Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Jules: You want to know what I’ve noticed lately here at 7-Imp? I’ve noticed that I’ve been posting quite a bit of art from illustrators or author/illustrators whom I’ve already interviewed or in some way featured previously. Robert Neubecker. Adam Rex. Grace Lin. Jeremy Tankard. Ed Young. Dan Santat. Jarrett J. Krosoczka. Whew. The list goes on. I wouldn’t feature them in the first place if I didn’t love their work, and I always end my correspondence with them (on, say, interviews) by inviting them to stop by any time, since I like to keep up with what they’re doing (and since I also otherwise try to do what I can to feature new artists). Well, Dave McKean is no exception. You may remember that he stopped by this year in March — with quite possibly the Most Art Ever in a 7-Imp Interview, as in you can just take your time in going to get yourself a cup of coffee or pipin’ hot tea while that interview LOADS. (And his art is so beloved all over the world that the 7-Imp McKean-interview gets linked to from places like this on a pretty consistent basis. Man, I wish I could read ’em.)

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Hey, wanna read something disturbing? Kinda spooky? Good. Check this out. It’s “Incubus” by Craig Arnold:

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs
on the peg over hers, and he’s inside.

She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on,
buys herself a minute looking for two
matching cups for the lime-flower tea,
not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves
and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze.
She talks a wall around her, twists the string
tighter around the tea bag in her spoon.
But every conversation has to break
somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa
he sits, warming his hands around the cup
he hasn’t tasted yet, and listens on
with such an exasperating show of patience
it’s almost a relief to hear him ask it:
If you’re not using your body right now
maybe you’d let me borrow it for a while?

It isn’t what you’re thinking. No, it’s worse.

Click here to read the rest.

I don’t have much to say about this yet, because I just discovered it myself, and I’m still trying to get my mind around it. I’ll tell you this much, though: I like it. I think it works, either as a literal supernatural tale, or as a metaphor for a specific kind of bad relationship.

What do you think?

(p.s.: In case you hadn’t heard, Craig Arnold disappeared a few months ago while hiking solo in Japan. So, while thinking about this poem, maybe also spare a thought for the sudden loss of a young talent, and condolences for his friends and family.)

Since I’m all about telling you what to do today, I suggest you should check out what the other poetry peeps are posting too. Tricia’s on round-up duty at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

This is illustrator Robert Neubecker’s cover art for first-time author Shellie Braeuner’s Great Dog Wash, released by Simon & Schuster in July. Remember when East Tennessee author/illustrator Lisa Horstman stopped by in early July? I’ll say again: 7-Imp seems to have readers all over the world, but it’s particularly thrilling for me to shine the spotlight on local (to me) authors, and Shellie is even closer, y’all. (We’re talkin’ Tennessee here; you know I have to say “y’all.”) Shellie, the recipient of the Cheerios Spoonfuls of Stories Children’s Book New Author Contest, lives right here in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s here to say a bit about herself today, and Robert—who, you may remember, stopped by last year, making all kinds of illustrators envious of his lovely studio—sent me some art from the book. You all know already how I feel about Robert’s art, but I’ll also say that again: His art, brimming with life and color and possessing a child-like sensibility, makes me happy, indeed. It’s like Marc Simont on a digital Crayola high. And I don’t think there could have possibly been a better choice than Robert for illustrating Shellie’s title.

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What would most of the world’s children’s librarians and teachers do without Caldecott medalist Gerald McDermott’s tales? He’s not here today, having coffee with me. (Bummer. I can’t always get my way.) I hope he can stop by 7-Imp one day soon, but this post is sort of a tribute to his books by way of his latest title, Pig-Boy: A Trickster Tale from Hawaiʻi (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Pig-Boy—drawn from the stories of the shape-shifting Kamapuaʻa, a divine trickster-hero in Hawaiian mythology—was released in April.

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Jules: These are artist Emilio Santoyo’s boys of summer. Emilio, a freelance illustrator and designer from California, is visiting this morning, as it’s the first Sunday of the month when I like to shine the spotlight on student illustrators or illustrators just moving beyond student-dom.

There is a certain manic energy and seeming spontaneity to Emilio’s work that drew my eye. And with such bright, happy colors, too, which kind of wink at us beneath his edgier pieces. Emilio graduated from the Art Center College of Design in 2007. Since then, he has been doing freelance illustration and design for small and big clients.

