Large Fears

Myles Johnson, author of the self-published children's book, Large Fears - a book for queer black boys and anyone else who's ever been scared - talks to Catriona Troth about phobias, dreams and intersectionality

Hi, Myles. Could you start by telling our readers about Large Fears?

Large Fears is a children's book I wrote centered around Jeremiah Nebula, the black boy that loves pink. It began as a kind of reconciliation with phobias and traumas I acquired while being a young black queer boy in the world. I wanted to create something that turned the ugly things that I faced as a child into something beautiful and inspiring.

This is a very personal book for you. Tell us something about what it means to you.

To sort of expand on it, it really is me having a conversation with my childhood and with every child that feels ostracized. Since creating this book and coinciding projects, I've felt like the dark things that I have gone through in my childhood and early adulthood have been for a purpose now that I am able to see how many people resonate with the story.

You also run workshops for children based around the book. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

The Large Fears Workshop is a workshop we conceptualized around helping children, and adults, conquer and discuss their fears. We used art projects and literature to help kids describe their fears, used concepts of community to help discuss ways to conquer their fears and ultimately reach their dreams. The idea is to help kids know through honesty, art, community, and belief there is not a fear large enough to stop them from their dream.

Reading from Large Fears at a workshop
©Devin Johnson / http://www.overdosedondope.com/photography/

The book's hero, Jeremiah Nebula, is described as a 'queer black boy.' Can you steer me, as a cis/het woman, through the rights and wrongs of the use of the word 'queer'?

Queer is a reclaimed word by the LGBTQ community that essentially ecompasses sexualities and gender expressions that deviate from the normative cishet expectation. The reason I used the term for Jeremiah Nebula is because I wanted to avoid sexualizing a child. Whereas "gay" and "homosexual" bring up ideas of romance and sex, queer is describing gender expression.

How did your partnership with the illustrator, Kendrick Daye, come about? At what stage did he come into the project? Is he involved in the workshops too?

Yes, Kendrick Daye isn't your regular illustrator that draws for the book and disappears. He's a true partner in this whole experience. He was there from the birth of the project until this very day, helping me grow the book, the products, and the workshop. I could never imagine being on this journey without him. Besides everything else, Kendrick is my best friend. He's my big brother. In a lot of way, he's the love of my life. He talks me off ledges and affirms my identity. He's a huge reason this book exists because his friendship helped me realize there was love and acceptance outside your family in the outside world.

It's a brave choice to self-publish any book - more so, I think, for a children's author. How much was it a positive choice for you, and how much a response to frustration with the trade publishing world?

It didn't feel very brave. I never saw a book like what I was writing on shelves. Beyond just the fact that he is black and queer, but the fact that text is lengthier for a children's book and the art is a kind of a homage to street culture and pop art. It was a risky creation in so many ways, but every time I got scared, I reminded myself that I created something about conquering your large fears, so succumbing to my large fears in any stage of this book would make me feel like an imposter. Now, that the book has genuine fans, those people make it much easier to be brave and keep pushing even through the difficult elements of getting this book out there. The fact that even one child has read this book has made anything I could complain about, worth it.

You crowd-funded the project through Kickstarter. That was clearly a successful move. What do you think were the keys to that success?

The key to success with getting money for any creative project, I believe, is creating something people want to see. It just so happened that what I desperately wanted to create was something that people wanted to see and were willing to skip a coffee break for. I know how hard people work for their money, so for someone to give it to me and my dream is the most humbling experience of my life, honestly. And I think everything I am doing when it comes to this book and beyond is so that person that gave me five dollars feels like it was money well spent, or better yet, money well invested.

Apart from the workshops, which we've already discussed, how have you approached marketing the book since it was published? What have been the positives and negatives of going it alone, with no publisher to either back or constrain you?

We've luckily had diverse press coverage, so that is definitely an element of marketing. From Saint Heron and Afropunk to NPR and NBC to BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, this book resonates with a lot of corners of culture which I think gives this book a quality of importance and "coolness" that you can't storyboard or predict, the public does that.

Aside from that, we've made sure the Large Fears world and Jeremiah Nebula are tangible on social media. We wanted it to feel less like just a product, and more of a world and your ticket to this world was a story. We created shirts that read "Black Boys Love Pink" accompanied with a stylized photoshoot that is an extension of the Large Fears brand, but it has had the ability to have a life of its own as a movement and a more adult "sub-brand", if you will. Also, we created short holiday-themed stories and memes with Jeremiah Nebula's mom entitled, "Mama Nebula Says". 

We made these things as a thank you to the people who support us, love Large Fears, and want to engage with Jeremiah Nebula. We also created these things as a marketing technique to make it so the Large Fears world feels like it living, evolving, and ready to be engaged with. 

The biggest obstacle about not having a publisher is being everything at once. We're not just the creators, we're the salespeople, the PR, the marketing department, the social media strategist, and accountants.

