“SOME PIG,” Charlotte the spider’s praise for Wilbur, is just one fondly remembered snippet from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. In Some Writer!, the two-time Caldecott Honor winner Melissa Sweet mixes White’s personal letters, photos, and family ephemera with her own exquisite artwork to tell his story, from his birth in 1899 to his death in 1985. Budding young writers will be fascinated and inspired by the journalist, New Yorker contributor, and children’s book author who loved words his whole life. This authorized tribute is the first fully illustrated biography of E. B. White and includes an afterword by Martha White, E. B. White's granddaughter.
On why the typewriter is the thematic design for the book
When I was researching E.B. White, the manual typewriter came up all the time. He used it as a child, all through his life. ... If there was one object that I thought represented E.B. White, it was the manual typewriter. So as a collage artist I wanted to use the pieces of a typewriter — the keys, the font and — in fact I typed up all of his quotes on a manual typewriter.
On what she learned about White's creative process
I was curious from the start about how he wrote his children's books. And each one surprised me; that Stuart Little came to him in a dream, one he had on a train. He woke up and wrote it all down. That was the beginning of Stuart Little. ...
On her own process and how she distilled White's story into an illustrated biography
The trick was that there was so much information, so the fun is that we find ways to make it consistent throughout. So, all the archival pieces are on — for instance — a light green paper.
Hopefully the reader goes along and doesn't notice the design so much, but just that the book flows. The design of it makes it like a jigsaw puzzle and, to be honest, I think it's the most fun part.
Once you know what you want to say and you have all this material fitting it together, finding the right pieces is really fun. It's akin to making one collage. It's the same — you're pushing pieces around until you hit on, you don't want to touch it — you've nailed it.
“On how one orients himself to the moment,”Henry Miller wrote in reflecting on the art of living, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Indeed, this act of orienting ourselves — to the moment, to the world, to our own selves — is perhaps the most elusive art of all, and our attempts to master it often leave us fumbling, frustrated, discombobulated. And yet therein lies our greatest capacity for growth and self-transcendence.
Rebecca Solnit, whose mind and writing are among the most consistently enchanting of our time, explores this tender tango with the unknown in her altogether sublime collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost (public library).
Solnit writes in the opening essay:
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Illustration from ‘Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost.’ Click image for details.
Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.
But unlike the dark sea, which obscures the depths of what is, of what could be seen in the present moment, the unknown spills into the unforeseen. Solnit turns to Edgar Allan Poe, who argued that “in matters of philosophical discovery … it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely,” and considers the deliberate juxtaposition of the rational, methodical act of calculation with the ineffable, intangible nature of the unforeseen:
How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.
The poet John Keats captured this paradoxical operation elegantly in his notion of “negative capability,” which Solnit draws on before turning to another literary luminary, Walter Benjamin, who memorably considered the difference between not finding your way and losing yourself — something he called “the art of straying.” Solnit writes:
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.
T and O map by Bartholomaeus Angelicus, 1392, from Umberto Eco’s ‘The Book of Legendary Lands.’ Click image for details.
The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.
Taking back the meaning of lost seems almost a political act, a matter of existential agency that we ought to reclaim in order to feel at home in ourselves. Solnit writes:
There’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.
[…]
Lost [is] mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry.
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
Illustration for ‘Mapping Manhattan.’ Click image for details.
During a recent vacation, I went horseback riding on a California ranch, home to a tight-knit equine community. Midway along the route, my horse glimpsed his peer across the field, carrying another rider on a different route, and began neighing restlessly upon the fleeting sight. Our guide explained that the horses, despite being extraordinarily intelligent beings, had a hard time making sense of seeing their friends appear out of nowhere, then disappear into the distance. Falling out of sight held the terror of being forever lost. My horse was calling out, making sure his friend was still there — that neither was lost. Underneath the geographic disorientation, one can imagine, lies a primal fear of losing control.
Despite the evolutionary distance, this equine disposition bears a disorienting similarity to the duality of our own relationship to the concept of lost — losing something we care about, losing ourselves, losing control — which Solnit captures beautifully:
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Archer B. Helmsley has
grown up in a house full of oddities and treasures collected by his
grandparents, the famous explorers. He knows every nook and cranny. He
knows them all too well. After all, ever since his grandparents went
missing on an iceberg, his mother barely lets him leave the house.
