Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

A few weeks ago, when illustrator Dan “Bellyache” Santat stopped by, he mentioned an upcoming picture book, Oh No!, written by Mac Barnett (writer and strongman-for-hire), and showed lots of great art from it. Being the illustration junkie and all-around picture book nerd that I am, I visited Mac’s site. I saw that his very first picture book was named Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem (Hyperion), and I was immediately intrigued. I also saw that it was illustrated by none other than Adam Rex, and I, at once, began to scold myself for having missed the fact that ADAM REX HAD A NEW BOOK OUT. I mean, if you’re as huge a fan of Adam’s books as I am (can you say, one of my top-five favorite contemporary illustrators?), then shouldn’t there be, I thought to myself, some kind of Jedi-like, clairvoyant, preternatural Adam-Rex mind alert that makes me just FEEL he has a book out and that I need to hit the library or bookstore? No? Oh crap, I just got behind at his blog, and this is what I get for getting behind.

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I would want to chat with author/illustrator Lisa Horstman, no matter where she lived, because I have been familiar with and have enjoyed her books for years now and because this is the first time here at 7-Imp that I’m having a conversation with an illustrator whose latest picture book, Squawking Matilda (Marshall Cavendish, April 2009), includes stop-motion hand-crafted puppets combined with digital art work. Yup, it’s a first, and I have to say her answer to the “process” question is one of my favorites thus far in all my breakfast interviews with illustrators. Ball-and-socket brass armatures. A jeweler’s drill press. Microknitting. Wee little puppet clothes. And wee little mask latex shoes. I find it all quite fascinating.

But, as an added extra bonus, Lisa is from Knoxville, Tennessee! In many ways, East Tennessee will always be home to me, and I’m thrilled to be shining the spotlight on a Tennessee author/illustrator. I don’t know why I didn’t invite her over for breakfast sooner, y’all. Seriously. 7-Imp evidently has readers all over the world, and that’s great. But it’s so nice to be having a breakfast chat for once with someone just a little over two-hundred miles away from me, as I blog in my little kitchen here in middle Tennessee. It’s great to see some Tennessee talent. Can someone give me a wa and hoo? And a WOOT! Okay, there. Got that out of my system.

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Heinies, heinies, heinies. I’ve got a…um, buttload of them for you today. Well, maybe not a buttload. But I do have several spreads to show you from Ayun Halliday’s and Dan Santat’s Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo, published by Hyperion Books in May, as both author and illustrator visit today to talk about the book. And other stuff. My favorite part of this post is how the illustrator expresses some reservations about his own art for the book, and then—without even knowing what the illustrator has typed—the author proceeds to talk about how much she loves the art and what the illustrator has done in the book. As a bystander and book nerd AND illustration junkie, this is all very fascinating to me, needless to say. But I digress.

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This is author/illustrator Jan Thomas with her Public Relations Officer and Security Chief. She’s here with her canine staff today to chat over breakfast with what I’ll call the Jan Thomas Appreciation Society. And that would be Yours Truly and two of the country’s best children’s librarians (all hyperbole—which regular readers know I’m guilty of—aside), Adrienne Furness of What Adrienne Thinks About That and Betsy Bird over at A Fuse #8 Production. Adrienne has written posts like “My Profound Love of Books by Jan Thomas”; Betsy has written reviews like this in which she’s declared things like, “All right. That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. Could we please please PLEASE just get it over with and declare Jan Thomas some kind of national treasure / picture book genius?” and “Thomas has that rare gift for synthesizing a book down to its most essential parts”; and I’ve posted about Jan’s work a bit as well—having turned into such a big fan of her titles, thanks to Adrienne—but the 7-Imp Jan-Thomas sightings are hardly tantamount to my fan-dom. So, I decided I wanted to shine the spotlight on her, too. And when I—lucky me—snagged her for an interview, I asked Adrienne and Betsy if they’d like to contribute some questions and/or say a bit about their own ardent devotion to Jan’s books.

