Podcaster in Residence - Episode 8 - The Reader - Clara Kumagai

In this penultimate episode of The Reader Podcaster in Residence Zoë Comyns chats to writer Clara Kumagai about botanical drawings of Manitoban plants, snakes and ecological crisis. Clara Kumagai is from Ireland, Japan and Canada. Her debut Young Adult novel, Catfish Rolling, was a YOTO Carnegie Medal nominee, shortlisted for the Great Reads Award and winner of the 2024 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Books of the Year. Her most recent novel, Songs for Ghosts, was longlisted for the YOTO Carnegie Medal for fiction and the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize 2026. She lives in Ireland. In each episode a writer is commissioned to write a short story – they are to imagine a fictional reader and write about what brings this character to the library. Clara took as inspiration, Plants of Manitoba by Hay Strafford Stead, and specifically an illustration of Seneca snake root. Her main character Willow is directed to the library in an absurd series of events on St Patrick’s Day. Ever since the snakes had come back the country had been in an uproar. There was the usual end-of-days proclaiming; it was the most convincing portent yet. It was down to climate change which was end-of-days stuff, but those proclamations had become mundane long ago. That redemption might have happened in Willow’s lifetime but people had resigned themselves to being sinners. She prayed to be carbon neutral in the next life; it was simply too hard to do in this one. The other contributing factor was that snakes had become a trendy pet several years ago, particularly the designer kinds with scales bred with patterns like smiley faces or question marks. Willow despised the people who had bought them. When the trend cycle moved on people let the snakes slither off to meet their own ends, and in the past they would have succumbed, poor things, to the chill of winter and the damp of all the other Irish months. Now there was the heat. It had culminated in this year’s Paddy’s Day parade being cancelled… In the podcast Clara also chats to Zoë about AI, storytelling and young adult fiction. She discusses the research she did in the National Library as well as speaking to Krista Leddy, a Métis Knowledge Keeper - Clara and she spoke about traditional cures and customs which feature in the Plants of Manitoba story that Clara has written for the podcast. “Aunty Rose was the one who taught me about Seneca snake root. Named for the Seneca Nation. She showed me other plants, the ones that had adapted and were still growing. She wasn’t really my aunty. She had been a girl on the prairies, and so had her mother, and all her mothers before that.” “Her family must have been in Canada for a long time,” the Keeper said. “Her family was in Canada before it was Canada.” Clara’s novels for young adults Catfish Rolling and Songs for Ghosts are both published by Zephyr, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing and are available in bookshops. And if you want to make an appointment at The National Library you can look at the thousands of illustrations and drawings in the collections including Plants of Manitoba’s (call number is PD 4691 TX). Thanks to Assistant Keeper Laura Ryan for finding this gem in the collection and sharing it with the podcast.