We recently caught up with author, illustrator and skateboarder Dan Bryant to talk about his pair of children's books - Six Year Old Sidney: The Skateboarding Boy and the festive follow up, Sadie Saves Christmas - and his recent Karma Kids collab. Read on to find out more!
So then Dan, give us an introduction please - who are you, where are you from, and what is your background in skateboarding?
My name is Dan Bryant and I was spawned and raised in gorgeous Somerset in the south west of the UK. I currently teach art and photography full time at the local college in Minehead, making me more of a weekend warrior when it comes to skating (weather and motivation permitting).
Growing up in a tiny village near Minehead I first became aware of skateboarding in, what I can only assume was the very late 70’s or early 80’s. seeing the ‘bigger boys’ cruising in a pack down the gentle slope on the nearby estate. It immediately looked cool, even though they were just rolling - it might have been that whole biker gang vibe or something, there was - after all, a hell of a lot of double denim was going on there at the time!
Two second hand Delux Surf Flyers trickled down to me and my younger brother Joe via the usual hand-me-down route from our older cousins (along with nylon tracksuits and dismembered Action Men), and from then on we always had boards around. The mid 80’s BMX boom hit us quite hard, but the astronomical price of a good bike was always a little out of reach for us, making do with re-sprayed second hand pieces of crap to practice our endos on. But the silver lining to the whole BMX scene was the magazines, Freestyle BMX and BMX Action Bike being the two I particularly remember from that time. Scattered around those now yellowing pages were the odd ad for Variflex completes, a few grainy photos of local scenes all around the country, slowly evolving into full on skate articles, interviews and new product (the birth of R.A.D mag). Exciting times!
As soon as the global skateboard culture was fully revealed, initially through the magazines and occasional TV stuff, I was in…100%. I used and broke a few crappy market boards before my 13th birthday and chose - in hindsight not the best choice - a Vision Gator, with neon yellow Gullwings and Big Balls. My mum thoroughly enjoyed asking the guys at the local skateshop for those wheels.
Cue the skate rat years, rudely interrupted by parenting duties pretty early on - five great kids and a wonderful wife - a range of random jobs to keep the wolf from the door until I got my arse back to college to study fine art as a mature (in name only) student, aiming for teaching or a lucky break selling my paintings and sculpture for millions.
In I think 2016 I got the job managing our local indoor skatepark, Minehead Eye. It was so much fun getting to organise little comps, a couple demos, and it was really nice to have access to somewhere dry to skate!
Eventually I decided I needed to try for a ‘proper’ career as I didn’t like the idea of being a wrinkly old man working at the skatepark forever. No offence to any wrinkly old skatepark managers out there; I just felt it was time to move on. And here I am today, teaching at the same school that confiscated my Roskopp all those years ago.
In regards to illustrations and writing, is that something you’ve always had an interest in, or being actively doing? What or whom inspired you to first pick up the pen/pencils?
Drawing has always been ‘my thing’, literally as far back as I can remember. I was forever doodling on envelopes, inside treasured family books, under tables, with my fingers on fogged up car windows…always drawing. It gave me the ability to create creatures and ships when I was super into Star Wars, design vivariums for reptiles when that was my obsession, and of course drawing skateboard graphics and little skater doodles when this whole thing grabbed me. I really do believe that parents and teachers hold the ability to make or break a child’s self-belief that they are an artist. I was luckily told, “hey, you are a really good artist” pretty young, so guess what? I did it more and more, and guess what? I got better. So side note: be careful how you speak to little kids, don’t crush their potential!
Interestingly, I always loved to write creatively, I could see how the two disciplines overlapped and decided to study English at A level. Lesson 1:
Mr Jones - “Daniel, are you sure you are supposed to be here?”
Me - “Oh, bye then”.
I immediately went and changed options that day and studied geography and hated every minute! Thanks Sir.
Can you kindly give us a rundown of your work over the years?
After a few joint and solo exhibitions in the local area I weirdly didn’t seem to be making millions! And as most of my time was spent working or looking after the kids, I found it really cathartic to start writing…erm…little poems. I used to pen God-awful teenage laments to girls I was either going out with (rare) or wanted to go out with but had no confidence to address the situation (much more likely) so I knew how fun it was to play with rhyme, switching the words out until it read perfectly. I started to write a few short ones (short is good because I could fit them in whenever I had a little time) about frogs and toads and other creatures I had an affinity for. These would ultimately become the main bones of my second book Ode to a Toad.
Tell us a bit about Six Year Old Sidney - The Skateboarding Boy please. Was this your first foray into writing for children? Where did the inspiration come from, and how long was the writing and illustrating process?
I’m always aiming - and still am - to make writing my main gig rather than my side hustle, I really wanted to write a children’s book - after reading so bloody many of them, good and terrible - and I had a feeling I could do a pretty good job.
“Always write what you know” said some writing Animal Chin type many, many years ago so I knew that, although pretty niche globally, skateboarding would have to be the theme.