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Illustrator Pamela Zagarenski is here this morning for a breakfast chat. Together, she and poet Joyce Sidman created one of my favorite picture books thus far this year—if not my very favorite—Red Sings From Treetops, released by Houghton Mifflin in April. You can read a bit more about it here — in a short post I did early this month. Red Sings is a poetry collection that brilliantly, in more ways than one, celebrates colors as you’ve never quite seen them celebrated before.

Pamela’s delicate and inventive mixed-media illustrations have been seen in two previous poetry collections — Maxine Kumin’s Mites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems from 2006, as well as 2007’s This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, also by Joyce Sidman (“her skill as a poet accessible to young people is unmatched,” wrote School Library Journal about Sidman), and both released by Houghton Mifflin.

Since Pamela sent over one hundred images for this interview (I never really counted the images in the Dave McKean interview, but this might rival it), I’m going to get right to it, and we can find out what’s next for her and why she talks to her paintings (which I get. I really do.) For breakfast this morning, she’s having lots and lots of tea. “I get up really early (4:30-5:00),” she told me, “to paint, sketch, work on my computer. I have one, two, and sometimes three really big cups of tea, preferably with lots and lots of almond milk. I just love tea — always have! I don’t get hungry until later in the morning, but when I do, I like fruit, nuts, and raisins and brown rice or quinoa.”

Let’s get the basics from Pamela while we wait for our tea to steep, and I thank her for stopping by. And ESPECIALLY for the whole heapin’ ton of beautiful art.

{Note: I’m not going to put titles under each illustration, for different reasons, but The Really Eager and Curious can right-click on the images themselves—and then go to “properties”—to at least see JPEG names, as basically sent to me by Pamela and which are often the illustration titles as well. Also note that some of these images are details of larger illustrations. Most of these illustrations are hyperlinked to larger versions, too, so click the image itself to see in more detail.}

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First of all, I don’t want to embarrass him, but I’d like to take this interview with illustrator Edwin Fotheringham, pictured above, and use it as an example for all future interviewees of how to do a Q & A, my friends. As I tell folks when I do these seven-questions-over-breakfast interviews, I blog on the side. On the side, that is, of my work-work and spending time with my children. So, I send the same questions out to everyone. I wouldn’t be interviewing someone in the first place if I didn’t love his or her work and know a lot about it, but if I customized everyone’s questions all the time, I’d never have time to do any interviews at all. So, I always say: Take these general questions and run with them and show us who you are and what your work is about. And boy howdy, did Edwin (who also goes by “Ed”) do that. And for that I thank him.

Secondly—and I’ll keep this short so that we can get right to his interview—I’m very happy he stopped by for a breakfast chat, because I am really crazy in love with his art. He has illustrated two children’s titles thus far in his career, after doing a lot of really fabulous editorial work, which he’s been doing for over fifteen years. (If you visit his site, you will be rewarded with lots of art.) I have enthusiastically yammered about these two children’s titles here at the blog already. Since he talks about them below and I have some art from them, I’ll skip summarizing them, except to say: Ed has wowed the critics, wowed readers, and wowed me. As Betsy Bird put it this week in her halfway-mark Newbery and Caldecott predictions, “his fame has been steadily rising. His technique is superb. His style well-suited to the picture book genre.” (Right. That marks the seven-skerjllionth time I’ve quoted Fuse recently, but she really knows her picture books.) School Library Journal described his art work in his second illustrated title, Shana Corey’s Mermaid Queen, as “glorious.” Yeah. That, too.

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This is art from illustrator Pamela Zagarenski. I fell in love with her detailed, intricate, folk-art-esque mixed-media art—with the highly stylized characters therein—the first time I saw it. Have you all seen Joyce Sidman’s Red Sings from Treetrops: A Year in Colors, the most recent illustrated title of Pamela’s? It was released by Houghton Mifflin in April, and it is a wonder. It’s a poetry collection which celebrates the changing of the seasons — but through the lens of color. And I mean color in ways you hadn’t considered experiencing it — hearing, tasting, and even smelling it.

