(Inside A Black Apple)

Once, There Were Two Sisters

That's how their tale begins...and now they are in the world!

Snow & Rose is released today, both in print *and* in audiobook.

There are a few lines from a favorite song that stuck with me through the years I was working on this:

"Out of sorrow, entire worlds have been built / Out of longing, great wonders have been willed"

Because the ingredients for this story were this: an old sorrow and an old fairy tale. And from those two things, a whole world grew.

It is the most of myself I've ever put into any one thing; in writing about these girls, the wolf-hearted and the rabbit-hearted, and what they lost, I was able to write about the history of my own heart, and my own loss. And tangle it all up in ferns and ancient trees and keys that might-or-might-not-be magic.

I hope you will like my mysterious forest. You might, especially if you like any of these things: willful sisters, mysterious woods, boy mushroom-farmers, unusual libraries, strange enchantments...

You can find it online, at your local bookstore, through my longtime friends at BuyOlympia.

I've spent so much time here, and now it belongs to all of us...

to you too, if you want.

♥

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Tomorrow is Snow & Rose day!

One of my favorite things about the real, bound book is this little sketchbook section in the back.

I can't believe my first proper novel will be out tomorrow...I hope you'll love it.

♥

 

My Collection of Fairy Tales

Snow & Rose is out in exactly one week (October 10th!)  While we're waiting, I made a new page on my website celebrating one of my biggest inspirations: old fairy tale books.

Click here to see some of my favorites & nerd out with me!

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Snow & Rose

My next book comes out in just a few months (October 10th, to be exact) and I wanted to to tell you about it before it's actually here!

Snow & Rose is an illustrated fairy tale, my first proper novel and the most personal thing I've ever done. It was also the longest in the making -- I imagined a reworking of my favorite Grimm's tale, Snow White & Rose Red, years and years ago -- and then it was several years in the writing, editing & art-making.

I have so much to say about this story and the two girls that are its namesakes (and I will share more soon!) but for now I'll leave you with the words that grace the jacket flap, because I think it encapsulates the book so nicely:

************
Snow and Rose were two sisters, as different as night and day.
They lived in the woods, but it hadn't always been so...
 
Once, they lived in a big house with spectacular gardens and an army of servants.
Once, they had a father and mother who loved them more than the sun and moon.
But that was before their father disappeared into the woods and their mother disappeared into sorrow.
This is the story of two sisters and the enchanted woods that have been waiting for them to break a set of terrible spells.

***********

It is the tale of two brave girls, a strange library, and a boy named Ivo, of a wounded bear, of what it means to know and to believe.

You can pre-order your own mysterious tale of the forest from
your local bookstore,
Barnes & Noble,
Amazon

&
Powell's

More soon!
(October, kindly hurry up!)

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Littlest Family Process Art

Do you want to see what one of my books looks like at the beginning?

Julie at the great Seven Impossible Things has posted a bunch of process art from The Littlest Family's Big Day --  click over for storyboards, cover sketches, etc. There is even more, but I pared it down to a good overview of what it looks like behind-the-scenes.

I love these two early cover sketches so much. I think they were the first thing I ever made, when the idea was just percolating. Anyway, there's a lot more to see, along with art from two other books, The Lizsts & The Bear Who Wasn't There included in The Sweet & the Surreal, a post from her Kirkus colum last week.

I love seeing the beginnings of things, all wispy and rough.

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The Littlest Family is Out Today!

Today is a really Big Day, because The Littlest Family arrives in bookstores today! (I wanted to be sure to show you one of my favorite things in the whole book, the endpapers...I love endpapers & I'm especially proud of these.)

I know the family will arrive with their suitcases in hand, ready to go out on a wander.

I am so excited that this book is really real and is going to be on shelves and making its way out in the world. It's my tribute to going walks, to exploring new places, to how big the world feels, to all things tiny...

I love these mini-bears & I hope you will too!

More soon (there's a lot of process art that went in to making the book, so stay tuned...)

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My Shirley Jackson Year

    The year of Shirley Jackson actually began the year before. In my stack of Christmas presents was a copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and when I read the first few pages, I was done for. It is, to me, a Perfect Book, beautiful and meandering and dangerous and sad -- the kind of book that seems so right & that you love so much you wonder how on earth you it didn't find you before.

And thus the year of Shirley Jackson began. It wasn't planned or organized, I just ended up spending most of 2015 reading everything that is even remotely in print. And just when I'd run out, a collection of mostly uncollected things came out near the end of the summer (Let Me Tell You) so that was nice timing.

Shirley Jackson is so modern. She belongs with us, now: unconcerned about what is highbrow or lowbrow (in her influences or her work.) Uncaring for the divisions between what is important (capital-L) Literary fiction & what is genre writing, just fiercely herself. I think Jonathan Lethem talks about that in the lovely introduction he wrote to the Penguin Classics edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

She reminds me of my beloved Angela Carter in that way -- wild hearted, but feet firmly on the ground. Both with rare, magical minds but also earthy and wry and funny as hell. Amateur witches who thought about fairy tales and vampires a lot but also raised babies and gave the side-eye and laughed, I presume, all the time. And though they both have beloved novels, they might be, above all, masters of the short story, of small moments and self-contained worlds. You could do much worse than The Bloody Chamber & The Lottery for desert island material.

If I were to create my own Essential Shirley Jackson (and I've given it a lot of thought) I've landed on a fat little volume comprised of one novel, one set of memoir stories & one set of short stories: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Raising Demons (which I really prefer to Life Among the Savages, and which contains a beautiful story about clothespin dolls) & then, finally, The Lottery collection of short stories (especially Flower Garden & Seven Kinds of Ambiguity.)

Though I hate to leave out Hangsaman, if only for weirdness' sake. 

I also love her writing-about-writing, the few essays & lectures collected in Come Along with Me & Let Me Tell You. She is, in her advice and prescriptions about craft, as she as always appears to me, utterly enchanting but utterly real.

And people who are both are in such short supply.

 

 

Bits of a New Book

Hello there!
I've been hard at work finishing my next picture book and now that it is really & truly finished, I'm planning on doing nothing.
(Just kidding, I'm beginning the art for another book.)

I've been sharing these little bits & pieces over on instagram, and I wanted to see them all together. The art has only been finished for a little over a month & already I miss this book (and its occupants) so badly.

I can't wait to see the real thing (and for you to see it too.)

More on this little book when the time is right!

It Won't Be Too Long...

before the book these bebes belong to is out! This Summer.

I can't wait! In the meantime, we'll just have to hang out with this little crowd.

Editing Still Life

Thank you for the nice words & excitement re: the next picture book in the last post. More on that front soon!

While I've been proofing cute bebe feets, I've also been in the midst of editing another book...a longer book. It's a story I'd wanted to write & make real for years and years. I finally wrote it down last Spring, and my editor (who has been an important and dear and close collaborator on all my books) wanted to publish it and now I find myself at the end of a big round of revisions, and so pleased to be there.

It's my first proper novel. Though it is still short by grown up standards, it's quite a bit longer than Oddfellow's, which is really more a series of vignettes.

This one is a fairy tale.
And I will give you one hint: it's an expanded version of my favorite fairy tale. Some of you might know what that is, or might be able to hazard a guess.

It is scheduled for publication next year, 2016, and I will share dispatches and other bits as it gets closer!

PS: It will be illustrated! Mostly words, but there will be pictures too

Proofing Cute Feet

I spent a little bit of my birthday (last Friday - the 13th, and it wasn't filled with bad luck & bad omens, but instead with brunch & cake) looking over the first batch of proofs for my next picture book.

It comes out late this summer...more on that front (and more peeks) soon, soon!

20 New Classic Children's Books

The Huffington Post recently posted this list of new children's classics and I was so happy when I scrolled down to find Dream Animals on the list. Not only on this lovely list, but alongside some of *my* personal new(ish) favorites, like the achingly lovely How To and the audaciously big & strange & wonderful Once Upon an Alphabet.

Tin House Cover

Bess, Maude, Frances, Matilda & Maryanne are on the cover of the newest issue of Tin House.

Tin House* is a quarterly literary magazine, a preserve for written things: wildly imagined things, wryly observed things and unclassifiable things, poems and stories and oddities by beginners and big-timers all bumping elbows. Accessible, fresh & a really pleasing size to hold in your hands, they also have some very beautiful covers.
I'm happy to be a part of this issue.

* They are also a publisher of books!

Books in the Wild

My friend Crystal took this photo of the Dream book display, nestled at one of my favorite places, Land Shop & Gallery.

I love that little stand so much!

I actually have always thought, since my teenage days working at the defunct suburban music chain, Wherehouse Music, that a "standie" (as we called them) was the pinnacle of achievement. Putting together complicated, instructionless cardboard displays, I thought "Only very important things deserve this rigamarole."

Only people like Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks had standies.

I can't believe that there is a standie to hold the Dream books. Taping the cardboard head back onto Bob Dylan in 2002, I never could've guessed.

Day Dreamers !

Today we release the dragons (and a whole bestiary of mythical creatures) -
today Day Dreamers is out!

 It can be found at Barnes & Noble, Powell's, Amazon and your local shop

How about some process images to celebrate? They are one of my favorite things to see with other people's work...I love seeing the beginnings of things.

A sketch/color sketch/final painting of the Griffin dream (one of my favorite spreads in the book).

In the book, each place (a tide pool, a museum, a library, etc.) leads to a different beast and a different dream. Above, these are color sketches of the realities.

And in the land of waking dreams, you will meet dragons and a jackalope, a phoenix, a griffin, two unicorns, and a whole carousel of sea creatures.

And when you leave you learn the thing
That all day dreamers learn
When you leave the land of magic beasts
They wait for your return

Day Dreamers Eve

My new picture book, the companion to Dream Animals, is released tomorrow.

More soon, including
Dragons! Unicorns! Three Headed Pups!

A Very Short Story of a Little Elephant & Crocodile

This gem is from Babar & His Children.
I think it makes it into all-time-favorite children's illustration territory for me.

The text is also great, in a Babar-ish way (it begins "Three seconds in which to act -- and no gun!")  but I think it's a such a perfect three panel story all on its own. What cold heart could resist a baby elephant encountering a crocodile while floating in a bowler hat?

Soviet Era Children's Books

I'm always losing my mind a little bit over a lot of things. Right this minute, it goes something like: thoughts of my next picture book, balloons, Manet's portraits, Babar, muffins, girls in blouses, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, sewing dresses, the Bears film etc. etc.

There's also this Soviet era children's book art. All but one of these (the pink elephant) are from this beautiful archive/online exhibition from the Rare Books/Special Collections dept. of the McGill Library.

 

   

The lively, simplified shapes & beautiful, wise use of color and grey-blacks make them so arresting & eternally modern. I think the barracuda/cat/mouse spread is one of my favorite things I've seen.

Now I'm wondering about Beautiful Books, Terrible Times...it looks like a good one.

One Reason Why I love New Old Books

I found this 1930 edition of my favorite Colette book today (the first of the Claudine series, Claudine at School.) It was just sitting there, waiting for me at Powell's & I think it cost some king's ransom like six dollars.

I check the shelves of my favorite authors on most trips to used book stores, because even though I start off with modern editions of most favorite books, I always try to trade up to nice oldie (but readable) copies as I find them.

Plus, old books come with heart-melting little idiosyncrasies like abandoned library card pockets and bookplates (in this case) and sincere inscriptions from aunts and mentors (in other cases). I'd pay extra for those little things.

PS: well-loved cat tote from Leah Goren

Blanche & Cora

One of the most unusual old children's book's I've brought home lately: a nineteenth century chromolithographed book about two girls in florida, a bow & arrow, and a snake. I love the image on the cover so much (and the pamphlet-style book is quite brittle and delicate) so I think I'll probably frame it to keep me company here in my studio.

There is nothing quite like the colors they achieved when printing chromolithographs. There's an irrepressible brightness in the colors and a softness in the shadows...it's hard to define, really. I only know that they're some of my favorite, favorite illustrations and that boxes of postcards and game pieces and scrapbook bits printed this way make me go out of my mind a little.

