Interview: Barbara Bleiman
- Little Thoughts Press
- 12 hours ago
- 8 min read
Barbara Bleiman is a London-based ex-English teacher and education consultant at the English and Media Centre (EMC), with a keen interest in poetry. She has written a book about English teaching, What Matters in English Teaching, and has published two novels and two collections of short stories. She is also a children’s poet, with several poems up on the Dirigible Balloon website and one in their anthology Surfing the Sky. She was a featured poet in Northern Gravy (Issue 13), has a poem in Tyger Tyger Issue 9, and in a forthcoming MacMillan anthology of poetry for teens. Her debut collection of children’s poetry Snap! Poems for Children was published in July 2025 (Blue Door Press) and is available on Amazon.
Little Thoughts Press: The wistfulness in "My Grandmother’s Words" is quite touching. If you had a chance to talk with your grandmother today about her “puree of languages,” what would you say to her?
Barbara Bleiman: I’d ask my grandmother all about her past, her childhood and her experiences of growing up in South Africa as the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe, where her parents spoke one language, Yiddish, while the community spoke English and Afrikaans. In typical teenage fashion, all I could think of was my feelings of embarrassment at her oddity when she visited us in England, rather than wanting to find out more about her and her life. Now, through my education work, I’ve become fascinated by children’s complex linguistic heritage and how that enriches and shapes their identity. It makes me much more curious—and celebratory—about my own.
Little Thoughts Press: Have intergenerational relationships been a recurring theme in your writing, or is this the first time you have explored this theme? If the former, how have you touched on these relationships in other pieces of writing?
Barbara Bleiman: I’ve written a novel, Off the Voortrekker Road, about my South African family. It focuses particularly on my father’s childhood and early adulthood under apartheid. My grandmother’s story is told there, in fictional form—a much more sympathetic portrayal of her life than my teenage self ever managed to conjure up, trying to understand the complexities of her world, her family, her financial difficulties and the tensions in her marriage.
In my more recent poems for children, I often find myself writing about parent/child or grandparent/child relationships, inspired by watching and participating in the everyday interactions, arguments and emotionally resonant moments with my own grandsons. Poems in my recent collection, Snap! include several in the voices of children, feeling cross or sad, being silly, interacting with each other, their parents or with Granny and Grandpa. I love the way poetry offers children ways of recognising and thinking about their own feelings and experiences. And I especially love it when my poems allow children to laugh about these things. Several of my poems also aim to provoke laughter about silly grown-ups like me!
Little Thoughts Press: It can be hard for children to imagine a time when their grandparents will no longer be around. What sorts of questions would you recommend that young writers ask their grandparents, while they still can?
Barbara Bleiman: I’d recommend asking questions with a ‘Tell me about…’ opening. Tell me about what it was like when you were a child. Tell me about your parents. Tell me about the games you played. Tell me about a time when you were sad. Tell me about your friends.
I was very lucky that, despite living half way across the world, my grandfather (my mother’s father) wrote long letters to me and my brother, telling us about his life, so we had that opportunity to hear his stories and he opened up a window for us into another time and world. Either in conversation, or in writing, these windows expand one’s own world.
Little Thoughts Press: Our Stirring Words issue is all about odd, interesting, or inspiring words and phrases. What is your favorite word right now? Why do you love it?
Barbara Bleiman: I love ALL words, so, strangely perhaps, having a favorite word doesn’t really feature for me. I’m not a fan of ‘big words’ for their own sake, though I do really love the sound of words, especially in combination with each other. It’s usually the context and the combinations that really float my boat. So, for instance, in Snap! The word ‘no’ always gives me a little thrill when I read it aloud in the poem ‘The Wheels of the Bus Have Fallen Off’ and I see children’s reactions to these lines: ‘Oh no, oh no, oh, no, oh no,/Oh no, now what can we do?’ The exaggerated repetition of that simple word, and the rhythm of the line, works much better for me than having come up with a more elaborate word like ‘disaster’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘calamity’ or ‘cataclysm’. (Having said that, if I found a good excuse to match ‘cataclysm’ with ‘barbarism’ or ‘optimism’ or ‘cannibalism’ in a poem, I’d be pretty pleased with myself!)
Little Thoughts Press: How did you get started writing kid-lit and what do you find most challenging and rewarding about writing for kids?
Barbara Bleiman: I’m always spurred on by having an audience for my writing. Many years ago, I wrote two children’s novels, prompted by my own children’s reading interests. I had an agent who almost got one of them published but not quite! More recently, I found myself making up little rhymes for my grandson but, much to his annoyance, when he said, ‘Again!’ or ‘More!’ I couldn’t remember them well enough to repeat them. So I started writing them down. And then, bit by bit, I found myself getting them accepted onto websites, into magazines or anthologies, and finally into a published collection of my own, Snap!.
