She's hooked on storytelling
By Adam Dudding - Sunday Star Times 03/10/2010

Joy Cowley at Fish Bay, her Marlborough retreat. Below: pic by Adam Dudding, SST

She may just be New Zealand's biggest-selling author ever, but Joy Cowley has lost count. With her memoir out this month, she shows Adam Dudding around the remote hideaway where she dreamt up the little stories that made a big noise.

Joy Cowley has sold 40 million books. Or it may be 80 million. No one seems sure, least of all her. Though one time she counted up the cheques and noticed she'd made a million dollars in a year.

If you've sat on a school mat any time in the past 40 years or so, you will have read a number of her perfectly crafted (albeit very short) books. You'll certainly remember Mrs Wishy Washy. You may even recall the less famous Baby Gets Dressed, Where Is My Spider?, or even Splosh.

She's written around 650 "early readers", and each has sold by the truckload – and not just at home. Since the early 1980s, New Zealand reading programmes have colonised the English-speaking world, and from the start, Cowley was a key author; it's been estimated that 70% of American schools use her books.

There have also been 50 or so non-school picture books (including the classic anti-war tale The Duck in the Gun), 80 short "chapter books" for developing readers, a dozen children's novels, seven adult novels, some short-story collections and several successful film and TV adaptations of her work.

"I'm like the fly," says Cowley, "that can lay 250,000 eggs in a day."

And now, at 74, Joy Cowley has written a memoir called Navigation. It's not a definitive autobiography – she finds those accounts, where every little detail of a life is put in, "terribly claustrophobic" – but after years of nagging from her publisher, she has taken a concise, anecdote-rich dance through what seems to be a life well lived.

There is dark material: a childhood blighted by poverty and her mother's worsening schizophrenia. A straying first husband and her suicide attempt that followed separation from him and, temporarily, her four children. The death from cancer of husband number two.

But the lows are touched on lightly. Far more attention is given to the highs (learning to fly a Tiger Moth), the quirky moments (throwing up in Roald Dahl's swimming pool after too many martinis), the mechanics of a writing career – and the transcendent. In a chapter titled The Religious Gene, Cowley describes a lifelong spiritual quest that took in dabbles with world faiths, some dream analysis and quantum physics, a near-death experience and, ultimately, a sort of homecoming to Catholicism.

Read the full, wonderful piece by Adam Dudding at SST.

Navigation, by Joy Cowley, is published by Penguin on October 11, $45. Cowley will hold events in Auckland and Wellington; details at www.penguin.co.nz. This month Cowley has also published a book of advice for would-be children's writers, Writing from the Heart (Storylines, $25), proceeds of which will go to the Storylines Children's Literature Charitable Trust.