Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

In all the many breakfast interviews I’ve conducted here in my own corner of cyberspace, I’m fairly certain I have never had an interviewee dish out two breakfasts at my 7-Imp cyber-table. But oh gracious, what a treat! Illustrator Shadra Strickland is here, and she has the following to say about what we’ll eat during our breakfast chat this morning:

I recently moved to Maryland, so my new breakfast of choice is crab cake benedict (poached eggs atop crab cakes over fried green tomatoes with hollandaise sauce) with coffee. My absolute favorite breakfast is fried cheese grits with biscuits at Enid’s.

And here are our choices: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the first Sunday of the month, which means it’s time to shine the spotlight on a student illustrator or recently-graduated one, and I’ve got the latter today. JooHee Yoon joins me today, and she’s just finished school and is setting out to find her place in the world of illustration. Will you help me welcome her?

Here she is to tell us a bit about herself (and here’s an October interview about her printing techniques for those wanting to learn more), and I’ll follow it up with a handful of images. I thank her for visiting. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning over at Kirkus I shine the spotlight on Norton Juster’s new picture book, Neville, illustrated by G. Brian Karas. The link is here.

Over at last week’s column, I asked writer, researcher, teacher, editor, producer/film-maker, and poet Steven Withrow in an abbreviated Q & A all about his new project, Poetry Advocates for Children & Young Adults, or PACYA. (As I noted at Kirkus last week, in the name of full disclosure I’m one of PACYA’s advisory board members, a follow-my-bliss, labor-of-love type of activity for sure. I’m happy to be a small part of the many efforts on this project.) The full interview is below. Enjoy.

Read the rest of this entry »

I do these breakfast interviews a lot—today’s guest has brought, as you can see here, her plain Kefir with Cinnamon Life cereal and blueberries—and my favorite question is the simplest one: “Are you an illustrator or author/illustrator?” The answers I’ve gotten over the years, which are surprisingly varied, tell me a lot about the interviewee. I’m not surprised that today’s visitor, author/illustrator Laura Ljungkvist, opts to call herself a “visual problem-solver.”

And that’s because Laura, also an editorial illustrator, creates picture books that are often picture puzzles, relying mostly on what one reviewer once called “acrobatic lines” (I love that description) to tell her tales. Her Follow the Line books (there are four total thus far, the most recent one released this past summer), as well as her debut picture book, feature one continuous line, beginning on the cover, running through the entire book to create shapes and tell and name and designate and identify, and ending on the back of the book. The lines zoom, circle, zigzag, twist, turn, and dance, encouraging reader participation and lots of examination for curious eyes. (In this recent blog post of hers, one can see she was destined to make books like this.)

This June 7-Imp post featured some of Laura’s editorial art, including her “Tables for Two” illustration for The New Yorker, which was clearly a predecessor to her Follow the Line books for children. It’s interesting to note how her editorial art informs her children’s book illustration — or perhaps vice versa. “It’s natural,” she told me around the time of that post, “for an editorial illustrator to write and illustrate their own books. After ‘solving your clients’ visual problems’ comes a time when you want to ‘solve your own problem.’ It’s the same process; only now you’re the boss!”

I thank Laura for visiting this morning. I’ll get the coffee brewing and get the basics from her while we set the table for seven questions over breakfast. Read the rest of this entry »

Who ever said that glitter on the cover of contemporary picture books is all bad? If it’s glittererized French pastries from Caldecott Honor artist Betsy Lewin, I’m all for it. And in the case of Leslie Muir’s Little Bitty Bakery, released in August by Hyperion, it is.

Both Betsy and Leslie are visiting me for breakfast this morning, and I’m hoping they brought along some of the pastries from the chef pictured above, ’cause that would mean I’d be chompin’ down on some éclairs, chocolate macaroons, and crème brûlée, seeing as how this pastry chef specializes in French delights. Mmm. In this rhymed tale, we learn that she’s worked all day on her birthday, not even stopping to make her own birthday cake, and—leaving her rolling pins laying quiet—she climbs into bed. But the mice in her bakery, for whom she often leaves out cheesecake, have a most delicious surprise planned for her, so all is not lost. Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’ve had a copy of Stephanie Brockway’s and Ralph Masiello’s The Mystic Phyles: Beasts (Charlesbridge, July 2011) for nearly four months now, but sometimes I’m just slow here at 7-Imp. Better late than never, right?

Also, better to post this around Halloween anyway. Mystical beasts. Mystery letters. Goblin spiders. Black cats of doom. Really evil bunyips. Strange fires in a creepy house. Cryptic necklaces that strengthen one against attacks. Weird things all-around. Yep, it’s fitting.

This is the story of Abigail Thaddeus, who lives with her eccentric grandmother and very controlling grandfather. Abigail can count her friends on one hand—okay, one finger—and her social life at her junior high school is really difficult, to say the least. But, after a black cat delivers her a note and a key, her life changes forever, launching her on a quest for … well, research. “What I’d like you to do is research,” an anonymous letter (“Your Devoted Friend,” it is signed) says. “You will start with mythical beasts….Find as much information as you can. Educate yourself. Investigate the mysteries, then discern for yourself the fact and fiction.”

