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The Rabbit Hill Festival of Literature took place on Saturday, October 25, 2008 at the Saugatuck Elementary School in Westport. The theme this year was Bringing Life to Literature. The event featured author/illustrators Steve Jenkins, Grace Lin, Barbara McClintock, David Wiesner, and Mo Willems and artistrator E. B. Lewis.

The first half of the day took place in the auditorium. Each writer/illustrator spent twenty minutes presenting.

Steve Jenkins
Author/Illustrator of books such as Biggest, Strongest, Fastest and What Do You Do With A Tail Like This.

The books he writes now are the intersection of the memories he had as a child and the influence of people he knows as an adult.

As a child he was interested in science and would write science books.

He went to design school where he met his wife. After design school they started a design company and designed book jackets, illustrated articles, and created covers for Foders. When doing the covers for Foders he became interested in the paper cutting collage technique.

After his children were born he started reading lots of picture books. As his kids grew, they provided him with all the questions he needed to get story ideas. Often their questions were about animals and nature, which went back to his interest in science as a child.

For more on Steve Jenkins visit his website at http://www.stevejenkinsbooks.com

E. B. Lewis
E. B. Lewis calls himself an Artistrator because he started as a fine artist. He grew up in Philadelphia and is the first to admit he was a tough child. When he was in sixth grade his Uncle Bradley started to take him to art classes to help turn him around. It worked.

E. B. likes to capture life in his painting. He documents life in his work.

He did not start out as an illustrator. He was a fine artist. An agent saw one of his paintings called, “The Children of Jacob” in a magazine and asked him if he would consider illustrating children’s books. He initially said no because he was a fine artist. But the agent referred him to the works of other artists turned illustrator such as Chris Van Allsburg. So he did. He went to the library and studied the illustrations in children’s books and decided to try it. The agent sent out his work and he instantly had a number of books to illustrate.


Each time he gets a manuscript he starts by researching the setting. Then he draws pictures and finds models. He then takes photographs of the models and the settings and combines them to create his paintings. The books he accepts have human interest and emotion.

For more on E. B. Lewis visit his website at http://www.eblewis.com

Barbara McClintock
Barbara grew up in Clinton, NJ. She was a real tomboy. She always remembers drawing.

Influenced by Milo Winter, who illustrated Aesop's Fables, and the cartoon Top Cat, she began her book career creating her own Top Cat comic books when she was little.

When she was nine she moved to North Dakota. Her fourth grade art teacher turned her onto art history and told her to draw to the edge of the paper.

When she was older she decided to be an illustrator. She knew that Maurice Sendack was a well-known author/illustrator so she decided to call him and ask him how to do it. He spoke to her on the phone for twenty minutes and told her how to put together a dummy. He also suggested she move to New York. She did.

Now she works in her house in her library, which is full of resources. She writes and illustrates. She starts by sketching and doodling. Then she scribbles writing into her drawings. She sticks pictures and post-its on her wall. When she is done planning, she writes the whole story down then creates a dummy book. To create her illustrations she uses a layering technique, making separate drawings and placing them together. She uses pen and ink to go over the drawing and a light box. Each ink drawing takes about a week. Adding color takes another week.


Grace Lin
Grace is an author, illustrator, and novelist. She grew up in upstate New York where she was the only minority family. Since her parents allowed almost no television, she learned to love books, writing, and drawing.

Grace started writing and illustrating as a kid. She loved drawing fairytale stories and knew from a young age that she wanted to be an author/illustrator. She went to Rhode Island School of Design and was taught all the fundamentals of art. But when, as part of her program, she studied in Rome, she realized that she was only copying the work of others. She decided that she needed to find her own voice.

She started drawing the things that defined her as a person, her family and heritage. Those stories are the ones she has become known for telling.

For more on Grace Lin visit her website at http://www.gracelin.com.
(Also see the write up of her Rabbit Hill break-out session.)

David Wiesner
David Wiesner grew up in New Jersey and now lives in Philadelphia. As the youngest in the family he received a lot of support for his interests. His father gave him a large drafting table. His mother saved everything he ever drew.

David always remembers drawing. He used hand-me down art supplies. The only artist he ever knew as a young child was Jon Gnagy. When he got older he loved to research artists. He loved the detailed image-makers. He loved the weird and strange.

Many of the things he drew as a child became the stories he writes now. A cemetery, a swamp, and a dump surrounded his house growing up. He also liked big bug movies and Route 22 New Jersey that had old oversize advertisements. He liked to think about things oversized, which is why it was not surprising to see the oversized vegetables in June 29, 1999.

His book Hurricane is the only book he wrote truly based on his own life. But growing up in New York and New Jersey influenced Sector 7 and Flotsam came from summers at the New Jersey Shore.

