Roger Sutton: Reading Ripples was such a beautiful respite from this horrible winter weather.
Katie Yamasaki: When I was working on Ripples, I went around and looked at a lot of bodies of water and how the light reflected off them. Rivers especially, but also lakes and ponds. That was such a respite. Just to look at the different ways that light is reflected on water based on how the water is moving and what the sky looks like at any given time. I loved working on it.
RS: If you think back to the way we drew water when we were kids, it was blue, with pointy waves. And then you realize there’s really nothing at all blue about it.
KY: That’s right. It's reflecting whatever is above it or whatever below it is shining through. It's so hard to capture. But it's nice to try because you get to spend that time looking at it and thinking about it.
RS: Do you paint outdoors ever?
KY: Not really, no. I paint in my studio. Well, I do paint outdoors all the time because I’m a muralist. I’ve painted probably eighty outdoor murals. But I don’t do a lot of observational paintings outdoors. That was never part of my education, and I never cultivated it as a practice. But it is something I would love to do. In New York, painting outdoors is like participating on the street in the community. And I love doing that with murals. I can imagine it feeling different if I was trying to do an observational painting, because you tend to get a lot of feedback. Constant, constant feedback. Which can be fun and can be grueling.
RS: I bet. I'll see people painting or sketching outside and part of me really wants to watch, but part of me feels like it’s sort of like looking at somebody in church. You don’t want to disturb them or make them feel self-conscious.
KY: My favorite thing about painting murals is the mutual engagement you have with the people who live in the place where the painting belongs, because it's their mural, and at the end of the day it’s for them. It’s for the people who inhabit that space.
RS: I remember we talked last time about the relationship between your murals and your picture books, where you pursue similar themes but the practices could not be more different.
KY: The stories for my books are often related to where the stories come from for my murals, but they come from different lived experiences. Ripples is the only book I've ever done that doesn't have any buildings in it. It's set entirely in nature. I've never done that before; my books are usually very much set in the city. Ripples originated from conversations I had with people in a women's prison in upstate New York, where I teach an art class. We were talking about mothering as a verb, and how mothers get held up on pedestals, which is well-deserved, but that also there are many other people who mother, who care for, children. What I found with my students in the prison is that their relationship to motherhood is complicated. Their relationships with their own mothers; their relationships to the children they must mother from prison—that's so complicated. And then they also form families inside the prison, where there might be an elder who takes on the role of mother. So I was thinking a lot about mothering as a verb. I was thinking about my older sibling, who is very much a caretaker of my daughter, and about many of my friends who don't have biological children of their own but are such caretakers. So the book started out with that—looking at different ways we care for our children and how those messages are internalized by kids so that they then learn to care for each other and also for the planet that we're living on.
RS: Everybody's mother.
KY: Exactly, yeah. It’s funny because in some ways Ripples felt very much like a departure because of the setting. But the caretaking component, and also the community component, where our care is most effective when we do it collectively—that feels related to the murals that I've been doing for twenty-five years, and my books too. The first book I both wrote and illustrated is called Fish for Jimmy, about two brothers who are incarcerated during World War II as Japanese Americans and whose father was arrested the night of Pearl Harbor and taken to a military prison. But the book is about the care that the older brother takes for the younger brother and how children are very much natural caretakers. They’re born and cared for, and it’s the first thing they learn. The ways we care for our children are the ways they’ll become caretakers themselves. There are the basics of feeding and cleaning, but there are also things like giving them space or letting them be quiet. It's a lot like nature; sometimes we just need to leave nature alone. And so Ripples was a nice little diversion from my usual subjects but also felt pretty connected to them.
RS: Is it set in an actual place, or did you imagine it?
KY: I imagined it. While I was working on Ripples I visited a river in northern Michigan as well as the Yuba River in California, and then of course we're right by all these rivers in New York, but it didn't feel like any of those rivers. It was an imaginary place. And just this idea. I was trying to figure out how I could make a connected journey, something that would bring all the friends in the book together. So in the book a child (who is my daughter) is having an idealized, magical day with her grown-up, who is caring for her in these beautiful ways. And then when she gets to the end of the river, she sees this big job she has to do. In life, there are so many instances where we can be overwhelmed by seeing what a big job we have to do. But in the case of the book, the big job is that the river has been neglected. There's a lot of trash, and the river has a lot of need. But then the community comes down, all the child protagonist’s friends come down. They work together, and the point is that togetherness. And all the friends know what to do because they've been cared for this whole time in all these very natural and deliberate ways.
RS: And you bring that in so beautifully, that first we just have this idyllic lazing down the river in a rubber raft. And then we see the child and her caretaker picking up trash where they see it by the raft, and then we see that this is actually a community project. And we have encountered the members of that community along the shore as we go. So our entry into the world is gradual. It grows from just that little girl and her caretaker. The world gets bigger. The water gets bigger. The friends become more numerous. “And we make ripples.”
