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Left: David Rozenblyum

Right: Darren Creighton

Roger Sutton: Did you work on this book together? Or, Matthew Burgess, did you write the text on your own first?

Matthew Burgess: One story of the origin of this book is that I wrote to Matthew after I read Mina. I was really taken with that book, and I sent Matthew a message telling him how much I loved it. I think that might have opened the door. What do you think, Matthew?

Matthew Forsythe: Yeah. And I was a fan of yours, the work you were putting out. I remember when you and Cátia published The Bear and the Moon, I was obsessed with that book. And a couple of years later, the two of us explored the idea of doing something together. It was very much, “Hey, should we write this together so that the text is influenced by the images and the text, obviously, influences the images?” So a more deeply collaborative effort than the norm, and we both were enthusiastic. We thought it would be a really quick project, but that was actually over three years ago.

MB: It's rarely quick.

MF: It always takes years.

MB: What I remember happening was Matthew wrote to me and said, “Do you have anything in the Burgess factory to share with me?” Maybe those weren't his exact words, but I remember the phrase the Burgess factory, and I thought, Okay, what can I come up with? I didn’t have anything in mind, but I knew that I didn’t want to lose my opportunity. So I went to work in response to that invitation and got busy on something. I worked on an initial draft for several weeks, maybe a month, before sending a document to Matthew with my fingers crossed. And I waited a week or so to hear back. I was almost at the point where I thought, Okay, I’ve got to let this go. Usually after a certain number of days pass, it’s not a good sign.

RS: “He doesn’t love me back.”

MB: But then I got a very encouraging email, and it was a go.

MF: I think the lag was just agents and editors. I was instant with my response. I thought, Oh yeah! because it hit the bull’s-eye in terms of imagery—it was all things I really wanted to paint. My memory, though, is different. My memory is that you said, “I've got something because I just did a book of poetry and I have an extra poem that I didn’t put in the book.” And I said, “Okay, let me see the poem.” But it sounds like you actually went away and wrote a poem.

MB: Who knows, who knows what the truth is?

RS: Maybe we’ll never know. But in any case, it was a complete package from the beginning when you brought it to Stonefruit Studio, which is a new imprint of Sourcebooks.

MB: We had talked about working with Mabel Hsu, because I was already working on Fireworks with Mabel at the time, at HarperCollins. Matthew, did we bring it to her? Didn’t we go directly to Mabel?

MF: Yeah, it was really about Mabel. We just wanted to work with Mabel. I love her sensibility; love her values and her enthusiasm. All her work is so exciting. We were excited to work with her. And If the Moon turned out to be one of the first books at her new imprint.

MB: Yeah, this is actually Stonefruit’s first picture book. And part of the appeal for us was that we knew that we could collaborate the way we wanted by initiating the project in this way. That there could be an element of conversation and collaboration throughout the process.

RS: Matthew Burgess, do you ever start a picture book all by yourself and then an illustrator is chosen later along the route?

MB: Yes, maybe half of the time it goes that way. But sometimes the match is made before a book finds an editor.

RS: But for this project, you each knew what the other Matthew was doing all along.

MF: We did.

MB: We worked in tandem. But it’s not as if I wrote art notes. Matthew completely developed his own visual story to go with the text. I think part of what appealed to you, Matthew, was that it's a poem and there was so much space for you to tell your own story that ran parallel to the words. Am I right?

MF: Yeah, we totally worked in tandem. At the beginning the text was very different. The book even had a different title. But these were all decisions we made together. It's a dream collaboration when you can talk to each other about everything, talk through everything. For instance, I had to cut some images, Roger, because as I told Matthew, “I just can't draw this. I can't draw everything.” I think we had that conversation a few times where I said, “I love this stanza, but I'm not going to do it justice. That's not going to work with me. So can we cut these pages and can we push these other pages? Because those I can do.”

RS: Matthew Forsythe, I’m dying to know what you can't draw.

MF: Oh, there’s so much. Where do you want to start? I think, Matthew, you had some redwood trees shown from above, and I had to say, “Ooh, that sounds like something that someone else could really nail, but not me.” With a few other things it was more “I don't know if I can do this justice in this context and in this visual flow.” Because as an illustrator, I feel that some things interrupt the visual flow, feel a bit like a sidebar to where I would take the book. So it was amazing that we could adjust course for those kinds of things. They didn't slow anything down.

RS: I just flashed on that Peanuts cartoon where Lucy is analyzing Charlie Brown about why he always draws people with their hands in their pockets and he says he can’t draw hands.

MF: That's exactly it, yes.

MB: And then there’s the Maurice Sendak story about him not being able to draw horses and the Wild Things being born out of his inability to draw horses.

RS: Thank goodness.

MF: I think here the hands of the boy are mostly just balls, clumps, little spheres.

MB: Although there is the spread with his two hands.

RS: Where he's holding a snowflake on one of his fingertips.

MB: I think it helps that the poem had a certain modular quality. That there’s a series of “if” questions. I actually had more of these questions. I think that served the collaboration because Matthew could choose which ones enticed him. The ones that didn’t really call to him, we could dispense with. So because the manuscript had that modular quality—pieces, a series—it was okay to snip and reassemble.

MF: Totally.

RS: It seems seamless to me, though. The book definitely has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So it’s not completely, “Okay, let’s take out the redwoods and put in the snowflakes.”

MB: That’s the magic of revision. There was one change that’s kind of interesting. The way Matthew conceived of the journey out into space and back again, there was a moment, later in the process, where we had to invert the order of the planets in order to create more of a sense of out and back. Is that right, Matthew?