The book is designed to look like a sort of scrapbook or journal of Abigail’s: Filled with drawings, journal entries, notes, confessions, details of her days at school and home, and her research, it is composed of original illustrations from Stephanie and Ralph, as well as re-printed photographs and illustrations (i.e., the 1936 photo in Popular Science of the bull made to look like a unicorn by Dr. W. F. Dove at the University of Maine). Young Abigail notes her research findings (pictured above is part of her research on Sea Monsters, including what you don’t see in that spread, “Species of Sea Monsters”), most followed by “My Incredibly Brilliant (But Not Very Scientific) Ideas” about what each creature could actually be: Sea Monsters, as reported by sailors over the years, could in fact have been giant squids, finally discovered in the mid-1850s. Or, my favorite, Bigfoot could in fact be a “worldwide hallucination…One person sees what they think is Bigfoot and runs home to the tell the story. The story spreads. Then other people claim to see it, either because they’re dying to see it, too, or they’re afraid of it, or it’s the first thing that pops into their heads when they spy something strange. Could this really happen on a worldwide scale?” Read the rest of this entry »

This morning over at Kirkus, I shine the spotlight on Steven Withrow’s worthy new venture, Poetry Advocates for Children & Young Adults, or PACYA. My Q&A with Withrow about PACYA is here, and next week I’ll have a bit more with Steven, too (here at 7-Imp).

In last week’s column, I wrote about Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s beautiful new picture book, Naamah and the Ark at Night (pictured above), an August Candlewick release, illustrated with watercolor collages by Holly Meade. Here are some spreads below, followed by spreads from another of Holly’s titles this year (April 2011, also from Candlewick), one she both wrote and illustrated, called If I Never Forever Endeavor.

The latter title, as Holly explained in her 2009 visit to 7-Imp, is “a story about a small bird and his internal dabate over whether to attempt that first flight from his safe nest — or not.” Those collage illustrations were rendered in watercolors and linoleum block printing.

Enjoy the art . . .

Read the rest of this entry »

I had the pleasure in early September of talking via phone with author/illustrator Brian Selznick about his latest title, Wonderstruck (Scholastic, September 2011), as well as a bit about the 2008 Caldecott winner The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007); his hybrid style, if you will, of picture book, novel, and graphic novel; and the upcoming film adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, titled simply Hugo, by Martin Scorsese.

7-Imp readers know that my interviews, particularly with illustrators, tend to consist of the same set of questions I send to everyone — and interviews I can conduct via email, too. If, in Bizarro World, 7-Imp’ing were a full-time venture, everyone would get questions customized specifically to them, but having a standard set of questions for all the folks with whom I conduct Q&As is the only way I can find time to post any interviews at all, since blogging comes after things like children and work.

However, with Selznick I had the opportunity to do a phone interview right at the release of Wonderstruck and didn’t want to pass it up. But it took a while to post, since after the interview’s completion, I had to find a transcriber to make it so that I could post it online for my readers. Finally, nearly two months later, here it is.

In a former professional life, I was a sign language interpreter. My Bachelor’s degree is actually in that very subject, and I spent years studying American Sign Language and Deaf Studies and worked in the field for a good while in East Tennessee. For that reason, several of the questions below—and a good deal of my conversation with Brian—is about his research into Wonderstruck and the deafness aspect of the novel, which I wrote about over in a September Kirkus column. That link is here.

Also, I should quickly note two things: First, my landline phone, during our conversation, decided it’d had enough of me, and when I called Brian back on my cell, he and his editor ever-so kindly recorded the latter part of the conversation on their end. This meant that my final questions and comments were not recorded, but as you can see below, I was able to piece together what I had asked him. Secondly, the transcriber did edit out things like “um”s—my own and Brian’s—but we generally left intact the casual, conversational tone that was this phone interview.

I thank Brian for his time. Fellow illustration junkies will note that I’ve laced the interview with a bit of art, with thanks to Brian and Scholastic. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

That “I” up there is for “impossible” in my world today, because I think that it’s altogether impossible that “abecedarianship” is a word, but who knows.

Yep, I’ve got two alphabet books before breakfast, a quickie post filled with lots of art — and both books with retro-tastic illustrations. I was jonesin’ for some retro art today, and … well, here we go. Paul Thurlby and Luciano Lozano are our guys this morning.

Pictured at the very top of the post is the letter “I” from the hard-working Ministry of Letters. (For the record, his favorite words are “Itchy,” “Ice cream,” and “Icicles,” and his favorite musical instrument is the Irish Harp.) The Ministry of Letters is featured in Al MacCuish’s Operation Alphabet (published by Thames & Hudson), illustrated by Luciano Lozano and designed by Jim Bletsas.

Lazona is a freelance illustrator, based in Barcelona. Jim Bletsas—how much do I love that the designer is listed on the front page of this picture book?—is a designer living in London. MacCuish is a Creative Director at a creative agency in London and also makes his home there.

And under the “I” up there is Paul Thurlby’s letter “E.” If you haven’t seen Paul Thurlby’s Alphabet, released by Templar/Candlewick in October, and you’re a fan of alphabet books and/or retro illustrations (and lovingly-designed books), you’re in for a treat. Paul also lives in England. Here below is the cover and one more spread from Paul’s book, which is a straight-up alphabet book, but it stands out for its sleek design, clever concept art (note the rabbit below), and as I’ve already said, its retro vibe. Thurlby states in a closing Artist’s Note that he strove to make his alphabet stand out, so he “decided to pursue the challenge of fusing the object of the word with the shape of the letter.” Read the rest of this entry »

How do you introduce illustrators like Leo and Diane Dillon? Well, they’re not here visiting today (I wish), but how, I wonder, do I introduce their art without sounding like a blithering starstruck halfwit? Their work is simply stunning and quite often breathtaking and always beautiful. They are living legends, who have illustrated more than sixty books for children and are two-time Caldecott Medal winners.

If you’re a fan, as I clearly am, you’ll want to see a copy of their latest illustrated title, written by the great Patricia C. McKissack, who herself has also acquired a slew of impressive awards in her career, including a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award. It’s called Never Forgotten, was released by Schwartz & Wade this month, and has been met with starred reviews all-around.

Written in verse (“a searing cycle of poems” Kirkus calls it), it’s the chilling story of a young African boy taken by slave traders to America. Read the rest of this entry »