This past Friday, the New England Children's Bookseller's Advisory Council (NECBA) held its fall children's and illustrator breakfast in Providence, R.I. NECBA co-chair Read Davidson introduced the event to large applause, a response that repeated frequently throughout the morning.
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| Bryan Collier and Tami Charles | |
First to speak were Tami Charles and Bryan Collier about their picture book We Are Here (Orchard Books, January 3, 2023). Charles began, "I am so excited to be here, but I am more excited to be standing next to the most dapper dude in kid lit." Charles's first picture book with Collier, All Because You Matter, was written as a love letter to her son. We Are Here, she said, was written for her daughter, Grace. "Once upon a time," Charles said, "I had a daughter." But Grace didn't "make it to this side." We Are Here is a story for her and "the legacy of greatness from which she comes--for the joy and the wonder of who she could have been." Collier explained, "As the illustrator, it is my job to illuminate the words and take you on a journey that is parallel to the text. I have a point of view," he continued, "But I'll never alienate what Tami is writing." Instead, he uses it. Collier knew that this book was for Grace and included on every page a pink balloon: "It's as if Grace is there, floating throughout. She is always here and always present throughout all the storylines." In the way that Collier used Charles's son as a model for All Because You Matter, he used his own daughter--as well as several people he knows and loves--to model characters in We Are Here. "This," he said, "is the evidence that we are here."
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| Gale Galligan | |
Gale Galligan, author/illustrator of the graphic novel Freestyle (Graphix, October 18, 2022), took the stage next. "Thanks for all the cool stuff you're doing in your communities," they began, "I admire that so, so much." Sometime in 2014, they said, "Otherwise known as a decade ago--sorry, sorry, sorry--I was browsing the Internet. And then I stumbled across a video from a yo-yo competition.... I was enthralled." They bought a yo-yo and dove right in. "I was hitting myself in the face a lot." But when they joined a yo-yo club, they started getting better. "Listen, I'm still very bad at yo-yo," they admitted. But "with Freestyle, I really wanted to show that feeling of getting so so so excited about something and then finding people to share it with--finding a community. And for me, there was no way better to do that than to make a comic about it."
Chloe Gong made her debut "during the pandemic." Foul Lady Fortune (Margaret K. McElderry Books) is her third title and connects to but stands alone from her two previous books. As Gong wrote the Romeo and Juliet-inspired These Violent Delights duology, one character kept "nudging" her: Rosalind. She was intrigued by how readers fell in love with Juliette but hated Rosalind, who made many of the same personal choices as Juliette. Though Gong grew up loving "the brave heroines," she wanted to write a female character with a "kind of messiness" to her. And so, she let Rosalind's nudging pull her to Foul Lady Fortune, in which the young woman is "stuck in a frozen state of who she was when she made a huge mistake." The book is, in Gong's words, "Shakespeare's As You Like It meets a quintessential civil war era Chinese drama about politics and spies in 1930s Shanghai with the tone and sci-fi elements of a Marvel movie."
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| Malinda Lo | |
Malinda Lo's first words from the podium were, "I want to take a moment to thank you for all the support that you gave me and my books over the last few years." Booksellers sold her National Book Award-winning Last Night at the Telegraph Club, "during the pandemic when people weren't really going to bookstores. You put it on the indie bestseller list for 20 straight weeks." Lo described her new book, A Scatter of Light (Dutton Books for Young Readers, October 4), as a description of the "complex and messy experience of first love." It is "about identity and how it changes. About family, connections art and creativity." The book, she said, is set in 2013 because that's when she first started writing it. Scatter went on submission in 2014 and "was rejected by nearly two dozen editors. Some editors said they liked the writing but had problems with the sexuality. Some of the rejections I got did feel homophobic. It made me really angry. But one editor was interested in working with me." That editor couldn't buy Scatter, though, so the two discussed other possibilities. A Line in the Dark was born. Then, when her publisher picked up Telegraph, they also offered to buy Scatter. When Lo returned to Scatter, she said, "I knew that in the six years that had passed I had become a better writer." But "almost all of the book's intimate scenes are the same--word for word--as they were in 2013. I am so glad we are now in a time when this book can be published."
The final speaker was Brian Selznick. The idea for Big Tree (Scholastic, April 4, 2023) came from a project Selznick had been working on with Steven Spielberg. The director spoke with Selznick about writing a movie from a plant's-eye view in the time before dinosaurs. This would be a terrible idea, Selznick noted, because the only plants were ferns. He suggested the Cretaceous period. "When the pandemic hit, it became clear for various reasons that the movie was never going to happen" and Selznick was "able to make the story as I saw it." He decided that "nothing can happen in this book that isn't scientifically based and scientifically accurate." Which means it's "a 600-page book about characters that have no faces." In the world of Big Tree, "only plants can communicate. So, they believe that nothing else in the world is able to communicate." Selznick, who "started off as a bookseller," also told the crowd that, while working at Eeyore's in New York City, he realized "this was the community of people I want to be around." Now, he said, "Every time I sit down to write, every time I sit down to draw, it is [being a bookseller] that informs my work." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness