Tag: Jane Yolen

Picture Book Review: Bear Outside by Jane Yolen

On By Only Picture BooksIn Picture Book Reviews
Author: Jane Yolen
Illustrator: Jen Corace
Neal Porter Books
2 March 2021
32 pages

For the first time ever, the review of the story-​side of a picture book isn’t being done by Ryan G. Van Cleave (owner/​operator of Only Picture Books).

Don’t worry, though. We’ve brought in ringers to handle things at the same high level we all expect of OPB picture book reviews.

So, without further ado, here’s this month’s picture book review that features insight from Brooklyn-​based editor Octavia Saenz and Florida-​based freelance artist (& OPB superfriend) Austin McKinley.

—Octavia’s Review of the Writing—

Bears are quiet, solitary things, but sometimes, if you look closely enough, you might find profound wisdom. Like the narrator of Bear Outside, the book itself is a quietly wise thing with a simple exterior that hides a deeper truth about what we owe ourselves.

The story is simple—and, like any good picture book, is half told in the details of the art—as the narrator explains how she wears her bear on the outside, as a form of protection, as a companion, as a talisman of courage. Beyond the narrator’s simple words, we see how the bear is a shield against mocking classmates as well as a a collaborator for the narrator having fun on their own. She says, too, that the bear is hers to take care of, and in the artwork we see her taking care of herself. She engages in brave and kind acts, fighting back bees to eat honey, and giving flowers to a neighbor, all with the help of the bear.

Bear Outside, celebrated author Jane Yolen’s 400th book, is an ode to kids who march to their own bear, and a guide for the imaginative ones in touch with their needs and boundaries.

It’s wonderful.

5 out of 5 pencils

—Austin’s Review of the Illustrations—

The central conceit of Bear Outside—that of a child imagining wearing their inner spirit as a kind of protective and companionable aura—is delightfully rich visual territory which the book’s artist, Jen Corace, explores with palpable joy. The sumptuous textural watercolor world she creates, which ranges from soft pastels to vibrant jewel-​toned hues (the red leaves on that giant, two-​page tree spread are chef’s kiss material!) is punctuated by Bear, the only cartoon element in each illustration described with a calligraphic line. As the book jacket explains, it was this conceptual image Corace created—of a girl surrounded by a bear—that formed the impetus for the book proper.

Corace has so much fun depicting Bear reading a book in a blanket fort (more great textures!) riding a bicycle, and jumping on a trampoline, that one can’t help but grin in appreciation. Her character and stage design have that quality of all the best children’s book illustrations: they are warm, inviting, approachable, and deceptively simple. Almost as if a child had done them, but a child with a master’s hand. It reminds us of the way we felt as children, and it makes it look easy.

Little touches–like the girl and Bear riding on the front of the shopping cart, clambering into a tree fort, flailing in water wings, or going to sleep with a night light–are all rendered in flattened perspectives. Overlapping watercolor elements and simplified backgrounds bring the childhood of our mind’s eye into a soft, sensitive focus.

A stroll through the artist’s website reveals there are many things about the imagery for this book that are motifs throughout her work. The little girl with the black bob haircut, the semi-​translucent textures, and the fanciful combinations of people and animals all make regular appearances. Corace’s work here is moodier than her children’s illustration, more akin to what might appear on an indie record’s album art.

What makes Bear Outside unique is not just the more whimsical palette–it’s how charmingly relatable the scenes are, and the humor that arises when the core personality of the narrator and the alter ego of Bear seem to vie for dominance. It makes you want to have such a bear in your life, and the beauty of the book’s message is that you can!

It’s a powerful, inspiring piece of children’s literature, simple to understand, but taking a complex topic like healthy self-​confidence, and making it impossible to forget.

5 out of 5 crayons

Octavia Saenz is an editor and cartoonist based in Brooklyn, NY who creates visual narratives about queer, Puerto Rican diaspora. Octavia grew up in Puerto Rico and has a BFA in Creative Writing and Illustration from Ringling College of Art and Design, as well as a Lambda Fellowship.

Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @shrimpwonder.

Austin McKinley makes comic books, cartoons, movies, video games, screenplays, novels and novellas through his company, Flying Car. He shot and appeared in the award-​winning feature documentary The New 8‑Bit Heroes alongside director Joe Granato. His comic illustrations have also been published by Image Shadowline, Devil’s Due/​1st Comics, Alias/​Blue Water Press, Avatar, Boom!, Blue King Studios, and FC9. He wrote and illustrated Squareasota, a weekly cartoon in the Sarasota Herald-​Tribune for seven years.
Most recently, he illustrated Tales of Mr. Rhee vol. 5: Rockstar Paranoia, a graphic novel for Source Point Press slated for spring 2021.

Counting Crows: A Conversation Between Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple

On By Only Picture BooksIn Behind the Books

As part of a whirlwind blog tour to support their new co-​authored picture book, Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple share thoughts about the genesis and writing of Crow Not Crow.

(OPB doesn’t do many non-​Monday posts, but when we do a Bonus Goody, it’s always going to be worthwhile like this. Enjoy!)

JY: I remember the first time you talked about teaching your wife Betsy how to bird using something you called “Crow Not Crow.” She was a Minneapolis girl and really didn’t know one bird from another. But you had been taught to bird as a child by your father who had grown up in the mountains of West Virginia. I thought Crow Not Crow might make a great title for a picture book, but since it wasn’t my idea, I left it alone. Only much later did I start bugging you about it.

AS: The actual teaching idea started out as a joke, splitting all of the bird kingdom into two classes: Crow and Not Crow. But the more Betsy and I joked about it, the more useful it started to seem. She got really good at telling crows from not crows, and we quickly added other birds into the mix. Now, she’s a full-​fledged (pun intended) birder.

When you first mentioned doing Crow Not Crow as a picture book, I didn’t see it. I hadn’t written in any kind of illustrative medium and hadn’t yet learned to think visually while writing. But after writing three graphic novels with you, I was suddenly eager to work on Crow Not Crow.

JY: That is the core of writing picture books–thinking visually. You have to think in double page spreads, as scenes. You have to understand what makes the reader want to turn the page.  But you also have to think like both a poet and a storyteller–compression and expansion. How to tell the story as if it is as tight and lyrical as a poem. (And I DON’T mean it needs to rhyme!)

Of course, adding the fact that we were two people writing one story from the point of view of a child only made it harder. It sounds really complicated put that way–but in the end, it was as wonderful as a dance.

AS: I like the fact that the form is compact and constrained. Constraints help me be more creative. I’m forced to rethink all the crazy ideas I have and mold them into a usable, readable shape. It’s that shaping that makes them come to life. Without constraints, I fly off into the ether, ending up with pages of stuff that gets tossed in a drawer, never to be seen again.

JY: I agree–there is something to be said for constraints in art. You learn them so you can eventually change, reorder, even violate them. A picture book–like a sonnet, a haiku–has certain parameters. And we slip into them as if putting on a special outfit: the ballerina has her tutu and toe shoes, the football player has pads, and clowns a red nose. We write picture books knowing the page count, understanding the page turn, aware of the child audience. Constraints but not restraints. Like grammar, we need it at the base of our picture book.

But I also love to work on books with you–and your brother and sister. Such partnerships come with other constraints. Family meetings without the fraughtness. Yes, you and your siblings are all truly good writers. But even more, when we work together on books, we deepen and broaden our relationships, for now we have more than just family gossip to sustain our visits. We talk art, craft, business–and new ideas as well. Besides, in books like Crow Not Crow, we bring back great memories of your dad, and what a wonderful husband and father he was. Not only did he teach all of us to bird, and was unsparing in sharing his own knowledge of the outdoors, he was also a great first reader for me. I know he would have loved this book because–as the original inspiration for Pa in my book Owl Moon–he cared deeply about good, honest, and lyrical books for kids about the natural world.

And when we write something like Crow Not Crow, it becomes a part of his legacy.

 

Author Interview: Jane Yolen

On By Only Picture BooksIn Behind the Books3 Comments

This month’s PB author interview is by a writer who has a special relationship with OPB—she helped get it going. I’d been mulling over creating this website for a few years and when I shared the idea with my friend and mentor, Jane Yolen, she told me: “Silly boy. Why aren’t you already doing this?”

So, of course, I did exactly that. And she was eager to volunteer to be one of my first interviewees. The only reason she wasn’t the first one published here? I had many hours of recordings to work through and I’m a slow transcriber. Plus—what to leave out? What to include? It wasn’t easy.

I was lucky enough to be able to bring Jane out to Ringling College of Art and Design in January 2018 for a couple of days of events to support the creative writing program there. So the following interview has been pieced together from just a small bit of the mountain of writing and publishing information she shared in classes, student meetings, lunchtime talks, and public evening discussions. Yes, this is longer than most OPB author interviews but I suspect you’ll forgive me for its length. (And if you still need more from Jane, check out my interview with her in a fall 2018 issue of The Writer, where I cover lots of different things than what’s below.)

Jane really needs no introduction. If you’re here, you love picture books. If you love picture books, you surely have a half-​dozen favorites written by her. I’ll simply end this warm-​up by sharing three of my own favs of hers. If you don’t have these already, maybe grab a copy?

       

RVC: One of your Ten Rules for Writing Success is BIC. Could you share what that is?

JY: Butt in Chair. Or if you wish to be polite here in Florida—Bottom, Buttocks, Behind, Backside, Behunkus in Chair.

In other words, you have to work. Fingers on keys. Or wrapped around a pen. Use a chisel to carve the book on stone. If you aren’t at work writing, you’re not writing the book.

Yes, there are other parts to writing. There’s thinking it through. There’s research. There’s seeing landscape. There’s listening in keyholes. There’s sorting through gossip. There’s smelling the grandbabies. These are all wonderful parts of getting ready to write. They’re what I call “gathering days.”

But in the end, if you never put your B in the C, you are not going to write the damn book.

RVC: Procrastination really isn’t part of your vocabulary, is it? 

JY: You see, too often we sit around thinking about what we hope to, plan to, want to write … and never do. The difference between my 366 books and your not-​quite one, or not-​quite five or not-​quite ten or even your not-​quite 100 books is as simple as that. Write the damn book.

Stop agonizing over whether you’re an undergraduate or a graduate student, a housewife or somebody’s younger brother. Stop worrying about having original ideas or contracts or contacts. Stop telling your boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or partner that some day soon they’ll see you in print.

Just write the damn book.

Now I’ve just said “damn” three times. Oops—make that four times. If that seems unseemly for a children’s book writer, I apologize. But choosing and using the right word has been my passion for over 50 years now. (Longer if you add in my writing in high school and elementary school, though some of it was pretty lame, I admit.) And damn is the right word. Though one famous children’s book writer friend of mine calls it something stronger, from earlier on in the alphabet, which I won’t use here in polite company.

I know that urging—no insisting—that you write the damn book may seem simplistic. But until you get the book down, what have you to show?

I was an editor for fifteen years, and editors know that finishing a book is one of the hardest parts of writing. Most would-​be writers want to have written. But for true writers, it’s the process of writing that they find fulfilling, not necessarily publication.

For years over my desk, I had posted: “Love the process, not the product” and while I have long since lost that piece of paper, I no longer need it. That motto is imprinted on my heart.

Yes, I know. Easy for me to say with my 365th and 366th book just out this past March, but honestly, that number could’ve been a terrible burden if I didn’t love writing. The writing—even when it is difficult, even when it’s horrible, even when it’s going badly—is the reason for doing what we do.

So that’s why my very first rule has to be: Write the damn book!

RVC: For some years now, you’ve run small writing workshops—called Picture Book Boot Camps—that are described as “A weekend Master Class for published picture book authors with Jane Yolen, held at her farm in western Massachusetts.” Where did the idea for these retreats come from?

JY: For years, I taught workshops at writer’s conferences and weekend retreats, and I loved the teaching, but when someone else is throwing the party, they get to keep all the change. So to do a 2- or 3- or 10-​day conference? Putting what I’m writing on hold for that many days for nearly any amount of money became non-doable.

When we put together a conference of our own, Heidi [Jane’s daughter Heidi EY Stemple, who is an accomplished PB writer too] and I make enough money to make it worthwhile and we plan it exactly the way we want to. I’m still able to do some of my own work during the Boot Camps, too.

We’ve had some absolutely stunning authors participate and their work was extraordinary at times. We’re working with people who are already published and that was a very conscious choice. We wanted people who already understood what revision meant, people who understood what listening to critique—without pride or arguing—meant, people who listened when you talked about problems and went on to solve them in their own way.

I get a lot of people asking: “When are you going to do a picture book boot camp for newbies”? And my answer is never. There are lots of places that will do that, like an SCBWI conference where people can have their first manuscript read by a professional in the field. That’s not what I’m going to do here.

“Can’t you do a boot camp for novelists?” people also ask. For nine years, I edited novels. But to really be able to provide a good and solid critique of a novel, reading one chapter isn’t enough. You really need to read the whole thing.

How could I possibly read 10 whole novels like that? I’d have to put my entire life on hold to sit down and write the kind of critiques I’d like to provide as an editor.

RVC: One of the things you told my Writing Picture Book students is to cultivate patience. I’ve been thinking about that myself a good bit these days.

JY: There are two kinds of patience needed when working on any kind of writing.

The first is with yourself. Give yourself the time you need to settle into your story, to find your characters who—like recalcitrant teenagers—sometimes want to be anywhere but where you are. Or your poem, with its fish-​sliding words that are difficult to catch. Or your essay or memoir or anything.

And more, you need to be patient with the publishing process should you wish to go that far. It may help to know that even those of us with books in the double and triple figures have to learn to wait.

Editors aren’t slow because they like to be mean. They’re slow because the process itself doesn’t encourage hustle. If they’re in the book business, they’re already working on lists that are two and three and four years into the future. Magazines and journals—probably three to six months ahead.

Editors are being forced to attend endless meetings, few of which have any immediate meaning for you and your work. They have their own host of complaining authors. Or they move to another publisher or magazine just when you were working on something together. Or they turn down everything you send them, almost always without comment.

