A little bit of Woodbine magic, with Johnny Magory

When an author of children's stories gets to read them directly to children, a kind of magic happens, especially if the reading is in a bookshop, writes Brian Byrne.

That was the case this morning in Woodbine Books when Emma-Jane Leeson had the opportunity to read her stories about Johnny Magory to a perfect audience of small people.

And their parents too, of course. But they weren't that important. What was important were the journeys that Emma-Jane took her listeners on around Ballinafad Lake near her home outside Clane, across the bog that extends from the other side of the lake, and along the canal that's a boundary for part of the area.

On those journeys, they, and Johnny Magory in the pages of the books and their imagination, met with lots of the creatures who share those spaces. Badgers, frogs, birds, hedgehogs, red squirrels — "the reds are the important ones because they're the Irish ones" — and many more. All in the company of Johnny's faithful dog Ruairi.

Johnny also brought them to the piles of turf drying on the bog after the local people had spend many hours 'footing' the fuel out of its natural space. And he showed them the fish in the canal — "that's a pike, he'd got a big mouth with lots of teeth, and he's ugly" — and the other underwater creatures of the streams in the area.

Poor Johnny was sometimes in trouble with his mother after going on these adventures, at least once late back home for lunch and sent to his room for being 'bold'. Which to everybody in Woodbine Books did seem to be very unfair.

Emma-Jane read three books; at the end of each there was a little test to make sure that her audience had been paying attention. As if they wouldn't ...

It was two-way magic, of course. There were the questions from the listeners afterwards, and the discussions between them and Emma-Jane which were surprisingly adult. Well, surprising to adults, maybe … children always know what they want to ask and say.

For Emma Jane, such bookshop events have been rare enough, because though she started writing and publishing her books a few years ago, she has also had a full-time job. But she's leaving that at the end of March to 'do more of this'.

So there's going to be a lot more magic happening around, you can bet ...

Woodbine Books owner Dawn Behan with Emma-Jane.

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