Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

In yesterday’s post, or my attempt to spread some laughs this week via cartoon art, I intended to include a few more titles, but I talked long enough for two of them. So, here’s my Part Two to that post, celebrating the cartoon-style of illustrating in picture books currently on shelves.

The art opening this post is from Jean Van Leeuwen’s Chicken Soup, illustrated by David Gavril (Abrams, May 2009), which Publishers Weekly described as a “marvel of suspense and silliness” and a “kid-pleasing read-aloud.” All the chickens are on the run, because the farm-yard rumor mill is that Mrs. Farmer has pulled her big cooking pot off the shelves and is about to make some chicken soup. All the chickens, that is, except for Little Chickie, who has the sniffles, and you know how that goes: One doesn’t much feel like skedaddling out of a henhouse and all across the farm when one has a cold in her beak. “Run anyway!” advises Red Hen. And so Little Chickie runs. Lots of sneezing is involved, since—every time the animals think they’ve got themselves well-hidden—Little Chickie lets loose with a raucous “AAH-CHOO!”

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I don’t know about you, but the news this week — both from my little sphere of friends and the world-at-large — is bringing me down. Reminding me that life is, simply and fundamentally, un-flippin’-fair. (How about that infixing there?) I thought, for that reason, I’d shine a spotlight today on some light-hearted cartoon-esque picture book titles. Wait. There is no “esque” about it. These are illustrators working very much in a cartoon style. Perhaps they will contribute a laugh to your day. They certainly try, and they certainly did so for me.

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This is art from illustrator Pamela Zagarenski. I fell in love with her detailed, intricate, folk-art-esque mixed-media art—with the highly stylized characters therein—the first time I saw it. Have you all seen Joyce Sidman’s Red Sings from Treetrops: A Year in Colors, the most recent illustrated title of Pamela’s? It was released by Houghton Mifflin in April, and it is a wonder. It’s a poetry collection which celebrates the changing of the seasons — but through the lens of color. And I mean color in ways you hadn’t considered experiencing it — hearing, tasting, and even smelling it.

In SPRING,
Red sings
from treetops:
cheer-cheer-cheer,
each note dropping
like a cherry
into my ear…

And, in Summer, “Yellow melts / everything it touches . . . / smells like butter, / tastes like salt.”

If you’re not familiar with Sidman’s work, you’ll be treating yourself to read more of her titles. Check out these links for more information: Read the rest of this entry »

Jules: See my new doll? This is my kick #1 this week and a gift from illustrator Katherine Tillotson. I received the doll—we’ll call her Mrs. Petal Pauline McWheely—just yesterday as a thank-you for today’s feature: Katherine’s here today to share some art from her newly-illustrated picture book by author Megan McDonald, It’s Picture Day Today! (to be released in June by Atheneum Books).

Mrs. Petal Pauline McWheely has a lot in common with the students in McDonald’s picture book — students with names like Buttons and Feathers. Yup, it’s a school full of art materials: Clothespins, Easter grasses, glittering stars, twisty yarns, and lots of wheely things. They all gather for the class pic, only to discover that Glue is missing. (Glue is a popular guy, as you can probably imagine.) It’s pretty much mayhem (and kudos to Katherine for keeping it interesting; I’m no artist, but it seems to me it’d be challenging to animate things like fuzzy pom-poms and string), until the picture gets snapped right before the book’s close, which opens up into a four-page spread — and which I won’t give away. But it has a lot to do with how Mrs. McWheely is structured here: Making order out of scraps, out of chaos, out of what you thought was little to nothing.

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I’m a big advocate of reading poetry to children. At home and at work — when I was in a school library, that is. One of my favorite school librarians, under whom I once interned, would open up his time with his middle-school students by simply reading a poem to them each time they visited the library. No analysis, no quizzes. Just hear and enjoy and savor. And I fervently hope my girls grow up to enjoy and read poetry on their own. Instilling an appreciation for poetry in young children is really quite simple, too — and very fun. Read it to them. Read read read poems. Play with the rhymes. Emphasize the sounds of words. Poetry celebrates the rhythms and sounds of language and word play, so if you read it a lot—outloud—and dance and snap and clap and play, they’re gonna get it. And they’ll likely enjoy it.

I’ve been reading Favorite Poems: Old and New, originally published in 1957 by Doubleday/Random House. The poems were selected by Helen Ferris, and it was illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. It includes over seven-hundred poems divided into eighteen categories—from silly to somber, from story poems to scary poems to Bible prose, from Mother Goose to Walter de la Mare, from Shakespeare and Dickinson and Tolkien to Carl Sandburg and Lewis Carroll and T.S. Eliot (and JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING in between)—and is quite the comprehensive introduction to poetry. Visiting its home at Amazon, one can see that it inspires such user-review statements as, this is “PURE nostalgia!!!” and “the ONLY children’s anthology you’ll need.”

