Cassandra Darke

Fascinating book talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with Posy Simmonds talking about the process of writing her latest book “Cassandra Darke”. 

Posy gave an illustrated talk on how the book evolved from early sketches saying how you started to give your characters clothes in in this case how Cassandra’s trappers hat isolates her from weather and the world. She told us how she draws the floorplans of characters and sketches their interiors so that she can see the characters in them.  Her sketches were art works in their own right regardless of how they are then used in the book.

She talked about taking long bus rides to find locations for the book and how she uses those rides to look at people who she then sketches when she gets home.  She said she was taught to draw by looking. She told us how she works in crayon and paint and writes the story in long hand. Her husband then sets that text in speech bubbles.

The event was cleverly chaired by Liz Forgan, the editor of the Guardian’s Women’s Page in the late 1970s, when Posy was working there. They reminisced about their work there and they described Posy’s cartoons from that time as “Hogarth without cruelty”.