Little Fur Child

Last week, very out-of-the-blue, I got a wonderful package in the mail from one of my favorite people. Inside the wonderful package was the drawing above, an original Garth Williams sketch of the Little Fur Child from Little Fur Family, my all-time favorite picture book. I know I might've said all of the rest of this before, so bear with me if I'm repeating myself!

I remember there was an auction of most of the original artwork a few years ago, and I wanted so badly to swoop it all up. Feeling wistful about that made me all the more beside-myself to have an original Fur Child of my own. I love sketches in general, and I know this little guy (and his perfect little hat!) will be close beside me in my studio for forever. I just have to find the perfect frame for him!

My three favorite things about Little Fur Family:

- What a bunch of misfits the family is, but how perfect they are together. The little one is very bearish, the papa is a Scottie-dog/bearish creature, and the mama is...? A bush-baby? The grandfather (not pictured) is also very terrier-like, so I'm assuming he's on the father's side.

- The papa's outstanding singing-face in the lullaby scene (top R)

- And my most, most, most favorite thing of all...in the book but possibly just in general: the moment the Fur Child finds a tiny version of himself (top L)

"Then he caught a little tiny tiny fur animal,
The littlest fur animal in the world
It had warm silky fur and even a little fur nose
So he kissed it right on its little fur nose
And put it gently back in the grass
And the little tiny tiny fur animal
Ran down a hole into the ground.

The subtly frantic look on the tiny tiny fur animal's face really makes it, I think.

Dream Animals at Seven Impossible Things

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast is one of the very best children's book blogs in this wide world, and Dream Animals was recently featured there with some previously unseen sketch-to-finals (like my bear boy's dream up there.)

Julie, who runs Seven Imp, has a wonderful & voracious eye and writes really smart, thoughtful posts that emphasize art and illustration. The fact that it is reliably an art-party over there (and her thoughtful & thorough way of approaching illustrated books) makes it probably my favorite picture book place online. Besides, it's one of the only places I've ever come across a write-up on the work of my favorite Japanese illustrator, Komako Sakai.

If you hop over there, I can't be responsible for the rabbit hole you'll almost undoubtably fall down! There's so much to read & so much to see.

Dream Animals in the Wild

On Tuesday, we headed to Powell's to see Dream Animals on the shelves - a publication day tradition! Even if you know the book is going out into the world, its something altogether different to see it there.

We also spied it at Land, before procuring some of my favorite miniature cupcakes. We were lucky enough to have out-of-town friends visiting, so we celebrated all day, all over town!

Dream Animals Is On Sale Today!

The day is here - Happy publication day to Dream Animals! I am so excited - I am certainly going to have a piece of book-birthday pie and who knows what else?

Today it's finally landing on shelves in bookstores all over the place - Powell's, Barnes & Noble, Your local bookstore!

This is an excerpt from the letter I wrote to accompany a special mailing of books...

When I wrote the text, it took the form of a new nighttime mythology, something that felt at once novel and timeless (and worthy of entering into the mighty and towering library of Bedtime Books). I created the artwork using both tiny pots of ink and little pieces of paper as well as big tubes of paint on great wooden panels. I loved creating all of the artwork, down the little imaginary constellations, but painting the six dreams was particularly special– a reverie.  A very time-intensive reverie, but a dream nonetheless.  

All in all, this parade of gentle foxes and tigers and bears (and their little riders) took hold of my heart and didn’t let go for nearly a year of scheming and sketching and writing and painting.

And now, it’s finally time for our dreamers and their companions to make their way to you.

For local (or local-ish!) pals,

A BOOK LAUNCH / SIGNING PARTY 

Where:  Land Gallery in Portland

When: November 2, 3:00 pm

We will have reading, signing & treats!

Whether you are big or small or rather medium-sized, I promise you this:

Furred or finned or feathered, your Dream Animal is waiting!

Hooray !

Dress to Match Your Reading

We pause dispatches from The Deep Green Sea because today I am very pleased at the way my dress matches my current reading.

I found this nice copy of Colette's Chéri the other day and it kind of matched my outfit that day (a blush silk skirt & black leotard) too.

Isn't that jacket beautiful?
In my dreams, all novels look like this - a lovely patterned jacket (one chosen especially with each book in mind) and a simple little box for the title and author.

What a pretty row of spines they'd make!