Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

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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Jules: Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks on this Mother’s Day 2009! In honor of the special day, we’ve got some Mother’s Day photography and a bit of art. (That quote above comes from Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, and I just wanted to share it. It’s my favorite thought-on-mamahood ever.)

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You guys, yesterday’s birthday wishes were so, so kind. How can a girl get so lucky to have such friends — and a blog partner-in-crime who will get Barry Manilow to sing to her?

Anyway, thanks again, and onwards and upwards…

Ah, just look at that watercolor creation. This comes from author/illustrator Maria van Lieshout, and it’s a sneak-peek from one of her upcoming titles, Sleep, Baby, Sleep, to be published by Philomel in October of this year, and written by Maryann Cusimano Love. Here’s another sneak-peek:

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I know this spread, from Janet Stein’s This Little Bunny Can Bake (Schwartz & Wade, March 2009), appears tiny, but click on it to see it up close and personal. You know I like my weird picture books (that’s a compliment, coming from me), and there was something about the art in this book that drew my eye: Perhaps it’s the whiff of retro? Perhaps it’s the use of brush-and-ink to bring the tale to life? The predominance of gray so that, when our rabbit protagonist appears in her shade of light pink, our eye is drawn to her? The absurdity in the characters’ actions and the humor therein? The dessert recipes on the endpages? (Helloooooo, C.G.’s Divine Chocolate Meringue Cookies and Crazy Coconut Lime Macaroons. Nice to meet you. Man, I love a good macaroon, but I digress.) The notion of a SCHOOL OF DESSERTOLOGY. O! Sign me up. I think it’s all of the above, but first I have to tell you a bit about the book. And its creator, Janet Stein, has stopped by for one of my in-her-own-words type of features. (And can I just say that I LOVE what she says about cooking below? Well, there. I just said it.)

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This post is a Part Two, if you will, of yesterday’s post, in which the art work of graphic novelist Eric Wight was featured. Eric very graciously created a Mad Tea-Party image just for 7-Imp, and it’s here to the left. Don’t you just love it — and Alice’s face? I didn’t put it in yesterday’s post for different reasons, mostly because I knew I wanted to post about it today. But, as mentioned yesterday, it is already up at the site — in the header of this page. Go have a look and see how fabulous it is! That page, based on the size of our blog’s email in-box, gets a lot of traffic, so we hope lots of folks will see it.

You may remember that 7-Imp is collecting various Mad Tea-Party images to include in the headers of our site’s pages (though we committed to always leaving the classic Tenniel image on the main, or “home,” page of the site.) We also recently acquired illustrator Helen Oxenbury’s version of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea-Party, and it has also been added to the header of another page of our site, the “Note for Publishers & Authors” page. It looks like this below, but you can also see it here.

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Jules: This is how happy we are that the month of May has arrived. See? We’re swoony and floating.

It’s the first of the month again, and that’s when 7-Imp features a student illustrator or someone otherwise new to the field of children’s books. The art today comes from first-time author for young readers, Eric Wight. Here we have an illustration from his debut graphic novel, My Dead Girlfriend, which was listed among the 2008 Great Graphic Novels for Teens by YALSA. So, yeah, Jenny Wraith here is swoony and floating, but she’s also very much not alive.

As you can see, Eric’s not new to illustration, but this May he will be debuting a new chapter book/graphic novel hybrid series for younger readers, called Frankie Pickle. Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom, published by Simon & Schuster, will be released this week. “The Frankie Pickle series,” Eric told me, “is about a typical boy with an anything but typical imagination. Whenever faced with a challenge, Frankie becomes lost in fantasy -– which sometimes causes bigger trouble than what he started with. But, in the end, creative problem-solving always triumphs. The aspects of the chapter book that take place within Frankie’s imagination are told with sequential panels, while the parts of reality are prose. My intention for creating a hybrid was to seamlessly integrate words and illustrations in order to entice even the most reluctant of young readers. A father of two small children myself, I also set out to write a book that parents would find equally entertaining as they read it to their kids.”

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Well. It’s the last day of April, folks. Though I’m a big believer in poetry every day of the year, I’ll miss National Poetry Month 2009. I thought we’d say goodbye to it with the one and only matron of children’s literature, Mother Goose.

There are a whole slew, to be precise, of Mother Goose collections out there. And, by all means, if you want to know the weird and wonderful stories behind how these weird and wonderful rhymes came about, pick up a copy of Chris Roberts’ entertaining Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme (first published in 2004 by Granta Books). I blogged about it here, back in the Dark, Dark Times When Our Images Were Lamentably Small.

As I mentioned back then: Heavy Words Lightly Thrown is a raucous and very fun read. And you gotta love a book that takes its title from a Smiths’ song anyway. Who knew that the lullaby “Rock-a-bye, baby” (pictured left as British author and illustrator Tony Ross illustrated it) could be a warning about hubris? And that “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” above, is all about taxation? And that one saucy explanation for “Jack and Jill” is:

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Meet Bean. She’s tried so hard to get the attention of her best friend, Bella, who is a poet — and busy writing. “‘Yoo-hoo, Bella,’ said Bean. ‘See my new hat?’ ‘I don’t have time for hats, Bean,’ said Bella. ‘I’m writing new poems…I can’t think about rivers and moons when you are talking about hats,’ said Bella.” Bean really wants to go for a walk with her friend, and—even though Bella figures a walk to the pond would be lovely, indeed—she simply wants to finish her poems.

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I hate it when that happens. Remind me not to vacation in the outer reaches of the solar system again.

I’m here today, during this last week of National Poetry Month 2009, to share some poems from new picture book poetry collections. That opening poem is from Jack Prelutsky (with art from Jimmy Pickering), but I’ll get back to that in a moment. I’m here to talk just a bit about each title, but I’d rather let some art from each book—as well as some poetry, of course—do most of the talking.

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