He has always looked at things from different angles. He feels this way of seeing came from watching films while comic books created his love of telling a wordless story.

For more on David Wiesner, visit his website at http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/authors/wiesner/home.html


Mo Williams
Mo Willams started as a writer for television. Writing for television taught him a valuable lesson. When he researched what kids were saying about one of his shows he read, “The writer is trying too hard.” From then on he has tried to disappear when writing. He wants his audience to be able to decide for themselves what is happening in his books.

He manipulates his readers with colors (they change with the mood).

Mo Willams goal is for his books to reach something different. He believes that good picture books are the ones that are individual.

He also makes sure that all of his drawings can be drawn by a five year old which he demonstrated by having the audience draw the pigeon from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.

For more on Mo Willams, visit his website at http://www.mowillems.com

Check back for more on my break-out sessions with Grace Lin and Christy Ottaviano, editorial director of Christy Ottaviano Books at Henry Holt and Company.

The meeting began with three members who attended Rabbit Hill Festival of Literature sharing their experience. Rick Riordan, author of Lightning Thief, suggested checking out a program called Inspiration to map out plot development. His website is also full of resources for writers and is worth looking at. Gail Carson Levine, author of Ella Enchanted, shared that the hardest part about writing for her is accepting her own work. A good lesson for some of our members to take with them. Next, the group critiqued the submitted chapters. At the end of the meeting the group decided to accept more members and to try to meet every two weeks.

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Last week was somewhat of a "proofs week", what with magazine text galleys to proof on Tuesday, and the new sketches for Bubble Homes and Fish Farts on Thursday (from another crème de la crème editor, in case anyone's keeping a scorecard).

Each sketch was about 5 megs, and I'm on rural dialup, so the process of downloading the sketch pdfs was akin to squeezing a very large octopus through the mail slot, although considerably less gooey, I must say. By lunch time, I was feasting my eyes on the beautiful new spreads.

Bubble Homes and Fish Farts (Charlesbridge, 2009) contains some unusual creatures in unusual situations. This makes it a challenging book to 'get right' visually. As a nonfiction writer, it's a huge relief to me to have a publisher, editor, and illustrator who share my quest for detailed accuracy. I know. I'm lucky.

Illustrators and authors aren't always allowed to communiccate in this crazy picture book biz, but with the blessing of our editor, Carolyn (illustrator) and I have. It makes sense for her to have access to my research information and images, some of which have come directly from the scientists I talked to when writing the book.

The first sketches were right on for most spreads, the only exception being a few bizarre, idiosyncratic animals for which photo reference material is scarce. All but two of Thursday's sketches have nailed the animal idiosyncrasies in question, and even those two just need minor tweaking. Carolyn rocks. On to colour art!
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Watertown, to be exact, home of Charlesbridge, the publisher of my upcoming picture book, Bubble Homes and Fish Farts. Yesterday, my editor emailed to say she was mailing the sketch galleys to me.

Sketch galleys! Oh, my goodness, I can't express how excited I am to see what images the amazing Carolyn Digby Conahan has come up with to accompany my text! Aside from her signature bug art that appears in Cricket Magazine each month, Carolyn's style is delightfully whimsical. I was thrilled when I found out Charlesbridge had signed her as the illustrator for BH&FF.

And now...the sketches are finished and on their way to my mailbox. The waiting begins. If I lived in Boston, I could have said, "I'll come right over and pick them up." and I'd have the sketches in my hot little hands already, but I don't live on the same coast, or even in the same country, so I'm at the mercy of two giant postal systems.

Instead of dwelling on the excruciating wait, though, which, according to my family, could make me rather, um, "interesting" to live with, I'm going to revel in the anticipation, which so far, has resulted in a perma-grin and much happier times at Casa Bayrock.

Sketch galleys! Woohoo!
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It's been a while, so I thought I'd post an update on the cow horns that are on my roof.  If you're a new LJ friend and don't understand why someone would do this, you can read all about it in my earlier post.  (Then you can quietly un-friend me if you decide I'm just too strange to hang out with, after all.)

I checked on the horns tonight, and the small critters eating away the gunky stuff between the horn and the bone in the middle of it have made some progress.  Not much, but a little.  In one horn, you can now see a tiny gap between horn and bone, where the fleshy stuff is gone.  At this rate, however, SPITFIRE will be published, read, and out of print before these things are ready to show anyone at a presentation. They also smell bad.

What I really need, I've decided, is something that works more quickly.  Blog karma brought me the answer when I checked out Unabridged -- the Charlesbridge blog and heard about what some of their editors saw on a tour of the American Museum of Natural History during a break from BEA. 

Check out these guys...

Turns out you can order them online, too, but they're expensive (and kind of scary, frankly).  Let's hope the critters on my roof get to work soon.