Kurt Browning puts his spin on alphabet books

EDMONTON - Under L is for Laces, a small boy looks out from the painting, a smile plays on his lips as he pulls tight the laces on his skates.

The boy is Gabe Browning, son of champion skater Kurt Browning, and, not surprisingly, the kid in the picture looks like he can't wait to get out there and start cutting some figures with those skate blades.

L is for Laces is one of the sweetest pictures in Kurt Browning's first foray into kidlit with A is for Axel (Sleeping Bear Press, 40 pp., $23.95), an alphabet book that's based on the sport of figure skating.

"My son's only 2 1/2," Browning says in an interview from a Kansas City tour stop of Stars on Ice, "so this kid in the picture is a little older, but it's Gabe all right."

And, yes, Gabe has had the book read to him, and has given Browning the kind of approval that a dad can truly appreciate: he's virtually memorized the book.

"Like all kids his age, he really doesn't have a long attention span, but he loves to hear me read the poems and hear the cadence of them and the words that rhyme at the end. He likes it a lot and he always seems to know what's on the next page. It's kind of scary."

So far Gabe has been skating only once, but in a chat the two had while Browning is on tour, he extracted a promise that they would go skating again.

"He was pretty clear about it. 'Poppa come home,' he said, 'take me skating.'

"I guess he knows his dad is a skater.'"

Browning has has high praise for Melanie Rose, the artist who provided the illustrations.

"I think she was terrific, and the pictures are warm and kid-friendly," Browning says.

While the alphabet poems are directed at children under the age of 6, Browning also wrote the more sophisticated sidebars that serve as an introduction to figure skating for older readers.

"I think this book has a longer shelf life for children than a lot of other books of its type. Obviously if you're learning your alphabet, this is a fun way to do it, but if you're a little older and your interest is piqued by what you might have seen on television, this might provide some answers to the curious."

Although he hasn't heard from any fellow skaters, he sought advice from the likes of Jamie Sale on P is for Pairs and Shae-Lynn Bourne and her partner Victor Kraatz on D is for Dance, and their feedback was positive.

"The biggest thing for me," he says, "was making sure we covered the entire sport through the alphabet."

Browning's favourite is the letter I, and it's one that he struggled with for some time, finally finishing it while sitting under a hot Spanish sun on a European vacation he took last year with his family.

"It seemed to come right from the heart," Browning says. "It was was the last one that I wrote, and I tried four or five different versions before I finally got something that works."

It is an evocative poem, and a fitting one from the skater from rural Alberta who is clearly familiar with a cold Prairie winter as well as skating before thousands in some of the best ice skating rinks in the world: