“I can hear the beat, feel the rhythm” : writer Sheree Fitch and translator Marie Cadieux on children’s book ‘EveryBody’s Different on EveryBody Street’
Written for The Aquinian
(‘Peculiarities’, by Incé Husain)
Filled with eccentric illustrations and rhythmic poetry, EveryBody’s Different on EveryBody Street is a children’s book by Canadian writer Sheree Fitch that infuses joy and color into depictions of human quirkiness and suffering.
It was originally released in 2001 as a mental health pamphlet, serving as a classroom tool for teachers and children and a means of raising funds for the Nova Scotia mental health foundation. The work was initially burdensome for Fitch, whose son lived with mental health conditions and minimal resources to cope. In 2018, it was developed into a children’s book by Nimbus publishing, and preceded her son’s death by a month. Approached by Marie Cadieux of Boutons d’Or Acadie publishing, it has now been released in French with a new afterword that recontextualizes the work in the wake of her son’s loss.
“I shed tears over that book because I believed every word I said,” says Fitch.
She explains that the work initially came to her while she walked down the crowded streets of New York and was grappling with the burden of writing the book. As the sea of strangers rushed towards her, she was filled with a profound sense of unity with humanity.
“It did come from a place in my heart that I don’t even understand,” says Fitch. “I could see all of us as this incredible interconnected weave of souls and I just knew that everybody coming towards me had a story. And though everyone was different we were all one.”
She describes that the sound of her feet against the sidewalk morphed into a rhythm that opened her up to words and shaped the ideas for her story.
“Often for me it’s a beat inside of me, it’s almost tactile,” Fitch says of her writing process. “I can hear the beat, feel the rhythm, and then I have to score the words to the beat that I feel in my head…It is connected to a sensory oneness in a moment. ”
The book has capitalized ‘B’ and ‘O’ in the words ‘EveryBody’ and ‘EveryOne’ throughout the book. Fitch says that she steers the capitalization of letters in certain words to embed second meanings within them.
“I wanted (readers) to see that every ‘One’ is in ‘everyone’ and every ‘Body’ is in ‘everybody’ and anyone is ‘any’ one - it gives a different way to emphasize (the ideas) and maybe it is seen a little different,” Fitch elaborates. “If we look at ‘healthy’, most people don’t see ‘heal’, but I do see that. I wanted (readers) to see the ‘many’ and the ‘one’.”
The book highlights people’s quirks by comparing them to exotic animals like peacocks, hippopotami, and ostriches. The visuals also depict mental conditions directly. The OCD community is referred to in the line ‘some are paper-clipping meat’; ADHD in the line ‘some are messy as tornadoes’ ; and anxiety as ‘a hat of worry seven stories high’. Fitch shares that the concretization of these mentalities serves to instill comedic effect, ease of visualization, and universality. She also shares that the symbolisms build personalized connections to the book because people react differently to them, to the extent that the work goes beyond mental health.
“The concretization of those images - I think what they portray more than anything is not a mental health issue but the complexity of human nature, and once you look at that, you’re looking at all human struggles - the complexity of humanity,” says Fitch.
The inherent ambiguity in the content is conducive to what Fitch considers good children’s literature. Fitch is wary of writing children’s books with explicit messages in them.
“I can’t sit down and write a book with a message in it because that violates what I think good children's literature is. I think a good childrens’ book should be a book with a story first that captivates you, and if it's a good children's book it should be as good for adults as it is for children!” says Fitch. “If you dumb it down (for children), you’re patronizing.”
Fitch believes that the dialogue around mental health has substantially changed since the work’s initial publication in 2001. But she emphasizes that true societal progress around mental health is measured by access to resources. “I’m glad a book can spark discussion but it has to be fixed with resources and action,” Fitch says. “At the end of the day we (must) save lives and heal those broken souls and get them the resources they need before it's too late.”
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Writer and translator Marie Cadieux of Bouton d’Or Acadie publishing says that the French translation - Sur la rue de Tout-le-Monde - allowed for a deeper exploration of some of the book’s ideas through word changes mostly driven by a desire to preserve the writing’s rhythm. For example, she cites an example where she changed the word ‘koala’ to ‘owl’ because it better suited the flow of words in French. She notes that this also changed the tone of the stanza, the symbol of the owl conveying insomnia, solitude, depth, and beauty.
“I tried to work with rhymes more closely in French to deliver that singsong voice that is such a special trait of Sheree’s English writing,” says Cadieux.
Cadieux also brought the book’s emphasis on inclusion and acceptance to a new level by embedding it in the grammar of the work; she ensured an equal balance of masculine and feminine words, grammatical designations that are absent in English.
“It constrained me in some ways but also gave me some freedom, that English is a more neutral language than French. For me it was really important that we not just be in the masucline, which is in French,” says Cadieux. “(There is) lots of discussion about non-gendered writing. ‘Everyone’ in French is masculine, but ‘everyone’ in English is really everybody and everyone. I worked very hard to have feminine and masculine words and words that weren’t gender specific.”
Cadieux considers translation an artform, comparing it to the way that musicians play and interpret classical works written by others. In that way, she considers the success of the translation to be measured by self-satisfaction.
“There’s a satisfaction in the reading that should bring the balance between having really followed and been loyal to the spirit of the book and original writer, and at the same time, giving a voice and a full existence to the text in French so that now it can (work) in another language.”
On the topic of conveying serious societal issues like mental health through children’s books, Cadieux shares that the conceptual simplicity required to write children’s books is a huge talent.
“The simplicity (in children’s books) is really the essence of things. It’s possible that they go further (than adults books) because we can’t hide in many sentences,” says Cadieux. “It’s about really condensing what’s important, to talk about all those questions. It’s important to dream and to laugh, and think about things that are more complex, but to keep that element of smiling and joy. It's a huge feat.”
Cadieux shares that the new afterword Fitch wrote for the French translation contains the line: “If adults read childrens’ books every night before going to sleep, it would change the world one book at a time.”
“I think she’s completely right,” says Cadieux. ♦
Some interview content from Marie Cadieux was translated from French.
A modified version of this article appeared in The Aquinian on March 6th, 2022: