Sunday, October 28, 2007

Robert's Snow - Adam Rex!

Behold J.Lo, in all his snowflakey glory!

Adam Rex is one of the illustrators who has donated a snowflake to the wonderful Robert's Snow auction to benefit the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute. He happens to be one of my favourite illustrators, and I was very happy that I snagged him when the ladies over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast (also big fans...see here and here) were organizing this whole affair!




I think I first came to Adam Rex's work through Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. The second I spied the cover, I knew I had to have it. As a collector of Halloween picture books, I was so pleased not only with the art, but with the smart and funny poetry within. It's a killer for my Halloween read alouds with all kids loving the illustrations, and the kids with that sense of humour (you know the ones) splitting their sides over the content.

My next encounter (after searching for more) was with the Lucy Rose series. An early chapter book, featuring a feisty protagonist (what's not to love?). After that, I just wanted to read, and own everything. Fandom? Maybe...but I have yet to be disappointed.

Adam graciously agreed to answer some of my questions, as well as some questions from The True Meaning of Smekday loving kids at my school. So here we go.

Stacy: How did you get involved with Robert's Snow?

Adam: They tracked my email address down and got in touch in 2005–I think Grace Lin had seen my first book, The Dirty Cowboy (written by Amy Timberlake), and thought my work would compliment the collection.

Stacy: Did you always know that you wanted to be an illustrator? How did you figure out that writing and illustrating for children was for you?

Adam: I always knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind. I didn't think about writing and illustrating kids' books until I was in my teens, and working in a bookstore. When I became familiar with some of the titles coming out in the late eighties like The True Story of the Three Little Pigs! and A Day With Wilbur Robinson, I realized there was a place for my sense of humor, and for the sort of art I wanted to make.

Stacy: How long were you cooking up The True Meaning of Smekday?

Adam: Oh, off and on for four or five years. At first it was just the fun project I worked on when I wanted to avoid my real work. So I started slowly. Then my agent sold it based on maybe the first third, and I worked more in earnest then. But I think some of the ideas go back further than that–I've long thought an alien invasion would be a good way to address our own history.

Stacy: How did you come up with the Boov Speak? I found that when I was reading Smekday, Boov speak stayed in my brain quite easily. Did you find yourself rearranging your words while you were writing?

Adam: Boovspeak comes kind of naturally to me–it's kind of an exaggeration of how I talk when I'm being lazy and there isn't anyone but my wife and me around. As I was working on Smekday I reached a point at which J.Lo's (my Boov's) speech came as quickly for me as did any other character's. I have not had for writing this way recentlies, so I am possibly notso much a Boovspeak Superstar as to before now. Hm.

Stacy: My students were asking about the "secret cover" on Smekday. The dust jacket image is different than the image that is physically on the book. What's the story?

Adam: No big story, really - I just came up with a number of images that I thought would make different covers for the book, and wanted to use as many of them as possible. People can peruse my July postings on my blog to see a little of how the cover evolved. I don't like to waste ideas, so I stuck runner-up covers beneath the dust jacket and on the title page. My books Tree Ring Circus and Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich have "secret covers" as well, for various reasons.

Stacy: I have read that there is a sequel to Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich in the works. How is that going? Is the writing process for a collection of poetry vastly different than for a picture book?

Adam: It's written! Now I'm just figuring out the art. It will be called Frankenstein Takes the Cake. I've reported in other places that I thought it was going to be called Frankenstein Makes a Sequel, but I was eventually talked out of that.
Writing in rhyme is different from writing prose, of course, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, writing something like one of my Frankenstein books is, in a way, like writing a number of rhyming picture books at once. Many of the poems in FMaS could have been expanded into full-length books if I'd thought that was the best way to present them.

Stacy: And here are some questions from my students who have been reading and loving The True Meaning of Smekday...

From an 8th grade reader: When you wrote the book, and didn't tell the readers some of the horrors of the aliens, did you know yourself? Or was it a mystery to you as well as the reader?

Adam: I don't know what details you're thinking about specifically, but I can definitely say that some things in Smekday were as much a mystery to me as I wrote as they will be to my readers. I wrote a lot without knowing exactly where the story was going, or how it would end, and trusted that I would figure it out eventually. That meant I had to go back from time to time and change some passages I'd written earlier so they'd fall in line with some plot detail I'd only just discovered. I didn't know at first, for example, that Gorg is not the name of the alien race, but rather that every member of the race is named Gorg. But it struck me at some point that having your planet invaded by, say, the Todd (a huge group of people who are all named Todd) or whatever would be funny.

From a 7th grade reader: How did you think of the characters and planets in The True Meaning of Smekday?

Adam: I thought a lot and drew a lot. When I felt like I had a good idea what the aliens were going to look like, their appearance helped me figure out what kind of people they were.

From another 7th grade reader: This book has so many characters and contraptions...it had a crazy plot. What or where did all of those ideas come from?

Adam: I was inspired by a lot of other books and movies and so forth, particularly the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy by Douglas Adams. But my ideas come from the same kind of places everyone's ideas come from -- you all the stories you've read, the movies and TV shows you've seen, things other people have old you, then maybe you mix it up with some other stories and ideas that don't seem to have anything to do with the first stories and ideas, then you run it all through the dirty coffee filter of your brain and, if you're lucky, it comes out looking and smelling like something brand new.

