Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Harry Bliss hardly needs an introduction to parents and the teachers and librarians of elementary-aged children. His first illustrated title, A Fine, Fine School, written by Sharon Creech and published by HarperCollins in 2001, became a New York Times bestseller, and he has gone on to illustrate many other best-selling titles, including the popular Diary of a Worm (2003), Diary of a Spider (2005), and Diary of a Fly (2007), all written by Doreen Cronin. His most recent illustrated title was last year’s Louise, The Adventures of a Chicken, written by Kate DiCamillo, the tale of an intrepid chicken, longing for adventure, who leaves her comfortable nest and goes to sea. Harry’s forthcoming title—as in, on shelves this month—is Luke on the Loose, a TOON Book from Raw Junior, which Harry both wrote and illustrated.

But many people will also recognize Harry’s cartoon work: He is a cartoonist and cover artist for The New Yorker. In fact, his collection of New Yorker covers can be viewed at his web site, as well as many cartoons and peeks into his illustrated children’s titles. Harry also signed on with Tribune Media Services to create a self-titled strip, featuring his single-panel gag cartoons, Bliss. (The Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune are a few of the newspapers which run it.) The Bliss collection can also be seen at Harry’s site.

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This is a quick note today to share some of the most very excellent kidlitosphere events going on this month, most of them having to do with National Poetry Month. I mean, really, the kidlitosphere ROCKS. If it were an animal, it would be a rocknocerous. If it were a store, it’d be Rock-Mart. If it were a small village in the distant hinterlands of the British Isles somewhere, it’d be Rockingham. Its rockositude is, quite frankly, off the charts. Here’s proof:

Wait. Who is this guy? Oh yeah, okay. It’s Gregory Pincus over at GottaBook. Who up and shaved on us.

In case you missed it, Greg will be celebrating National Poetry Month in a big ol’ way with 30 Poets/30 Days. Read all about it here, including his all-star poet line-up, but bottom line is that he’ll be posting a previously unpublished poem by a different poet for each day in April. You gotta love that. Jack Prelunsky launches Greg’s event today with “A Little Poem For Poetry Month.”

The honorable Tricia Stohr-Hunt of The Miss Rumphius Effect features Poetry Makers, in which she’ll be interviewing thirty-six rock-star poets during the month of April. The schedule’s here. How fabulous is that? Very, I say.

The multi-faceted Farida Dowler of Saints and Spinners and Minh Le of bottom shelf books (whose response to the curse-word Pivot question back in August 2007 remains my all-time favorite one and which is not appropros to this post, so I apologize) are hosting—starting today!—a children’s-book-sequels contest that calls upon the abundant creativity of their readers. It is entitled, not surprisingly, Unnecessary Children’s Book Sequels That Never Were. (What? You’ve never heard of the doomed, downright DISASTROUS sequel to Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats, the recently discovered Millions of Rats? Well, head on over to Farida’s site to read about it today.)

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Well, this past Sunday—in which the art of Julie Fortenberry was featured, incidentally, so go check that out, if you missed it—I took a poll as to whether or not the creature below was a Rabbit or a Duck. As you can see, this spread below from Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s and Tom Lichtenheld’s Duck! Rabbit! is slightly different from the spread shown on Sunday, but it’s not much more help for the undecided:

To be official about it all, here were my poll results (my online poll, that is; my five-year-old walked around with the book all last week, quizzing everyone she saw):

• “Um, hello. It is obviously a RABBIT. Okay, so it can also be a duck. But look closely people! As a RABBIT, it is so much cuter! Cuteness always wins. Therefore it is a RABBIT.”
• “I think it’s both, but I agree that the rabbit is definitely cuter.”
• “I vote for Rabbit (he told me to).”
• “I’m very left-to-right-oriented, so that’s a rabbit to me – rabbit ears, then head. If it were a duck, he would be facing the other way.”
• “Duck. I can accept it as a rabbit only if I can accept that rabbits don’t have mouths.”
• “…it looks like a Hesperornis without the scary teeth.”
• “I vote rabbit.”
• “I saw a rabbit.”
• “…Rabbit. 100%.”
• “…that duck/rabbit is messing me up.”

