Michelle Mulder's Blog

Thank you to Dean Murdock of the Amazing Places podcast for a fantastic interview about Home Sweet Neighbourhood! Dean really knows how to get a rollicking conversation going about some very important topics. Check out the episode here.

I find it hard to be a beginner at things. And that’s precisely why I’ve taken up drawing. It encourages me to use parts of my brain that I don’t often use. It keeps me humble. In fact, sometimes I feel so humbled that I wonder why I’m doing this to myself … but, if I’ve learned one thing from writing, it’s how to get through blocks, and now I’m applying that knowledge to this new endeavour.

First, I decided to work at drawing for an hour a day. Improvement is inevitable if we spend an hour a day at something, right?

Second, I asked a friend if I could call her twice a week to let her know whether or not I was meeting my goal. She agreed and even offered to come over and help me with my shading troubles!

Third, I made sure that I kept it fun. The more fun I’m having, the easier it is to overcome resistance.

Now I’m curious to see how developing this new skill – this new way of using my brain – will encourage me to grow and change as a writer and as a human being. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

Happy Spring! And happy launch to my two new books, The Vegetable Museum and Home Sweet Neighborhood: Transforming Cities One Block at a Time!

I’m super excited to be moderating a panel with some of my favourite children’s authors here in Victoria on October 27. The event is called Pathways to Publication, and it’s open to anyone interested in writing for children. Best of all, it’s a fundraiser for Victoria Refugee Sponsorship Group to help bring an 18-year-old young woman to Victoria. Please do help spread the word!

What might a book about Mexican migrant workers in Canada mean to kids in Shenzhen, China? I wasn’t sure. But when a teacher asked me to Skype with her students about my book After Peaches, I was excited to find out.

The kids had read the book as part of a unit on migration, and their teacher used it as a springboard to talk about migration issues in Shenzhen. In our hour together, I learned that their city was founded in 1979 as an economic hub, and it’s often considered a meeting place between East and West. People have moved there from all over the world, and all over China, to find work and do business.

As it happens, the people who arrive in Shenzhen face many of the same issues that my characters faced in After Peaches: language barriers (and that goes for people from other parts of China, too, as each region has its own dialect), the challenge of finding well-paying work, and the struggle to ensure that employers respect their rights as workers. There are other challenges, too. I learned more about the hukou system, where Chinese people are considered official residents of the place where their parents were born. They are entitled to education and healthcare only in their place of residence, and if they move to another part of the country—like Shenzhen, for example—education and healthcare are very hard to get.

We talked about how cultures blend because of migration. Many of the students in the class speak at least three languages. One girl explained how her family carries on Mongolian traditions while living in Shenzhen. A boy talked about the culture shock of arriving from rural U.S. to a bustling city of skyscrapers. “Up is still up, and down is still down, but everything in between is different,” he said. It’s one of the best descriptions of culture shock that I’ve ever heard.

Together, we agreed that some issues around migration are the same the world over. And that’s got me thinking about the value of stories. When I wrote After Peaches, I never imagined kids would be reading it in China ten years later. If asked, I would have said that such a specifically Canadian (and Mexican) story would have little to do with life in Shenzhen. And obviously, I’d have been completely wrong.

So here’s to sharing our stories, no matter how specific. Wherever we live, and whoever we are, we all have something in common, and stories to share.

Thanks to the students and teacher who shared their stories with me yesterday!

Happy new year! I’m back at my desk after a loooong break, and have just updated my website with news about my next book, coming out on March 20, 2018! Check it out here.

One of my favourite moments this summer was meeting a young reader who created a winning Heritage Fair project based on the 1947 chocolate protests (the same topic about which I wrote Maggie and the Chocolate War, my first chapter book). Jasmine’s well-researched project blew me away. What an honour to meet such a smart, engaged, and creative young person! Thanks, Jasmine for including me in your time at the Provincial Showcase!

Hurray! Pocket Change has just been named the children’s non-fiction Honor Winner for the 2017 Green Earth Book Awards!

I’ve just heard that Pocket Change made it onto the long list for the 2017 Green Earth Book Award! The list is a fantastic assortment of books, and I can hardly wait to get reading. So many great stories to explore!

I flipped through Orca Books’s catalogue yesterday, excited to see all the great titles hitting the shelves this Spring. (I’m especially looking forward to Let’s Eat!, by Kimberley Veness, about urban gardening, eating local, and permaculture. Hurray!)

A few years will pass before my own new books show up in a catalogue, but I look forward to when they do. In 2018, Orca will be publishing my next book in the Footprints series, which is about rewilding – bringing wild nature back into our cities. (We’re still playing around with the title, but I’ll include it here whenever we figure it out!) In 2019, Orca will be releasing my first juvenile novel in a while. Right now it’s called Seed and involves an urban farm and a guerrilla gardener, among other things. I’ve also signed a contract for another nonfiction book about community, and my research so far is inspiring me to try out all sorts of fun stuff, from planting a boulevard garden to setting up a free lending library. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!