In a Smithers coffee shop, Ava MacDougall, 4, sits with crayons scattered about, drawing spiky blue rays around a frightful face. She’s drawing a monster—a googly-eyed monster, to be exact—which also happens to be her favourite thing to draw.

Ava’s artful sketches of these gruesome sub-bed dwellers were recently published in Shoo! Scram! Scat!, a children’s book made in collaboration with her mother, Tashi Newman, and grandmother, Carla Burton.

Apart from monsters, “I usually draw persons or my favourite friends and sharks that are nice or mean,” Ava tells me, without looking up from her crayons.

The trio has just come from their first public reading of Shoo! Scram! Scat! at the Smithers Public Library, where the self-published book was received with delight by roughly 20 children. Tashi read the book and Carla taught the kids the accompanying tune: “SHOO! SCRAM! SCAT! I don’t want you here! OUT! OUT! OUT! Watch the monster disappear.” It’s about as catchy a song as they come, and it wasn’t long before the audience, aged 3 to 5, was happily singing along.

“I think it’s a really neat poem for kids. It worked for my kids. I think it psychologically deals with the monster issue,” Carla says. “All kids are afraid of monsters at some point or other.”

Monsters are a family theme that stretches back to Tashi’s youth when, every night before bed, Carla would read her children five stories and sing them five songs. Tashi remembers manipulating her younger sister, Gabe, with monster threats to get the bunk she wanted: if it was the upper one she wanted, she’d tell her sister that monsters like to climb ladders; if the lower was her preference, she’d explain that monsters hide under the bed and kindly offer to face the risk herself.

Stand your ground

Shoo! Scram! Scat! started as a song that Carla invented decades ago when Tashi, then 5, and Gabe began to fear what lay in dark corners. Through the song, Carla, who had taken two years of a Bachelor of Arts in Music degree at the University of British Columbia before completing a Bachelor of Education, would teach her children to stand their ground against the hairy beasts.

“Tashi and Gabe would be scared, so I would say, ‘Get out of here!’” says Carla, a Prince George resident who often spends time in Smithers with her children and grandchildren. “Instead of saying, ‘Don’t be scared,’ I’d say, ‘Get out of here! Go on!’”

It was Ava’s love for drawing—and, specifically, drawing monsters—that inspired Carla to turn the song into a book.

“I tried drawing stuff and I tried to get people to draw stuff for me, but everyone was too busy,” Carla says. Instead, she took photos of Tashi and Ava, put them under plain paper and coloured an image on top. The monsters were drawn in Smithers, mailed to Prince George and superimposed on the images.

Dedicated to “anyone afraid of monsters,” the book comes complete with music and lyrics at the back, so families can sing the song instead of just reading it. It also comes with an important message, a gift to the parents if you will, by ending with the most empowering message to children: “Or YOU could tell the monster that it must go away. The monster will be so surprised it will be afraid!”

As Carla notes, “Sometimes you don’t even need to wake Mom and Dad up—you can just chase the monsters away yourself.”

She’s considered following up the publication with other messages to empower the toddler, such as a song she wrote about moving, which was designed to ease the transition of going to Vancouver for her own children.

“You could cover all kinds of things,” she says. “They’re basically all geared toward trying to help kids do stuff.”

Shoo! Scram! Scat! is available at Big Smiles in Smithers and the Smithers Public Library. It can also be ordered at www.blurb.com/bookstore for $22.95 hardcover or $12.95 paperback, or by contacting Carla at symbios@shaw.ca.