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Here is one of my all-time favorite picture characters in all the universe. Do you know him, too?

He showed up in 2000, brought to life by author/illustrator D.B. Johnson, who is pictured here, and his story, Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (Houghton Mifflin)—the first of many Henry stories, we came to find out later—was inspired by a short passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. This book came out right around the time that I had decided to study children’s lit in grad school via a library degree. (At this point, I was married and living with my husband, but just prior to that and when I was single, Eisha had been my roomie, and she’d bring home beautiful and/or clever picture books from her library job and leave them sitting on our kitchen table. As I’ve said before here at 7-Imp, she’s to blame for my picture book passion. But I digress.) I had never seen anything like it before, and neither had the rest of the world: In fact, D.B., who goes by Don, was awarded the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award for Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, which he discusses a bit below, as well as the 2000 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Picture Books. (See his wonderful acceptance speech here: “This whole idea of walking to get where you want to go resonated with my life. It was Thoreau’s way to be his own man, to stay close to nature, to be a writer. It was my way to be an artist.”) Three more Henry books were to follow: Henry Builds a Cabin in 2002, Henry Climbs a Mountain in 2003, and Henry Works in 2004. (Incidentally, you can see the books online at the “books” portion of Don’s site.)

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Jules: I know it’s a bright Sunday morning, a new day, and not time to climb back into our beds, but I can’t help but open with this image, because I love the colors so much I just might want to marry them.

This comes from illustrator Julie Fortenberry. Julie has two blogs—one devoted solely to her art and one all about picture book illustration. And here’s the thing: I’ve always loved her children’s illustration blog, but I never quite made the connection that it was Julie Fortenberry who authored it. Sometimes I’m slow-on-the-draw like that.

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I know I tend to run on a bit about how much I love my newly-adopted city. Ithaca is a good fit for someone like me – it manages to pull off a friendly small-town homey feel with walk-the-walk social consciousness and an unabashedly intellectual core. But the longer I’ve lived here, the more I’ve come to realize it’s even more complicated than that. Layers upon layers. For instance, you’ve all heard me rave about the abundant natural beauty we’ve got going on:

But then we also have this:

This is the long-defunct Ithaca Gun Company factory. It was empty for years before being condemned in 2006, and after long discussions of how to deal with all the toxic chemicals it’s been leeching into the ground and river, demolition finally began last month.

My friend Justin Souza, one of the Poets Upstairs, has written a poem about the dual nature of our fair city. It’s called “Scenes from Other Summers,” and it was published this month in Oak Bend Review. Here’s how it starts:

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I do a lot of illustrator interviews here at 7-Imp, but as I was formatting this one, I realized that I don’t often talk to artists like Geoffrey Hayes who create books for the VERY WEE set, as in the pre-preschool crowd. For that—and many other reasons—it’s good to welcome Geoffrey this morning for seven questions over breakfast.

Geoffrey has written and illustrated over forty children’s books, including Bear By Himself, Margaret Wise Brown’s When the Wind Blew, and the early-reader series, Otto & Uncle Tooth. To be perfectly honest, I’m still exploring his previous titles, but what caught my eye—what made me want to invite him over for a breakfast chat—are his new Benny and Penny titles for RAW Junior. These titles are Geoffrey at his very best.

Have you seen these guys yet?

