Cathy portrays joy of nature with tale of Fabulous Frog

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

“I could have given Fabulous Frog an ice-cream to eat, but that would have been a real fail,” says writer and illustrator Cathy Dunne.  Cathy is referring to the central character in her new book, Fabulous Frog and the Insects Stories, which is for children aged between 2-6 years.

Fabulous Frog is hungry. He wants to tuck in to insects, worms and spiders, the way frogs do.

But this is a story and, understandably, none of these creatures want to be eaten. So, they set out to convince him why he shouldn’t guzzle them.

They do so very effectively in this short, beautifully illustrated book which grew out of Cathy’s passion for the natural world around us. It follows her previous frog adventure, Fabulous Frog and the Bumblebee (and me), published in 2017.

Saving the insects from the hungry frog, however, left her with a dilemma. Once Fabulous Frog had accepted all their reasons and was still ravenous, what could she give him to eat? It needed to be an insect of some sort to be true to the spirit of the story.

If anyone could find the right answer to that question, it was Dublin-born Cathy, whose father Richard had worked as an entomologist with Teagasc in Kinsealy and brought all kinds of strange creatures home to his family in the name of research.

One on occasion, she recalls vine weevils arriving in a jar which was covered with a J Cloth – they escaped and were still being picked up around the house a week later.

Happily, Cathy’s mother Anne, from whom she inherited her love of art, was cool “and generally very blasé about most stuff”, her daughter says.

Cathy and her siblings regularly visited Richard’s workplace in Teagasc, free to explore boxes of butterflies, moths and other insects.

That gave her an appreciation of their importance and meant she had no fear of them. But not everybody was so lucky, explains the artist and writer who now lives in Kinvara.

“My children went to school in Malahide and listening to them talking about what they loved and hated, I realised a lot of children were afraid of spiders.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app

The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City  and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.