Nicholas Read Writing Non-Fiction for Young Children by Adelia MacWilliam “The state of the planet is broken,” UN Secretary-General Guterres said recently in a speech at Columbia University. “Humanity is waging war on nature.” While it may seem like a stretch to go from Guterres’ proclamation to an interview with a writer of children’s books, not so. Nicholas Read’s books are part of what will heal the divide. Read’s most recent book, A Bear’s Life, is one of a series of several books done in concert with Ian McAllister, a world-renowned nature photographer and filmmaker. McAllister was at the forefront of the activism that helped preserve the Great Bear Rainforest, a swathe of temperate rainforests that stretch across 6.4 million hectares of the remote British Columbia coastline 14 WORDWORKS ︱ 2021 Volume I
and Haida Gwaii. After a visit there, poet Patrick Lane wrote: “I walked in the hollowed paw prints a grizzly bear left / ten thousand years ago this morning.” As Read tells it, “Ian and I got to be friendly when I was working at the paper (the Vancouver Sun) and we wanted to do something together, which is how we ended up going to see the publishers at Orca. And they did something that publishers rarely do, they saw how exceptional the photographs were and decided right then and there that they should have books with these photos.” What followed were a series of books for middle school readers: Salmon Bears, The Sea Wolves,
and The Great Bear Sea. Then the publishers decided that there should be a series for younger readers, Kindergarten to Grade 3, which became The Seal Garden, A Whale’s World, Wolf Island, and the most recent publication, A Bear’s Life, pairing McAllister’s beautiful photos with Read’s playful storyline. Read explains, “Ian doesn’t like writing, whereas I love it. I use the information he gives me as well as drawing from other sources. Ian reads what I write and corrects any errors. It’s very much a collaboration.” He went to say, “Ian has spent years of his life there (the Great Bear Rain Forest) and he knows it as well as anyone could. He’s as much a part of it as the bears and the bees. However, I’m much more of a city boy.” While Read’s text is an integral part of these books, he prefers to shine the light on McAllister. “If we were a stage act, Ian would be front and centre and I would be the accompanist, off to the side.” Read went on to say, “Unlike most people, Ian has a cause. He has a mission. He has a purpose. I do what I can to help him.” Read’s background in journalism has been helpful. As Read explains, it’s a journalist’s job to make to make things simple for people to understand. Most newspapers are written to a Grade 6 level, so it wasn’t a stretch for Read to write for middle school students. Writing