Archer
longs for adventure. Grand adventures, with parachutes and exotic
sunsets and interesting characters. But how can he have an adventure
when he can’t leave his house?
It helps that he has friends like
Adélaïde L. Belmont, who must have had many adventures to end up with a
wooden leg. (Perhaps from a run-in with a crocodile. Perhaps not.) And
Oliver Glub. Oliver will worry about all the details (so that Archer
doesn’t have to).
And so Archer, Adélaïde, and Oliver make a plan. A plan to get out of the house, out of their town entirely. It’s a good plan.
Well, it’s not bad, anyway.
But nothing goes quite as they expect.
“A dreamy charmer of a book, full of clever wordplay that practically demands it be read out loud.”—New York Times
Have you ever wanted to hold a little piece of the impossible? Lavishly illustrated in full color, The Doldrums
is an extraordinary debut about friendship, imagination, and the
yearning for adventure from author-artist Nicholas Gannon. A modern
classic in the making, The Doldrums is for readers of inventive and timeless authors such as Brian Selznick and Lemony Snicket.
Archer B. Helmsley wants an adventure. No, he needs
an adventure. His grandparents were famous explorers . . . until they
got stuck on an iceberg. Now Archer’s mother barely lets him out of the
house. As if that would stop a true Helmsley. Archer enlists
Adelaide—the girl who, according to rumor, lost her leg to a
crocodile—and Oliver—the boy next door—to help him rescue his
grandparents. The Doldrums whisks us off on an adventure full of sly humor, incredible detail, and enormous heart.
With
approximately twenty pieces of breathtaking full-color artwork, as well
as black-and-white spot illustrations, and gorgeous, literary writing,
Nicholas Gannon proves himself to be a distinctive new voice with his
middle grade debut. Be in it for the limitless imagination. For the
characters who capture your heart. For the rich world you’ll want to
settle into. But most of all, be in it for the friendship. That, after
all, is the true adventure.
Written by Deborah Underwood Illustrated by Meg Hunt Published by Chronicle Books, May 2015
There has of late, thankfully, been a rash of
children’s books with a strong emphasis on female empowerment. Shannon
and Dean Hale’s The Princess in Black is one great example. The Detective’s Assistant, by Kate Hannigan, is another. And the favorite in our house is Andrea Beaty’s Rosie Revere, Engineer.
We have a spirited five year old (she’d want me to specify five and a half)
girl, and it’s of grave importance to us that she grow up knowing that
being a girl isn’t a hindrance but rather a gift and a strength, so
whenever we go to buy books, there’s usually at least one in the stack
with a strong female protagonist. The problem with these books, often,
is that they’re Message Books, which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad
thing, but Message Books tend to lack a certain… Nuance?
Our daughter doesn’t want to be read a lesson, and we
don’t want to read one to her. She wants a story, and we want a
conversation starter; we don’t want a book that says “Don’t
underestimate girls, because girls can do anything!” We want a book that
sets us up to say “So, why do you think that character underestimated
her? Do you think that was fair? Why?”
Deborah Underwood’s latest is one such book. It’s the
story of Cinderella, transposed to outer space, and replacing Disney’s
enduring yet whimpering heroine with a little girl of great strength and
a solid idea of herself. The handling of the Cinderella story owes a
lot to Marissa Meyer’s young adult novel, Cinder, whether conscious or by coincidence, but no matter: It’s a great set-up.
There’s the requisite evil stepmother, the evil
stepsisters, the ball, the fairy godmother, but it’s all tipped on its
head. The godmother is a robot. The ball is gravity-free. Cinderella is a
fledgling spaceship repairperson. The Prince of the story doesn’t even
fall for Cinderella because of her beauty; he is smitten with her
ability… But Underwood doesn’t bog down in proving how clever she can be
with reinventing the source material; she sets up the .
There is a moment towards the end which I was
dreading as I saw it coming: The traditional marriage proposal. You know
how it goes: The Prince finds the girl who fits the slipper (in this
case, a space wrench) and takes her as her bride, saving her from her
life of misery, and Cinderella, with hearts in her eyes just from being
near a real prince, gratefully accepts! But Underwood skillfully
sidesteps the awkwardness, and nods toward the creepiness of how the
story is supposed to go. This is a girl who wants a career.