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I love that author/illustrator David McPhail describes himself as a misanthrope. Not only because statements like that from people who create books for children help eradicate this notion that all of them—or anyone else working near or around children, for that matter—live in little pink bubbles, surrounded by severely cute and insanely fluffy bunnies. (Seriously, the average 7-Imp reader knows they don’t, but I think that notion still prevails with the general public.) But also because of the element of surprise that resides in that statement: McPhail’s work is often infused with a sweet affection, sensitivity, and warmth and often revolves around the themes of friendship, cooperation, and familial relationships — often, but not always, animal characters, for which he is probably best-known. Not that misanthropes can’t appreciate cooperation, mind you. I guess I’m just saying: I flippin’ love it when someone surprises you.

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Jules: Happy (upcoming) Memorial Day and happy three-day-weekend to one and all! We hope folks are around today to come kickin’ with us, and we certainly hope everyone is having a relaxing and sunny weekend thus far.

Oh, wait. Yeah. I should have introduced the penguin here. The penguin with the plunger. That’s Patrick. If you think he looks as if he might be sleepwalking, well…you’re right. He’s got sleep issues. He’s also got his own picture book.

And I’m going to let author/illustrator Sarah Ackerley tell you all about him. Sarah—who grew up in Texas, studied art at The University of Texas at Austin, and moved to California last year—is here to tell us what she’s done, what got her inspired to make books for children (here’s a hint), and what’s to-come.

And we thank her kindly for stopping by. Ladies and gentlemen, with no further ado, we welcome Sarah Ackerley . . .

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It’s hard for me to admit this out loud, but here it is: I’m terribly vain. Not in the usual sense of the word. I mean I am preoccupied with my appearance and with others’ perception of me, but I tend to see and expect the worst of myself. And I hate it. I hate that I even care what I look like, that I actually get depressed that I don’t look like Gwyneth Paltrow or Angelina Jolie or whatever impossible standard of physical attractiveness the media are currently obsessed with. Shouldn’t it be enough that I’m decently healthy, that I have a husband and family and friends that I love, a job that I enjoy, a nice place to live, and that people keep writing great books for me to read? Do I really have to be conventionally pretty, too, to call myself happy?

Sometimes it’s nice to have a reminder that there really is more than one definition of beauty. So here’s “Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell:

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

(Click here to read the rest.)

The lovely Susan Taylor Brown is on Poetry Friday Round-Up duty this week at her blog, Susan Writes. Enjoy some true beauty over there.

Speaking for myself only here, I’ll be on a blog vacation all week. (There is some kind of name for this, but I always screw it up: “blogvation” or some such thing? I’ll hit it old-skool and just say: Jules won’t be posting this week, yo.)

Don’t miss, in the meantime, the Summer Blog Blast Tour 2009. The master schedule is here at Chasing Ray. You’re in good hands with all those bloggers, I tell you what.

I hope everyone has a happy and prolific (but only if you want it to be) week. Curtsey. Peace sign. Tip o’ the hat. I’ll see you on Sunday when 7-Imp goes a-kickin’.

Jules: We have an author and illustrator duo visiting us this morning, shining a light on some nonfiction today: The creators of Bubble Homes and Fish Farts (released by Charlesbridge in February of this year), author Fiona Bayrock, who has written many science books for children, and author/illustrator Carolyn Conahan. Yeah, I said fish farts. In her March review of this book, Jen Robinson, one of our pretty regular kickers here on Sundays, wrote: “Fiona Bayrock has taken a unique premise, researched it to find lots of interesting, factual examples, and then added (with Carolyn Conahan’s help) both humor and heart.” Well, I say she nailed it with that statement. Just when you thought you understood all there was to know about bubbles and their purpose in this world, along comes Fiona. PSYCHE! Or “paradigm shift,” in the words of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. (Can I yell “PARADIGM SHIFT!” like someone would yell “PSYCHE!” Nah. Doesn’t flow well.) Yes, where was I? Fiona shows us the varied, weird, wild, wonderful, and all-around funky ways animals use bubbles. Sixteen different ways, to be precise, from the star-nosed mole’s bubble-blowing from its sniffer (note: that is not a rigorous scientific term) in order to find food to the the rattlebox moth’s “glob of yellow bubbles” that seep from its head as a warning to predators — and lots of other bubble action in between.

I want to say you’ll be blown away by this title, but then Andrea and Mark, the dynamic duo over at Just One More Book, beat me to that very necessary pun.

I asked both Fiona and Carolyn to talk a bit about the book today, and Carolyn is also here to share some watercolors from it, as well as a few sneak peeks at some of her other projects.

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