Wider by the Sea, a children’s book from debut writer, Serena Molloy, features a young girl, Ró, her only friend, The Bean, and a dolphin called Sunny. An only child, life is tough for Ró. She’s struggling at school. When she tried to read, the words jump around on the page, and the other pupils look down on her. To make matters worse, her parents are fighting. She’s only happy when she’s out in nature, watching the dolphin as he dances in the waves.
Things improve when a new teacher arrives at the school. She praises Ró for her artistic talent and makes her feel special. But when the The Bean finds a new gang of friends, and the dolphin disappears, she reaches a new low.
This glorious, redemptive book dealing with friendship, bravery, and learning to believe in yourself is written in an easy to read verse format, with plenty of illustrations. It’s brilliant for readers of nine and upwards who, like Ró, struggle with their reading. And that’s because it’s something the writer knows all about.
“I struggled with reading at school,” she says. “It was hard, when other children didn’t. I felt different.”
Serena was the second of five children, so it was a busy household, but her elder sister was great with her, when it came to homework.
“She helped with that, and with my spellings,” says Serena. “So I think I got away with things for a while.”
Life was tough for her until fifth class, when she had a really great teacher.
“She started to focus on the things that I was good at; I liked writing imaginative stories, (even if my spelling and handwriting were terrible,) and I won two art prizes.”
The teacher called in Serena’s parents and told them of their daughter’s difficulties.
“Mum was very supportive. She put words on the wall, and by repetition, and going over and over my reading, I started to focus.”
She also started going to the library.
“The Wexford library was in a prefab, with rain coming in. There were puddles in the children’s section that you had to jump over. But I discovered amazing writers there like Judy Blume.”
Her confidence restored, Serena sailed through secondary school, and gained enough points to study English at University College Dublin.
“I still had to work extra hard, but I knew I wasn’t stupid.”
From there, she became an English teacher, and taught throughout the UK for ten years. And although she adored seeing her talented pupils excel in English, and had fun seeing what their imaginations would come up with, it was the ones who struggled that interested her the most.
“I tried to become like the teacher who had helped me,” she says. “Seeing less able children make progress is a wonderful feeling.
“I remember asking one class of children who had a lot of challenges to write pieces about what would make an ideal world. I got in touch with a journalist I knew who wrote for the local newspaper, and he published their pieces in a two page feature for World Books Day. These were children who really struggled with literacy, and they got so much pleasure from seeing their work in print.”
During all those years, Serena had been writing.
“I wrote mainly poems,” she says. “It started when I took a creative writing group in UCD. And I started writing bits and pieces of things throughout the time I was working.”
When, moving to Galway, after the birth of her fourth child, Serena gave up teaching, she decided that now was the time to focus properly on writing.
“I did some creative writing courses, including a very good one in the Irish Writer’s Centre. I wrote three YA books, and one for younger children.”
She had some success; an agent took her on – though when nothing happened they decided to part company – and two of the books were longlisted for Awards – one for a Chicken House competition, and the other for Mslexia Children’s Novel Competition.
The idea for Wider Than the Sea came from a conversation with one of Serena’s friends.
“I happened to mention that I had dyslexia, and she said, ‘why don’t you write about that?’ I decided to write in verse because you can play with the words more than you can in standard prose.
“It makes it easy to read. Some children are not able to books with lots of words, but they still want a good story.”
In a clever move, Serena brings in the Amazon device, Alexa. When Ró is unsure exactly what a word means – she asks Alexa for a definition. And, for example, asking what shyness means, because she is called shy at school, she got the reply, ‘Not at ease in the company of others, easily frightened or timid.’
“When I was a child, there was no Alexa, no audio, and no other means to access a book other than reading. If children, today, can’t read, they have a lot more options. They can do their homework on a computer.”
Dyslexia is still an issue that is on Serena’s mind, because her youngest son, who is now ten, was diagnosed with the disability.
“It’s handled so much better now,” she says. “One of his teachers spotted it when he was small; he was assessed, and gets extra help, and it’s not as much of a stigma. Loads of children are getting supports for various reasons; because English is not their first language, or they have ADHD, or a hearing impairment.”
Even so, there are moment that her heart bleeds for him.
“He came out of school crying one day, and I said, ‘what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Mum, one of the girls said my handwriting is like a baby’s. He was devastated.”
She made Ró an only child because, being one of five, Serena had always wondered what that would feel like.
“When I was young, I would sometimes wish that I was an only child. But then, when I heard my sister talking to her friend, who was one, I remember seeing the other side. I thought, it’s probably not that great to have everything focused on you and nobody to share things with.”
As for the warring parents, and The Bean’s defection – she added those elements to give Ró that extra challenge.
“I see character as a blister. The most interesting time is when that blister is about to burst. Ró is just about managing at school, but then other things go wrong in her life, and it’s like an extra ball – she can’t do it anymore.”
As for that dolphin – it’s no surprise to learn that Sunny is modelled on the famous Dingle dolphin, Fungi.
“Fungie disappeared when I was writing the book, in lockdown,” says Serena.
Serena has almost finished the second of the books for her two-book deal, and hopes, in the future, to continue as a writer.
“With my children around, I gave up on the idea of a study,” she says. “I have my computer in the corner of the kitchen, and just write when I can. I have no set rules, no daily wordcount targets, or specific times, I just wait until an idea is in my head, and sit down and write it. Then I think about the next bit. It’s a bit haphazard.”
It was strange, Serena says, getting her agent and publisher during lockdown.
“I never met anybody,” she says. “All the negotiating was done from here. It wasn’t until the moment that I saw the actual book that it felt real.”
Wider than the Sea. By Serena Molloy, with illustrations by George Ermos. Hodder: €9.99. Kindle: €4.85.
Published in the Irish Examiner on 8th April.
© Sue J Leonard. 2023.
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