Authorgraph 272: Matt Goodfellow
Matt Goodfellow interviewed by Clive Barnes.
It has taken Matt Goodfellow a while to discover where his talent might find a home. When we meet on Zoom, Matt tells me he has always been good with words, ‘When I was a kid, I found making stupid stuff up to make people laugh came quite easily.’ He admits that maybe this talent went unrecognised at high school, at least by the teaching staff: ‘I was a bit of a pain, really.’ He went on to study English at university and worked for a short time as a journalist – ‘so the writing was always been knocking around there.’ But, from the time he was thirteen, he was determined to be a songwriter. He says now that ‘poetry and song lyrics are best mates, one and the same thing to my mind.’ But at the moment he gave up the songwriting dream and retrained as a primary school teacher, he thought ‘the songwriting, the creativity, was all done.’ It wasn’t, of course.
Once in front of a class, Matt began creating poems and songs with the kids and inviting authors in. Tom Palmer was one of the first. Matt watched Tom with his class and thought, ‘right, I quite like the idea of that.’ And then ‘the writing gradually took over from the teaching.’ His poems began appearing in children’s poetry anthologies. His headmaster allowed him to take his poetry sessions out to local schools. He self-published his first collection of poems in 2016 (now an expensive second-hand purchase on Amazon) and appeared on the radar of two of the principal publishers of children’s poetry: Janetta Otter-Barry at Otter-Barry Books and Gaby Morgan at Macmillan. His collections began to be regularly shortlisted for the CLiPPA (Centre for Literacy Primary Education Poetry Award). By then, he was writing full time and last year his first verse novel, The Final Year, took the CLiPPA and a host of other awards. His most recently published verse novel, The First Year, quickly followed that success. It finds young Nate, who spent his final year at primary school in the earlier book, moving on to his first year at high school. This is a bigger, and, Matt believes, even better book. It is shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and looks likely to gather more awards.
Matt’s poetry displays enviable strengths: a sensitivity to the audience, a command of form and subject, from playful and funny to thoughtful and serious, a sharp and subtle take on the world, and a vigorous attention to language. He says that the verse novel was a new challenge, ‘I wanted to push my boundaries. I’d got to the stage where I had a spine of poetry collections from KS1 to KS4. I feel that I’d said all I’d needed to say with the single poem.’ There were difficulties to overcome, though. ‘I have ADHD. I don’t sit writing for hours at a time. I have written about kids like Nate for a long time, but giving him more space meant I was spinning more plates to keep control of the narrative.’ Matt is thankful for the support of his editor, Charlotte Hacking, particularly as he realises he is sometimes a difficult man to work with: ‘I’m quite childish and I’d be sulky about stuff at times.’ It was Charlotte who introduced him to the illustrator Joe Todd-Stanton, whose illustrations Matt describes as ‘just beautiful’ and which contribute so much to both the Nate books. When Matt talks subsequently about the verse novels it is often as a joint author with Charlotte, we rather than I; and it was appropriate that The Final Year was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award, which uniquely recognises an editor’s role in a book.
We talk about Nate’s voice, the voice of both the books. Matt says, ‘It’s not really my voice. The book is set where I used to teach for eleven 
years. Nate’s voice is a bit of my voice as a kid, the voices that I heard as a teacher in that community, and a bit of stuff I made up. Hopefully there’s an authenticity there because that’s what young people that I taught sounded like.’ We move from there to regional patterns of speech, to dialect. Matt says, ‘One of the greatest things that poetry offers us is the chance to capture patterns of speech like this. The musicality of regional accents and dialects is a beautiful thing. Nate’s voice is an interesting one and he’s proud of it.’ Matt returns to the theme later but before that we talk about how Nate has grown between the two verse novels.
Nate is still the eldest of three boys and living with single parent Gemma, with the support of her best friend Auntie San. His sworn enemy Turner is still giving him grief. But little brother Dylan isn’t poorly anymore and, being at a different school, Nate moves away from his brothers who, for a while, make a team without him. He has new things on his mind, including the return of his dad, whom he barely remembers. Matt says, ‘We are perhaps even more inside Nate’s head. He is beginning to understand a bit more about the world swirling around him and into which he’s been catapulted. And, in that sense, it’s darker. I wanted to explore Nate’s mum and Auntie San a bit more and to introduce a new female friend, Muna, to Nate’s circle of mates. I think Nate begins to understand that a lot of power comes from the female characters in his life.’
We talk a little about Gemma, Nate’s mum, and Nate’s family. Matt says Gemma was quite a divisive character among readers of the first book, perhaps because she has three children from different absent fathers and leaves Nate to take a lot of responsibility for looking after his brothers. I noticed that one review of The Final Year describes Nate’s family life as chaotic. I wondered whether Matt agreed. He thinks hard about the answer. ‘I think Nate’s life is difficult as all lives are difficult. We really worked hard to treat that family with respect. I write about lives that I’ve seen. It is chaotic but there’s a lot of love. Human beings doing the best that they can. This is real life, we are all victims of life and all lives are important and Nate’s experiences of life matter.’ Over the course of the two books, Nate discovers that he wants to talk about his life through his own poetry and this is what Matt says is his mantra when he talks to children and young people, ‘wherever you live and whatever happens to you, you matter.’ In the novel, Nate begins to understand, too, that some of his strength and his need to express himself through poetry comes from his mum.
Clippa 2024 taken on the 12th July 2024 at the National theatre
There is an intensity and passion in what Matt says about his ambitions for his future work. He says that The First Year is perhaps the last we will hear of Nate, but he hopes there will be more verse novels, He wants to challenge both himself and perceptions of what poetry can do. We talk about Alan Garner and David Almond, writers that Matt admires for their ability to bring place, working class community and language together in work that transcends conventional notions of prose and poetry. Talking about Garner’s Stone Book Quartet, he says, ‘The words are on fire. It’s an incendiary for the brain. I’d like to be able to do that for my readers.’ And it seems to me that this is not just a challenge for himself as a writer. We talk, too, about his continuing work in schools, ‘for me as important as the books.’
Matt sees the way that poetry is taught in schools and tied to the exam system as disempowering for both poetry and the next generation. He wants to bring poetry back to communities that he feels have been disenfranchised. ‘Poetry has often been talked about in an elite way. Poetry is the distillation of this and that…I tell the kids if you like music, you will like poetry.” Matt feels that poetry should be a way for everyone to articulate who they are and where they come from, which is there in their own patterns of speech: ‘People’s cultural heritage matters, their accent and their dialect matters.’ It’s a conviction that drives his performance of his work (which you can catch on the CLPE website); that resonates throughout the verse novels and that will surely shape the work that is to come.
Clive Barnes was Principal Children’s Librarian, Southampton City and is now a researcher and writer on children’s books.
The First Year (978-1915659606) and The Final Year (978-1915659040) by Matt Goodfellow are published by Otter-Barry Books and illustrated by Joe Todd-Stanton, £9.99 and £8.99 pbk respectively.
