Imaginary Friends

Dan Santat

Not every child invents an imaginary friend like the star of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat, winner of the 2015 Caldecott Medal. And the ones who do, says author-artist Santat, don't "pick imaginary friends based on anything in particular."

Santat himself didn't have an imaginary friend, he told us when we interviewed him for Shelf Awareness after his Caldecott Medal was announced. "If I played make-believe, it was referenced by something I knew. I was going on an adventure with a Ghostbuster or Pac Man," he explained. "Talking with kids, not a lot of their imaginary friends reflected their interests or anything in particular about them." The imaginary friends in Beekle, however, share a great deal with the children who created them.

Q: You characterize both Beekle and his child, Alice, as relatively friendless--or at least incomplete--before they meet. 

Dan Santat: For the message of making a friend, I found it to be important to find two halves to a whole. To have Alice find--not because she's an introvert or shy--to find a friend in a world created by her, fills that void. It's like having that "a-ha" moment when all the pieces are coming together. I didn't want the imaginary friend to sound clichéd--hairy monsters with horns and stripes that didn't reflect anything. I wanted them to reflect these children and their interests. You can tell a lot about these children without any dialogue in the book.

Q: How did you come up with that setting--a kind of island of misfit toys with imaginary friends in limbo until they meet their child?

DS: It's funny that you call it limbo, because for a while the island's name was Limbo. The imaginary friends serve a function, but they don't know what it is yet. If you look on the endpapers, there's a monster that plays the drums for a child who loves music [and other examples]; they're not aware of the other half that completes them. With Beekle, my struggle was to make him in such a way that he didn't give away his purpose. He's the only pure white character in the entire book; he represents a blank canvas.

Q: Your Beekle-eye view of the subway is so spot on. Did you think of the sailing ship and the subway as a kind of journey to transition from his island of imaginary friends to the world of humans?

DS: The spread that really communicates the journey well is when he's lost in a sea of commuters walking, and you don't see their faces, just a sea of legs. I was trying to portray a child's experience. It's not as intimidating to meet people eye to eye as it is when you see these giants. If you're little and you're sitting on a couch, your legs are dangling off the edge of the chair. That's evident in the scene in the subway. Every year I go to New York to meet with my publisher, and people on the subway have their faces in books or they're sleeping. They don't really make contact or look around or reach out to anyone. There's a sense of a loss of magic when you're an adult. Things don't seem spectacular because you've gotten a bit cynical with the world.

You see that in the cake and the strawberries, the music notes of the accordion; those are the bright colors. It was important to me to separate these two worlds--the childlike innocence from the reality of how the world is to an adult.

This excerpt is taken from an interview that first appeared in Shelf Awareness.

Play

Hervé Tullet turned the world on its ear with Press Here. It was executed with such genius simplicity, that we all wondered why it had never been done before. With Mix It Up!, he holds to that simplicity and does for color what Press Here did for gravity.

Mo Willems (l.) and Herve Tullet in Bryant Park
Photo: Meg Parsont/Phaidon Press

The way Tullet plays with cause and effect is eye-opening for any child--from 1 to 92. And "play" is the key word. "Play is the work of childhood," wrote Jean Piaget in his Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (W. W. Norton, 1962). Through play, a child learns how to resolve conflict, how to negotiate, when to lead and when to step back.

Tullet teaches, through play, what happens when you mix two colors (a new hue emerges), turn a book on its side (the paint runs down the page), and when the child places a hand on the page (you leave an impression). When Tullet and Mo Willems spoke together at New York's Books of Wonder in April 2013, they talked about the importance of play in their own work. "I want my books to be played, not to be read," said Willems, best known for his Pigeon picture books and his Elephant and Piggie beginning readers. 

Both author-artists said they draw in order to free themselves. Isn't that play? Neither author admitted to getting stuck ever, nor are they afraid of getting stuck. Tullet quoted a jazz musician who once said that improvisation feels like falling, but you never actually fall. Willems said that each evening, he and his family and any dinner guests on hand all gather around the dining room table where they stretch a giant piece of paper and draw. His dining room walls have a chalkboard surface so they can draw there, too. 

