Meet Adele Vincent - author of Butterflies Be Gone!

Tell us about yourself – where did you grow up?

 

I mostly grew up in a country town called Beechworth in Victoria but was born in the UK to Aussie parents and came to Australia at age 4. We also lived for nearly 2 years at Uluru before Yulara was built when I was 5/6 yo. The desert and rock connection was a powerful experience for me and I still feel that Uluru is home country for me.

 

Describe your writing style in one sentence?

 

I love to play with sounds and rhythm in the language to express with feeling as much as with words.

 

Tell us about your book?

 

Butterflies Be Gone came about from a lifetime of living with anxiety and finally feeling like I had found something that could make a real impact on the condition and treat the very root of the problem. I wanted to share the tools of yoga and meditation that I found so helpful with other families and kids with anxiety.

 

The main character is a boy so as to help get past the idea that yoga is for girls. My aim was to create a beautiful storybook that can help anxiety on all levels—mental/mindset, emotional/feelings and physical/structural issues—and also stand alone from the yoga for those uninterested in poses. The meditation at the end is subtly woven into the story and not labelled as meditation or even mindfulness, to make it just part of normal life, which it is or should be. 

 

Who has influenced you the most in your writing?

 

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is an absolute favourite of mine and inspired the transition of the character from his bedroom into an imaginary world. Other inspiration came from the rhyming fun that Julia Donaldson has with words and the imaginary journey and delightful simplicity of Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. As for a real live person I’ve been most directly influenced by, that would have to Andrej from Little Steps whose advice was golden e.g., ‘Keep it simple’ and ‘You’re writing a children’s book, not an encyclopaedia’. 

 

If you could take one book away with you to a desert island which book would it be?


It would be the whopping 2 volume commentary on the Bhagavad Gita written by Paramahansa Yogananda. That would be a lovely peaceful environment to really get stuck into it properly. Normal life makes such study challenging. I would also take as many traditional Chinese medicine texts as I could fit in my magical bottomless bag.

 Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

I would NOT advise aspiring writers to read those particular books unless they’re very dedicated yogis or have a strange bent for oriental medicine, and even then they’d be well advised to contact me for better advice as to where to start. ; ) The advice I do have is to totally ignore all the traditional advice for aspiring writers (e.g., write every day, write, write, write) and instead to meditate every day, morning and night, and in between wherever possible, until life becomes one long continuous meditative state. Then the good stuff happens—time is no longer linear, space doesn’t exist—and inspiration flows easily and smoothly and a good children’s book can be written in a few days (well, it still needs a few edits, but the good guts of it are there on the page).