Five questions for Philip Reeve & Sarah McIntyre, author and illustrator

Philip, you have been based in Dartmoor for a long time. How has it influenced your writing?

I wanted to live on Dartmoor ever since I came here with my parents as a child, and became even more determined as a teenager—my favourite illustrators, Brian Froud and Alan Lee, live here, and the moors, with their granite tors and twisty trees and rows of standing stones, are the perfect landscape for fantasy. It feels like Middle-earth.

I moved here from Brighton in 1998. I never managed to get much writing done before that, so I’m sure the peace and quiet of Dartmoor helped. I go for a lot of walks on the hills and in the woods, and think about stories while I’m walking. The moor hasn’t appeared explicitly in any of my books, but lots of place names have crept in—Natsworthy, for instance, or Aish. The map of Devon is covered with good names waiting to be attached to characters. Here Lies Arthur is partly set along the northern edge of the moor, while the island of Wildsea in my new Utterly Dark novels is definitely a bit Dartmoor-ish.

When I started working with Sarah, I think we had a bit of a town-mouse/country-mouse thing going on. She would come to visit me and my family here, and I would go to stay with her and her husband in the big city. Some of our stories sprang out of that contrast, like the Roly Poly Flying Pony books, whose hero, Kevin, moves between the Wild Wet Hills of the Outermost West and a tower block a lot like the one where Sarah used to live. She and [her husband] Stuart live just down the road now, so we’ll have to see if that changes!

Sarah, you relocated to Devon this year. What prompted the move and have you found a
literary community there? 

I’ve loved travelling to Devon for a decade, ever since my husband Stuart and I met Philip at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We struck up a friendship based around drawing trees and landscape, and after months of comparing drawings, Philip and his wife Sarah invited us out for a sketching holiday on beautiful Dartmoor. Stuart and I did alright in lockdown, but we were working back-to-back at our desks. And the police were quite militant about not letting us sit down in our local park to make a drawing or drink a flask of coffee. As soon as we were allowed to travel, we bolted out to the countryside. I’ve already taken a printmaking workshop run by an artist (Viv Styles) who lives down the road, and gone outdoor sketching with the local Society of Artists.

You are both patrons of The Bookery in Crediton. How did you become involved there? 

Philip has been a patron for a while, and I joined the team quite recently. It’s impossible to miss, because it’s one of the best bookshops in the country. Last year I helped Dee Lalljee and Claire Lewis on the team with a rebranding of the shop and Cathy Holden organised amazing school visits for both of us and drummed up local business sponsorship so every child could own their own book. It hosted Philip for a well-attended community event featuring his Utterly Dark book, and I helped it run a competition for three winners to have a one-on-one professional critique and creativity session with me.

The first book in your new series, Adventuremice, is out next spring. What is it about, and what was the inspiration?  

I planned to take an art sabbatical in Nepal, which Covid cancelled, so I had a rare free book slot to fill. Instead of taking on a book, I painted pictures of the toy ships I had collected over the years from Deptford market, and included little sailor mice in them. I didn’t plan to mix the mice with publishing, but so many people kept asking if there would be books that I decided to ask Philip if he would come on board and turn them into a series with our editor, Liz Cross. We have aimed the series at slightly younger children than our other books.

What else can we expect from the Adventuremice? And what else are you working on? 

While the first book is mostly above water, in the second book, the mice rescue a lost mermouse baby and go looking for its underwater kingdom. What else? I’m answering most of these questions because Philip is busy today shooting a small-budget Arthurian film on Dartmoor. Earlier I helped paint some knights’ shields and made a little sculpture for props. It’s medieval costumes, mossy woods and fog machines at the moment—all rather exciting.

David Fickling Books will pubish Adventuremice: Otter Chaos by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre on 2nd March 2023, followed by Adventuremice: Mermouse Mystery on 1st June 2023.