The Avonlea Badlands in Saskatchewan. A little dog in a cosmonaut costume. A NASA geologist. Those are some elements of Laïka, où es-tu?, Martine Noël-Maw’s seventh title in the Éditions de la nouvelle plume eSKapade young adult collection.
- Laïka, où es-tu?
- Martine Noël-Maw
- Les Éditions de la nouvelle plume
- $14.95 pb, 120 pages
- ISBN: 978-2-924237-97-7
The eSKapade collection is a project aimed at encouraging reading among young people. “It’s hard to get young people to read,” says Noël-Maw. “It is even more difficult to get young people to read in French in a minority setting.”
She continues, “There really wasn’t anything in the books that people could relate to, the names of people, the names of places. I made it a point of honour that all the stories would take place in Saskatchewan. It’s Regina, it’s Moose Jaw, it’s Spiritwood. I absolutely wanted young people to be able to recognize and identify with one another.”
It’s been a busy spring for the former executive director of the Regina publisher Éditions de la nouvelle plume. The Ghosts of Spiritwood, the English translation she did of her young adult novel, Les fantômes de Spiritwood, has just been published by Regina-based Shadowpaw Press.
Laïka, où es-tu? is the result of six creative workshops with 22 fifth-grade students from École Monseigneur de Laval in Regina. “I come with absolutely nothing,” Noël-Maw says, “except that the story is going to take place somewhere in Saskatchewan. The young people propose characters, with the settings that come with that.” It went pretty quickly to the Badlands and the Prairie parkland.
“The students could write, they could draw, they could play,” she says. “One of the drawings was of Laïka dressed as a cosmonaut. Laïka was this little Soviet dog who had been sent into space. The Soviets hadn’t told people that she would either die of heat, or heart failure, or starvation. When it was known that she was dead, that they knew from the start that she was going to die, the animal rights movements began.”
Monsieur Chèvre was a human victim of a similar kind of practice. A charlatan experimented on him by grafting goat’s legs on him. “There are beautiful drawings of this fellow,” says Noël-Maw. These drawings were given to the graphic designer for the book cover.
Local settings and student-created characters make for stories that resonate with young readers.
“When you write, you want the reader to believe it. In La Malchance d’Austin, the first novel I did for this collection, a little guy from Moose Jaw has a bionic leg transplant. All sorts of things happen to him while he’s at the Shriners Hospital in Montreal. I gave talks about this novel all over the country. And there was always someone in every class who asked me if they could meet Austin. Because for them, it’s true.”
