For the love of story-telling

MUTHONI GARLAND, 50, is an acclaimed author, having penned several adult and children’s books. She is one of the co-founders and editors of Storymoja, a Kenyan publishing house. She spoke to NJOKI CHEGE

When my husband moved to Cairo in 1999 after landing a contract in Egypt, I joined him there. It was then that I embarked on an online fiction writing course, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I had never thought that I would ever change my career; I thought that marketing was ‘it’ until I stumbled upon writing and decided writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Muthoni Garland

I studied for a degree in Business Administration with a major in Marketing from the Ohio University, USA. I worked for a market research company in the US before coming back home, where I worked for two major advertising companies before I quit to start my own marketing research company.

But with my new found love in writing, I sold off my marketing research company when I came back to Kenya. I had a keen interest in short stories and I was highly commended in the 2002 BBC Commonwealth Radio Competition. This gave me loads of confidence to send out more of my work to get published.

Getting published internationally was a thrilling experience, especially since I had never imagined myself as a writer. So far, I have published two adult books locally — Tracking the Scent of my Mother and Halfway Between Nairobi and Dundori — and several children’s books and online short stories.

In 2007, we came together as a group of writers published by Kwani? to form Storymoja, with the aim of creating a publishing house for high quality and world standard local stories.

We mainly focused on shorter books so as not to intimidate those who claimed not to have the time to read. We could also sell them at a reasonably low cost. Unfortunately, the post-election violence hampered our sales and we were almost forced to close down the company in 2008.

We persevered but decided to also publish children’s books as a way of growing our customer base. We mainly profile children between ages six to 14, although we are developing books and projects that involve younger ones.

I personally love stories, having grown up in a story telling culture. I grew up listening to stories and later retold them to my children.

Children everywhere have a hunger for stories. It is the gatekeepers (parents, teachers) who put up the barriers when it comes to inculcating a reading culture in them.

Well-read children

Kenya’s growing middle class can afford to buy books on a regular basis, but many parents don’t buy them for their children. Few parents tell their children stories or read with them on a regular basis. Those who do tend to favour western stories.

Books literally carry you to a world that forces you to reflect.

Research evidence shows high correlation between a person’s success in life and one’s exposure to reading widely at an early age. Well-read children tend to be more confident and write better in all subjects.

Books unlock a person’s ability to generate compelling ideas and solutions. They allow an individual to stretch that creative muscle and come up with solutions for their society.

Unfortunately, there is a degeneration of reading for pleasure, which is worrying. It is strange how many adults think and say ‘reading is good’, or ‘reading is important for our society’ and yet they themselves have not read for pleasure since they finished high school. It is a shame that even many of those who can afford it do not have a library at home.

To counter this, we have embarked on a reading revolution to promote a positive reading culture in East Africa. Our main emphasis is to tackle adult apathy towards reading for pleasure. Forced reading and only reading for exams is an old approach that should die like the dinosaurs.

The challenge now is to encourage children to fall in love with reading and to be curious about the world. In many forums, we talk to teachers and parents to inspire children to develop curiosity about the world accessible through books.

Storymoja reaches out to children in creative ways and through interesting initiatives such as storytelling, talks by young local authors, writing activities, performances, spelling bee and other competitions in schools.

Our books are about excitement, pleasure and encouraging curiosity. In fact, we’d like to see a more curiosity-driven approach to education. I get very disturbed if a child doesn’t ask ‘why?’… the most important question in the world.

On a visit to the UK in 2008, I heard about the Hay Festival. Curious, I went to the place where it was being held, Hay-on-Wye, a nondescript place in the middle of nowhere, a village smaller than Dundori centre.

I wondered what could possibly be happening in such a place so far from any significant town, but I was surprised to see stars like Hugh Masekela, internationally acclaimed writers like Arundhati Roy, Nobel Prize winners like the late Wangari Mathaai, and even former presidents including Bill Clinton.

There were about 150,000 people who visited in a span of ten days. I was impressed by the idea and thought I could introduce the same in Kenya.

I invited the Hay Festival organisers to visit us and review a similar but smaller function we were hosting dubbed the Storymoja Nyama Choma Fiesta. People would come eat nyama choma, listen to stories and buy a book. They were impressed and gave us advice and logistical support to launch our first Storymoja Hay Festival in Kenya in 2009.

Talking about books

Our festival’s main aim is to excite people about books. We bring established and aspiring authors together to have conversations on topics inspired by books. In the last three years, we have brought to Nairobi many international stars like Ben Okri, Vikram Seth, Petina Gappah and local East African stars like Binyavanga Wainaina, Rasna Warah, Monica arac de Nyeko, Maddo, Eric Wainaina, Doreen Baingana, Tony Mochama and many others.

In a village-like scenario with different ‘huts’, ordinary people mix up with ‘stars’ to chat about poetry, writing, and non-fiction issues raised in books, like human rights, IT businesses and environmental degradation.

Currently, we are still in our early learning stages and we are encouraged by the positive response we are getting.

We did not realise that Kenya has so many poets. We will now have a poetry festival within the Hay Festival to tap into the people’s love for poetry.