped in high quality

literacy approaches and I remember the decision to make sure that the children’s

writing was spelt properly. There are no mistakes in this book.

The pictures in the greenhouse effect are pretty minimal. I remember that the

concept of ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ was hard to get the kids to illustrate –easier was

the picture of the flood, which is one of my favourites – the two colours working well.

It is interesting that although this book was reprinted, we still maintained the two

colour printing approach which was driven by the process of screen printing. In some

ways that original economy required by the process led to us thinking about having

limited palettes for colour. In ‘Happenings in Poem Talk’ the pictures are much looser

and really integrate with the text. Both books demonstrate an exploratory approach

to the design of books by children in terms of presentation of the words and the

pictures – finding a balance between representation and interpretation I think are

pretty significant in the early days of these publications.

V: Tell me about the book ‘The Greenhouse Effect’?

S: ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ first started as a hand printed book in 1989. We got

some recycled paper from the recycling bank in Hackney and pre-cut all the paper to

the right page sizes. Every pair of pages was hand screen printed in two colours.

This was a very laborious process requiring many screens and a huge amount of

time to print and then assemble the books. But my screen-printing process had not

yet evolved to create a book on one page. Later I understood the efficiencies of

working with an imposition of pages on a single sheet to lessen the printing time. I

don’t remember the size of the original edition, but it must have been quite small -

probably around 50 copies. Later it was commercially reprinted in a larger edition in

1990. I think the books were distributed to every school in Hackney at the time. In

parallel with the English edition was a Turkish edition, as the school had a large

Turkish community. Although the translation was never perfect, we all thought it was

important to produce this edition which, again, led the way for many future dual

language editions.

V: How did you develop this work following the Hackney Schools Publishing Project?

S: For the following five years after this I worked in many schools in the UK, in

Sweden and even in the USA when, during a week to ten day period, a limited

edition of hand printed books, in all shapes and sizes, were created. Very few of

these were ever reproduced via commercial printing. It seems like the process of

creating them was as valuable as the outcome of the book itself. To be honest, at

that time, probably nobody even thought about making more books. That changed

with the first poetry book we did in Ireland in 1996, when we followed up a silk-

screened limited edition with a larger offset printed edition.

Happenings in Poem Talk:

Here’s another conversation about this series of books carried out in March 2025,, here Penny Robertson, the teacher involved in the project, joins the conversation:

SS: ‘Happenings in Poem Talk’ was part of the Hackney Schools publishing project

that we set up through the Teachers Centre, and I got a little bit of money. I

remember £5,000 or something like that– probably less. And we bought a computer

with it, and we did ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ and ‘Colours’ and this one was the first

book that we ever screen printed on one sheet of paper. That was a new thing– in

four colours, two colours on each side of one sheet of paper, then folded and cut into

a 12 page book.

PR: I remember the whole thing about the ISBN number, the kids being really

amazed about… that it’;s actually got an ISBN number. Yeah. Amazing.

SS: One of the things that was important about these early books was making it a

professional publication—and using professional materials– photographic screens

and high quality rag paper. I suppose it was part of bringing the professional

printmaker to the classroom and instead of making a series of prints making an

edition of books assigned with an ISBN. And it all happened in a week,

PR: That’s right. So not all the writing was done in that one week.

SS: I remember going in on Monday and you’d done lots of writing et cetera. And

then we generated all the pictures and on the Wednesday we got the screens made.

A local screen-printing company made four photographic silkscreens, one for each

colour to be printed. On Thursday we printed and then Friday morning, more printing,

printing. And then by Friday lunchtime there was a stack of 100 sheets of paper. And

then in the afternoon it was fold, fold, staple, staple, rip rip rip. And then there we

were. I think we did 100 [books].

PR: Did you? I can’;t remember. Did we print 100 copies? I remember the kids had

one each. There were some left in the school. In the school library? Right, and I’ve

got one.

SS: We had a little launch at the end of the Friday. A few hours before parents were

expected for a book launch, these large printed sheets would be stacked in a pile with

children around wondering how and from where their book was going to appear. Frenetic

activity ensued with a production line of children folding, stapling and tearing. Invariably, as

the stack of books grew, so did the children’s amazement. A moment of magic!

PR: I can’t remember what time of year it was? Some of the poems… because

Susanna and I had done lots of different projects, over that school year.

SS: I was lucky in this classroom to be working with you and Susannah – both

experts in the language side of things—while I brought the visual arts and specialist

printmaking techniques to enable a book to be created. The poems in the book had

been written before I arrived and the first two days were spent illustrating, rewriting,

editing and designing the layouts of the book—all done by hand, we only used

computers for typesetting.

PR: Because Susanna and I used to job share, we did projects with both teachers

obviously, but she would do lots of writing workshops with the kids. So we did a

whole thing on planets and the moon, and a few of those poems are in there. I can’t

remember what other ones we did. Oh, I think we had a rabbit in the class.

SS: I remember Trixie’s nose went twitch, twitch, twitch.

PR: That’s right. Some of the poems we already had in a kind of repertoire.

SS: One of the key reasons for having a visual artist in the classroom is to bring a

level of visual rigour to the way the illustrations are made. I was particularly pleased

with the way the tiger was drawn on page 11. Rather than giving it an outline, the

tiger is created by negative space and a few simple red lines. I’m sure this was not

the first attempt by the child at drawing the tiger– frequently this process includes

redrawing, re presenting, honing and refining images.

