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Some Thoughts on Writing and Illustrating
This is a photo of me when I was six.
And here we have one taken a year ago at seventy-five.
For all those sixty-nine years, I have felt close to that six-, and also seven-, eight- and nine-, year-old that I
was. I have felt myself to be a kind of spokesperson for childhood.
It's not only that I remember so much: the many apartments in which we lived in New York City, the
teddy bear I had, my slippers, my father's tender voice as he read us stories and poems and also his frighteningly angry voice, my upset stomach on walking
into a new school, the face of my mother worrying about paying the rent as well as her attractive pink skin and freckles. Then there were the foods that I loved: rye
bread and butter; chicken feet cooked in soup; the special treat of heavy cream; the feat of forming little sculptures out of the soft crumb of bread while trying to
ignore the parental tension at the table. As in so many families, it was a volatile mishmash of love and worry about money.
These memories seem to be held, very much as children would feel them: in my skin and throughout my
body. They are both sensual and kinetic. From them I get a powerful stream of details for my writing and especially for my drawing and painting.
I have mostly written in first person. In AChair for My Mother and in Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe, I
did not even tell the name of the main character. Yet my characters, formed as they are from some impulse within, take on new qualities as suits their newly
created stories. How very much Rosa longs for her mother to have a comfortable beautiful chair covered with roses! That came right out of my desire as a child
to be able to give my mother some marvelous gift that would take away her sad, overworked look. Yet when readers ask if Rosa in the Chair series is me when I
was little, I have to tell them, "Not really."
Bidemmi in Cherries and Cherry Pits, Elana Rose Rosen in Scooter, Stringbean Joseph Coe in Stringbean's Trip to the Shining Sea, and now Amber in Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart are much more
me. They have my deep attachment to words and to drawing, to curiosity and to love of adventure. But Rosa, so much more a quietly dutiful family member that I ever
was, surely did grow right from my heart, as did all the others.
The way in which characters and their stories grow and blossom from one's experience, from books one has
read and loved and from sheer invention, is so mysterious. It is one of the deep pleasures of my imagining—writing and picturing life. And those
characters, once invented, have their ways of hanging around. When I went recently to received a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart, I felt that Amber was right there with me. I
had to explain that I was handing her my engraved silver plate, for she was the one who had waited decades to be drawn out of her silence into aliveness through word and picture.
But a book is not only words and pictures. It's a whole little world. The chosen proportions—covers, endpapers,
decorations, pacing, and font (perhaps hand lettering as in More More Said the Baby), even spine and flaps—are all expressive of the particular story and its creator, who
is in turn costume designer, psychologist, mayor, city planner, garden and house designer, sociologist, world changer. . . .
From the time when I first learned penmanship I have felt a close connection between writing and drawing. I
sensed something special to my spirit in the way feeling, thought, and imagination flow out of the hand with brush, pencil, or pen and onto to paper in words
and images. I have filled many notebooks with poems, essays, stories, sketches, cartoons, dreams, doodles, and ideas for leaflets and speeches, over the years.
Though I have tried to do my part to move the world toward less violence, more justice, and a better life for
more people, I definitely don't want my books to be pulpit, soapbox, or classroom. Mostly I have wanted a variety of characters to be leading their lives of emotion,
curiosity, imagination, and adventure right in the midst of their struggles to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. I may have put those complicated,
colorful borders around the pages in the Chair series as emblem of the richly textured life of the characters despite their slim material resources and the fire that
burned up all their belongings.
I felt an obligation to give them a colorful, decorative life in my books. But also it gave me great pleasure to
create those decorated pages on which their story unfolded. I trusted that those pages would transmit to readers and lookers the respect and affection I have for my characters and their stories.
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About the Artist (in her own words):
I'm now 75—a lot of years of varied passionate interests, founding (with others) a cooperative community, raising three
children, starting a school. There have always been lots of kids to do things with—bread sculptures and gingerbread houses, stories, costumes, masks, puppets, hikes, gardens, trips. I also kept
journals, wrote poems, studied Japanese calligraphy, designed covers for a pacifist magazine, organized against militarism, injustice, the threat of nuclear destruction. . . . What else? I cooked in a
Summerhill school in rural Ontario, Canada; made a 500-mile canoe trip on the Yukon River; moved to a houseboat in Vancouver, British Columbia; took to writing short stories; illustrated my first
book with Remy Charlip (Hooray for Me); found my way to Greenwillow; moved to New York City. On and on . . . too much to tell. But it all added up, and here I am today, as excited about Amber Was
Brave, Essie Was Smart—my thirteenth book—as anything I've ever done.
Books by Vera B. Williams (all published by Greenwillow Books):
*A Chair for My Mother (1983)
Something Special for Me (1986)
Music, Music for Everyone (1984)
Stringbean's Trip to the Shining Sea, illustrated by Jennifer Williams (1988)
Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart (2001)
*A Chair for My Mother celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2003.
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
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