Who is Michael Rosen?
Raconteur
Orator
Storyteller
Educator
National treasure
On Tuesday, September 26 at the community centre, Martin Bruce engaged Michael in conversation as part of the Rye Arts Festival, beginning the event with a rather intriguing poem which had been born as Martin was making notes on Michael’s book, Getting Better:
What is recovery?
Stretching like a cat
A Before and After
Looking down into the Book of Glum.
Lonely corridor syndrome is new:
I’m frail
When you come home you are a year on
But I am more than my frailty
These were simply Martin’s jottings as he looked at the first chapter but then he realised that they could be read as verse. Rosen thought it was a wonderful poem and so too did the audience.
David Angell, trustee of the Rye Arts Festival commented: “Tonight was for me an incredibly special one. Helping organise a talk by Michael Rosen at Rye Arts Festival, was always going to be a special thing. Interviewed by one of the finest I’ve seen – Martin Bruce – it was a talk that oscillated between belly-laughter and deep, heart-wrenching empathy in reflection, in sadness, and back to happiness again.
“One thing I shall always remember is that I now get to pass down my first edition, now signed, of Going on a Bear Hunt to my daughter Molly, who already knows much of it by heart.
“We share words because sometimes they are all we have to give: but what a gift they are.”
Gaynor Cooper travelled from Oxford to enjoy the event, commenting after the conversation: “Michael is living testament to the power of positive thinking. A man who has had so much sadness permeate his life, his wry (Rye?) humour seems to sustain him – and us. He recalled an early memory discovering a dead, unspoken of, sibling, his own ‘lost years’ his undiagnosed thyroid problem, the dreadful loss of his own child and then his most recent experience of ‘Nearly Dying’.
“I know Michael from his time as Children’s Laureate, so this interview showed a very different side of him, but he is still the man with such a way with words that he moves you along the full spectrum of emotions, whether laughter or tears.”
It was a wonderful evening and we could have had another hour of his thoughts and words.
Image Credits: Kt bruce .