'In Care and Incredible' with Rosie Canning

Rosie Canning, author of 'Hiraeth' discusses her new book 'In Care and Incredible', her own life experience of growing up in care, and her mission to de-stigmatise care experience in literature. 

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Transcript

ExChange Wales: Welcome to the Exchange Wales podcast: a series that explores research and practice sharing, evidence and care experience to build better social care in Wales and beyond.

Martin Elliott: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Exchange Podcast. I'm Martin Elliott, and today I'm joined by Dr. Rosie Canning, who is here to talk about a new children's book which is released at the end of July, In Care and Incredible: 30 Care Experience Superstars You Need to Meet, which she produced with Dr. Dee Michelle. We'll come on in a minute to talk about the book in a bit more detail and who's in it and why you published it. But I thought we could start, if you'd be happy to talk a little bit about why you're interested in literature and representations of care experience and sort of your journey to where we are today in terms of the book that you're just about to publish.

Rosie Canning: Okay, lovely. Thanks, Martin. It's really great to be here. So it's quite interesting that we're having this conversation now, just as England have finally given an apology for the mothers who were forced to give up their children for adoption. So I was born in the late '50s, which was during an era of extreme stigma towards single mothers and my mum, Mavis, was described as having a history of mental illness. She was labeled a stolid, apathetic young woman, not capable of assuming a lot of responsibility for her child. That's from my private archive, and yet the diagnosis itself was inconclusive, and in quote, "It was difficult to make a definite diagnosis.

The diagnosis rested between a schizoid and a depressive illness." Again, my private archive. So consequently, because my mum was deemed unfit, I was taken into care, and my mother was sent home. I was put into a residential nursery, and there began eight years of instability, but followed by a period of stability, being in one children's home for the next nine years, and leaving at 17.

And interestingly, I've been writing a chapter about mother and baby homes and institutional nurseries using my personal archives with me as archivist and artifact. That's my thing at the moment. So I found myself reflecting on those early years , and I don't wanna give too much away, but I really am a walking miracle.

Martin Elliott: So I suppose, obviously, as you've just described, you've got your own lived experience of the care system and as it was in the 1950s, and I'm sure, well, I read something where you were saying that during that period of time, one of the things that you were interested in was books was fictional writing.

Rosie Canning: When I was five years old, I used to walk to my local library on my own. You know, people say that term, "Oh, books saved my life. Library saved my life." They really, really did in my case. Yeah, I think going right back, I discovered in my personal archives words that I'd spoken at nine years old and were recorded by a social worker, which were, "I want to write a story about myself."

I had used writing before, even as early as six years old. I can remember writing a letter of complaint to my mother actually, interestingly. Words gave me agency. You know, I started to realize that, you know that old saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword," which might be a bit of a cliche, but I still believe that.

So going right back, I did a presentation with some young girls that were leaving care, and I'm going right back now. I was probably, maybe nearly 30, and I was dismayed that despite 20 years since leaving care myself, that there was... There wasn't any support for these young girls just setting out, and they were such a lovely bunch, and it made me very unhappy.

I think the seed of doing something about that was sown then but also I went to an event by Lemn Sissay. It was called From Pip to Potter, and it was in 2012, where he highlighted the stark contrast between society's admiration for orphans in fiction with the treatment of real children in care, and I found that so powerful, and it was something I hadn't thought of, and I had already been thinking by then that I wanted to do a PhD, and that kickstarted that journey, and I suddenly thought, " I sort of know what I want to do."

It goes right back to my childhood in care. 

Martin Elliott: Yeah. 

Rosie Canning: Because I can remember I lived in a children's home, which was a, a corner house. It was quite a big house, and it felt like we were the centre of something and that people knew about us and stared at us, and- You know, we had certain reputations. I grew up with other people's stigma on my shoulders.

It wasn't mine. 

Martin Elliott: Yeah. 

Rosie Canning: You know, the stuff about my mum having been a single mum, not married, giving birth to me, and me being rejected by my own family and society meant that I was walking around with this stuff, but I didn't know why. So when I went to Lemn's event, it was like an explosion. 

Martin Elliott: Mm. 

Rosie Canning: Oh my goodness me.

Wow. 

Martin Elliott: And you made reference earlier on to that sort of the very young you saying, "I'm going to write a book when I'm older." And then obviously during the time that you were doing your PhD, you produced a fiction book, which is, if I'm, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but is loosely based on some of your own experiences of care, which is the book Hiraeth, which for a Welsh-based podcast is, it's always good to have a Welsh titled book.

