Brave in Every Which Way
by Maddy Mara
ill. Lauren Degraaf
Published by Affirm Press
Author Interview with Maddy Mara
Congratulations on the publication of your important, affirming picture book, Brave in Every Which Way, Maddy Mara, and thank you for speaking with Joy in Books at PaperbarkWords.
Guest Author Post by Maddy Mara about Brave Every Which Way
Maddy Mara on what bravery really looks like, and their new picture book Brave in Every Which Way
Maddy Mara is the pen name we (Hilary Rogers and Meredith Badger) use to write kids’ books together. While we mostly write junior fiction series (we’ve spoken to Paperbark Words about our Itty Bitty series, and we also write bestselling series such as Dragon Girls, Forever Fairies, and Dragon Games) every so often we get the picture-book tingles and cannot resist creating one. As anyone who works in children’s publishing knows, these are heartsoaringly gorgeous projects that mostly don’t sell enough copies to cover the huge expenses for publishers – let alone the extraordinary time and skill required from the illustrator. For this reason, we only ever pitch picture books that we’re confident are irresistibly strong and catchy, and meaningful. To us, a book about what it really means for kids to be brave definitely fits that bill.
As two very small women – one of whom fears rodents and the other who still gets jittery on planes – we may not initially appear very brave. But we’ve both taken difficult, bold steps in our lives that have nothing to do with ‘jumping from planes or surfing fast trains’. We have pushed ourselves out of our comfort zone again and again, leaving good jobs to try new things, stepping away from bad decisions and learning from them to make better ones next time, in our quest to set up Maddy Mara as a thriving business that now comfortably supports two families.
It’s these moments in life – trying something new that you might turn out to be terrible at, or admitting you were wrong about something, or doing things in a way that works for you and possibly nobody else – that we think are the true acts of bravery. For Brave in Every Which Way we wanted to capture these ideas in an approachable and hopefully not didactic way. So we started thinking about the day-to-day things that kids do which we believe are genuinely brave: trying a new food, saying sorry if you mess up or hurt someone’s feelings, admitting you’re wrong, helping others or asking for help for yourself.
These sound like simple, sensible parts of being a human but they rarely come naturally, and we think framing them as brave is an important way to rebrand these ‘soft’ skills that are actually anything but.
Writing about these skills also sounds simple and sensible – but when you’ve got a strict rhyme pattern to adhere to, and strong ideas about vocab and sentence constructions, it turns out to be quite challenging! We mostly write quickly (Maddy Mara does around 10 books per year), but we still had countless versions of verses with three fabulous lines … and one dud. It’s times like that when we’re endlessly grateful to have two brains and four eyeballs between us.
Once we were happy with the text, we sent it directly to Tash Besliev at Affirm Press (now Simon & Schuster) who, to our delight, immediately agreed it was worth pursuing. It was Tash who found Lauren Degraaf, a Canadian illustrator, and saw the potential in partnering our text with her artwork. Lauren’s tender, warm depictions of the situations we explored in rhyme have just melted our hearts.
When we wrote the poem that became this book we had no idea that the world in 2025 would look like it currently does. We had no idea that we’d see rulers incapable of admitting error or showing compassion for those who are different or marginalised. Sadly our ode to everyday acts of bravery increasingly feels quite radical. We will continue to slide into a world that accepts lying, and believes differences need stamping out, if we don’t teach the kids in our lives – the leaders of the future – these life lessons.
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