With a whopping 110 published books under her belt, children’s author and poet Celia Warren could certainly be described as a prolific writer.
Her poems and stories have appeared in hundreds of anthologies; she is a frequent contributor to BBC television and radio;and is published by many educational publishers, including Schofield & Sims, Collins, Scholastic, Pearsons group in the UK, USA and Hong Kong and Oxford University Press.
She is also a regular writer in schools, using skills from her previous teaching career and recently enthralled young visitors to Plymouth’s City Museum and Art Gallery with her poems and stories about mini beasts, including Alex the Ant and Don’t Poke a Worm till it Wriggles.
She said: “I’ve always enjoyed words - playing with words, learning and speaking foreign languages, solving word puzzles and cryptic crosswords - and it’s wonderful to be making a living from writing them.”
“Poetry is a fantastic medium for children. It’s very confidence building when they’re learning to read and write, with its rhyme, alliteration and repetition and children enjoy the freedom to play with the sounds of words.”
Celia grew up in Brigg, North Lincolnshire, a market town near Scunthorpe.
She studied to be a teacher at Loughborough University in the 1970s, where she met her Devonian husband. They lived in the Midlands for 30 years and Celia taugh
t infants’ classes. After a break to raise her family she returned to teaching as a part-time peripatetic teacher of children with specific learning difficulties, across the whole primary age range.
Her work with literacy skills and phonics led to her being published in educational reading programmes and then being commissioned to write a book of phonic poems by educational publisher Ginn.
This educational publishing work has now built up to a sizeable amount, with Celia regularly contributing storybooks in mainstream educational series, such as the Oxford Reading Tree and Literacy Web and the Collins Big Cat series.
She has recently extended her best-selling comprehension series for Schofield and Sims, who also published her poetry anthology and teaching guide, A Time to Speak and A Time to Listen. Compiling her earlier RSPB Anthology of Wildlife Poetry was a labour of love. She chose over 130 poems, some specially commissioned, plus some of her own.
She said: “It’s great now I’m established in the educational publishing industry, because editors move around a lot and tend to take their writers with them. I’m always happy to make any changes required and editors have said I’m easy to work with. You can be precious about your work and it sits in a drawer and nobody reads it. I’d rather be adaptable and be published.”
Celia has been writing increasingly intensively over the past 20 years. It was an occupation that she could continue to pursue while she and her husband juggled careers and acted as full-time carers for their respective parents. Her husband’s parents’ health needs brought them back to his Devon roots and, soon after, Celia’s elderly parents followed them to Strete.
Celia had always written as a child and was delighted when she was able to combine her love of poetry with educational texts, helping to instill that interest in others.
She said: “My mother loved poetry and used to read AA Milne and Walter de la Mare to me when I was little. Later, Charles Causley soon became a favourite but my all time favourite individual poem is The Donkey by GK Chesterton.
“I wrote lots of poems and stories as a child. As soon as I found out that what could be read could also be written I started writing.”
The first poem she took pride in was called A Paddy Bird from Ceylon, inspired at the age of nine by the text on her brother’s model plane kit.
She added: “It’s still in a notebook somewhere. My older sister quoted from it in her university thesis on language, which made me think it must be good!”
“That poem spurred me on to write more and, from the age of 12, I started sending stories off to publishers. I collected lots of rejection slips but one editor wrote back to encourage me to keep practising. I then had book reviews and poems published in the teenage magazine Elizabethan and used to write a magazine for my family called Morning Magazine. I wrote it every week for about seven years, emulating publications I loved, including their fashion and music pages and competitions. My parents, brother and sister were very encouraging and used to enter my competitions to win my drawings!”
Celia has always enjoyed drawing and painting and focused on modern languages and art at school. She got top grade at Art A-level and studied Art and Education at university. She still uses her artistic skills to illustrate her website and poems with quirky line drawings.
Her first properly published poems were “grown up poetry” – in magazines such as Outposts, Orbis, Envoi and The Countryman. One year she received a special commendation in the BBC’s annual Wildlife Poet of the Year competition. Since then, one of her children’s poems was cast in iron as part of Hampshire’s Stockbridge poetry trail.
And, as you can imagine, Celia has written lots of poetry inspired by the sea since moving to Devon. She is planning to put together a collection of sea poems in the near future.
She said: “Devon is so beautiful. Spike Milligan’s Eccles said, “Everybody’s got to be somewhere” and this is a great somewhere to be.”
“I love Dartmouth. I love the coastal path and the sea – it’s different every time you look at it. And it’s such a fantastic place in which to write poems and stories.”
For more information visit www.celiawarren.wordpress.com
First published By The Dart March 2015 Issue