Rosie Canning: Okay. So I expect some of your listeners will know what this word means. Hiraeth. It has no word in English. It's a Welsh word meaning homesickness for a home to which you cannot return. A home which maybe never was. The nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past. Well, I was writing a PhD novel, and it was called Homesickness, interestingly, and this is many years ago now, and I suddenly saw this thing pop up on social media, and I just thought, "Oh my goodness, that word.

I have to have that word for the title of my novel." So there were some questions that I asked myself before I began writing, or even while I was writing actually. And, one was could I write a novel that both acknowledged and critiqued the care experience of a young care leaver without resorting to stereotypical, i.e.,

criminal, homeless, or prostitute representations, you know, those sorts of things. And the other question was how much of my life as a child in care should I share? And the question at the heart of the novel is how can a young girl survive in the world without parents, without friends, and without family?

ExChange Wales: Mm. 

Rosie Canning: So I took everything away from Marianne as a way to see what would happen. How would she find these tools within herself to cope with being on her own in the world? So I guess I could just say that here is a story about care, silence, and the long search for somewhere to belong. 

Martin Elliott: Sounds like a very good summary.

So obviously we've talked a bit about your own lived experience and your own journey, and then how that sort of led into the PhD. And there was a lot around sort of fictionalised characters within that piece, which then leads us into the new book, which is just about to come out, which is actually about real people, who have lived experience.

Rosie Canning: Okay. So Dr. Dee Michelle and myself, we met online. And she was coming over to the UK for the Care Experience Conference back in 2019, and that was how we met. We actually met before we both went to the conference at the Foundling Museum, which was a perfect place because Lemn's exhibition was still on. It's, you know, it's a permanent exhibition, which is all about orphans in stories.

And so it was perfect because Dee and I both had that background reading when we were children of reading orphan stories. I suppose we were still thinking about the stigma that was around, children in care, and you've only got to see that now and again there's one of these horrendous petitions, around, a children's home being opened up in a road, and you'll see that stigma is still alive.

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Rosie Canning: So we decided that we would do something about the stigma, and we would say, "Hey, everyone, what about this person? What about that person? They were brought up in care." And these are famous people that we're talking about, and they're in the public eye. You know, Barack Obama, Marilyn Monroe, I mean, we've got hundreds of people on the website.

So that's a bit of background to the children's book, In Care and Incredible. So that's how we came to start writing the book, and it's nonfiction, because obviously it's, about, real people. So, you know, we've got record-breaking athletes, award-winning writers, activists, inventors, leaders who've shaped history.

So 30 incredible people who also spent time in foster care, lived with relatives, or who were adopted. Now, it's a shame people can't see the illustrations. They're fantastic but you can either look at the Jessica Kingsley website or Amazon. The book is going to be published on the 21st of July, so people can actually look and see a few of the illustrations by Lauren Fernandez, who grew up in foster care.

It was really important to me, and I've always been like this, about the PhD. I wanted to use academics that had experience of care. Whenever I've done a project, so for example, A Portrait of Care was something I did a while back, and I got lots of, artists to take part as well. And I'm, you know, I made sure that they were care experienced as well.

So I always like to big up- ... those with care experience. And Lauren is our illustrator, and she has done such an incredible job of bringing... I know these are real characters- But there's something about the way we're writing about these characters. We're writing with our care experience lens, which hasn't been done before.

Yeah. It might be mentioned in passing, but it's not really of... You know, it's not really a thing. 

Martin Elliott: Yeah. It's not the main focus of... Yeah. 

Rosie Canning: Yeah. The youngest person in the book is world champion American gymnast Simone Biles. She was three years old when she first went into foster care, and five when she was adopted by her grandparents.

The oldest person in the book is Isaac Newton, who as we know is famous for explaining gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree. And of course, Barack Obama. We are hoping that he'll see this book eventually. 

Martin Elliott: That'd be fantastic. 

Rosie Canning: Yeah. Obviously he's the first African American president of the US, and he spent time with his grandmother, when he was, growing up.

So one of my favorite stories is that of Michaela DePrince, who sadly died in 2024. She was very young. She was born Mabinty Bangura in Sierra Leone during the civil war. Her parents died and she lived in an orphanage. And she was treated cruelly because of her vita- f- let me say this word correctly, vitiligo, which she said made her look like a baby leopard.

She wasn't treated very well there. Because of her skin condition, she was always given food last, and I imagine there were times when it ran out. One day, a magazine page blew into the camp, and it was of a ballerina standing on her toes, and the ballerina looked happy, and she decided that day that one day she would dance, too.

You imagine she's in a, an orphanage in the, you know, in Sierra Leone. A civil war raging, and it was a wonderful moment, I think, for her, a positive moment. So she was adopted by the DePrince family in the USA, who'd actually adopted, I can't remember exactly, I think nine other, children. And, she started ballet lessons immediately and just became the most remarkable ballerina, and she also became, such a wonderful role model for other young people, particularly in the, Black communities.