That idea turned pretty quickly into a whole story arc following Sidney, the embodiment of all young skaters, from learning tricks, getting better and better, entering a contest at the local park…and then I needed some peril, some kind of problem to solve. From experience, especially during the long dark nineties when boards hovered around the 7-inch mark, breaking a board is definitely a serious issue for anyone, especially a kid who loves to skate more than anything!
This called for a saviour to appear so I drew upon my childhood heroes and contacted the first one that I thought of, Mike Vallely. He was also a good choice because Mike V is an easy rhymer! Weirdly enough, he said yes! He said he would be honoured to appear in the book, which was such a great feeling, plus it meant I could get stuck in to writing the rest of the story, wrestling the best structure and rhyme along with fleshing out the little sketches I had made for each page.
The writing, apart from the waiting for a reply from Mike…I call him Mike now as we’re such close homies (laughs), was pretty swift, probably done in a few days; it’s just the most enjoyable process!
Then came the artwork.
I was kind of dreading this because I knew how many hours it was going to take, this took a good few weeks of sketching, inking, scanning and iPad colouring until I was happy with the results.
I self published initially on Amazon’s Kindle platform, which is completely free to do, just takes a bit of tweaking to get it all looking right. I really recommend any budding authors give it a go! The feedback I got was overwhelming, all positive and often asking when a ‘real’ book would be coming.
When and how did you cross paths with Carl Mynott and Stour Valley Publishing?
I met Carl via Tony Wood, a Facebook friend and author of Procrastiskate and Coping Mechanism, which are both rad poetry anthologies with a skate twist; I have artwork in the first and a guest poem One Six Nine in Coping Mechanism. We are both in FOUKS: Family Of UK Skateboarders, on Facebook, so a meeting of minds seemed natural. I asked Carl, who may have one of the only skater run publishing companies, if he would be interested in helping me get Six Year Old Sidney onto real bookshelves, and the rest is history!
Moving on to Sadie Saves Christmas, which is currently available for pre-order, when did the idea come to you to release a festive follow up to Sidney…?
Initially I had no intention of writing a follow up, as it seemed to be an open and shut case, so to speak; it kind of ends with no loose ends (I don’t want to spoil the ending for new readers). A couple of people asked when a book featuring a female skater would be made, and I suddenly realised how the only female character in the book is Sid’s mum! I also had a comment from someone who noted that everyone in the book was pretty pale - there was definitely more tonal diversity in the original illustrations, but in print they do look kind of pale. This really got me thinking about my responsibility to the skateboarding community to try and be as inclusive as possible.
All of these revelations came over the Christmas period last year, shortly after Sidney’s paperback release so it seemed natural to write a Christmas story with Sidney’s best friend Sadie as the hero(ine?).
Were you hoping to get any particular message across with Sadie Saves Christmas? And who would you say the book is primarily aimed at?
With Sadie I wanted to demonstrate the authenticity, relevance and power brought to skating by our female counterparts. My youngest daughter is really getting in to skating recently - she has a sick Steve Douglas reissue, I’m so proud. It’s a proper little Christmas adventure too, which any child can enjoy, but sprinkled with attitude and terminology specific to our culture.
A nice little feature I added to both books is a little glossary of the skate words used in the book to educate the little grams and their less informed parents.
When are the finished books expecting to arrive, and where can people order their copy from?
Six year Old Sidney is available from good skateshops - if yours doesn’t stock them point them in my direction - and from Waterstones online, or my publisher’s shop shookbop.com. Sadie Saves Christmas can be ordered now from shookbop.com and they should ship just after December 6th, just in time for Christmas!
To top it all off, Karma Skateboards have worked with me to create their inaugural Karma Kids complete set up, featuring Sidney and packaged with a copy of the first book! I’m so stoked on this, as it’s always been a dream of mine to have a board graphic.
This graphic was inspired by the Alien Workshop papier-mâché designs made by Mike Hill in the 90s, the frog with a knife in the head? So I papier-mâché’d a Sidney, a board and a quarter pipe, and created my little homage. These are available from Karma now!
Can you tell us a bit about your other titles available via Stour Valley Publishing - Ode to a Toad, and The White Feather?
Ode to a Toad features a cute selection of warm, funny little poems about the UKs most endearing creatures - as long as you like bugs, reptiles and amphibians - all the illustrations were made by myself using a dip pen and ink wash, so it’s all black and white and classy, a great coffee table addition.
The White Feather is a beautiful children’s story, when I say ‘children’s story’, everything I write has to pass the parent test; if a book isn’t fun to read aloud to someone, it is no good. This one follows a dove’s feather as it travels downstream to meet its final destination, I think it’s a sentimental story, kind of moving I hope, and it is made using photos for backgrounds taken all around the area I live, combined with digital drawing on top. Lockdown really helped get this one finished!
Any final words for the literature minded folk reading this?
Readers keep reading, there are worlds waiting to be discovered.
Writers keep writing, there are worlds to create.
Which reminds me, I have just finished writing the next book in the Sadie and Sidney series which is literally out of this world. I will keep you posted, just got to do all the damn illustrations now!
