Michael Rosen Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen muses on the mysteries of the alphabet, a topic he explores in Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story

As daily viewers of films, we regularly accept something odd: the focus pull. We look at a scene in which, say, there is some blurry stuff on one side of the screen while in the distance someone is going about their business. Then, for no immediate apparent reason, the blurry stuff stops being blurry and we suddenly start to see someone or something who has some kind of relation to that first figure. Without the use of lenses, we're able to do something similar with the alphabet. For much of the time, particularly when we're reading, the alphabet is out of focus. Unlike the blurry film, though, it is more as if we both look with it and through it at the same time!

So, when we're learning to read, we learn any or all of these: the names of letters, the sounds of letters, the sounds of combinations of letters and we learn how in English, the match between letters and sounds is not 100% regular. Sometimes letters can denote different sounds: the 'ch' in 'machine' asks us to make a different sound from the 'ch' in 'chapter'. Sometimes a given sound can be denoted in different ways: in most dialects of English 'crow' rhymes with 'though', 'so', 'sew', 'beau' or 'oh'. Yet, we would never be able to read for the purpose of understanding what we're reading, if we paid close attention to this kind of thing as we read. In some way or another, we have to use what we know in order to not notice that we're using it.

That said, there are times when we pull focus on it, and the letters as letters figure. Older readers may remember 'letraset', sheets of letters which we could stick on to paper so that we could produce swanky looking greetings cards or 'print ready' copy of our student samizdat. We had to concentrate on the letteriness of letters. With predictive test urging me to write 'leatheriness' rather than 'letteriness' I have to pull focus with great persistence in order to write what I want to write.

'Alphabetical order' is another. No one knows for certain why or how the letters became ordered as A, B, C etc. All that can be discerned is the history of that order going back to the Phoenicians or 'Semitic' peoples before them, who cracked the idea that you could use a squiggle to denote a sound rather than an object. But why put the squiggles in an order? We've found it useful though. One Zenodotus, librarian at the ancient library of Alexandria is one of the first known alphabetic classifiers. He sorted the scrolls into the alphabetic order of their authors. When we run our finger through an index, we pull focus on the letters.

We come to think of alphabetic order as sacred: the hymn runs 'Alpha and omega he', after all and yet the machine I'm using to write all this, is resolutely, proudly, divergently non-alphabetic. And there lies a story…

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.