Pie shared – Jen Wallace's heartwarming story about a boy dinosaur

Jen Wallace’s brilliant debut novel began life as family lore. Now readers everywhere can tuck into a hearty slice of Dinosaur Pie

Words: Libby Norman

Dinosaur Pie is such a satisfying and well-rounded read it’s hard to believe this is Jen Wallace’s first time in print. But then, it has been a very long-time in the cooking. The book’s title has been part of family lore since her teenage children were toddlers and she was using ingenuity to coax them to the dinner table at home in Cork. “On the spur of the moment I said: ‘there’s dinosaur pie for dinner’,” she says. In fact, it was humble cottage pie, but the children came flying and the dish tasted irresistible with that new name. “It became a thing in our family – to this day we have dinosaur pie for dinner.”

Jen Wallace later wrote a poem of the same name for her children – it was one of many. “I’ve been writing all my life. I sent out my first kids’ book manuscript 18 years ago, but then I spent the next 16 years raising children and writing bits and pieces.” Then she saw a call for applications for the Children’s Books Ireland Raising Voices Fellowship. This supports aspiring artists and develops talent from underrepresented voices. Applicants had to submit an example of their work – she was more than ready. “I had a laptop full of stories and poems and I just picked one off and sent it.”

Pie shared – Jen Wallace's heartwarming story about a boy who becomes a dinosaur — Rory has to inhabit a dinosaur’s body after a slice of dodgy supermarket pie – great comedy but also a chance to explore themes around not fitting in

The award of a fellowship in 2022, and the support that followed, were a turning point. There was one-to-one mentoring and advice from industry insiders. Also, a residential writing retreat at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan. When Jen Wallace got there and saw her room, her very own place to write, she cried. “I had never left the children for a week, not to mention go away and have a week where I can just write. It was such an honouring.”

The fellowship delivered insights and support, but also the confidence to be seen as a writer. One anecdote sums it up perfectly. During the fellowship, Jen Wallace had to drop off one of her kids at Forest School regularly, which meant five hours to kill before pick-up time. “At the start of Raising Voices, I used to park up in the supermarket car park, sit in the back of the car and write. But then, towards the end, I was pulling up at a hotel, going in, ordering my lunch, sitting at a lovely table and writing there.”

“My editor said: ‘Jen, Rory has ADHD, doesn’t he?’ And I said, ‘Well yeah’. But it was sharing what I see “

Dinosaur Pie began its journey to fully-fledged novel when she was looking through her laptop archive of stories and poems, thinking at the time about material she could use to create a picture book. That old dinosaur pie poem she’d written years earlier popped up. “The more questions I asked about it the bigger it became. It just wanted to be a bigger book.” And it is. Our hero Rory morphs into a dinosaur after eating suspect meat from a dodgy supermarket pie. Dino-mad kids will adore that wild idea, but there are subtler elements in play.

“When I started writing Rory, he was just Rory and I was writing a chaotic family, kind of like our chaotic family. My editor said: ‘Jen, Rory has ADHD, doesn’t he?’ And I said, ‘Well yeah’. But it was just sharing what I see, and we drew it out a bit more just because there are so many kids having those experiences. It’s life and it’s not really seen. I wanted to tell it from the inside out so people could say: ‘Well of course Rory’s overwhelmed – there’s all that going on in his head today’.”

Jen Wallace has extra insight here because she is autistic herself and, while some may worry about giving ‘labels’ to children, she believes acknowledging neurodivergence is important. “These are useful labels because it gives you context in the community, as opposed to the shame labels that they put on you otherwise,” she says. “My own experience is it’s very validating and leads to greater self-compassion, as in, ‘there’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just my way of being in the world and the world isn’t necessarily set up for people like me‘”.

Rory describes his ADHD succinctly and with great humour, but then his transformation into a human dinosaur becomes both a fun plotline and an excellent analogy for the travails of daily life and fitting in with a world just not set up for you. There is a cast of diverse and engaging characters around him. His geeky yet cool buddies Daria and Oleg are committed to the quest to make Rory human again. There’s the weird and kindly neighbour downstairs, Jebey, desperate to be formally introduced to the aliens he just knows are already here on earth. Then there’s the Goth teenager Lex – a sweet but painfully awkward teen who just gets Rory and looks out for him. Jen Wallace loves the positive relationships that can exist between teens and younger children. “When I was developing it from a picture book text, I had this image of Rory, and Lex. It was kind of the first relationship I developed.”

Rory’s Mum is drawn sparely but vividly – lone parent doing her utmost to keep the family afloat, even after her son becomes a dinosaur. Jen Wallace is extremely detail-oriented with all her characters, describing her process as closer to excavating than building. This meant she had a rich back story about Rory’s Mum’s life that didn’t go in the novel but gives her character depth and warmth.

More than anything else, Jen Wallace wanted Dinosaur Pie to tell a story about coming together, also celebrating the differences that make us who we are. “I wanted to explore how we deal as families and communities with kids going through really tricky times. And I wanted to explore the supportive community, and supportive friends, because I don’t see that very often in children’s literature.”

There’s a delicious comic vein running throughout – Rory navigating shower time, having such bad dino breath he makes the school hamster faint, and not wanting anything to eat but sausages. Adults and children will both appreciate these jokes, but there are others aimed squarely at budding palaeontologists. “I had one or two tiny jokes in there that I think adults will miss – but the nerdy dinosaur kids will get.”

Jen Wallace says she was lucky to have her own children as critical friends – including her youngest, who was then aged seven (ideal for the target age 6-8 audience). “It was wonderful for us all to be part of the process – they were all voting on covers and everything here.” And, of course, even though the truly authentic dinosaur pie is still eaten in the Wallace household it’s now a much bigger pie and can be shared with young readers everywhere. “Dinosaur pie started off at home here, and now it’s going out into the world!”