Stacy: Since it's Halloween and all, could you let us in on your favourite candy? Is it the same as when you were young or has your palate evolved?

Adam: I like gummi a lot these days, and it didn't really exist in America, as far as I knew, when I was a little kid. My earliest memories of Gummi Bears are from 6th or 7th grade. And yet Wikipedia tells me they've been around since the twenties. I don't know. I also love good dark chocolate, which as a kid I lumped in the same category as wine or coffee or kissing in movies -- things that only the mental illness of adulthood could cause you to like. When I was a kid I liked Butterfingers.


If you just can't stand it and you need some more, Adam Rex can be found all over the web. Here's a list of a few of the places that I found!

Adam Rex

Smekday

Ironic Sans

Nerds with Kids

The ARTDEPARTMENT

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty

And for the CONTEST! Just use the comments to tell me what YOUR favourite Adam Rex title is, and you will be in the running for a brand new shiny hardcover copy of The True Meaning of Smekday! Woot!

Friday, October 26, 2007

Robert's Snow


As many of you know, bloggers all over the kidlitosphere have been posting about the upcoming Robert's Snow auction. Amazingly talented illustrators have painted snowflakes, which will be auctioned off during 3 consecutive weeks, and all of the proceeds will go to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Booktopia and Tweendom will proudly show-case Adam Rex! Adam has graciously agreed to answer some burning questions, and I will be giving away a brand spanking new hardcover copy of The True Meaning of Smekday to a lucky reader!

Sunday, October 14, 2007

NYPL's Bookfest 2007



Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending New York Public Library's Bookfest 2007. The keynote speaker was Lois Lowry. She spoke eloquently on writing, censorship, and family, and she gave attendees a sneak peek into her soon-to-be-released title, The Willoughbys. What a great way to start the morning!


Following Lowry's address, I was a group leader for a book discussion called "How Mysterious!". Earlier in the summer, I chose 5 titles to bring to the group. Enola Holmes: The Case of the Missing Marquess, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, The Case of the Flying Zalindas, Gilda Joyce Psychic Detective, and The House Where Nobody Lived. I had a lively group of folks with librarians and educators from New Jersey, New York, Long Island, and Pennsylvania. We had a great discussion about the nature of mysteries, boy vs. girl readers, and coincidences! It was quite fun.

There were many other groups going on at the same time. The leaders and topics were as follows:

Jen Hubert - YA Dystopian novels
David Mowery - YA Comedy (What's So Funny?)
Kimberly Paone - YA Dark and Creepy
Rachel Payne - A Caldecott Retrospective
Karen Smith - Picture This (Imagination and Reality in Illustrated Picture
Books)
Rosanne Cerny - Urban Places, Urban Spaces (Picture Books)
Lisa Von Drasek - No Drama Here (Middle Grade Fantasy)
Susan Pine - Wind Beneath My Wings (Middle Grade)
Rita Auerbach - Illustration Innovation (Middle Grade)
Randall Enos - Difficult Times (Cross Over fiction)

After a yummy boxed lunch and some chat time, attendees were treated to a panel on technology and art. The speakers for this session were William Low, J. Otto Seibold, and John Grandits.

A great time was had by all!


Monday, October 08, 2007

The Wednesday Wars



Holling Hoodhood lives in a perfect house, with a perfect lawn, smack-dab in the middle of a town that is either Jewish or Catholic. Holling's family is Presbyterian, which has never been a problem until this year. You see, Wednesdays are religious instruction day. This means that the Jewish kids head off to Hebrew School, and the Catholic kids head off to catechism. Holling has nowhere to be except school, and his teacher Mrs. Baker is now teaching a class of one. She is not pleased.

Holling is soon completing tasks like cleaning the chalkboard erasers, and dusting the classroom. And then it gets worse. Mrs. Baker brings in the Shakespeare!

Gary D. Schmidt has written an incredible story that is meaty, articulate, and important. Set in the Vietnam era United States, the Hoodhood family is staring change in the face. The perfect house and the perfect lawn isn't so perfect inside. As Holling tries to manage Wednesdays of 7th grade, his teenage sister Heather is becoming politically minded and estranged from her dad. Holling is seeing blatant racism directed at his Vietnamese classmate as local soldiers lose their lives.

Woven into the story is an innocent humor that brings the reader effortlessly along. From the escapee class pets, to Holling's stage debut, The Wednesday Wars is a pleasure to read. It's a solid dose of good old fashioned storytelling.

Imagine that!

Planet Esme - Bliss!

As you know from my last post, I was recently in Chicago attending the kidlit blogger's con. Swing on over to Booktopia to get my first impressions. That Saturday was great, but lots of meetings were involved! On Sunday, Esme invited us over to her Planet for brunch and a look around.

O. M. G.





This is what we saw when we entered.












And this.









And this.







And this.









Wow.

Esme was so generous with her space. (This is an apartment for her books, you know). We were all in awe. And we enjoyed a delicious brunch, and each other's company. It was time to leave too soon. I shared a cab with fellow Canadians Andrea and Mark, and was back in stinky NYC before I knew it.

But I think that Planet Esme will be somewhere I go in my head when crowded on a train, or herding onto the ferry.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Monday, October 01, 2007

Cybils!

It's that time again!

I am proud to be serving on the Middle Grade Fiction judging panel. The nominations are pouring in, and I can't wait to dive into the reading!

Woot!