It\u2019s the kind of day you wouldn\u2019t believe is winter when Andy Griffiths and I meet \u2013 crisp blue sky, barely a tussle of wind and a temperature warm enough to breathe and think.<\/p>\n
We both arrive 10 minutes early to his childhood home on a steep street in Vermont, a suburb that was very much the fringe of Melbourne when Griffiths grew up, but now is comfortably in the eastern suburbs.<\/p>\n
Built in the 60s, the brown brick house hasn\u2019t changed much. \u201cIt\u2019s really comforting,\u201d says Griffiths.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a really great place to grow up,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause there were kids everywhere.\u201d He points to the houses on the corner, reflecting on his neighbours. \u201cThere was always someone out on the street to play with or talk to, or little kids to tell silly stories to, and there were dogs everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the bottom of the intersecting street is a pine forest that leads to Dandenong Creek. We walk down slowly, stopping to ponder the trees. \u201cIt feels a little bit lighter than it did. Or maybe it\u2019s just me who\u2019s changed, but it did feel a lot darker and more mysterious. It\u2019s like you\u2019re in another little world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trees stand tall, with very few low-lying branches, not at all good for climbing. Every other kind of mischief, however, was within this open circle of trees: dragsters with banana seats, making up outrageous stories, hiding beers for teenage parties, and firecrackers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was one of those childhoods where you\u2019d go out in the morning and didn\u2019t really have to come home until it got dark.\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffiths leads the way to the creek where he and his friends played as children.<\/p>\n
Griffiths\u2019 father was an industrial chemist, with a knack for building things and for gardening. His mother was a midwife who ran the secondhand book stall at the school fete, filling the house with all sorts of books donated from the neighbourhood. Griffiths often had first dibs, and still has some of those books, spanning from fiction to philosophy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re really precious reading experiences, because they\u2019re not necessarily what you would have given to a kid, but they just opened up the world to me. I often muse back on that and think: something was looking after me there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Children\u2019s books did still appeal to him, however, and he loved Enid Blyton from an early age.<\/p>\n
\u201cI loved her because she\u2019d just get the kids away from the parents in the first chapter, plunge them into danger or an adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tattooed punk children\u2019s author is rather dapper in a tweed jacket over a cardigan vest and wearing a trilby hat, but still at home in the forest, leading us the \u201ctraditional way\u201d that the kids would go down to the creek. He compares the creek to Winnie-the-Pooh\u2019s Hundred Acre Wood<\/a>, a place of freedom.<\/p>\n Freedom comes up a lot in conversation \u2013 not necessarily in a large political sense but rather the freedom to imagine, to play and to explore the world without adults present. He didn\u2019t know the years of unobserved childhood wandering around the creek would become the bones of his career, spanning four decades, although his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also includes bottle shop worker, punk vocalist and English teacher.<\/p>\n Parents have a role to play in ensuring a balance in their kids\u2019 lives, a balance between outside play, gaming and reading, Griffiths says.<\/p>\n Griffiths has made an impressive career spanning four decades of writing for six-to-10-year-olds, an age at which he says, \u201cAnything is possible. They\u2019re still in that phase where the world is large. You don\u2019t know what\u2019s quite true or what\u2019s not true,\u201d he says, slowing down for a moment.<\/p>\n Despite reports that children, especially boys, are reading less and struggling more with literacy, Griffiths is mostly optimistic, meeting thousands of kids a year.<\/p>\n \u201cParents do have a role to play in ensuring a balance in their kids\u2019 lives, a balance between outside play, gaming, reading. Because [in] reading, while you\u2019re getting that intense experience, you\u2019re gaining literacy skills, which make such a difference to every aspect of your life, which I think is a pity that that\u2019s being lost through neglect.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the same time, there\u2019s more books for kids than there ever was for more varied readerships. So much more.\u201d<\/p>\n His own childhood took place during the golden age of reading, as Griffiths calls it. \u201cWe weren\u2019t spending all our time reading books, because we had our dragsters and we had the keys to the kingdom.\u201d But he had the best of both worlds: playing for hours, all children together, and also getting lost in books, simply because, \u201cwe had many spare hours growing up that couldn\u2019t be filled with anything else\u201d.<\/p>\n Griffiths\u2019 tattoo of Johnny Knucklehead, one of the characters in his new book You & Me and the Peanut Butter Beast.<\/p>\n We leave the forest by a sharp ascent over muddy grass and rocks, returning to the block around Griffith\u2019s childhood home, heading towards the old milk bar.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to keep writing the type of thing that a particular reader really craves. It\u2019s the most positive way I can think to make a difference. What I\u2019m doing is translating what I loved in my childhood reading, finding that essence and the spirit of it and modernising it and passing it on.\u201d<\/p>\n His newest series, working with Bill Hope, is a change of direction after 30 years of collaboration with Terry Denton on the Treehouse series<\/a>. The series with Denton ended after 13 books<\/a>, published from 2011 to 2023, which sold more than 10m copies and were published in more than 35 languages. The series was a slightly unexpected hit internationally \u2013 Griffiths\u2019 previous series had only received local success.<\/p>\n \u201cI just thought our particular flavour of humour was like Vegemite,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was an outpouring of grief by dedicated readers and their parents [when the Treehouse series ended]. And they were like, you can\u2019t stop. And I was like, well, I have,\u201d he says, \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m going to stop writing.\u201d<\/p>\n Allowing himself to do things that \u2018have no ostensible value or purpose\u2019 is reinvigorating, he says.<\/p>\n He knew where he was going next. Over the years, many children had written to him, asking if they could appear in a book, because obviously that wouldn\u2019t be too much trouble, which led to the idea of the ubiquitous main characters in his latest book, You and Me, illustrated only as a pair of adventure costumes to leave their appearance to the imagination.<\/p>\n You & Me is an adventure series, in which the main characters are called You and Me, which serves to encourage reading aloud.<\/p>\n The second book, You & Me and the Peanut Butter Beast, firmly establishes the characters: Me, who wants to follow the rules, and You, who is more impulsive. Then there is Johnny Knucklehead, a reappearing swindler who started out as just a name in Griffiths\u2019 head until Bill Hope sent over some drawings, the final sketch now tattooed on Griffiths\u2019 palm.<\/p>\n Keeping in touch with a childlike sense of imagination, play and humour is something that Griffiths considers greatly.<\/p>\n \u201cI allow myself to do things that appear to have no ostensible value or purpose,\u201d he says, permitting himself to spend hours in a record shop and rereading childhood favourite books. \u201cYou come away restored and buzzing with the excitement. It adds richness.\u201d<\/p>\n Griffiths says he always knows when he is working too much \u2013 everything is a chore and not much fun. Humour, he says, has great value, not just because it is pleasurable to laugh, but because it can shift frames of thinking.<\/p>\n Griffiths is excited by the prospect of the forthcoming album by the Alice Cooper Group. \u2018It\u2019s really good to allow ourselves to be excited by whatever it is\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cLaughter throws the switch back to openness where you\u2019ve got the potential to make a more creative decision than just grimly doing whatever needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, what excites him \u2013 like he is 13 years old again \u2013 is the fact the Alice Cooper Band is releasing their first album in 50 years. \u201cIt\u2019s really good to allow ourselves to be excited by whatever it is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the kind of day you wouldn\u2019t believe is winter when Andy Griffiths and I meet \u2013 crisp…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-85983","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}