Writing books where all kinds of kids can see themselves: An interview with Rachael King

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Musician Kiki Van Newtown talks with writer and former musician Rachael King about playing in bands, opportunities for girls in the music scene and her new book, Violet and the Velvets: the Case of the Missing Stuff.

When Rachael King was fifteen years old she played her first gig at the Performance Cafe in Auckland after only six weeks of learning the bass guitar. Her band played with their backs turned, finding themselves too shy to face the audience. But despite the nervous start, this foundational experience set King on a path that would take her across the world, first with music and then with writing, before winding its way into her latest offering, Violet and the Velvets: The Case of the Missing Stuff.

This affirming, joyous, and often hilarious book is a departure from King’s previous dark and uncanny novels, which are full of secrets, the supernatural, and creatures suspended between this realm and another. For longtime fans, Violet and the Velvets might seem like an abrupt change of course, but King says for those who know her this new book is completely on brand. It was a conscious decision that King made to break away from more melancholy themes and do something different, bringing together ideas that had been percolating in her mind for years and weaving her extensive musical background through Violet and the Velvets. And it’s certainly not the first time King has chosen to change things up in a well-considered and clear cut way.

Throughout the late ‘80s and early ‘90s King played with Flying Nun staples The Cakekitchen, Bressa Creeting Cake, and The 3D’s, who—she notes laughing—went on to support Nirvana, tour America with Pavement and play with U2 at Western Springs after she left the band. Describing herself as an ‘eternal guest musician’ King played with a bunch of different bands over a decade, and at one point ended up in Boston recording at Fort Apache Studios after meeting Nic Dalton while playing support for The Lemonheads.

This affirming, joyous, and often hilarious book is a departure from King’s previous dark and uncanny novels …

King’s last band before quitting music was Celine, where she got to play bass more experimentally with thrumming chords and dissonance. When asked why she eventually quit music, King says that it was fun until it wasn’t, and this shift coincided with her plans to travel and begin a writing career. So in 1996 she took a decisive step and sold her beloved bass in order to afford her first laptop—an Apple Mac that cost $2200.

For years King had been telling people that she was going to write a book called Violet and the Velvets, long before she ever sat down to write the story. It was a specific convergence of life events and productive procrastination which finally spurred her on to get the story down on paper. She wrote the first of what will become a four part series during a six month period when she was supposed to be writing another book, because nothing is quite as motivating as an approaching contractual deadline for something else entirely. And she found the writing flowed organically.

Specific details of Violet and the Velvets are lifted directly from King’s life, and the book as a whole reflects not only King’s experiences but the vibrancy and creativity of her community. Where King spent eight years responding to emails at all hours as the programme director of WORD Christchurch, Violet’s mum also ‘works in the arts, for a festival, which means she’s overworked and underpaid’. She drives a messy car with iceblock wrappers stuffed in every nook and cranny, has dyed red hair, and plays a 1960’s Fender Precision with gold scratch plates and gold machine heads—the very same bass guitar King sold back in 1996.

In fact, it was a night out where King and her son attended a BandQuest competiion that helped shape the premise for Violet and the Velvets. With no girls’ schools scheduled in the lineup that evening, they were struck by the lack of diverse gender representation onstage. King recalls thinking ‘I’m looking at a microcosm of the music industry right here’ where boys are encouraged to give it a go, and everyone else is handed a microphone as an afterthought.  
King’s own history playing in bands predominantly with men seemed to be echoing through the decades, but an opportunity to connect with BandQuest while writing Violet and the Velvets has her hopeful that change is now happening in the music industry, driven by concerted efforts to make music more accessible and inclusive for all young people, and the work of groups like To the Front – Girls Rock! Aotearoa. So enthusiastic about this transformation is King, that she’s arranged for a percentage of all royalties from the series to go towards supporting Girls Rock! and their amazing mahi.

Accordingly, Violet and the Velvets reads as a sort of treatise on what is possible when you give some twelve year olds instruments and encouragement. Violet herself has been raised with a strong DIY ethic, and her ability to sense injustice and figure out solutions leads to the formation of the Velvets. She’s a kid with a busy brain, and towards the beginning of the book Violet shares that she has ADHD, explaining to the audience what it means for her and how she moves through the world. It’s a uniquely positive portrayal of ADHD which is presented without any moral baggage—it’s just another way of being in a world where diversity and difference is quintessentially normal.

 … the book as a whole reflects not only King’s experiences but the vibrancy and creativity of her community.