You have a separate Twitter feed for Jeremiah Nebula (@largefears). Is that aimed specifically at your young audience? Do they interact with you on there?

It is aimed at the younger audience, as well as people that prefer to just interact with the Large Fears and Jeremiah Nebula, and not necessarily myself and Kendrick. And yes, we get the cutest mentions and pictures from the young ones and adults!

This is a book for children, but it is hard not to see it in a larger context. Marlon James's recent Man Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, attacks the intolerance and hypocrisy of Jamaican society towards gay men. And there are grave concerns regarding the safety of gay men in many African countries. Do you think there are particular challenges to being both gay and black, even in outwardly more tolerant societies?

The intersection of being queer and black is a difficult one. You're carrying two oppressions and that is difficult. And yes, economically, politically, and socially, I can be oppressed by not only the cishet community, but the white community. That is a lot to put up with, but amazingly, I've been carrying the oppression for so long that I've come numb to how heavy it is, so even when asked about it like now, it's hard for me to articulate my strife because I've become so accustomed to ignoring my pain. But yes, even in progressive cultures, this intersection oppresses me.

What is your greatest hope for the book and for the audience it addresses?

My greatest hope for the audience it addresses is for a true liberation of possibility and wonder to happen inside of them. My greatest hope for this book is that it surpasses any hope that my tiny brain could ever conjure up.

Finally, I believe the book is not currently available in Europe. Any plans to launch it internationally?

We're working with a fantastic literary agent, so hopefully upon landing a publishing deal, we'll be have to offer this book internationally.

Thank you, Myles! We look forward to that. In the meantime, for those readers in the US, here's where to buy the book and those cool t-shirts:  http://largefears.com/store/

A Century and a Half of Wonderland

One hundred and fifty years after the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - perhaps the first great classic of children's literature - Catriona Troth examines its history, its mythology and its legacy.

We moved around a lot when I was a child. As a result, we had few relics of parents’ childhoods. One exception was my mother’s copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, bound in navy-blue linen with gold lettering, and including the original Tenniel illustrations.

I loved that book. I loved the way it played with words, like a cat playing with a ball of wool. I loved its surrealism, quite free of the moralising nastiness of other Victorian favourites such as (gawd’elpus) Strewlpeter. And I loved the way that the text danced around the illustrations, weaving the two together in a way that modern authors and illustrators like Cressida Cowell and Nick Sharratt have taken to a whole new level, but which must have been revolutionary in the 1860s.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (the real name of Lewis Carroll) was an unlikely candidate to become one of the lions of children’s literature. A mathematics don at Oxford university, he was ordained as a deacon (a sort of probationary priest) in 1861, though he never became a vicar. He wrote a treatise on geometry which has Euclid arguing humorously with is modern rivals. He was also an ‘early adopter’ of the new technology of photography.

I fancy I can detect some of Carroll’s fascination for geometry in his second book, Alice Through the Looking Glass. I wonder if he had read of the discovery, in 1858, of the Möbius strip, when he imagined those paths that always twist round and bring you back where you started.



The story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland supposedly began one drowsy afternoon in Oxford in 1862, when Carroll and another Oxford don took three little girls, Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell, daughters of the University Vice-Chancellor, on a boating trip down the Thames. To while away the time, Carroll wove a story in which Alice, then 10 years old, was the heroine.

Alice was enchanted and asked him to write the story down. He did so, calling it Alice’s Adventures Underground and illustrating it with his own cartoons. When it came to publication, though, friends including the art critic John Ruskin persuaded him to find a professional illustrator. The man Carroll chose was John Tenniel, newly appointed as chief political cartoonist in Punch magazine.

Unsurprisingly for a book of such towering importance, a good deal of mythology clings to it. Many places claim a connection, including the seaside resort of Llandudno, where the Liddells took a holiday home, Pen Morfa. The small town, sheltered by the Great Orme, would certainly have been a tranquil place for the author to work on his creation. However, there is little hard evidence that Carroll joined the Liddells there, though photographer John Lawson-Reay believes he has identified Carroll in a photograph taken at Pen Morfa.

Simon Schama has included some of Carroll’s many photographs of the Liddell girls in his current exhibition of British portraiture (The Face of Britain) at the National Portrait Gallery. They include a previously unseen image of the 18 year old Alice that Schama describes as ‘excruciatingly awkward’. Whether it is awkward because she hates having her photo taken or because of her feelings for the photographer, it is impossible to know. It is true that Carroll’s relationship with the Liddell girls can seem a little queasy through modern eyes, but as Schama tells the Guardian, “We would do very badly to say these [photographs] are purely innocent and ... as badly to say these are exhibit one in the paedophilia case against Lewis Carroll.”