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Back when I took part in my half of 7-Imp’s blog identity crisis, I decided to no longer accept review copies of titles for a while. Well, after that while passed, I came to discover a more fine-tuned focus, I guess you could say, here at 7-Imp — for my part. And that would be that I love talking to illustrators, and I love love LOVES me some good picture book art. So, while I no longer accept review copies of novels, I find it hard to turn down—and, it turns out, will gladly accept—advance copies of new picture book titles that I think look exciting. All of that is to say that I keep wanting to say to you all, have you SEEN Betsy Franco’s new collection of concrete poems, A Curious Collection of Cats, illustrated by Michael Wertz? I’ve been wanting to say that for a while. And then I have to stop and remind myself that it’s not out on bookshelves and in libraries yet. But guess what? Yup, you got it: It’ll be out in April from Tricycle Press, and April is wowwheredoesthetimego NEXT WEEK. In honor, then, of National Poetry Month, which will be here oh-so soon, I’m finally going to show you some illustrations from this engaging book.

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Here is the celebrated and award-winning author and illustrator of many picture book biographies, Don Brown. He is having A Moment with what he refers to below in our chat as his wondrous, yet flat-out evil, printer. I’m happy to welcome Don this morning for seven questions over breakfast — not only to distract him from his printer woes, but also because his books are ones I’ve followed and enjoyed for years.

If you’re a children’s librarian—whether a public librarian or school librarian—and/or a parent who keeps up with children’s lit, particularly nonfiction titles, you may wonder, as I do, where we’d be without his engaging picture book biographies, particularly since he often, but certainly not always, brings us the lives of lesser-known figures (Ruth Law, Mary Kingsley, Alice Ramsey — to name a few). And even when he’s telling us the story of more celebrated figures of history—Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Dolley Madison—he manages to stand apart from the crowd: Kirkus wrote about One Giant Leap: The Story of Neil Armstrong, “{t}he story has been told many times, but perhaps never with so much heart and spirit.” I think the common denominator in his picture book biographies, no matter the subject matter, is that he’s bringing us the stories of those people who followed their bliss and lived with passion.

And if you enjoy his books as much as I do, you’re probably nodding as I say: Doesn’t that seem like what he’s doing, too? I’ve never read a Don Brown story in which it didn’t seem as if he was having great fun sharing with us. And, in the words of School Library Journal, he’s “a current pacesetter who has put the finishing touches on the standards for storyographies.”

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Jules: Today, 7-Imp welcomes photographer Jacquelynn Buck. Jacquelynn, who is actually formally trained in Public Health but who has a passion for photography and design, does portraits, weddings, travel and nature photography, and even design work (websites, posters, postcards, etc.) — and much more. I first heard about her from Sara Lewis Holmes, whose author photo was taken by Jacquelynn. In fact, I very first read about her here at Sara’s site in 2007. (Sara also interpreted some of Jacquelynn’s photos in this intriguing Poetry Friday post.)

Jacquelynn writes at her site, “I want to translate on paper that core that is each person, each city, that makes them who and what they are…There was a time in my life when I wanted to change the world. And maybe I still will. But today let me show you the world through my eyes. Know that not everything is as it seems. Discover again what you thought you already knew.” These are fitting words for Jacquelynn’s latest photography project, entitled Real Women. She tells us all about it below (and you can read about its origin at her site), but—to summarize—it’s to help women see themselves as beautiful, just as they are. To which I’m sure most of us would say, AMEN.

This post follows on the heels of author Sara Zarr’s post from this week about her experience during an author photo shoot, in which she specifically and repeatedly told the photographer that she didn’t want to be Photoshopped. Here’s part of what Sara wrote:

When I was setting up the appointment for the shoot, I told the photographer’s assistant that I just wanted to look like me. He asked if I required a makeup artist. No. Not my style. I sent him to my blog, I showed him recent photos of me that I liked. The day of the shoot, I spent over an hour with the photographer. And said again – I just want to look like me. As he shot me, we talked a little bit about women being photographed. How we all have our insecurities. How I’d come to accept mine and don’t want to turn down life opportunities because I think I should be thinner or prettier. At the end of the shoot, he said that he could work magic with Photoshop, and if I wanted to look like I’d been going to the gym every day for four months, he could do that. I said no. I said I wanted to look like me. I said that a large part of my audience is made up of teen girls and I didn’t want to perpetuate that whole “I’m not okay” thing.

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