Because within ballet, it's very much... I think it's changed now, but it's very much, a White privileged arena and, you know, she did heaps to change that perspective.

Jenny Fagan, she's the author of five novels, a memoir, Ootlin, and eight poetry collections. And Jenny gave us, a review of the book, and, I'll just share that with you.

She says, "In Care and Incredible is a vital representation of resilience and talent from individuals who chose to not let their journey from care define their future goals or dreams. It's an honour to be alongside so many amazing people." And if I can, I'd just like to read a couple of sentences. So we write about, Jenny, growing up in care.

She was in care from when she was born, and she lived in many, many places in Scotland. "So Jenny found it hard to live in so many places, and when she was very young, she lost her voice. She didn't know how to get it back. Then something amazing happened. She wrote a poem. That's when she realized her voice was safe inside her writing.

She could look at the words and know she could use her voice whenever she wanted." So that's just a little excerpt from, Jenny's story. Another favorite story of mine is, that of Saroo Brierley. So he was born in Khandwa in India, and when he was five years old, he went to a train station with his big brother begging for food.

He fell asleep and woke up alone, and he then spent a few weeks traveling on trains, not really knowing where he was going. He survived on the streets before being sent to an orphanage, where he was adopted by the Brierley family in Tasmania. So he was taken from India and transported to Tasmania. But he never forgot his family, and as a grown man, he started to use Google Earth like the world's most determined detective, and he came across a railway station he remembered, and he followed the tracks and found Khandwa, and then his old street, and then he found his family.

So there was a little boy, a computer, a memory, and lots of hope. Now, I think I should mention one of the Australians, because what tended to happen was Dee knew much more about Australians with care experience than I knew, you know, the British. But this book has tried to encompass the world. So there's Faith Thomas, who, when she played for the Australian cricket team in 1958, was the first Aboriginal Australian woman to represent Australia in any sport.

She learnt to play cricket by throwing stones at birds, which is not such a nice thing, but that gives you a, a bit of an idea of, some stories. 

Martin Elliott: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. So to round up, I guess, so obviously you've got this fantastic book which is, will imminently be out in the world, and I guess to sort of- wrap up our discussion for today.

I was wondering whether what you hope children, both those that are care experienced and those that aren't, who may come into contact with other children who have some form of care experience, what you hope they'll get from the book, from reading the book? 

Rosie Canning: Okay. So obviously for any child that is in some sort of care, what they'll get is a lot of very well-known and famous people who are, you know, have had the similar childhoods to them.

There'll be people that they can identify with, and just read about these, amazing people and their stories. I think also for children that are not care experienced reading this book, they perhaps might even, you know, know one of the ca- one of the people in the book, and they might even be a hero of theirs.

Say, for example, like Raheem Sterling, a footballer. They might not know his, about his childhood. Or Sophie Willan, the, the wonderful, writer and actress. Or even Mo Farah. You know.

Martin Elliott: Yeah.

Rosie Canning: These are people that, they may have come across, and just be able to learn more about their childhoods.

And we have to remember that there are difficulties in all families, and I'd imagine there'll be things that will help, you know, all children when they're reading, about these incredible people. Also, in the book, the way that Lauren has done the illustrations is that all the characters, they're surrounded by these wonderful, you know, it might be flowers or just a plain band.

And so what we've done is at the end of the book we've put in a, a frame, and then we've said, you know, "Now it's your turn, and you can include yourself in the book and draw your own portrait." And, you can, you know, I mean, teachers could photocopy that and, use it as a resource. I think also, you know, you were asking me about what children in care might get from the book, but also I think this book is going to appeal to educators, foster carers, anybody that's involved with, working with young people in care.

It has so many uses. I think it'll be a brilliant resource as well because, you know, if we even think about some of the early, people that are in the book, Charles Dickens, for example, you know, using this book can be part of, a history lesson- Yeah ... as well. Yeah. So there's all sorts of ways I think that the book can be used, and I think it's a book that you can dip in and out of, because each little story is a story on its own.

Martin Elliott: Brilliant, and that seems like a really nice place to finish. So good luck with the book and its launch, and I look forward to seeing a copy once it's out in the world. So thank you for your time and for being part of the podcast, and it's been lovely to talk to you. Thank you very much. 

Rosie Canning: Thank you, Martin. Thank you for inviting me. 

ExChange Wales: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Exchange Wales podcast. At Exchange Wales, we connect researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experience to share evidence, practice, and insights that shape social care. Our work spans children's and adult social care, and we're also exploring the growing role of artificial intelligence in the sector.

If you'd like to learn more or get involved, please visit exchangewales.org.