The joy of writing for children is getting their honest, unvarnished reactions. My grandsons sometimes give me a thumbs up, laugh uproariously and ask for repeats—but sometimes I get a thumbs down, telling me that a poem was no good. Both reactions are important for a writer. When I’ve performed the poems, or seen photos of children reading the book, I love the reactions. Children are the best audience one could hope for!
Little Thoughts Press: Which kid-lit authors and books were your favorites growing up?
Barbara Bleiman: Strangely, I have very few memories of my early reading of children’s picture books—apart from a terrifying copy of Struwelpeter—poems with moral warnings and ghastly pictures that gave me nightmares. I wonder whether there were fewer picture books around in 1960s childhoods, or families just didn’t buy them for their children? I suppose I must have read some, along with the Janet and John books that taught me how to read.
Later, I loved C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series. I’m not generally a big fan of fantasy, nor was I then, but those children and their adventures felt real to me. I stepped through that wardrobe with them. Likewise with The Borrowers, living under the floorboards. Maybe it was the transformation of life in a boring, ordinary house that felt so special in both of these books.
By the time I was ten or eleven, the local librarian started suggesting adult novels to me, literally taking me through the swing doors from the children’s to the adult library and metaphorically helping me step into new territory. From then on it was Jane Austen, Jean Plaidy and romantic historical fiction. I’d said goodbye to books for children, until I came back to them with my own children and discovered a whole new world of writers.
Little Thoughts Press: And what about today? Any kid-lit writers you love and want to shout out?
Barbara Bleiman: I love what’s going on in poetry and verse novels at the moment. Sarah Crossan is a superb YA verse novelist, as is Tia Fisher. I also highly rate Coral Rumble’s recent book Jakub’s Otter, which is very inventive in the way it includes poetry, written by one of the child characters. Poets like Sarah Ziman, Attie Lime, Joshua Seigal, A.F. Harrold and Carole Bromley are all writing brilliantly for children, and, of course, Michael Rosen.
In fiction, there are some stunning writers. Geraldine McCaughrean is an all-time favourite but there are newer writers too, especially writers of color like Sita Brahmachari (with her new book Phoenix Brothers) and Hiba Noor Khan with her marvellous book Safiyyah’s War, a wonderful story about the Great Mosque of Paris and the role it played in rescuing Jews from the Nazis.
I also love the way some writers are managing to write really high quality, accessible books for struggling readers that are full of interest, complexity and depth. Barrington Stoke is a UK publisher specialising in these. Anthony McGowan’s series of books including Lark and Brock, and Keith Gray’s The Climbers are all absolutely terrific.
Little Thoughts Press: What advice would you give to young writers?
Barbara Bleiman: 1. Read. Every writer draws on their reading. You can barely start writing a line of a poem or a sentence of a story without your own reading influencing it, consciously or subconsciously. The more you read, the more ideas and options are available to you, with chances to borrow, imitate, adapt and try out the things you yourself most like as a reader.
2. Be fearless and take risks. Everything good starts off with an experiment—‘what if I do this?’ Being playful and exploring different options can take you to surprising places. Your brain is a thinking, feeling, flexible thing, filled with half-memories and ideas that surface in ways that aren’t always predictable or planned for, especially with poetry and storytelling! Get going, be open to all those unplanned things and be unafraid to see what happens and where that leads you.
Little Thoughts Press: Is there anything else you wish I had asked? Any upcoming projects, publications, or other news you'd like to share?
Barbara Bleiman: Of course I’d love more children to read the poems in Snap! It’s available in both paperback and hard cover.
I also wonder if your readers might like to see another poem I wrote recently about that same grandmother and my grandfather, exploring their past lives? It shows what a different world they came from and perhaps explains why I found the gulf between their world and mine so huge.
My Grandfather’s General Store
In Parow, Cape Town, 1940s
My grandfather owned a general store,
like no shop you’ve ever seen before.
On an empty street, in a long ago place
filled to the brim, not an inch of spare space
with wood and leather, glue and flax seed
tacks, screws and nails, sacks of chicken feed
paint and paraffin, hinges and locks
hammers and chisels, rubber tubes in a box
bicycle tyres and sheets of clear glass
door knobs and handles in shiny gold brass
broken fig biscuits in a big row of jars
a few wooden toys and small Dinky cars
biltong – dried meat – hanging on hooks
manuals and machine instruction books
bricks and cement out in the yard
pipes for plumbing and a steel fireguard.
My grandfather worked in the store every day
the little bell tinkled and customers came
to buy, to chat, to hear all the news
to scan the goods, to pick and choose.
No plastic bags, no swipe-your-card tills
no delivery vans, no credit card bills.
Just grandpa and grandma and their general store
open at 7, closed at 4
when they’d pull down the blinds
and lock the door.