In SPRING,
Red sings
from treetops:
cheer-cheer-cheer,
each note dropping
like a cherry
into my ear…

And, in Summer, “Yellow melts / everything it touches . . . / smells like butter, / tastes like salt.”

If you’re not familiar with Sidman’s work, you’ll be treating yourself to read more of her titles. Check out these links for more information: Read the rest of this entry �

I love that author/illustrator David McPhail describes himself as a misanthrope. Not only because statements like that from people who create books for children help eradicate this notion that all of them—or anyone else working near or around children, for that matter—live in little pink bubbles, surrounded by severely cute and insanely fluffy bunnies. (Seriously, the average 7-Imp reader knows they don’t, but I think that notion still prevails with the general public.) But also because of the element of surprise that resides in that statement: McPhail’s work is often infused with a sweet affection, sensitivity, and warmth and often revolves around the themes of friendship, cooperation, and familial relationships — often, but not always, animal characters, for which he is probably best-known. Not that misanthropes can’t appreciate cooperation, mind you. I guess I’m just saying: I flippin’ love it when someone surprises you.

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Illustrator Christopher Denise and author and poet Kristy Dempsey are visiting this morning, but let me get something out of my system first, in all my excitement here:

I love love love this illustration from Chris. It comes from Jane Yolen’s The Sea Man, published back in 1997, a book I’ve never seen but really want to find now. This image is both wonderful and positively terrifying to me:

Okay, back to Chris and Kristy (and more art work from The Sea Man is below): They have a brand-new picture book out, entitled Me With You, released this month by Philomel. This week, Kristy is spearheading some online activities to celebrate the release of the new title. When I told her that I had tried to connect with Chris last year—I had wanted to feature some of his art work, but we somehow lost touch—she was just as excited as I was at the idea of me attempting to reach him again to do an interview and feature more of his beautiful art, including some spreads from their new title. Told in warm, simple rhymes, it celebrates the bond between grandparent and grandchild. Here is how Chris brought Kristy’s words—and the beloved duo—to life:

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Here’s swimmer, film star, fashion trend-setter, and the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel, Annette Kellerman, “slicing through the water—winning races and setting records.” Have you all seen the fabulous new picture book biography about Kellerman and her derring-do? Perhaps you read Betsy Bird’s review of it last week. I love this book, and I’m here on this Nonfiction Monday to welcome the author, Shana Corey, who is going to talk a bit about the book and her work. Shana, as she writes in the book’s Author’s Note, has “always been interested in women and girls brave enough to make waves.” And I’ve got some fabulous art from the title to show as well — with fingers crossed that illustrator Edwin Fotheringham will soon be sending me his responses to my illustrator-interview questionnaire and then we can hear more from him, too. If you saw his work in last year’s What to Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy! by Barbara Kerley, then you know how exuberant Fotheringham’s highly stylized illustrations are. (If you’re like me and haven’t had your seven impossible cups of coffee before breakfast yet, Edwin’s art will wake up DIRECTLY.)

Corey’s Mermaid Queen (Scholastic, April 2009) is the story of Kellerman, born in 1886 in Sydney, Australia. Annette, as a child, had to wear leg braces (probably from rickets, Shana writes), but later she learned to swim and, as noted above, set many records. She began her swimming career at a time when women athletes were far from respected. But, believing swimming was the most superior sport, Annette kept at it and also spoke out against the constraining (to say the very least) ladies’ bathing costumes of that time. Once, when wearing a boy’s swimsuit at London’s Bath Club, she caused quite the stir and eventually sewed stockings onto the suit, a moment from her life included in Mermaid Queen — and done so dramatically and to great effect. Also included is the scene at Boston Harbor in the summer of 1908, which you can see here, in which Annette was arrested for indecency for not wearing a dress-and-pantaloon swimsuit, popular during that time.

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