From 'Diadromes' magazine, 2003, Children's Literature Study Club
Sophia Madouvalou was interviewed by the authoress Angeliki Varela

Q. You've been writing children's books for twenty years now. What's the secret of your art?
Α. My secret is as secret as a game can be secret: a game with the real, the imaginary and the absurd. I leave myself in the hands of my imagination and allow it to set the rules of the game, or else I set the rules myself and invite my imagination to the game.

Q. Is writing a book a game for you?
Α. I started off writing for the fun of it, but I don't know if I'll ever become what they call a 'serious' writer. I like to play with the unbridled imagination of reality. Imaginativeness is a real dimension of life, a dimension that opens new perspectives on the world of reality. Imagination never ceases to create the fairy tale of life. And I wouldn't miss that game for anything in the world.

Q. Why did you choose the field of children's literature for your creative writing?
Α. The latest revolutionary theory that arose from the discovery of 'The Chicken that Became an Egg' has thoroughly confused me. I can't make out who chose whom. However, theories concerning genes lead me to the arbitrary conclusion that both the 'grandmother on the outside, grand-daughter on the inside' gene and the 'hahano' gene are responsible both for my scientific and artistic choices.(σ.σ. Και εμένα 'με μπέρδεψε για τα καλά' η απαντησή σου. Ειλικρινά, δεν βγαίνει νόημα με ξερή μετάφραση. Δεν μπορείς να κάνεις μια πιο καταληπτή διατύπωση; Aς ήταν έτσι στο περιοδικό. Δεν θα πάρει κανείς χαμπάρι.)

Q. Apart from their inventiveness, imagination and humour, what stands out in your books is how daring they are pedagogically. They display a deep understanding of children's ways of thinking, learning and feeling.
Α. It is natural for what I have inside me to come out in my work. Before I discovered I had a bent for creative writing and wanted to devote myself to that and nothing else, I spent many years as a student.

Q. Did you go through teacher training?
Α: I studied in associated fields. I first specialized in developmental psychology but then I was drawn to educational technology. These postgraduate studies were concerned with the use of technology in education, educational techniques, lesson planning and the writing, production and assessment of educational materials. I specialized in TV and multimedia and as I wanted to be able to do my work more effectively I also studied directing.

Q. Does all this knowledge you have acquired affect your writing?
Α. Of course. Sometimes I feel that all this knowledge has a limiting effect upon my work and at others that it frees my hands. My imagination hates being bound by any rules yet my academic background demands that order be imposed. And the result is what you might call organized unruliness.

Q. Do your books invite children to be creatively unruly?
Α. That's the game I play. I break one rule so as to make another. I make up my lies just as I make up the truth. And as I do all these things I dream of the unruly fairy tale.

Q. When will you write them?
Α. When I dare to break all the stereotypes inside me. I do not believe in stereotypes. Besides, that's apparent from my books.

Q. If you dared, what would you write?
Α: To give you an example, while children are growing up they pass through a stage where they use dirty words. In psychology, this is called the scatological period. I would like to write a book in which the first syllable of every word would be 'skato' (shit). It would be a shitwriter writing a shitbook for shitty kids. I toyed with this idea with my son and the laughs we had over it were literally cathartic.

Q. Will you find anyone willing to publish it?
Α: I can't find an illustrator and that's why I haven't yet written it. (laughter)

Q. When one reads your books one gets the feeling that the illustrations don't merely play a decorative role but are an integral part of the text.
Α. That's chiefly true of those books that are aimed at children who are just starting school. I write my books in two languages. One is the picture of the story and the other is the story of the picture. For these two languages to become one demands very good planning of the book and close collaboration between author and illustrator.

Q. In other words, you direct the book as it were and the illustrator executes your vision?
Α. I've had the good fortune to work along with inventive and talented illustrators who have added their own dimension to what I have imagined. What gives a picture wings are its composition and its colours. And that is a specialist's job.

Q. Has your work in educational television affected your work as an author?
Α. For at least a decade, I used to imagine the development of the story in pictures and then I would put it into writing. In recent years I've written without thinking about the picture at all.... I'm telling lies again. (laughter)

Q. What is it that prompts you to write a book? How does the idea come to you?
Α. My ideas come from the unbridled imagination of reality. A tiny little fragment of reality becomes a source of creative inspiration for me. I clothe it in dreams and imagination and make another reality.

Q. How do you choose your subjects?
Α. It's not I who chooses them but children's insatiable curiosity about the world around them that does the choosing. All my books aimed at children of pre-school or early primary school age were prompted something a child said to me or that I overheard. In the initial years my son and his friends were my source of inspiration. Games, jokes and free-ranging imagination were a way of life in our house, and they still are. Every day, we would make up the fairy tale of life out of the reality of our everyday existence. A xylophone and the roof my son drew on top of the five lines of a musical stave when I told him they were the house that all the notes lived in provided the inspiration for the book “ Doremefasollasi”, while “The Magic Mirror” began with a half-eaten biscuit that became whole again as if by magic when the shiny top of the tin it had been in happened to be put down beside it.

