Meet the Catchpoles
Literary agents and authors, James and Lucy are best known by their collective name “The Catchpoles”. Here they talk to Pen&inc. about their new book, You’re so Amazing!, and explain why inclusive doesn’t have to mean inspirational.
JAMES and Lucy Catchpole are passionate about how disability is portrayed in popular culture, and have built up a healthy social media following through their eloquent blogs and thoughts on the subject. These include a post hailing a one-star Amazon review of James’ first book What Happened to You?, appeals to put an end to damaging tropes, tips for illustrators drawing disabled characters, and a list of 20 great books by disabled authors (https://
bit.ly/3H6RdrF). All this is interspersed with their own personal experiences. Both James and Lucy are disabled (“The Catchpoles” brand includes the tag line, “More children than working legs”), and their online presence provides the perfect intersection between their work in publishing and their thoughts on disability.
The Catchpole Agency represents some of the brightest talent in children’s and young people’s publishing (including SF Said, featured later in the pages of this issue of Pen&inc.).
The agency was started by James’ mother, and James got involved from an early age, saying: “I had the good
4 PEN&INC.
fortune to inherit an agency. My mother founded us back in 1995 and I used to read the submissions for her throughout my teenage years. I didn’t realise it was good fortune at the time – I had other avenues I wanted to explore – but by my late twenties I could see what a wonderful job it was and started working full-time. I took on the agency around 10 years ago, knowing that Lucy would be on board – she actually has a degree in English, whereas mine was in music.” James says his focus is on working with authors on “narrative structure and helping to shape their stories and develop their ideas”. Lucy’s focus is on the public face of the agency, and she has helped create and develop The Catchpoles’ unique brand and message. Because of their online presence and focus on disability, Lucy says: “Sometimes people approach us thinking we are specifically an inclusive literary agency, though that’s not our starting point. We are a mainstream children’s literary agency. We have books about monsters and bananas and unicorns.
“Having said that, you can’t separate out the fact that we are disabled and that we
are interested in marginalised voices, and in stories that haven’t been heard before.”
And James’ own books, What Happened to You? and You’re so Amazing! (co-written with Lucy) fall into that category of stories that haven’t been heard before. They both tell James’ story from his own perspective. And they both focus on the way people responded to him as a disabled child. James says: “When the chance presented itself to tell a story about disability from the inside, I wanted to write about how people respond to disabled people, and how that feels. In many ways it’s the most important story because it’s the day-to-day, hour- by-hour reality for anyone who looks intriguingly different.
“Even as an adult, every time I go out of the house there is something of a public performance about it – people will stare. Strangers sometimes come up to me in the street apropos of nothing to ask how I lost my leg. Imagine that with disabled children in the playground among their peers, and how intense that can be.”
Spring-Summer 2023
All illustrations by Karen George
http://karengeorge.net
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