Whatever the reasons for the interminable slowness, the snail-​like nature of the business, it’s rarely just the author’s fault. All the editors I know read manuscripts on the subways, the trains, the ferries, the buses on their way to and from work. They take manuscripts with them on planes across the country and back again. They carry manuscript with them on vacations, to weddings, funerals, and family birthday parties. They read at night in bed, at conventions, and skip breakfast to read some more. And those are the manuscripts they have already bought! You can imagine how long it takes for them to get to the manuscripts in the piles of as-​yet-​unbought, even from top agents.

And then there’s the slush pile. Slush—or unsolicited manuscripts—are what’s sent out by new writers who have no agent, no contacts, no big name to drop into the letter of introduction.

But cultivating patience should never mean that you stop working. No rest between stories. And while those manuscripts are out making their rounds, getting occasional nudges from you, you are writing the next and even better piece.

I’m still learning how to write every single day.

RVC: What’s the best bit of writing advice you’ve ever received?

JY: Two things.

The first came early on in my career from an amazing editor name Francis Keene. I did about four or five books with her. She said to me: “You have great facility. Don’t be beguiled by it.” In other words, don’t just take the first thing that comes out. You’re good enough to go with the first thing that comes to mind and run with it. But just don’t leave it there.

And the second one came from Linda Zuckerman, another amazing editor. I’d written a novel for her about the Shakers entitled The Gift of Sarah Barker. Set in the 1850s, everything that happened in this novel all happened in three days.

I first showed it to my husband who read it and said, “It’s too fast.”

Then I showed it to my agent who agreed—“Three days is too fast.”

Then when Linda bought the book, she asked, “Tell me why everything happens in three days?” She asked me the question instead of telling me I was wrong. And as I was trying to explain it to her, I realized that I had imposed a fairy-​tale number on a historical story. It didn’t work.

Linda then told me: “Trust your reader.” And that became the second mantra after “Don’t be beguiled by your own writing.”

RVC: Tell me about SCBWI. You got involved early. What did it mean to you? What’s its relevance today?

I am now, outside of Steve Mooser and Lin Oliver who began SCBW (the “I” came in later—at the start, it was mostly just Writers, not Illustrators), the person who’s been in the organization the longest. The person who got there before me was Sue Alexander. It wasn’t even an organization when Sue joined, just Steve and Lin saying “Hey, let’s put on a show.” They were both young, working for the same company that had hired them to put out a series of textbooks for kids. They were good writers, but neither one had ever written for children.

They looked for an organization where they could join and learn, but there was no such thing. So they started one. They put an ad in the paper, and Sue Alexander, who lived in CA (where Steve and Lin worked), was the first one to sign up. Right after that, Sue came to Colorado for a workshop Uri Shulevitz and I were doing, and she quickly became a friend of mine.

She told me about this organization, I said “How do I sign up?” I had about 6 or 7 books out at that point, so I too wanted to be in an organization with other children’s book writers.

The “group” asked me to come to California where they were going to have their first-​ever event—not a conference so much as a dinner. They needed dinner speakers, so they asked Sid Fleischman and me, as we were the only two well-​published children’s book authors they knew.

While I was there, they were telling me that had plans to have an actual conference. I said, “I’ll come and speak at it. But I’m in the Northeast, can I make an SCBW outpost there and have people join?” They said that I could be the first regional advisor. They hadn’t even considered having regions for the group before.

So that’s what I did. First I spoke at their dinner and then I organized the New England Region of a barely-​started SCBW.

RVC: What’s the value of SCBWI today for young writers?

JY: The value is that it’s still a place that’ll tell you everything that you need to know about getting started in the children’s book field. SCBWI’s board, which I’m a part of, is full of industry insiders—writers, illustrators, art directors, editors, agents, movers and shakers. We meet twice a year, once in NY and once in LA. And we’re a working board. We’re not just an in-​name-​only board. We discuss everything that has to do with children’s books and publishing—from this publisher is not paying its people, this bad boy of publishing has been abusing women, or this agent ran off with money to work with larger issues as well, such as how do we help get more minorities into publishing, a yearly list of publishers’ wants, what is trending, what are the addresses for those publishers, and how do people who don’t have agents get access, those sorts of things.

It’s very much the only organization that’s hands-​on in terms of helping early-​career writers. And it continues to serve the writers through their apprenticeships and well into the fullness of their careers.

RVC: Any final words of wisdom for those of us who, like you, are still learning to write every single day?

JY: Don’t believe anyone’s rules. Not even mine.

Write what you want, how you want, when you want. The only rule that counts is number one: Write the damn book.

Write it because you must. Because it whispers incessantly in your ear. Because it is your passion, your desire, your constant companion. Write it because you have to.

Write it because I want to read it.

RVC: Thanks so much, Jane!