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I grew up around castles and ghosts and witches so the world within a children's book is an ideal environment to me.
My father was in the military, which made my sisters, my brother, and I army brats. When I was little we lived in Germany. My mother
would read to us about princesses in stone castles, fire-breathing dragons and, of course, heroic knights who arrived just in the nick of time. Hair-raising adventures! Breathtaking escapes! Then we
would take a Sunday drive along in Rhine Valley and actually visit a castle. Once you've climbed overgrown steps to a tower spire and looked through arched, stone windows at the Rhine and the hills
below, you pretty much know that a dragon has been there. It was all real.
When I was ten, we moved to Okinawa. The island's major newspaper occasionally featured a cover story about an appearance of the
Nago ghost. To my relief, she only haunted cab drivers. Accompanying photos usually showed people out on Highway 1 (her main beat) waving lanterns in the night to entice her to appear for their
cameras. Riding the school bus along that highway was chilling enough but on frequent walks through neighboring villages with friends, we'd see black-robed, haggard old women and men, bent under the
weight of bundles of sticks carried on their heads. If you've read your C. S. Lewis, and I had, you'd know witches when you saw them.
Many years and books later, at a library conference in
Dallas, I had my annual epiphany. Picking up Deborah Nourse Lattimore's book Why is There No Arguing in Heaven (HarperCollins), I found myself staring at the very temples in Tikal, Guatemala,
that I had just climbed during a recent visit. There were the stone carvings and pictographs, even the monkeys that chattered overhead in the surrounding forest. DUH. Why not, it struck me, climb right into the book?
My editor at Henry Holt, Nina Ignatowicz, had suggested that I do an African folktale and we both thought an Ananse tale would be great. My research at local libraries revealed that the most
appealing stories had already been done. And done well. Fortunately my husband, Chuku Lee, my mother Christine, a librarian, and I had plans to travel to West Africa to visit friends. Hopefully, I
could uncover new stories or rather, old stories, right at the source.
Through friends, I found myself on the outskirts of Accra one night listening to a storyteller spin tales for
hours in his native Ewe! His gestures and sing-song delivery were promising, but once translated, I knew his stories weren't the ones I wanted to illustrate. Some had too much violence, others
featured animals I didn't want to paint. Combing bookstores and libraries, I finally came across the story that would become Ananse and the Lizard (Henry Holt). It has elements that appear in folktales from around the world and, in a rare turn, the trickster spider gets tricked.
With a few trips to Accra's mind-boggling marketplace for reference material, I was set: Kente cloth and beads, masks and artifacts. And what I suspected proved true. The scent of the air,
the storyteller's laughter, the villages we drove through, and strolls we took under African palms all played through my mind as I worked on Ananse at home in Brooklyn. Having walked through those pages, I know this will never be just a book for me.
Now, what was that story I was thinking about that is set in the south of France? •
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About the Author:
In addition to the Coretta Scott King, the Orbis Pictus, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, Pat Cummings
is the recipient of eleven t-shirts, thirteen mugs, three hundred fifteen ballerina drawings, and one unidentifiable science project (possibly a large model of a molecule) from
readers. She has been illustrating children's books ever since she graduated from Pratt Institute. Ten years later, realizing that recording her younger brother's childhood exploits
would be an ideal means of revenge, Ms. Cummings began to write. By repeatedly changing her brother's name she has been able to sneak several books about him into print.
Currently, Pat and her husband, Chuku Lee, live in a loft in beautiful downtown Brooklyn, New York. Their cat Cash, who dropped in for a visit nineteen years ago, occasionally models for
books, as do family members and friends, both willingly and unwittingly.
Books written and/or illustrated by Pat Cummings:
Ananse and the Lizard: A West African Tale (Henry Holt, 2002)
Lulu's Birthday written by Elizabeth Howard (Greenwillow, 2001)
Angel Baby (HarperCollins, 2000)
Purrrrr (HarperCollins 1999)
Talking with Artists 3: Conversations with Peter Catalanotto, Raul Colon, Lisa Desimini, Jane Dyer, Kevin
Hawkes, G. Brian Karas, Betsy and Ted Lewin, Keiko Narahashi, Elise Primavera, Anna Rich, Peter Sis, Paul Zelinsky, compiled by Pat Cummings (Clarion Books, 1999)
Talking with Adventurers: Conversations with Christina Allen, Robert Ballard, Michael Blakey, Ann
Bowles, David Doubilet, Jane Goodall, Dereck & Beverly Joubert, Michael Novacek, Johan Reinhard, Rick C. West and Juris Zarins, compiled and edited by Pat Cummings & Linda
Cummings, PhD. (National Geographic Books, 1998)
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
Meet the Author/Illustrator Archives
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