My Kirkus Q&A with Rafael Yockteng
Thursday, March 1st, 2018
“It is a compliment to me that my books are published in North America, as it is the opportunity to unite a very fragmented world.”
Over at Kirkus today, I talk with Colombian illustrator Rafael Yockteng, pictured here, about his newest picture book, written by Jairo Buitrago — On the Other Side of the Garden (Groundwood, March 2018).
The Q&A is here. Next week, I’ll follow up here at 7-Imp with a bit more art from the book.
Until tomorrow …
Photo of Rafael Yockteng taken by Gabriela Montoya.
“For a while, I’d wanted to write a story about a character whose super power was making clothes that transformed the wearer. I couldn’t think of a premise that fit until I was watching RuPaul’s Drag Race one day, and suddenly everything clicked. I’ve also wanted to do something fun, like a Disney princess movie but with more queer themes attached, and everything fell in line perfectly from there.”
“I started thinking about illustrating [Richard Wright’s] haiku back in 2006 after I came across a few of them in a poetry anthology. I had read Native Son and The Outsider in my twenties and had more or less dismissed his work as too polemical for my tastes. I was surprised and delighted by the poems. A quick search online led me to a posthumously published collection of over 800 of his haiku, Haiku: This Other World. 
“I wanted to write about Mary Shelley for over a decade after I learned that she was a pregnant teenage run-away when she wrote her novel, Frankenstein. That blew me away. Why did I not know more about her life when she should have been an incredible role model to young women? We’ve all heard the popular myth that Frankenstein was conceived spontaneously on a stormy night when the poet Lord Byron dared a small party of fellow expatriates to write ghost stories. But the myth strips away the identity of the brilliant young woman who wrote one of the most influential novels of the Romantic era and places credit for its inspiration in the hands of a man. Countless events in Mary’s life before and after that evening played a much greater role in the horror novel’s creation.”
“I’ve mentioned in a few interviews my desire to see more stories about brown weirdos, because that’s something I never saw as a kid — brown people who were outside the ‘mainstream.’ Growing up in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood and attending schools with a similar demographic, there weren’t many kids who were into books or writing or art or music. And that’s not to say that those two things don’t go together; I just never saw it in my sort of insulated world. I didn’t start making zines or really get into punk until I was in college, but these are both things that if I’d had any exposure to as a twelve-year-old, I would have eaten up.”
“When my kids were little, it turned into sort of a game, where we’d notice the bright red male cardinal out at the bird feeder [in our yard], and we’d try to find the female cardinal. And sure enough, she was usually nearby. It made me wonder what would happen if they ever became separated, and how far one might go to find the other. I felt like there was a story there.”
Have you seen Chris Harris’s I’m Just No Good at Rhyming: And Other Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups, illustrated by Lane Smith? You may have already read about this book, as it’s received a whole host of starred reviews.