Meg Hunt’s illustrations are stunning. They are very dark, in contrast to
the brightness of most kid’s picturebooks, but this works to the story’s
benefit. She’s created a world. (My single complaint would be that,
when the Prince’s spaceship breaks down, the smoke kind of blends into
the rest of the picture; it took us a second to see what the problem
was… But that’s the definition of splitting hairs!)
Her style is reminiscent of folk art. It looks like
paint layered upon paint; I suspect, of course, that it’s digital, but
if it is, it’s exceptionally well done in that it doesn’t read as
digital. Interstellar Cinderella is her first picturebook, which in
itself is remarkable. (That said, she’s by no means a newbie; her CV is
impressive.)
It would be a mistake to consider this a book for
girls, and, arguably, it’s even more important for boys to be exposed to
this message when they’re young. Regardless of the gender of your
child, your bookshelf can only be enhanced by the inclusion of Interstellar Cinderella.
Once upon a planetoid, amid her tools and sprockets, a girl named Cinderella dreamed of fixing fancy rockets.
With
a little help from her fairy godrobot, Cinderella is going to the ball.
But when the prince's ship has mechanical trouble, someone will have to
zoom to the rescue! Readers will thank their lucky stars for this
irrepressible fairy tale retelling, its independent heroine, and its
stellar happy ending.
This is Sadie Written by Sara O’Leary Illustrated by Julie Morstad Published by Tundra Books, May 2015
This is Sadie is an understated book. It sneaks up on you without warning, and slaps you upside the heart.
Author Sara O’Leary takes a remarkably
common premise –kids have wild imaginations, and can do wondrous things
with nothing more than an empty box– and weaves something incredible.
Her text harkens back to a day of unforced simplicity in children’s
literature, when easy ideas were delivered with just a pinch of poetry
to make them go down even easier.
Consider:
Sadie likes to make boats of boxes
and castles out of cushions.
But more than anything she likes stories,
because you can make them from nothing at all.
Beautiful, and it reminds me very much of
A.A. Milne, to be honest; even more remarkable, it compares favorably
to the great master. The beauty of O’Leary’s writing is that she doesn’t
strain to narrate in a child’s voice; she is clearly an adult
commenting on what a child does, and even though we no longer, as
adults, behave as children, we are better equipped to appreciate the
beauty in what they do. A child hasn’t the language to relay the wonder
in their own behavior, because to them there is no wonder, there just is
what there is. There is no shortage of books that celebrate a child’s
imagination, but O’Leary’s avoidance of the trap of speaking in a
child’s voice is what separates This is Sadie from the abundant pack.
The other thing, of course, that sets
this book apart are the remarkable illustrations from O’Leary’s frequent
collaborator, Julie Morstad. (I believe this is their fourth time
around the block together…)
Morstad’s works pulls influence from
picture books of the seventies, which may explain why it resonates so
strongly with parents who have kids of an appropriate age for This is Sadie.
(The book seems to have taken on something of a feverish following
online since its release just a few short weeks ago.) Her illustrations
are epic when needed, and perfectly composed. Take the above, for
example: A simple line about the fleeting quality of time, but Morstad
delivers something dreamlike, and full of awe.
There is a lot of buzz surrounding This is Sadie
at the moment, and my B.S. meter was on high alert when I sat down to
read it with my daughter, to be frank; I tend to be suspicious of things
that build hype so quickly, but this is one of those instances where
the work backs up the promises made by the publicity people and
bloggers. This is Sadie is a wonderful book.
P.S. Bonus points for doing something
interesting with the dust jacket! It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine that
this opportunity is so often wasted in book design, but Tundra and
designer Kelly Hill have done something pretty cool here… I don’t know
if there are awards for jacket design, but if there are, This is Sadie surely deserves consideration.
Sadie is a little girl
with a big imagination. She has been a girl who lived under the sea and a
boy raised by wolves. She has had adventures in wonderland and visited
the world of fairytales. She whispers to the dresses in her closet and
talks to birds in the treetops. She has wings that take her anywhere she
wants to go, but that always bring her home again. She likes to make
things -- boats out of boxes and castles out of cushions. But more than
anything Sadie likes stories, because you can make them from nothing at
all. For Sadie, the world is so full of wonderful possibilities ... This
is Sadie, and this is her story.