Q. You must have a good relationship with your son.
Α. A wonderful one – and explosive, too. He doesn't play with me any more. Now he's grown up he's claiming copyright on the ideas that he's given me! (laughter)

Q. Can Sophia Madouvalou be found in her books?
Α. Some small elements of my personality have gone into certain characters. Through them I made my revolution, reached compromises or defended my ideas. “It's Raining Chair-Legs” and 'The Chicken who Became an Egg”, which is coming out now, while not being autobiographical, have a lot of Sophia in them. But the humour and absurdity that typify my books are an integral part of me. I am a born giggler. (laughter) I use humour and absurdity to defend my optimistic attitude to life.

Q. Which qualities do you chiefly value?
Α. remaining childlike, optimism, joyfulness, loving peace, respect for others, love of life, the ability to dream and creativity.

Q. How do you feel when you are writing a book?
Α. I feel as if it is the adult who is writing, but taking dictation from the child that is within me. Every time I lock the unbridled imagination of reality inside a book, I dream that imagination is going to school and that children are learning to feel imaginatively, to think imaginatively and to face life imaginatively. This gives me immense pleasure and makes me want to sit down in my study and play the imagination game again.

Q. It seems you have a very good relationship with imagination.
Α: Only “very good”? I owe my very existence to it. Imagination is my inseparable friend, and I have even given her a name: Liberty. Without her, the course of my life would be monotonous, mediocre and sterile.

Q. Do you communicate well with children?
Α. Children have offered me unique moments but in my turn I have offered them unique experiences. Joy cannot be hidden. I communicate very well with them. I visit schools as often as I can both to give them renewed energy and to receive it. Throughout Greece I have met wonderful teachers who manage to get children's literature into their schools, even if through the back door, as well as others who regard it as the Cinderella of Greek education. There is no greater joy for an author than to receive warm letters from children and teachers of schools visited some three or four years earlier. They even send me pies and cakes. Words can't describe the feelings that gives me.

Q. Do you engage in any other activities with children outside school?
Α: Till now I've engaged in two activities in towns and libraries throughout Greece. One is called “ Earth's Duvet” and the other “A Ball of Fairy Tales”. The former is an ecological protest and the latter an activity to encourage children to read more. The duvet is growing longer and wider all the time and is waiting for all the children of Greece to paint it. I think it's very important for children from various parts of the country to actively participate within a framework that raises their social awareness, both on a thinking and imaginative level, of a subject that concerns them all, such as the environment.

Q. The other activity?
Α: The aim is to produce a huge ball, like a ball of wool, containing all the fairy tales Greek children have read. They write down on a strip of cloth the name of the book, their own name and the place they come from. These strips are tied together and wound into a ball. In both of these activities the children are spurred to join in by the feeling that they are themselves participating in a fairy tale.

Q. To return to your books. A surrealistic vein is apparent in them.
Α. I wouldn't use the word “surrealistic” since it is a term with a specific meaning in the science of semantics. My imagination is under the complete control of my logical thinking. I simply want to exercise its rights to the very limits of logic. And these limits elude us. Only when logic is in rebellion and by the use of the absurd and the fantastic can we expand reality and reach its ultimate frontier: hyper-reality.

Q. Regarding what you have just said, how does one of your books work in the hands of a child?
Α. I can only speak about how I intend it should work. I take a child on a first excursion into life, hand in hand with imagination. My intention is that through the joy of this excursion I will be able to broaden their sense of reality and endow them with an awareness of the value of the fantastic. In this I have humour and absurdity as my helpmates. A book is like a flint-stone. What interests me is the sparks it can produce.

Q. Do you want to pass on the germ of imagination?
Α. Τhe germ exists. Imagination is something children have and it is through their imagination that they develop. It is through the world of imagination that they enter the world of reality, but on the way it somehow gets lost. I want imagination to go to school and shout out to the teachers and children, “Forget what you've learned and start to dream!” What I want is to cultivate imagination in young people. Stories and fairy tales are nothing more than the fertile soil that children need to develop their abilities and survive within reality.

Q. It seems you don't look on imagination and reality as two conflicting states of being.
Α: Anything but. The secret is for contradiction to become composition. My aim is to amalgamate the the two states in one hyper-reality which is nothing other than the unbridled imagination of reality that can make our lives happy and creative. When I set the imagination free, It does not mean that I close my eyes to reality. It means that I set myself free from the past and the present and can see beyond the bends in life's road. Man's liberation presupposes the liberation of the mind. And this is more necessary today than ever before. Today, imagination is a survival technique.

