Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

A friend who made me a holiday mix CD put a version of Patty Griffin’s “Mary” on it, sung live with Shawn Colvin, and I was very pleased to hear it. It’s one of my favorite songs in all the universe, and it’d been a while since I’d heard it. I’ve been listening all week and wanted to share it today in this brief Poetry Friday entry.

This is a song about Griffin’s grandmother (or so I’ve read, or maybe heard, since—as Eisha can tell you—I like to rub it in how many times I’ve seen Patty Griffin live, mwahaha). It’s also about the Mary, and it’s a song that ran (happily and constantly) through my head during my honeymoon stay in Rome and Florence almost ten years ago, having seen a lot of early Medieval art depicting the Virgin Mary. I’m a Big Sap: This song makes me well up every time I hear it. I mean, EVERY time. To me, it’s many things — but primarily a nod to the complicated art of motherhood. I don’t know what defines a mother better than Patty’s line “and always you stay.” (That brings to mind this from Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, which I’ve shared before: “Walking to the honey house, I concentrated on my feet touching down on the hard-caked dirt in the driveway, the exposed tree roots, fresh-watered grass, how the earth felt beneath me, solid, alive, ancient, right there every time my foot came down. There and there and there, always there. The things a mother should be.”)

Here she is performing it live with Natalie Maines. (I know little to nothing about Maines, but this is the best live video version out there, and she does a fine job of singing back-up harmony here.)

Some of the lyrics: Read the rest of this entry »

It seems hardly anyone is around now, and folks are very busy this time of year, but I’m here once again this week, for whomever might be lurking, to check in with British author/illustrator—and one of my Most Favorites Ever—Mini Grey. Mini visited 7-Imp in October of last year, and I’ve been following her book releases this year as well. First off in 2009, there was Egg Drop, released by Knopf Books for Young Readers in July and originally published in Great Britain in 2002. In fact, as you’ll see below, it was Mini’s first picture book release. More on that in a sec.

Let’s start with her very most recent illustrated title, not even out in the States yet, Hilaire Belloc’s classic cautionary tale of a poem, originally written in 1907, Jim (Who Ran Away from His Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion). It was released in October of this year in the UK by Jonathan Cape/Random House, and I’ve actually got a copy in hand, though it’s not available here on this side of the pond, as they say.

As you can see on the cover there, you’ve been warned: “Contains a dangerous beast and a miserable end.” If this book had existed when Adrienne Furness and I composed our “Straight Talk About the Food Chain” / Slightly Demented Picture Books post, also one of my Most Favorites Ever, boy howdy and howdy boy, this would have been at the top of our protagonists-getting-eaten list. As Adrienne said in that post, cautionary tales make great sense to kids, though some parents often get squirmy over the violence. This very tongue-in-cheek, black-humored poem, as you can read here in its entirety, is one of Belloc’s no-holds-barred humorous cautionary tales. (Think Roald Dahl for tone.) He wrote many, which were later illustrated by Edward Gorey, and they were said to be intended for children — but most appreciated, in all their satire, by the grown-ups around them.

Mini seems to have delighted in illustrating the classic poem, and she doesn’t hold back. See what I mean? (Click to enlarge each spread.)

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For the past several weeks, I’ve been highlighting the recent work of folks whose work has been featured previously at the blog — either in some kind of feature or interview. They happened to all be men, and so I determined to shine the spotlight on some women. Since it’s so close to the holidays and I’m generally disorganized, I don’t have as many women lined up here: In fact, I’ve got Lauren Castillo and Leslie Evans today, and I hope to bring you some work from the delightfully subversive and always surprising Mini Grey very soon. And that’s it. But perhaps this is something I can continue in the new year.

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{Quick Note from Jules Here and I Mean Quick Because I Don’t Intend to Run My Mouth Before Each of Steven’s Interviews: For those 7-Imp readers who missed this recent announcement, writer and researcher and teacher and editor and producer/film-maker and poet (whew again) Steven Withrow will be contributing one interview every month to 7-Imp. He’ll be featuring a children’s publishing professional, or an expert from a related area, who is not primarily known as an author or illustrator—a publisher, editor, agent, art director, designer, critic, scholar, professor, librarian, bookseller, printer, marketer, museum curator, etc. (Suggestions are always welcome, he says.) I’m delighted. I think we’re all going to learn a lot, and all I had to do was format this interview! Yup, it’s all Steven. And I really enjoyed reading it. I’ll see you all soon. Until then, here’s Steven, and I thank both him and Susan for the visit…}

Welcome, Susan Sherman, to 7-Imp. Susan has been designing children’s books since 1977. Currently, she is art director at Charlesbridge Publishing in Watertown, Massachusetts. Over the years, she has been art director of children’s trade books at Houghton Mifflin and creative director at Little, Brown and Company. She also has her own graphic design business, Ars Agassiz.

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First of all, Adam Rex made that image. I love it so much that I want to take it to the Peppermint Prom. But more on that at the post’s close.

Well, okay, so Sam-I-Am’s superstar friend isn’t really penning a tell-all book, but I am happy to share this morning that Elizabeth Bird of A Fuse #8 Production, Peter D. Sieruta of Collecting Children’s Books, and I up and landed ourselves a book deal last week — with lots of help from our agent, the valiant Mr. Stephen Barbara, and after lots of hard work and wordsmithing this Fall in creating the proposal. We got this good news last week but wanted to coordinate today’s posts about it at our respective blogs: You’ll see at Betsy’s blog (via a very enlightening infomercial) and Peter’s blog today that they’re announcing it as well.

