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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You guys! Do you know that there is a newly-illustrated version of Daniel Pennac’s perfectly perfect book, The Rights of the Reader? I originally read this text of Pennac’s, first published in France as Comme un roman in 1992, as Better Than Life, published by Stenhouse Publishers in 1999, I believe it was. Yes, you school librarians and teachers probably know this text well. And, if you don’t, you likely are familiar with—or have at least heard of—Pennac’s beloved Reader’s Bill of Rights. Perhaps, it just occurred to me, it’s even one of those love-it or hate-it-type books, as what Pennac is suggesting for education is quite radical, going against the grain of the way reading is generally taught in schools today. But put me squarely in the love-it camp. And, as I’m having a busier-than-normal week, I can’t go into all the reasons why, my Ode to This Book, so to speak. But consider this my brief barbaric yawp on the 7-Imp roof-top about Pennac’s book.

Most importantly, I haven’t even said yet: This new edition—released by Candlewick at the end of last year, I believe it was—is illustrated by Quentin Blake. Be still my heart. I guess I was slow in getting to it, but I’m happy I eventually found it. And it has been translated fearlessly by Sarah Adams.

What I do have time to share is this wonderful excerpt, which has an all-new meaning to me, now that I’m a parent:

“…{T}he ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were little—set time, set gestures—was like a prayer. A sudden truce after the battle of the day, a reunion lifted out of the ordinary. We savored the brief moment of silence before the storytelling began, then our voice, sounding like itself again, the liturgy of chapters. . . . Yes, reading a story every evening fulfilled the most beautiful, least selfish, and least speculative function of prayer: that of having our sins forgiven. We didn’t confess, we weren’t looking for a piece of eternity, but it was a moment of communion between us, of textual absolution, a return to the only paradise that matters: intimacy. Without realizing it, we were discovering one of the crucial functions of storytelling and, more broadly speaking, of art in general, which is to offer a respite from human struggle.

Love wore a new skin.

And it was free.

Ah. Beautiful. Enough said.

Except…Amen.

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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Can you believe it’s been a whole year since the last time I broke out the marquee tag? Let’s see if I still remember how this works…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JULES!!!!

Yup, there we go.

Jules, for this year’s celebration, I invited Fountains of Wayne to sing a song in your honor:

(Ya’ll should know, if you don’t already, that Jules is a nickname for Julie.) What I love about that song is that, not only does it have your name in it, but it describes EXACTLY the kind of friend you are. You’ve always got my back. Not that I’m special – you’ve pretty much got the entire blogosphere’s back, too.

Oh, and guess who else? Are you ready for this? It’s your boyfriend, Barry Manilow:

I know, right? I didn’t think he’d be available, what with his being 197 years old and his tickets costing about $1000 and all, but when he heard it was your birthday, he was all over it. He said, “Oh yeah, Julie! Wasn’t she that little girl I winked at in the audience of a concert that time? ANYTHING for her! She’s my only fan under 60!”

See, even Barry appreciates how you’ve got HIS back, too.

What I’m trying to say here, is: you’re the best friend and blog-partner a girl could ever ask for. I hope I don’t take you for granted, but I probably do. So for this birthday, to remind you and everyone else how awesome you are, I’m proclaiming…

MY TOP 7 FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT JULES

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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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I’ve been reading Container Gardening, the latest collection of poetry from journalist, poet, and playwright Ellen Steinbaum (published last year by CustomWords). Ellen also, until very recently and for almost a decade, was a columnist for the Boston Globe, writing at “City Type,” conversations with Boston-area writers and poets. (Those columns are archived, for those interested, at her site.)

Ellen’s poetry is new to me, but I ripped right through this collection and I’m even currently re-reading it. I find many of these poems—whose themes often swirl around life’s most perplexing elements, memory, the rush of time, loss, and hope—to be moving. At her site, she writes, “I think of my new book, Container Gardening, as a collection of poems about what is perishable, what endures, and what makes us who we are. After my first book, Afterwords {pictured below}, which dealt very specifically with loss, these speak of how we pick up the pieces and go on to create the private and public worlds we inhabit.”

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