It’s with seamless skill that King weaves diversity through the book. She says this was easy as it’s a direct reflection of her own artistic and inclusive community, full of ‘bleeding-heart lefties’, and this shows as the narrative flows naturally across different identities and experiences in a way which is almost impossible to manufacture. King acknowledges her time at WORD for introducing her to writers from all over the world, recalling the performances by Ivan Coyote, a non-binary writer and storyteller hailing from Whitehorse in the Yukon, as life-changing.

Violet and the Velvets is an ‘own-voices’ novel and King, who is a big believer in getting representation right, worked with experts on child development as well as a sensitivity reader throughout the writing process in order to get authentic insights into experiences outside of her own. While the first instalment focuses on Violet, other characters are already taking shape as multi-faceted tweens. Aggie is the resident mean girl with a vulnerable side, Mo is an energetic go-getter, and Brayden can’t stop noodling obnoxiously on his brand new Fender Strat. As the characters are set to face bigger and bigger challenges as the series progresses, King says to expect character arcs full of growth and redemption. 

With Violet and the Velvets: The Case of the Missing Stuff ready to meet the world, King has been turning her attention to important side quests. For the first time in a long time she hit the studio, recording the Velvet’s hit ‘Too Shy’ at home with her son. Instrumental tracks were laid down digitally with King’s singing pitch shifted up to sound like a kid. Alongside a DIY video this 2-minute punk rager is now up on YouTube. King has been working with her publicist on merch including band t-shirts, and has been making badges down at her local library. She’s also working on a Violet and the Velvets playlist which she hopes to make public.

Music is a consistent companion to King, who describes her genre of choice as ‘dark folk/miserable white people’. She uses music to immerse herself in the right atmosphere for her writing. Recently, she’s been listening to Cinder Well, early Aldous Harding, Oxn, Lankum, and has had Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s ‘I See A Darkness’ on high rotation as she’s been focusing on the follow-up to The Grimmelings, a Young Adult folk horror fantasy called Song of the Saltings, out next year. Tiny Ruins is her all-time fav, with the subtle devastation of Hollie Fullbrook’s songwriting fulfilling the emotional intensity that King seeks as a music fan and as a writer.

Outside of juggling the world of the Velvets with other writing projects, King spends time listening to audiobooks and podcasts, and competing in a weekly pub quiz with a group of neighbours turned friends in their team called Universally Challenged. She sees friends from all over at writers festivals which fills in any gaps in her social life, and King is also keeping an eye on what she describes as a child literacy crisis in Aotearoa, which has informed the direction she is taking her work. King believes there is a direct correlation between the shuttering of school libraries and our declining child literacy rates, and she’s hellbent on reigniting a culture where kids are reading for fun.

Violet and the Velvets is King’s effort to write something that is accessible for reluctant middle grade readers.

Violet and the Velvets is King’s effort to write something that is accessible for reluctant middle grade readers. The book design itself includes a dyslexic friendly font with illustrations thoughtfully interspersed to break up the page and draw readers through the book. At the same time, Violet and the Velvets honours the maturity of its target audience, inviting readers into a world of complicated social dynamics and ethical quandaries. 

This ability to braid serious themes with plotlines and characters in a way which appeals to kids and young people makes King’s writing for children particularly potent. She finds writing books for children rewarding in ways she never found writing adult fiction, but that doesn’t mean King is not still writing for adults—after all she is very much of the opinion that children’s books are simply books for everyone that kids can also enjoy. She currently has a non-fiction book for adults on the go, and will continue to write personal essays. 

 … she is very much of the opinion that children’s books are simply books for everyone that kids can also enjoy.

But it is children’s literature where King’s brain is brimming with ideas. She credits the New Zealand literary scene with producing great books for kids, and is excited to be working with Allen and Unwin who she says are doing really exciting things in children’s literature. King’s 2012 award-winning junior novel Red Rocks has been turned into a TV series on Sky New Zealand Originals, and this book has just been re-released with a TV tie-in cover as Secrets at Red Rocks.

As King continues work on the follow up books in the Violet and Velvets series, she is ultimately focused on writing books where all kinds of kids can see themselves, using the power of storytelling to normalise what is, in truth, boringly normal. While Violet’s spark and heart might inspire more girls and gender diverse kids to pick up instruments and start bands, King’s joyous and inviting writing should nudge more writers to tell the stories that kids want to hear in accessible ways, helping to write into reality a world with more diversity on the stage and more kids hanging out in the library happily reading.

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