We’re happy to say that Candlewick will be publishing the book, and we’ll be working with Associate Publisher & Editorial Director Liz Bicknell. We couldn’t be more pleased and feel like Liz is the perfect fit for our book. (And I’m really looking forward to writing more with Betsy and Peter. I’d write an auto repair manual with the two of them. To say I’m happy Betsy contacted us last summer and said, “hey, let’s write a book!” is the year’s biggest understatement.)

Now, to tell you a bit about the book (straight from our proposal itself): Tentatively titled Wild Things! : The True, Untold Stories Behind the Most Beloved Children’s Books and Their Creators, it will look at the world of children’s lit, past and present, and examine some of its untold tales — with humor, celebration, respect, occasional irreverence, and always great affection for the field. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, a 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.

When I want those picture books in which gentleness reigns, I like to turn to Jim LaMarche. His illustrations for Albert, written by Donna Jo Napoli in 2001, are some of my favorites. (And I have Eisha to thank for my copy of that title.) And LaMarche has illustrated a whole slew of other widely-acclaimed titles, as well. In fact, at this time of year, there’s always Bear’s First Christmas by Robert Kinerk, which I posted about here in 2007, but I digress.

In Lost and Found (Chronicle Books, July 2009), which he both wrote and illustrated, LaMarche brings us three dog stories. In the first, Molly, the beautiful golden retriever of a little girl named Anna, manages to lead the way home when the girl runs away after a spat with her mother and gets lost:

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Welcome, dear readers, to an interview I very much enjoyed formatting. I’m not only a long-time fan of Barry Moser’s printwork and watercolors, but I also particularly enjoyed reading his honest and insightful responses to my questions. Though you will read below his perfectly understand-
able reasons for expatriating from the South, a part of Moser still feels affinity towards it; he, in fact, grew up in East Tennessee (born in Chattanooga, to be exact, in 1940), where I also lived for quite some time. And, speaking of the South, his response to the Pivot pearly-gates question is my New Favorite Ever.

Moser is not only an accomplished and renowned illustrator (in both painting and print-making); he is also a printer, typographer, calligraphy artist, designer, lecturer, author, essayist, and teacher. And a “booksmith,” as he told Anna Olswanger in this 1999 interview, adding “{m}y skin goes a little rankly on ‘children’s book illustrator.’ That’s an artificial subdivision. You’re either a book illustrator, or you’re not.” As the owner of the private Pennyroyal Press, his own imprint, Moser strives “to do…as beautiful a book as I can possibly do” (source here); he has illustrated and/or designed over three hundred titles for both children and adults.

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A quick spotlight today on one of my favorite picture books from ’09 — and one of the funniest. Red Ted and the Lost Things (Candlewick, November 2009) comes to us from the wise and prolific and award-winning Michael Rosen, the former British Children’s Laureate, who wrapped up his term in June of this year. It’s illustrated by one Joel Stewart, who is, tragically, new to me. I instantly fell in love with his graphic picture-book style, his soft-focus velvety touch, and I MUST learn more about him and his previously-illustrated titles.

The book tells the story of a bear, named Ted, who is separated from the little girl who loves him, Stevie, and left on the seat of a train. As you can see here below, he ends up on a high shelf in the Place for Lost Things — or so the forsaken Crocodile, all too familiar with the Place for Lost Things, tells him. “I’ve been here a very long time, and no one has ever come to get me,” Crocodile tells him in one arrestingly lonely spread, depicting the many shelves in the crowded Place for Lost Things with Red Ted and Crocodile as the only flashes of color in the top right corner. In fact, Crocodile’s been there so long, he’s forgotten his name. {Note: To make it easier to see, I’ve separated the following spread into two details. Please click on each image to see the entire spread from which the details come.}

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This is author/illustrator Cynthia von Buhler’s self-portrait-slash-doll. I invited Cynthia to 7-Imp this morning to share some art from her latest title, the downright luxurious But Who Will Bell the Cats? (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children; September 2009). This title has been met with such lavish reviews as: “Dark, complicated mixed-media illustrations bring a humorously creepy feel to the tale…this story of an indefatigable mouse should find a welcome place on the shelves of any castle…or library” (Horn Book); “Children will find a lot to discover in the details, even after repeated readings” (School Library Journal); “Beautiful and haunting with the kinds of images kids will pore over, there ain’t nothing like it out there today. A new fable in an all-new style” (Betsy Bird at A Fuse #8 Production); “Young readers will pore over this one again and again” (Kirkus)…Oh, I could go on.

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Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, a 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.

I think it’s been a while since I’ve showcased comics or graphic-novel art here at 7-Imp, so today I’m checking in with Neil Numberman and Aaron Reynolds, who have created Creepy Crawly Crime (Henry Holt, April 2009), the first title in a new series, called Joey Fly (Private Eye), which Kirkus calls an “auspicious series kick-off” and Publishers Weekly called in their starred review “a wowser of a debut.” Pictured here is Joey, about to begin his work-day. You can click on the image to enlarge and read the text.

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