'Table Manners' Book Launch for World Book Day!

'Table Manners' by Elizabeth A. Peck

Elizabeth "Lizzy" Peck, a teacher at St Mary's School, Cambridge has written a childrens book in aid of Jimmys. Lizzy's book, which is set to be release on World Book Day (6 March 2025) is an illustrated poem for children aged 4-7. 

Ahead of the upcoming book launch event, we caught up with Lizzy to explore the inspiration and process behind the book.

What inspired you to write this book, and how did the idea evolve from concept to completion?

The immediate inspiration for this book was very simply a meal with my daughter, who at the time was 4 or 5 years old. I seem to recall it was during lock-down. She and I were at the table, and she wasn’t behaving as well as she could have done, so we started to talk about table manners. We ended up listing various ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ and it just suddenly struck me, since I like to write poems in general, that such a list could potentially make quite a funny poem. Although I’ve tweaked and refined it a little since then, I wrote the poem overall that week. I tend to find that when an idea occurs to me, I like to work on it immediately and usually exclusively; it takes up a lot of my mental space until it’s all on the page.

In a longer-term sense, the inspirations behind the book are various Dr Seuss books, especially The Cat in the Hat Returns, which was an absolute favourite of mine as a child, and which I used to love reading to my daughter too, and Madeleine Says Merci, which teaches manners through rhyme but in a more serious way. More broadly, my other biggest influences in terms of writing children’s poetry are Julia Donaldson and Roald Dahl.

The poem was on the back-burner for a few years then, as other projects came up, including my other illustrated poem for charity, You Can Tell Me Anything. It was actually when I was participating in an event at Cambridge Central Library promoting this book, that I met local artist Alfonso Montellano López, who was there exhibiting his artwork.  I mentioned to him that I had other poems that I’d love to turn into books one day, and it turned out that he was keen on the idea of collaborating on Table Manners. That was about a year ago – in fact, we are both attending the same annual event at the library again soon! – and during this time, Alfonso created the brilliant and very expressive artwork that you can now see in the book. Of course, there was then the production and publishing process too, during which I was lucky enough to have a lot of say in everything from the layout to the typefaces, and also the process of initiating the partnership with Jimmy’s. At that point, we could begin to market the book, the first steps of which were very happily receiving the review from Daniel Clifford at Midsummer House Restaurant, and booking the launch event at Stir Café on Chesterton Road. 

Why did you choose to explore the main theme of the book, and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

Mainly, I hope children and their grown-ups enjoy reading the book and being a bit silly and playful together, and that it makes them laugh! It is intended to teach table manners to children, and indeed, the attempt to do this was the origin of the book as described, but that’s a secondary aim, really.

Were there any particular challenges or unexpected joys during the writing process that stand out to you?

 There were no challenges in terms of writing the poem itself, other than the usual challenges of making the rhythm and rhyme work perfectly, which is something I always really enjoy; it often feels quite like a logic puzzle.

The greatest joy in the earliest stages, and even now too actually, was that when I read it to my daughter originally – when it didn’t even have any pictures to accompany it – she giggled and asked me to read it multiple times in a row. I really hope that the poem has this effect on many other children too, but even if it never does, her reaction then remains the most important one for me!

The biggest challenge later on in the process has been promoting the book. We’ve been very lucky to have great support from various organisations and businesses, including of course St Mary’s, but it’s hard to attract people’s attention when there are already thousands of children’s books in existence. Nevertheless, we remain hopeful we can raise a lot for Jimmy’s with it!

How do you hope your readers will connect with the characters or story, and is there a personal message you want to convey through your writing?

I think the plight of the parents in the book, as they persevere in their efforts but become increasingly worn down, might resonate with a lot of parents/guardians who have had a child regularly fidget or mess about at the table. It can be very wearing to repeat the same requests over and over and see no progress! To be fair, in real life I think many parents might just take the tack of saying, ‘If you do that with your food again, I will take it away,’ but that wouldn’t have made for a very good poem.

I think, oddly, that children might connect more with the parents than with the girl too, as even fairly young children probably know that flinging food and so on is naughty and they might think, ‘Oh NO, she mustn’t do that!’ – but then, they will hopefully see the funny side and think she’s brilliant at the same time!

Having had feedback from quite a few people at this point though, it’s actually the cat who seems to be the most popular character! He was entirely Alfonso’s idea, so I can take no credit at all, and can only thank him for adding this great dimension to the book!

I didn’t create Table Manners with the intention of conveying a personal message to the reader, as it’s more about the experience of the poem overall – the rhythm, rhyme, and tempo, the journey of it – but if a more serious message were to be taken from it, I would like it to be this: that table manners matter because they allow people to enjoy meals together, and through these shared pleasures in life, we connect to each other.

Order the book here.