“Projects I take on,” Emilio told me, “can be as small as contributing a weekly comic for a newspaper, new product for my online store, to working on a full-blown commercial for a bank. I love new challenges, and that’s what keeps me moving.” Check out Emilio’s derby: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s this friend of mine. We share books and music. I do that with a lot of friends, but he and I will actually swap a CD or a poetry anthology and keep it for long periods of time, then returning it with many new thoughts to share. For the longest time, we swapped this nearly perfect CD (Holy Celtic Folk Music! It’s over twenty years old now. Does it get any better than “Fisherman’s Blues”? No, my friends, it just doesn’t.) And he once returned my copy of Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit with his own pencilled notes in the margins. I suppose some people might chafe at such boldness, but I loved it. It made the book even more special, and the next time I read it, I read it in all new ways.

I’ve had his copy of Charlotte Matthews’ poetry anthology Green Stars for a length of time now that is perhaps verging on inexcusable. But today, for Poetry Thursday-Slash-Friday (why not post one day early?), I have one of her poems to share. If you like it, you can thank me and my patient, forgiving friend, Shannon.

Charlotte, a writing instructor at The University of Virginia, won the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ 2007 New Writing Award for Poetry for Green Stars, released in 2005 by Iris Press in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This poem, “Two Moments with Strangers,” which I once briefly mentioned before at 7-Imp, was originally published in Potomac Review — but is also included in the anthology Shannon probably wishes I’d give back already. This is a haunting story poem, one of my favorites of Matthews’.

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Want to know the recipe for taking a remarkably old, classic, beloved fable and making it fresh and sassy and exciting — and seem as if it’s all-new? Well, wait a sec. If I knew that, I’d be writing picture books. But one way to do it is the following: You get the very prolific Caldecott medalist Ed Emberley and his daughter, who herself has created more than thirty books for children, and you convince them to create a book together.

Rebecca and Ed Emberley’s Chicken Little has been out a while (released by Roaring Book Press in March), but even though I’m just now getting around to this post, at least I’m getting to it, huh? Because I mean, really, dear friends. Did you take a look at that cover? The Emberley’s version of Chicken Little is wonderfully weird and a laugh-and-a-half. Or, as Betsy Bird put it back in March, “this book is utterly wacked, in the best possible sense.” I say that the Emberleys’ version can join hands with Scieszka’s equally wacked-out version of the tale from this classic. These two versions have all the spunk needed to revive a tale that is possibly as old as the 6th century B.C. (At least the story’s fundamental elements appeared that long ago.)

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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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Jules: Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, 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.

Today, 7-Imp welcomes author/illustrator Lita Judge, who is here to share a bit of sneak-peek art from her forthcoming title, as well as some spreads from her most recent picture book (and the second title she’s both written and illustrated), Pennies for Elephants (Hyperion, June 2009). Pennies, based on actual events of the turn of the last century, tells the story of two young siblings, living in Boston in 1914, named Henry and Dorothy. They had only seen elephants “once in real life, when Grams took Henry and me to the circus. They were my favorites. Henry’s too,” says Dorothy when she sees a newspaper boy one winter afternoon on a street corner, yellling, “Pennies for elephants! Pennies for elephants! Send in your pennies, your nickels, and dimes!” It turns out that the Orfords, noted animal trainers there in Boston, were retiring from show business, yet the city of Boston couldn’t afford to buy the pachyderms—the performing elephants, named Mollie, Tony, and Waddy—for the zoo. Mr. and Mrs. Orford, however, were going to give the children of the city two months to collect $6,000 so that they could visit the animals at the zoo one day. Henry, then, gets a bright idea, and
“{w}hen Henry got an idea in his head, it was like fuel to a Studebaker.” Thus begins the tale of how the children in Boston saved their nickels, pennies, and dimes to purchase the elephants for the city — beginning with Henry and Dorothy’s “entire life savings combined,” one dollar and fourteen cents.

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Are ya’ll sick of hearing about how awesome my job is yet? Well, tough, because I have to share this with people who will appreciate it: I got to handle a postcard written by Walt Whitman today. Just a quick little note he jotted off to a Cornell librarian, no big thing. But his signature, right there, large as life – I kinda teared up a little.

It got me thinking, and talking to a colleague about, Whitman and his place in the American poetic canon. I’ll admit, I don’t love every single poem the man wrote. He’s got an odd voice: part journalist, part transcendentalist, with a liberal dose of frank sexuality. But there’s no denying his groundbreaking contributions to the free verse form, and the use of poetry as sociopolitical commentary. And at his best, he can seriously stir up the blood.

Like in this one, “Beat! Beat! Drums!” Take it, Walt:

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

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