Q. How would you describe your books? Are they educational, are they works of literature, or are they the latter but with educational aims?
Α: I've never been interested in anatomy, nor am I a researcher intent on putting things in categories. I am a creator, and what interests me is the joy of creativity and communicating with my young readers. In many of my books I weave learning into the plot and make it invisible, thus putting literature at the service of education. My imagination serves the specific goal of each book but it chiefly serves my goal as a writer of children's literature. Setting free the mind and demolishing stereotypes are the revolutionary acts I ask of children.

Q. What's your opinion regarding children's literature in our country?
Α: In Greece, literature for children has come of age. It now has real standing. It has become more realistic and sincere and voices the needs and interests of young people. It has escaped from the motherland-religion-family mould, which may have served a purpose in its time, and fallen in line with prevailing international trends. Children's literature reflects the changes and challenges of modern life. Greek authors have never lacked imagination, thus freeing themes, language and form to give us today's modern books that satisfy the needs and enquiring spirits of both children and young adults.

Q. That is, you believe neither age nor subject matter prevent the play of imagination from being effective.
Α: Exactly! And that's something that the capable teachers who use children's literature as an inseparable part of a child's experience in the school environment are well aware of. For them, it is a means of fostering creative expression, mental and emotional development, as well as a way of encouraging reading and a sensitivity to language.

Q. What do you consider to be a good author?
Α: One that you recognize when you read his or her book without having seen the author's name. Today, everything has been said. You can't protest that someone has stolen your idea. What matters is the shape one gives to those ideas, the way something is described that defines the author's style.

Q. Here in Greece, do we have writers of children's books with a style all their own?
Α: Quite a few, and good ones, too: Boulotis, Maro Louizou, Trivizas, Eleni Mara, I.D. Ioannides, Varela, Manos, Loti. There are at least as many others among the older ones and a few of the more recent writers, too, such as Athina Papadaki. I just can't bring their names to mind. I know I'm being unfair to some who are both very good writers and friends as well. But that's memory for you. Who wrote “The Red of the East”, for example?

Q. When will you write a book aimed at grown-ups?
Α: Every time I'm asked that question it makes my gorge rise. It's as if I'm being asked when I'm going to write something serious, something that reflects my intellectual level. (laughter)
As I've been growing up I've felt the need to communicate with people of my own age and so in the last ten years I've written six short books for juvenile adults, books dedicated to youthful hearts and traditional values. Through the medium of an abstract poetic language and a latent humour the expressions of love, the highest of all traditional values, unfold.
I usually write these books when I have reached an emotional rock bottom and and am trying to exorcise my demons. (laughter)

Q. Let me put my question another way. Haven't you felt the need to write a short story or a novel?
Α: Had it been the product of a real interior need it would have already happened. Actually I do write such things from time to time but I leave them till they begin to go off. (laughter) The truth is that for ten years now I've been writing a novel or rather I've been involved in a dialogue with an idea. To be continued on the back cover. (laughter)

Q. How do you spend a typical day?
Α: Do you want an idealized version or the truth? (laughter) There's no typical day. There are, however, things that happen every day. My life is an 'organized unruliness'. In the morning, after a wonderful bath, I drink my coffee, read poetry eating bread and honey and dream. After that I spend at least five hours on the computer writing scripts for educational television. In the middle of the day I relax watching a brilliant dubbed Brazilian soap. In the afternoon I sit in my office thinking and writing for another five hours with breaks for therapeutic phone chats with my friends. In the evening I either listen to Maria Kallas while I read philosophy or practise Latin American dances.

Q. What's your favourite food?
Α: Real fried potatoes, with lemon and lots of pepper. But another meal that makes me dribble is a mountain of macaroni with steaming sauce or some mouth-watering meatballs or some scrumptious stuffed vine leaves or … the list is endless. (laughter) Only a gourmet authoress could think up a gastronomic word one hundred and sixteen letters long like the one I put in my book about a stuffed animal called Kolotoumba who was always falling on her bottom.

Q. Tell me something you would never, ever do.
Α: I would never treat anyone unjustly, even if it cost me. I have a highly-developed sense of fairness.

Q. What proposition would you like to end this interview with ?
Α: Oh, that's it and we're finished? Aren't you going to ask me about men? (laughter)

Q. Have you got time? (laughter)
Α: I've got time for one proposition and one wish. In my screenplay 'Life' I give imagination the leading role. The proposition is that only imagination can humanize a society that is in decline. I'll finish with a wish: It's the title of my latest book for juvenile adults: “Here's Hoping the New Year Sees You Fall in Love”!