Tullet and Willems prove that the best work comes out of play. It's true for children; why shouldn't it be true for adults?

Living and Creating

Interior from The Scraps Book

One of the things children will appreciate most about Lois Ehlert's The Scraps Book: Notes from a Colorful Life is the way she draws a correlation between her life and her art. Her ideas come from everywhere (asparagus hunting, a cat, a change of seasons) and her materials can be anything (paints, crayons, seeds, crabapples, fabric swatches). 

Even Ehlert's picture of the work table her father set up for her in her childhood home shares a striking resemblance to the workspace she uses today. Children will see that their own photos, paintings, and fabric scraps can contribute to a collage about family, home and pets. 

Study for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

The author-artist also shows children precisely which book included which collage or composition, leading to an organic scavenger hunt of sorts, to check out her many picture books and to witness the varied approaches and styles she's used to illustrate her stories (and the stories of others, such as Chicka Chicka Boom Boom). 

Her collections of model fish and words and art supplies reveal a passion for what she does and may well inspire children to build their own. Lois Ehlert shows that a childhood passion can become a lifelong joy.

Infinite Doodles

Barney with his dog Arlo

Barney Saltzberg has a wonderful message for children of all ages as his through line: There are no mistakes, and there are no limits to the imagination. Andrew, the hero of his latest book, Andrew Drew and Drew, might say that there are infinite doodles.

Andrew knows there will be times when he's not inspired, and the key is to doodle through them. Suddenly something new emerges from his pencil onto the page. To the child who says, "I can't draw" or "I don't know what to draw," Barney Saltzberg says, "Of course you can draw," and "Just begin." In Beautiful Oops! Saltzberg demonstrates how a spill or a rip can become part of the composition. In Andrew Drew and Drew, the half-pages that unfold mimic the artist's sense of discovery as he follows the doodling pencil to its destination--as an alligator, a rabbit or a fantastical night creature.

All that's needed is a paper and a pencil. No fancy dancy supplies required. The main thing is to have fun, and not to sweat it if your pencil needs a rest. The doodles will return, Andrew's example shows us, more plentiful for their dormant period. Barney Saltzberg believes, and also instills in us the faith that there's a limitless supply of doodles.

Thought #156

Bear Has a Story to Tell by Philip C. Stead, illustrated by Erin E. Stead, is a story of patience. It is also a story of paying it forward. And it is a story of creativity and friendship. All of this is true of the picture book itself. But it is also true of the creative process behind the picture book. Here’s why.

“The more I tried to write, the less I wrote,” Julie Fogliano confessed during her acceptance speech at the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards last Friday night, September 28, 2012. It was the kickoff to a two-day celebration of speeches and a colloquium, held at Simmons College in Boston. Fogliano and Erin E. Stead received an honor citation in the Picture Book category for their book And Then It’s Spring.

From And Then It's Spring

Fogliano had been trying to write since 1988. The breakthrough came with a request from her friend George O’Connor, fellow bookseller alum from New York City’s Books of Wonder, and an accomplished writer and artist in his own right (The Olympians series). O’Connor asked Fogliano if, for his birthday, she would email him one thought per day. Most thoughts had to do with legos on the kitchen floor and pancakes for breakfast, according to Fogliano. But Thought #156, she says, “about waiting and the color brown,” was different. She liked it enough to also send it to her friend Erin Stead, another Books of Wonder alum.

Erin Stead, whose husband, Philip Stead, had secretly shown one of Erin’s drawings to his editor, Neal Porter (which resulted in their first collaboration, A Sick Day for Amos McGee), now paid the favor forward. Erin sent Thought #156 to Porter and said she would like to illustrate it. And the seeds of And Then It’s Spring (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook/Macmillan), illustrated by Erin E. Stead, were planted.

But what does that have to do with Bear Has a Story to Tell, you might ask. I shall tell you. Philip and Erin share a studio. “Philip did much of the designing” of And Then It’s Spring, Erin Stead says. When Philip saw this drawing of the bears for Fogliano’s book (above), he scurried off to write Erin a bear book. Bear Has a Story to Tell.