A Foolish Interview for a Foolish Biography: Wolverton Hill (a.k.a. Barry Wolverton) Talks Lear

I had an amusing moment recently. I was speaking on my podcast the other day about being a bit of a “nonfiction stickler”. This made it into the show notes of the episode and when someone brought the post up in Google, they got one of those annoying AI related questions… about “the nonfiction stickler”. I found this amusing. As the official Nonfiction Stickler, I have certain things I loathe in children’s works of nonfiction. Things like faux dialogue and unsubstantiated sources.

And then… a book wiggles its ways past my defenses.

Because, of course, I am maybe not as much as a stickler as I pretend to be. I make exceptions with alarming frequency. For example, if you’ve something like a Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales books, I am fine with anything that includes speech balloons because speech balloons do not presume to be direct quotes. Plus cartoons are automatically considered to be made up, right?

Meet The Boy Who Became a Parrot: A Foolish Biography of Edward Lear Who Invented Nonsense, by Wolverton Hall, illustrated by Laura Carlin, and out July 29th. I confess that you could hardly design a picture book biography better designed to wear down my defenses. It is in some ways your standard picture book bio, sure, but the playful loquaciousness of the writing, the melding of fact and fiction (while also making it VERY CLEAR which parts are fantasy) alongside Carlin’s gorgeous art… this book is unlike anything that’s come before.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Edward Lear popularized the limerick as we know it and invented the modern literary genre of nonsense, made famous by Lewis Carroll. But did you know that as a teenager, he was a natural history artist on par with John J. Audubon? He has a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, placing him among the UK’s most important authors. Yet even still, Lear seems underappreciated. This picture-book biography will change all of that. Not only does it tell of what Lear did, it also shows who he was by conflating the naturalistic and nonsense, as Lear himself did, and by daring to be both fanciful and playful, for the facts of a life alone can never give you the full picture of a person.

Lear liked children and children liked Lear, for they shared an innate sense of play and silliness, as well as a tolerance for the absurd and unusual. As Lear understood so well, it’s not just fun to be silly, but a sense of play is foundational to a resilient life. And of course, nonsense as practiced by Lear was a sharp weapon of satire against rigid Victorian conformity.

Whether in his keenly observed work as a natural history painter or in his nonsense verse, Lear animated the world through a deep sense of empathy, and it is in this way that author and illustrator Hill and Carlin deliver Lear to us. Rich backmatter includes some Lear poems and paintings, a chronology, and notes from the author and illustrator.

Today, I have the great good chance to interview the book’s author. But what’s this? His name is NOT Wolverton Hill but Barry Wolverton? How highly irregular. How charming.

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Betsy Bird: Barry! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today about THE BOY WHO BECAME A PARROT. This is such an odd, entrancing, beautiful book to its core. Just to kick everything off, why Lear? Why do a biography of him? How did this particular book come about?

Barry Wolverton: He’s an artist I’ve long admired but who’s mostly unknown here. If you appreciate inspired silliness, whether that’s Lewis Carroll or Monty Python or Looney Tunes, you’ll like Lear! It was when I learned so much more about Lear’s affect on kids, the way he collaborated with them, really, that I decided to write a bio for kids. Children (and adults) genuinely loved being around him. As one young man who got to spend time with Lear wrote, “he is everything in the shape of fun!” Who wouldn’t want to get to know someone like that?

BB: Americans, at the very least, probably think first of Lewis Carroll when we think of nonsense English poetry. Our familiarity with Lear is next to none. What is it about Lear’s work and Lear’s life that speaks to the 21st century young reader today?

Barry: For one thing, his poetry is so accessible! Funny, irreverent, often joyful but sometimes melancholy, and musical (he called his longer poems “songs”). The limericks, for which he’s best known, are almost meme-like in the way they allow for endless reinvention over a basic structure.

Also, times have changed, but the fundamental challenges of growing up haven’t. Lear met kids where they were, made them laugh, and showed them how the imagination can be an antidote against boredom, sadness, and injustice.

For teachers, librarians, and parents, Lear’s limericks and nonsense verse, as well as the nonsense botany and bestiaries, offer so many possibilities for fun, creative exercises to do with children.

BB: Well, and the thing I love about this book, and the thing that utterly throws me about this book, are the flights of fancy worked in between the facts. You include whimsical (in the best use of the term) sections in between the true moments of Lear’s life (the talking parrot, for example) and it’s not really something I’ve seen writers do with their biographical picture books. What gave you the idea to write the book in that way?

Barry: Honestly, it never occured to me to write about Lear any other way! This is a writer who, above all, encourages us to play. To not conform. Kids loved him because he was fun and he broke rules, and I just felt like a book about him should show that and try to bring him to life.

Even still, the flights of fancy are grounded in fact, I promise! Lear would sit with the parrots in their cages while drawing them, and we know from his letters that he absolutely felt that the birds talked to him, and that he came to identify more with them than the patrons who gawked at them.

Similarly, it really was at Knowsley Hall where Lear first began writing the nonsense verse that would become the first Book of Nonsense, and it was because of his joyful encounters with all the children at the estate. Above I used the word collaboration — the stories and limericks he would invent for them might be in direct response to something going on in their lives, a broken vase or a bad mark or even self-consciousness over the size of one’s nose.

BB: Capturing Lear’s tone in an informational book is almost diabolically difficult. To a certain extent, you have to pick and choose the elements of a person’s life that fit the text. Were there elements of Edward’s life that you had wanted to include and couldn’t or was the book pretty much the same from first draft onwards?

Barry: I was worried Lear’s brief career as a natural history artist, while fascinating, was too different from his nonsense verse and illustration to fit into a kid lit bio. But being a naturalist was integral to the nonsense he wrote later. British collectors were fascinated by creatures from Australia, and Lear found himself cataloging strange-sounding specimens like the whiskered yarke, the eye-browed rollulus, the aequitoon and the jungli-bukra, which all sound like they were made up by a nonsense writer. He loved animals but was conflicted by this desire to collect, catalog, and characterize them. Lear ultimately created his own collection of wild creatures and set them free in the world of nonsense. He rebelled against the strict conformity of taxonomy the same way he rebelled against the strict conformity of Victorian society.

BB: Makes sense. Now there’s the text to consider, but there’s also the art. And a book on an artist can choose to get an illustrator that matches their style to a tee, or one can go a very different route and have something entirely different. I’d say that Laura Carlin falls into the “very different route” side of things. Her watercolors give the book a distinct and defining flavor. What are your thoughts on how she’s tackled your text?

Barry: It’s funny, one reason my publisher and I thought Laura might be interested in this book is because she’s English, where Lear is still a well-known and important writer. But she wasn’t as familiar as we expected. She just really responded to the text. And perhaps illustrating more to the story freed her up to make the book her own, rather than trying to match Lear’s own iconic nonsense drawings. Regardless, I love what she did. She captures Lear’s sense of playfulness, brilliantly uses differences in color to reflect his feelings about the different worlds his moved between, while also artfully weaving in some of Lear’s own illustrations. 

BB: You’ve written a variety of books for kids over the years. What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

Barry: Nothing currently with a publisher, but I’m working on a humorous middle-grade novel, and I’d love to find an illustrator interested in collaborating on a graphic novel.

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I do hope our talk has given you a little taste of all the wonders of this book. As I mentioned before, The Boy Who Became a Parrot: A Foolish Biography of Edward Lear Who Invented Nonsense is out July 29th. Many thanks to Barry for taking time to answer my questions and to Claudia Zoe Bedrick, Emilie Robert Wong, and the whole team at Enchanted Lion Press for helping to put all this together.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews