An aunt-niece team read out their first children’s book to the patrons of the Melfort Library.
Angela Joelle grew up around Melfort and Star City, but now works as a visual artist in Vancouver. Her niece Brynna Beaupre is from Regina. They both visited the Melfort Library Aug. 11 to read their first children’s book, One Bad Fry Spoils the Bunch.
The creation of the book started two years ago, when Beaupre, who was then nine years old, brought Joelle drawings of food with faces on them.
“We go to a cabin every year and that’s where I would bring the drawings and that’s how it all started,” Beaupre said.
Joelle said she thought the drawings were awesome.
“From there, Brynna and I started making scenarios for the characters. We started talking about, ‘what if Miss Cupcake is a hairdresser,’ and ‘what if Pops [a soda drink] is a fireman?’ and then we started creating the characters’ personalities and from there, we started building the story,” she said. “It all came from Brynna’s beautiful little drawings.
From there, the world of Fun Food Land developed. The land is filled with living food products that are upstanding and moral citizens, designed to teach their readers lessons.
In One Bad Fry Spoils the Bunch, an evil French fry manipulates the local chef to start making meals out of some of the other residents. Miss Cupcake and Pops must work together and use their problem-solving skills to come with a solution.
Why did Beaupre decide to use food as her characters in the original drawings?
“I thought it was just really cute, adding faces on to them.”
“Food is fun. Food is universal. Everyone can relate to food,” Joelle said. “We could have used ponies, we could have used bears, we could have used anything, really. It’s more about getting a message out to the public. For this book, we’re trying to get the idea of problem-solving out.”
It took about a year to write and draw the story and another year to deal with the publisher. There were some challenges along the way.
“It was sometimes hard for the scenes, to think in your mind on how that scene would look and stuff, but then we started sketching out things and it started becoming easier with that,” Beaupre said.
Joelle said that as a visual artist, she would sometimes get tired of doing creative stuff at the end of the day. So, if she had a problem visualizing how a scene, house or character would look like, she’d Skype Beaupre and ask her to sketch it.
“She would sometimes start the initial scene, house or character and then send it to me, then I could, from there, take it further. So she was awesome to leverage off of.”
The book is the first of a Fun Food Friends Adventure Series.
Joelle said this is the first time Beaupre and her have done a public reading together – and doing it in Melfort was special.
“This is the first library I ever went to.” she said. “It’s pretty cool to be able to give back to the community where I was raised and it’s really cool to be able to do this with [Brynna]. Without Brynna, I wouldn’t have this cool book, so she’s really instrumental to all of this.”
Beaupre was also pumped for the reading.
“[I’m] really excited because this is also my first reading with Fun Food Friends and it’s exciting reading in front of people.”
