Have you ever wondered what it would be like not just to swim in water, but to actually be water?

A new storybook from children’s TV creator and BAFTA award winner Jocelyn Stevenson immerses young readers in a watery world where travel to the ends of the earth is possible for Puddlers – humans that can become water – and Waterubas – a community of super-friendly characters that are water, and give their name to the book.

For Jocelyn, who describes herself as “ancient”, this is her first ever storybook and her “third act heart project”. The greatest influence on her extraordinary career was the late Jim Henson who she worked alongside at the Children’s Television Workshop on Sesame Street in the ‘seventies, before joining The Jim Henson Company to help create Fraggle Rock in the ‘eighties.

In the earliest days of Fraggle Rock, Stevenson says Henson told the creative team - “I want you guys to create a show for kids that will help stop war.”

“And I’ve always loved that, I mean who talks like that?” demands Illinois-born Stevenson during our interview in a noisy coffee shop in the back streets of London’s Victoria district. She is a firm believer that the biggest ideas can be carried by simple storytelling for children.

For anyone who does not know it, the Fraggle world was created with three separate species, she recounts, and they did not know each other existed, but they all influenced each other, and the audience could see how they were connected.

“And they were connected by water,” says Stevenson, “which is interesting when I look back on it.”

For the Waterubas – pronounced ‘water-rubas’ - rhyming with tubas - the journey probably started on The Magic School Bus, where she was head writer in the ‘nineties, and which has recently been rebooted for Netflix as The Magic School Bus Rides Again.

“We developed a way of writing scripts that put science at the centre,” Stevenson explains, “because too often, people will do a show with characters who have some kind of adventure, and then they’ll put the science on top as an afterthought.”

Stevenson says she was given the water-cycle episode, and admits that her first thought, thinking back to school geography lessons, was “How boring can you get?”

“Then I read a National Geographic article, and the subhead was ‘Water never stops moving’ - and I thought, bingo! Brilliant!

“Because of some mistake the zany teacher Miss Frizzle makes, they are all going to get stuck in the water-cycle, because water never stops moving and they won’t be able to get out - and they have to use science to fix the problem.

“So that is where my interest in water actually started. Before that I hadn’t thought about it, I mean we don’t do we? We turn on the tap and there it is.”

Having decided that The Waterubas story was going to be told as two novels for 9-12 year olds, rather than Stevenson’s usual channels of TV and film, she still needed a designer for the characters. The individuality of these charming Waterubas is beautifully captured by Brian Froud, a long-standing friend of Stevenson’s.

“Waterubas aren’t creatures that live in the water, they are water – huge difference! And the only person on the planet I felt could understand this is my old friend Brian Froud,” Stevenson explains.

“He designed the Labyrinth film and The Dark Crystal. He got intrigued by this idea of characters that are water, and the next thing I knew, he gave me 19 Waterubas that he’d designed.

“They’re so beautiful, and that meant I could describe them in the book, so it broke everything open.”

A whole body of research, that began 10 years ago, underpins The Waterubas and the first book Stevenson read was H2O: A Biography of Water by writer and physicist Philip Ball, who quickly became a science adviser, “because you always want to push it creatively, but you never want to misinform,” Stevenson insists.

She would attend academic lectures at the Royal Geographic Society in London, and during one session on freshwater, found that not only did she understand what they were talking about, but knew who all the people on the panel were.

“I thought ‘Okay, I’m ready to do my story-world and characters’,” she says.

Finding herself working on her own for the first time in a highly collaborative career, Jocelyn felt the need to develop her concept at a creative summit held, fittingly, in the historic English city of Bath. A community of eight people were brought together from around the world - “People I’d worked with, my son, my other half - all of whom were in service to the best idea.”

And drop-by-drop the Waterubas came together, both practically and philosophically. The story that Jocelyn most wanted to tell was about a human child who could turn into water, and that is the experience of Miriam, an 11-year-old schoolgirl who is the main character of The Waterubas.

“So we had that experience of being water, the whole ‘puddling’ concept, and the fact that Miriam can ‘puddle-jump’ meaning she can travel at speed as water to a Wateruba anywhere on the planet.”

Stevenson is clear that the books must have their own rationale to work, “We can’t sit there with Miriam in the ocean for 5,000 years, which is what happens to water, right, obviously it has to go quicker. The whole idea of water routes and an app that shows the weather, means we hear about what she’s been through - and finds out later that all the up-ing and down-ing she experienced, for instance, was actually a storm.”

A rich spiritual theme runs through The Waterubas – which emerges from the idea that a Wateruba never wants anything to be different than it is. While the Waterubas are completely content – whether frozen in a glacier for millennia, sucked up by a cactus, or trapped in a plastic bowl, Miriam, as a Puddler, finds the constantly changing world of water both scary and exhilarating.

“Waterubas don’t have agency, they go with the flow, but then the flow ends up melting glaciers, the flow ends up flooding things, and the flow ends up being atmospheric rivers,” says Stevenson. “What I found difficult as a storyteller was not giving them agency - and figuring out how to keep them involved all the time.”

As she transitions from a puddle to a cloud, from a raindrop to an ice-cube, Miriam learns that our fears are carried in the stories we tell ourselves – but that we can always tell ourselves new, better stories, and take back control of our emotions – and our choices. The book also reveals how everything is connected by water.

“That water connects everything is one of my big ideas in The Waterubas,” says Jocelyn. “I was discovering more and more how the messages are spiritual as well. Water is a big part of spirituality.”

The Waterubas may have reached publication, but that is only the start of the story, Stevenson is already working on book two – and has ambitions for a Waterubas feature film. She is also working closely with children, educators and the team at Water Week - which takes place in June 2025 - for a suite of educational resources for schools.

“For book two I'm reading this great book called Planet Aqua by Jeremy Rifkin, and there’s a paradigm-shifting idea in that book that I want to introduce,” she says.

“We don’t live on terra firma, we live on a water planet and the fact is we’ve been trying to manage water for 6,000 years, making it go where we needed it to go, where we humans needed it go to, never mind animals and the natural world. It’s biting us on the bum now.

“I want to try to introduce that idea without terrifying anybody, without being too sophisticated. I don’t think anyone, by the time they get to book two, would think they didn’t live on a water planet, because they’ve moved around with Miriam and met Waterubas in all sorts of situations, so they’ve had that experience of seeing Earth from water’s point of view.”

The Waterubas: Book 1 by Jocelyn Stevenson is published by Mystery School Press and is available at Amazon.