KY: I like how you describe it because it is a collective. We can do these big things together, but they don't always have to be so big because we can do them gradually as we go along. Periodically in the book they come across something like a piece of trash in the water, and they pick it up as they're going along down the river. And I think that sometimes problems like climate change or mass incarceration or gun violence—these problems are so big. But sometimes we can focus in and make things smaller and make things much more local by showing small moments of care. By listening to somebody. That's practicing care. Or by giving somebody space. Or by tending to somebody's hurt feelings or injury. And so the big giant problems that we're all so overwhelmed by, just by focusing on the world that's right in front of us, they can be faced little by little. |
RS: Kind of like halos.
KY: Yeah, like halos. But connective. Like finding out something about a person with whom you might not think you have anything in common. Maybe their parents used a similar seasoning when they were cooking, so your kitchens smelled the same as kids, or maybe your parents divorced when you were the same age. Any number of things. But what I always hope with books is that we lead, and we encourage children to lead, with a broad imagination about who somebody else might be, and that we assume care. Care is the reflex. It's a reflex that we were raised with from the time we were babies, and it's what we bring to our day-to-day actions with other people.
RS: Earlier in this conversation you were talking about young children learning to care, and I thought about how the first toy a lot of young children have is a doll. They do exactly what you're talking about, which is they are transferring the care they experienced from their caregivers and they’re passing it on. I guess I’d never thought about dolls that way before.
KY: There is a lot of research around dolls that's just that: it's an empathy-building toy. There's a doll in Ripples that's tucked into the child’s life jacket for the ride down the river—you might see it if you take another look. But that's exactly right. Children playing with dolls are patting the baby, they're rocking the baby. I remember when my godson was maybe fourteen months old. We were in Union Square, which is not a clean place. And his mom, my friend Monica, was wiping his hands with a wipe, and then he took the wipe and started wiping the sidewalk. We were thinking, That’s a hopeless cause, but also it’s “Just like my mom, the way I'm cared for, I’m kept nice and clean, I’m going to clean my environment.” It was an absurd environment to try to clean, but I loved how natural it was for him to try.
RS: So many books for young children express to kids how cared for they are, which is laudable. But in your books I also see teaching children how to care for others. The planet, the river, the aunt, whoever it might be. It’s a responsibility you give them. It’s very empowering.
KY: Oh, thanks. I was an art teacher for fourteen years, and what I found was that the more agency my students had in the classroom, to take care of the classroom, the more empowered they felt in their entire practice. So they set everything up, they put everything away, and it was just part of the whole thing. There's so much sensitivity now about raising children to have high self-esteem and to feel good about themselves. And I think that the missing piece in that conversation for a long time has been that feeling good about yourself includes your engagement with other people and your ability to respond to need around you. It's not just people responding to you, but it's you responding to the world that we live in, and that's empowering. I always hope kids will feel like they have some agency. You're not just a kid who's the victim of gentrification in Everything Naomi Loved; you’re not just a kid with an incarcerated parent in Place Hand Here. You're cultivating tools, and in the case of both of those books they're creative tools to engage your community and also face the hard thing that's happening. Because we don’t have a lot of control over some of these hard things that are happening, but we can figure out, “What are the most meaningful ways for me to cope with this?” And that's what I try to do also in the prison. These women are serving very long sentences, but it's like, “What are we going to do with this time, and how can we cultivate your mind and your eye and your spirit as an artist so that you can make this mean something else?”
RS: Right: “You can do something about this.” I mean, you can’t walk out of the prison...
KY: But you can build community within it. You can tell your story. You can make drawings about it, books about it. Your time still matters. Sometimes you read these ruinous reports about the environment and you think, What can I do about this? This seems so dire. But you can do what you can do. Doing something feels better than passively receiving all the news. I also feel like living in the relative privilege I have here in New York, being able to make a living doing work that I love, with family in a relatively safe situation, it’s not for me to become cynical about these things. I have to figure out what I can do. And hopefully show some different stories of kids finding their way through hard things.
RS: And themselves doing something about it.
KY: Absolutely.
RS: Do you think of yourself as a political writer, illustrator, artist?
KY: I feel like politics are in everything. I don't know that I would necessarily put that label on my work, but I'm also responding to things that fall under the umbrella of politics. I think that at this point care falls under the umbrella of politics.
RS: That's kind of frightening, isn’t it?
KY: But you see why it needs to be. If you were to make a list of the topics of my books, it would be hard to keep that removed from politics—Japanese American incarceration, gentrification, mass incarceration—but at the heart of the books are just human stories about community and connection and care and our responsibility to each other. So if that’s political, then sure.
RS: Well then, goddammit.
KY: There are books that will get banned just by their titles, but those are not going to be my books. I like to be at a book festival and have Dad Bakes on the table and have some dad walk up to the table and say, “Oh, I'm a dad who bakes!” And I can respond, “Well then, this is a book for you.” You know, a little bit of a Trojan Horse. If you have a book that says something about prison on the cover or in the title, people will instantly go to the reflex of flattening that character, or instantly go to the reflex of putting it into the “woke” category. So my preference is to focus on the characters and on the story. And as you would with any other details of a character, let those details emerge through the story so people can get to know them. If you meet somebody, it's unlikely that they're going to lead with “I was incarcerated for two years back in 1994.” You're going to have a regular conversation and then that may come up, and by the time it comes up, you already know that person as a fully rounded human being. So I don't know if my books are political. They're the stories I have a close relationship with. |
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