How did you come to write a poetry book?
Zoe Grant
One morning I found my brother’s old Batman costume. I put it on, went to wake my Mum and told her I would like to write a poem inspired by the costume. Ever since we started writing poems last year, I gave my Mum a lot of inspiration. She helped me turn these ideas into words and then we worked together writing the poems. Some of our poems rhyme and they are usually very funny. I did all the illustrations by myself.
Sherry Grant
The Bat Girl book is a collection of 21 poems written over 6 months. Zoe and I started writing poems for fun in June 2020, experimenting with different poetry forms; we didn’t expect for these poems to form the basis of a book. It was not until discovering an upcoming authors’ book fair in November 2020 that we decided to put everything together, the poems and Zoe’s accompanying drawings, to make it into a book.
Less than a week before the event we started printing and binding the books at home. We just wanted to put it out there and see what would happen. Later in June 2021 we held a book launch for Bat Girl at the Epsom Library to celebrate our first writing anniversary.
It can be ordered directly from www.batgirlbook.com
Did you take the book to school?
Zoe Grant
I took my Bat Girl book to school, showed it to my teacher and he introduced it to the whole class.
Sherry Grant
Last year we produced a homemade edition but this year we took our book to a local book printer to be printed on the best paper. We are very happy to see the final result and feel proud of ourselves to have come this far with the joint project.
Zoe illustrated for the whole book including the cover art. The Bat Girl book contains many poems about our family and aspects of Zoe’s life. It is really about Zoe’s experiences. This is our unique way of preserving our family memories, by writing them down as poems. We hope to inspire more families around the world to join our little “global movement” in writing collaboratively as a family pastime.
Sherry Grant
When we wrote this next poem we were learning about a five line form called Gogyoshi where all the lines begin with capital letters.
Batgirl
Pointy ears up
Bat Girl imagining flight
In penguin wings
Rescuing victims
From Corona virus