Regardless of the book’s origins, Carroll’s lunatic creations have wormed their way into the hearts and minds of children and adults for a century and a half. In part this is because it was one of the first children’s books intended to be read purely for fun and not instruction. A good deal of credit for Alice’s longevity, however, must go to her original illustrator, John Tenniel.

Many others have tried their hand at drawing Wonderland. Arthur Rackham produced a set of typically ethereal images in 1907. Ralph Steadman, better known for his collaboration with Pink Floyd on The Wall, captured much of the strangeness of Carroll’s imagination in his 1973 edition of Through the Looking Glass. Even Marvel Comics attempted their own versions – including a children’s strip cartoon in 1978, illustrated by Frank Bole, and a 1977 limited edition, drawn by Frank Brunner, with a Playboy-style nude Alice!

Yet it is Tenniel’s images that live on. People who have never read a word of the original can nevertheless recognise the grin of the Cheshire Cat or the 10/6 price tag on the Mad Hatter’s topper (even if they have no idea that 10/6 means ten shillings and six pence – about 52 and a half pence in post-decimalisation coins).

The subversive, surreal nature of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also makes it the perfect jumping off point for cartoonists and satirists. The Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street, London, is currently hosting Alice in Cartoonland, an exhibition of cartoons inspired by Wonderland. From shortly after publication to the present day, artists have used Carroll’s mad ideas and Tenniel’s iconic images to score political points, or just to make us laugh.

Alice in Cartoonland at the Cartoon Museum

Tenniel himself turned his own drawings into political cartoons in Punch – such as his ‘Alice in Blunderland’ cartoon, showing the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle deriding the newly erected Temple Bar memorial on Fleet Street.

E.H. Shepard, illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh and Wind in the Willows, turned to Alice for inspiration, with his Punch cartoon of Winston Churchill as the Duchess.

Victor Weisz (‘Vicky’) transformed British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan into Alice, his elongated neck a metaphor for the rising cost of living.

John Minnion portrayed Ronald Reagan as the Mock Turtle, Gorbachov as the Gryphon and Margaret Thatcher as Alice in a ‘dance of the superpowers.’

Fluck and Law, creators of Spitting Image, turned to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party to satirise the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981.

Guinness produced a whole string of advertisements inspired by Alice, with images by John Gilroy – such as the Queen of Hearts shrieking ‘Off with her head’ and the caption ‘Guinness keeps its head.’

Charles Schulz drew Sally reading a copy of Alice to Snoopy, who gradually disappears, like the Cheshire Cat, until only his grin remains, at which point he reappears, looking shattered, and begs her to read something different.

Adaptations of Alice for stage and screen abound – including the Disney animation of 1951, the Jonathan Miller’s BBC version from 1966, with a cast including John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave and Alan Bennett (described in the Radio Times as ‘unsuitable for young children’), the 1988 Czech film Něco z Alenky, (‘Something from Alice’), which mixes animation with live action, Tim Burton’s technicolour fantasy of 2010, and most recently, Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet, jointly commissioned by the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada.

But such is the strangeness of Carroll’s creation that no visualisation will ever quite match the one in the mind of a child reading it for the first – or the tenth – time.

Alice in Cartoonland is on display at the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street, London until 1st November 2015. The exhibition is curated by Brian Sibley, President of the Lewis Carroll society.

Lewis Carroll’s photographs of the Liddell girls are in the 'Face of Love' section of Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London from 16th September 2015 until 4th January 2016.

Fancy Taking Part in a World Record Attempt?

Even if you don’t have young children to read to, you’ll probably have heard of Julia Donaldson, former Children’s Laureate and much-beloved author of The Gruffalo.

Her latest book has inspired a World Record attempt and is raising money for Save the Children in the process.

The Paper Dolls, written by Donaldson and illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, is the story a little girl and her five paper dolls who go on an adventure through the house and out into the garden. Together they escape the clutches of a toy dinosaur and the snapping jaws of an oven-glove crocodile, only to face a very real pair of scissors.

Pan Macmillan are attempting to beat the current world record of 28,580 paper dolls, measuring 2.683 km, made by Tiffanie Tallman and the charity Fostering Hope in Phoenix, Arizona, on 28th October 2012.

By 31st August this year, they want to create a chain 3km long.

And for every doll in the chain, 10p will be donated to Save the Children.

To ensure all the dolls in the chain fit together, Rebecca Cobb and Pan Macmillan have created two templates: one for younger children with the dolls drawn on, that just needs to be cut out and coloured in, and one for older children with a single outline that can be copied across a folded sheet.

Local bookshops and libraries are organising Paper Doll events all over Britain this summer. You can also take part at the Latitude Festival (19th -21st July) and the Edinburgh International Book Festival (10th – 26th August).

If you’d like to join in, you can find an event near you. Or you can download one of the templates and post or email the dolls back to Pan Macmillan.

 Or if your local library or bookshop is not already taking part, why not persuade them to take up the challenge as part of their Summer Reading activities?