S.O.R Losers: Author and illustrator interviews
About the author
Avi – a name given to him by his twin sister – was born in New York City in 1937. Raised in a home with a family history of authorship and books, newspapers were a major part of his early life, just as they are today.
It was his childhood reading of serialized stories in New York newspapers that gave him the desire to revitalize the tradition. Though he struggled with writing in school, by the time he left high school, Avi had decided to become a writer.
In 1970, his first book was published and since then he has published – in the United States and around the world – more than seventy books for young people.
The recipient of many writing honors, which include the 2003 Newbery Medal, two Newbery Honors, the Horn Book Award, the Scott O’Dell Award, the Christopher Award, plus many state awards, Avi is known for his wide stylistic range and prolific literary skills.
Out this fall is his newest book, Sohpia’s War: A Tale of the Revolution.
An interview with Avi
Q. The Newbery Award is the highest honor a children’s book author can receive in America. How did it feel to win?
A. It was – and remains – enormously gratifying, marking as it does a recognition for not just the book, Crispin: The Cross of Lead, but my work in general. Having said that, it does nothing to help me write the next book. If anything, it makes it harder as expectations rise, including my own. For those interested in reading my Newbery Acceptance speech, it’s on my web site, www.Avi-writer.com.
Q. It was in 1996 that you conceived the idea for Breakfast Serials®. What brought the idea to mind?
A. When I was a boy, growing up in New York City, some of the newspapers were still running serials – a concept that had been in American newspapers since the Eighteenth Century.
It made a big impression on me. Then, in 1997, I had just finished writing Beyond the Western Sea. This was a huge (750 page) Victorian style novel, with many, many short chapters with cliff hanging endings to all the chapters. Though much longer than a newspaper serialization, that was the prototype.
Q. What do you think of Breakfast Serials now?
A. When I started, (with Keep Your Eye on Amanda!) I merely was interested in writing a serialized story, then seeing if a newspaper would publish it. The Colorado Springs Gazette was the first to do so, followed by The Denver Post. It spread rapidly from there, so rapidly in fact I couldn’t cope with the expansion. Fortunately Linda Wright offered to take over the project.
My idea was to revive a Nineteenth Century concept. Ms Wright has changed and expanded the idea to meet the needs and demands of the Twenty-First century. What she has done is quite remarkable.
Q. Is the current Keep Your Eye on Amanda! different from the original?
A. When I first wrote the story it had twenty-one chapters, with each chapter being no more than 700 words. This version is exactly the same story, reformatted if you will, to fewer chapters, with slightly longer chapters. Actually, I think it reads better in this version.
Avi has published over 70 books. Among the best known are:
• Poppy
• True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
• Crispin: The Cross of Lead
• Nothing But the Truth
• The Fighting Ground
• Things That Sometimes Happen
• Beyond the Western Sea
• Wolf Rider
• The Man Who Was Poe
• Seer of Shadows
• City of Orphans
• Midnight Magic
• Don’t You Know There’s A War On
• The Secret School
About the illustrator
Timothy Bush has written and illustrated five books for young readers and has illustrated a number of books written by others, including Eve Bunting, James Howe, and Marilyn Singer. He is the illustrator for Ron Roy’s Capital Mysteries series.
His publishing career began when he entered a “Tell-us-what-you-like-about-our-product” contest sponsored by a French paintbrush manufacturer. He was hoping for the free paintbrush they were sending to everyone who entered, but accidentally won first prize: a free trip to Paris. While he was there, the Berlin Wall happened to come down, so he traveled to Berlin and got to see that, too.
His work has won the following distinctions: International Reading Association Honor Book (James In the House of Aunt Prudence, 1993), Center for Children’s Books Best Books of 1999 (Bach’s Big Adventure, 1999, text by Sallie Ketcham), CBC/IRA Children’s Choice (Math Man, 2001, text by Teri Daniels). All In Just One Cookie (text by Susan E. Goodman) was an ALA Notable Book in 2007. His work has frequently been offered through Children’s Book-of-the-Month Club.
