Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Anyone else seen Salvatore Rubbino’s A Walk in New York and wanna share in my enthusiasm for this book? You know what I love most about this one, all about a young boy’s first visit to Manhattan with his father? The cheer in the book practically drips from the pages: The young boy, in all his excitement to see the big city, exudes a joy that is infectious. “I can tell who the visitors are,” he says in this first-person narrative: “{W}e’re the ones who keep stopping to look up!”

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Jules: Happy Sunday to all, and welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #121, featuring illustrator Tony Persiani and author Chris Barton, who has—in the past—joined us for some kickin’ here on a few Sundays (Chris, that is). It’s a pleasure today to have both Tony and Chris here to say a few words and show us some art from their new title, The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors, to be released by Charlesbridge in July. The Day-Glo Brothers, which is both the author’s and illustrator’s picture book debut, tells the story of Joe and Bob Switzer, who were born at the turn of the last century, who were opposites in many ways, and who—“by accident”—invented totally new fluorescent colors: Fire Orange and other glowing reds, yellows, greens, and more, which they came to call “Day-Glo” colors.

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I’m in one of my let’s-shine-the-spotlight-on-a-new-author/illustrator moods today, so I invited newcomer Johanna Wright over. I’m taken with her debut picture book, The Secret Circus (Roaring Brook Press, March 2009). You know how when you were a kid and the notion of miniature, underground, secret worlds was just about the coolest thing ever? Yes? Or was it just me?

Well, The Secret Circus is all about a world so shh-shh-secret that only the mice can find it. And it’s in sparkly Paris, no less, so it’s even better. A tiny circus. With tiny acrobats. Mice acrobats. Who tame big ol’ cats. In fact, that’s the spread opening this post, “the scariest page in The Secret Circus,” Johanna told me. “The mouse audience looks quite worried.”

Here they are eating their giant popcorn, which Johanna says she’d also like to do:

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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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Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

And Happy Father’s Day to all our papa-readers out there!

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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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This illustration here, which I adore on many levels, comes from Philip Stead. Philip’s debut picture book, Creamed Tuna Fish and Peas on Toast, won’t be out until this September-ish. I haven’t seen an early copy either. But a little birdy told me about Phil’s site, I visited, and I liked what I saw. I invited him over for one of my Random Illustrator Features, and—fortunately—he was interested in a visit.

Philip’s about to tell us a bit about Creamed Tuna Fish, a book with the sort of collage illustrations (and funky title) I like to see. This above image, though, is from his current work-in-progress, Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat, which looks equally intriguing and which he also discusses below. So, here he is, and I thank him for stopping by.

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Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you. Say that seven times fast.

This week we have one illustrator, Mr. Henry Cole (who has worked on more than fifty books and whom Erica Perl calls “a national treasure,” and I’d have to agree), and two authors, Ms. Perl herself and Linda Urban, whose stories Henry has illustrated this year in Linda’s Mouse Was Mad (pictured above) and Erica’s Chicken Butt! Know what? Yeah, I said chicken butt.

If you haven’t seen these titles yet and especially if you live and/or work with preschool children, I’m here to say that if you manage to get yourself copies and take a gander, you won’t be disappointed. Erica (who penned this very funny picture book in 2006) brings us Chicken Butt!, released by Abrams in April. She’s adapted into picture book form the classic school-yard rhyme, turning it into a call-and-response between a frustrated father, just trying to read the newspaper on a lazy afternoon, and his son, who manages to let a tattooed chicken—with, yes, a butt—follow him home. Publishers Weekly describes Henry’s art work in this one as “wryly effervescent as ever,” and Kirkus calls the book’s romp “a powerful piece of cacophony.” As for Linda’s Mouse Was Mad, released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May and met with great reviews all-around, well…move over, Sophie. (Okay, so she doesn’t really have to move over. That’s a great book, too.) This is a tale of a wee, WEE—but determined—mouse who is literally hoppin’ mad and trying to find just the right way to vent his anger. Mouse is also painfully adorable, but—as Kelly Fineman’s already put it—don’t tell him, because “being told one is adorable when one is angry is cause for still more rage.” Linda is the author of 2007’s A Crooked Kind of Perfect, and this is her first picture book.

As you can see, I’ve got a bit of Henry-art today. I had wanted to include this in my posts last week (here and here), shining a light on cartoon illustrations, but I knew that Erica and Linda would be stopping by today to say hi. So, here they all are. Let’s get to it — before we go kickin’ . . .

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I’m doing another Quick Art Stop, this week with a few illustrations from Giselle Potter. I interviewed her almost exactly one year ago and told her, as I often tell interviewees, to stop by again any ol’ time. I recently went knockin’ on her cyber door, in fact, to see if she could share some spreads from the latest Emily Jenkins’ title she illustrated, Sugar Would Not Eat It, released by Schwartz & Wade in May.

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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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