The Big Day introduced by Rachel Plummer
Rachel Plummer discusses her picturebook The Big Day, a celebration of love and inclusivity.
When my daughter was small, I was always telling her stories. Stories are a great way to learn about the world, and I’m a professional storyteller, so it seemed only natural to include them in my parenting toolkit. Don’t want to share that toy with your friends? Well, I happen to know a story about sharing. Nervous about a first day in a new place? I bet we can make up a tale about what a great adventure it’ll be. Feeling travel sick? I’ve got a good distraction!
It really worked, too. Stories helped my daughter to contextualise things she was seeing and experiencing, and to consider other people’s feelings and points of view in ways that had seemed too abstract before. Soon it felt like I was making up stories nonstop! Anything that was going on around us would find its way into one of them sooner or later.
Usually they featured a kid who was around my daughter’s age doing something pretty mundane (riding the bus, going to Nana and Grandad’s house, getting ready for bed time) with some fantastical, magical element added in. What if the bus driver was a unicorn? What if Nana and Grandad lived on another planet? What if the bed could fly?
As a queer parent, I had noticed that a lot of books aimed at young children didn’t have any families like ours in them. I wanted the stories I told to be full of people like us and like our friends and loved ones, so I often included LGBTQ+ characters in our stories – the story wasn’t about queerness, instead queer people just existed within the world of the story. LGBTQ+ families exist, so we should exist in stories, too. It’s that simple!
When it came to writing The Big Day – a picture book about a kid who gets invited to the wedding of two giants – I wanted to write about marriage equality in a way that wouldn’t be boring or meaningless to younger children. I thought about the stories I told my daughter, and I thought: what if you were invited to a wedding but the people getting married were both giants? What would that be like? What guests would come along? What flowers would they decorate with? What sort of food and drink would they have at the reception? How big would the giant cake be?!
I bet being at a giant wedding would be a lot of fun.
In the story, both of the giants are men – but that’s never really the focus or the point. The two grooms are getting married because they love each other, and want to celebrate that love with their community, and that’s all that matters.
Fairytales, however magical, have always reflected the real world that we live in, highlighting different aspects of it to impart important messages and teach us about ourselves and our place in the world. The message of The Big Day, as one of the giants puts it, is that ‘love is just love, whether giant or small.’
My daughter is a very grown up thirteen-year-old now, who happily spends her time making up her own stories, but I dedicated The Big Day to her and her little brother because they taught me the value of a good tale, and made stories an even bigger part of my life than I could have imagined. I hope anyone reading The Big Day enjoys it, too, and has a lot of fun in the magical story world that Forrest and I have created.
The Big Day by Rachel Plummer, illustrated by Forrest Burdett is published by Little Tiger, 978-1838915384, £12.99 hbk.