His stage adaptation of his 1995 book Grunt! The Primitive Cave Boy was produced by the Tony Award-winning Denver Center Theatre Company. The film rights to his 1998 book Benjamin McFadden and the Robot Babysitter were optioned by the Walt Disney Company; the film rights to My Dad’s Job (2003, text by Peter Glassman) were purchased by Nickelodeon films.
Timothy was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended the University of Dallas on academic scholarship. He spent two years as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Vienna, Austria, and also lived for a time on the Greek Islands. He currently resides in New York City.
An interview with Timothy Bush
Q. Has illustrating a serial novel been a different kind of experience for you?
A. Absolutely. It’s different from anything I’ve done before. In a picture book, the pictures are really what carry the story; in books for older kids, the pictures occasionally crop up as the pages turn to give the reader a model for how to imagine as he or she reads. With a serial story, the picture is present for the whole time the reader engages with that chapter; it has to attract, engage, and set a tone. It has to pull the reader along in the text without giving too much away. Keeping all of these things in balance materially affects the way I choose and develop each image.
Q. It’s been said by the national press that your “pictures have verve”. How do you accomplish this?
A. I drink way too much coffee.
Q. What is it that makes an illustration humorous?
A. I could try and explain things about reader expectation, upsetting of established hierarchies, identification with inner, anarchic children, but the truth is, I haven’t got the faintest idea and neither does anyone else. Funny doesn’t lend itself to functional analysis, and for this we should all be grateful.
Q. Any thoughts about your work appearing in newspapers as contrasted with books?
A. I very much like the idea of accidental readers. With books, the audience is there on purpose, and this is wonderful: they’ve come prepared to have an experience and are delivering themselves to you for that purpose. Newspaper readers, on the other hand, have a whole newspaper’s worth of choices. You have to catch them and win them over, especially in the opening parts of the story. Once they start reading, of course, the basic human need to find out how the story ends will keep them coming back. But as an illustrator, my job is to catch their attention and lead them to the door.
Q. Has TV, digital graphics, or animated film had an impact on contemporary illustration?
A. It’s so omnipresent there’s no way to avoid its impact. It’s completely created the visual environment we all work in. The question for me is, how do I react to it? Set myself apart from it? Do things that it can’t do and I can? Or – let’s face it – learn from it? I’ve done some work in digital media and it’s changed the way I approach picturemaking even when I’m working in more traditional methods. What’s important to remember is that all of these are different outlets for the same basic need: to tell stories. Different media allow for different expressions of creative imagination, but none of them is really a replacement for it.
Think about your local Home Depot store: they’ve got about a zillion different kinds of pipe, but all of them only move water. They aren’t – they can’t be – the water itself.
Q. How do you choose the moment in a story to illustrate?
A. I begin by reading and re-reading the text for whatever piece of the story is under consideration. I look for a couple of things: what are the major plot points in this part of the story? What are the most interesting visual possibilities? I do that while also remembering that any individual picture is part of a whole set. So I try to keep from making anything that’s too much like anything else. I want the full set of pictures to be as rich and various as I can make it.
Q. Have you ever begun with illustrations and then moved to text?
A. All the time. The first book I wrote and illustrated – JAMES IN THE HOUSE OF AUNT PRUDENCE – got started this way, and any number of projects since.
Q. Any advice for would-be illustrators?
A. Draw. Spend the time to learn what you’re doing. There’s no substitute for it.
• Ferocious Girls, Steamroller Boys and Other Poems In Between
• Benjamin McFadden and the Robot Babysitter
• James in the House of Aunt Prudence
• Three at Sea
• Grunt! The Primitive Cave Boy
• Bach’s Big Adventure
• Math Man
• The Christmas Cricket
• Wanna Buy An Alien?
• My Dad’s Job
• All In Just One Cookie