SS: With all these books, rarely was the writing done in the week. The writing was

usually done mostly beforehand. But we then had to rewrite them all out, I remember

that. And one of my memories of it. I can’t remember whether you remember this, but

was that we wanted to get all the writing right. What’s the word you used?.

Standardised spellings.

PR: Some of it’s printed out on the computer. Yeah. And some of it is handwritten.

Yeah. But I don’t remember the process of that at all. I mean, because it was the

very early days of computers in the classroom at that point.

SS: Yeah, they were printed out on paper and then stuck down onto sheet.

PR: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.

SS: It’s interesting thinking about what you’ve said about this book in relation the fact

these poems weren’t written for the book. That they’d already been written. it’s an

anthology, literally, of stuff around the classroom. But it’s an important point because

the strength of this book is the quality of the writing. The quality of the poems are so

good. I think for some of the later books we went in and said, right, we’re going to do

a book in a week. There was a short cutting on the quality of the writing. And I don’t

think they had the skills that you guys had in the classroom, you were the bee’s

knees of getting great writing out of the children. I think as well, that it was an

anthology, I think that it shows something about the writing that was going on in the

classroom at the time.

PR: It was good writing because that’s what we did. You know,it was a regular thing.

I mean, we weren’t as anywhere near as constrained as they became quite shortly

afterwards with the national curriculum. And the projects we did were just amazing.

You just could build in every single aspect of the curriculum and more, you know, and

I feel I really feel for people who are so constrained by the national curriculum now

and that you’ve got to break words down into or break English down into the parts of

grammar which I have no idea about. I just about know a verb, you know. But that

doesn’t mean I can’t write. Doesn’t mean I can’t talk.

SS: I think the philosophy of books like this was that they sit within alternative, anti-

establishment uses of printmaking, like, in the early days, t shirts, printed pamphlets

or whatever. And this is another form of that– actually giving voice to kids in the

same way.

SS: Do you remember any of the kids who were involved?

PR: God, absolutely. I really, really do, because… Sonny was the one who came up

with the title.

SS: Oh, yes, I remember. Remind us about that story.

PR: Okay, so I can remember Susanna and I talking with the kids about what we’re

going to call this book. They were having all sorts of suggestions that were really

quite, you know, possible, but dull. Yeah. Can we call it the book of poems, or class

six book of poems? That sort of thing. And then Sonny said, happenings in poem

talk, and everybody went… Yeah. And there was no question that’s what it was going

to be. They all stopped having ideas and that was going to be the title. And I can

remember Susanna saying to him, that is brilliant. And I thought it was a bit odd then,

but when I look at it now, I think it’s amazing. Amazing.

SS: It still stands out. You know, this book is really one of the very best. Yeah, there’s

no question about that. An unusual and special book required an unusual and

special title.

PR: But I do remember the kids. Yeah. Danny was they were really great kids. I can

remember them all really well. I think it were they Year 4. I think they were what we

used to call first year juniors, 8 or 9. They were year three. That’s what they were.

Yes. I can, I just can remember them so clearly. And how old would they be now

then? So they were 8 in 1991. So they were born around ‘83. Well, they’re 42.

SS: Wow.

PR: I still know Anni, one of the Bangladeshi families [from ‘Happenings in Poem

Talk’]. And she’s a teacher. She teaches English actually. Her brother is a doctor,

training to be a consultant, so I still know that family. Which is amazing.

They were great class. I think we had them for two years. I think we had them as top

infants and then into First year Juniors –Year three.

SS: Yeah. I suppose one of the things that we’re interested in is that bringing

together of the very strong art printmaking kind of practice. We were very keen to

use good paper, and inks in a classroom. And the gold paint, you know. It was

something about bringing the arts in to make something quite unique. I remember we

always talked about how the kids wouldn’t handle something like this otherwise.

PR: And the gold, they were just so amazed with the gold they couldn’t get over the

gold. And that their pictures were then in gold. I mean, we used to all make books all

the time, didn’t we? I mean, when I was a supply teacher, my standard thing was to

go in and find out what songs the kids knew and get them to make little books. And

by the end of the day, they’d all have made a book of a song or something like that.

But having something properly printed like that with the ISBN, like I said, and gold,

that was another level, completely another level. But I do remember you doing the

printing, Simon, because I’d never seen it. Screen printing. And I’ve never seen it

again. I just remember that really clearly.

SS: Using gold in this book was a critical part in its success– gold always carries a

specialness. The way the ink sits on the paper and the quality of the paper itself is

something that we were aware was unusual for children to experience. They were

handling an art object at the same time as it was their work in a book. The weight of

the paper, the inconsistencies of the printing and the edges all spoke to the object

being handmade.

This was the only book of the Hackney schools publishing project that was screen

printed only. Yeah. So what’s so bizarre now? I mean, we only have to go out for a

morning and we’ve taken 20 photographs, but we have no photographs of that of

those early days. I can’t find any. This book formed the model for many books to

come– both in its format and the workshop design.

This book still stands out for me as combining all the elements of a handmade book

really well - shape, colour, feel and design. This book was never reprinted – its

audience and reach was relatively small but it provided a model for many books in

the following years - each created in a week, in a classroom with everybody involved

in at least one element of the content, design and production. For me, this book was

the first that bridged my professional printmaking to a community-engaged practice

of classroom-based children’s own publishing, which later morphed into establishing

Kids’ Own Publishing in Ireland.