MF: Yeah, that’s right. For instance, the page with the moon had to go right before the boy lands in bed because he's coming back from outer space. So we had to move that spread toward the end. And again, sometimes with certain collaborations, that could be a difficult conversation, but with us it was so easy. It was just, “Yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense.”

I was going to say, with all the images, I immediately could see all the spreads. I wanted to draw hummingbirds and rockets and owls. Matthew, how much of that was because you knew that would entice me? Because obviously I want to draw owls and hummingbirds and rockets. It felt like the kind of thing I would have painted anyway, even if the book wasn't there.

MB: I have one of your postcards on the wall in front of my desk, and so because I'm familiar with your visual universe, that maybe guided me in some way in the writing. I can't say for sure. But now I'm remembering that you gave me images to look at to inspire the poem—“take a look at this,” “take a look at this.” I had a fragment of one of your paintings on my phone as a screensaver for several weeks, and I looked at it all the time.

RS: So where did the poem start? When you set out to write it, what was the image that drove you?

MB: I think the image that comes to mind is the first one in the book—Matthew's image of the boy in bed, with an expression of alarm or tension on his face. That was the beginning for me—that concept of lying in bed and the worries rising up. Which is a childhood experience that I had.

RS: It doesn’t end at childhood!

MB: No, it does not. That’s why this book is hopefully for both the child and the adult, ideally. But the idea was that that “if” is pitching the imagination and the mind away from the worries and instead in a more poetic direction. I was really thinking of the book as a bedtime book. That’s something I was moving forward with from the beginning. I like the idea of casting a sleep spell that was functioning with this idea of “if” moving in two directions. “If” can take you down a dark road or it can take you down a dreamier, more imaginative road.

MF: To send you off into dreams in a pleasing, beautiful way. In fact, the original title was just If—sort of working with that hinge. I was also inspired by Winsor McCay’s comic strip “Little Nemo.” The idea that this could be a poem, but also it could be a little adventure story. Because that's kind of what it is when we are going to sleep and our imagination takes us off. It's this very adventurous thing where we imagine the future, we imagine the past—we imagine, in this case, outer space.

RS: Do you remember bedtime stories from your childhood?

MF: Yes, of course. Mercer Mayer was huge in our house. Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was in constant rotation. But a lot of the stories were terrifying. If you think about William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, it's an existentially terrifying bedtime story.

RS: Turning into a rock!

MF: Can you think of anything more horrific? You’re not only isolated from your parents but they can’t even recognize you if they do find you! What about you, Matthew?

MB: Something just happened when you said “Mercer Mayer,” Matthew. At first when you asked the question, Roger, I thought, I don't know if my memory will go that far back. Because what are we talking about? We were maybe three years old? How far back does the memory go? But as soon as you said “Mayer,” my mind flashed to his book Just for You, which was one of my favorite early-childhood picture books.

MF: In Mayer’s books, there would be hidden elements—Professor Wormbog, the Zipperump-a-Zoo. Things that said, “There’s this story, but there’s this other thing happening too.” It was an early lesson that picture books have hidden layers, that there’s a lot more going on than the words.

RS: I loved in If the Moon keeping track of the boy as he’s transformed into his various shapes and the little clues that you would use—a lot with color—to let us know, say, which fish he is.

MB: Yellow shirt and orange pants. That’s how you lead us through in the beginning, Matthew.

MF: I’m trying to think about where that was challenging. When we get to the snowflakes, it had to get more abstract. We're not going to put some pants on a snowflake—that's too pat, that's a little too cloying.

RS: Right after that spread, the constellations kind of stopped me. I couldn't figure out which constellation he was.

MF: Yeah, at that point we had to get more abstract because he’s moved into the spaceship.

RS: Oh, he’s AMONG the constellations.

MF: Yeah, we take some license in that sequence.

MB: I think the trick is to establish the game and then you don't have to be beholden to it every step of the way…unless there's a very exacting child that's going to be sticking to the system very closely.

MF: Kids will notice everything. Everything will be noticed.

RS: You know, Matthew Burgess, one of the big dramas at the Horn Book in the 1970s, when you guys weren’t born and I was still in school, was an illustrated edition of Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. It was gorgeously illustrated by Susan Jeffords, but the Horn Book maintained that you shouldn’t illustrate lyric poetry because the point of lyric poetry is to allow the hearer or the reader to create images in his or her own head. What's your feeling on that, Matthew? Do you ever write poems that you would not want to have illustrated?

MB: I can’t imagine that. I take way too much pleasure in what happens when word and image come together. That's one of my favorite things about making picture books, this experience of writing something and then being in the position of seeing how it translates in someone else's imagination. What they create is endlessly exciting for me. So to me that sounds very strict—not wanting to have something illustrated. One thing I will say is that way back, I had my own aspirations to be a visual artist and so when I'm writing, sometimes it's very descriptive because I'm in my own visual trance as I'm writing and I'm creating images. So when I write for picture books, I find that often I need to pare that back. And this is a real pleasure, too—once the artwork comes in, I love the revision that happens in the eleventh hour when you see what's redundant and there are opportunities to again pull back from description to let the images step forward, or just not to have the text interfere with the images. I love it.

RS: Because the illustrator has done their job and created a visual world so you can step back.

MB: Exactly.

RS: Matthew Forsythe, I’m sure you’ve turned down picture-book projects because the timing was wrong or whatever. But have you ever turned down a project just because you couldn’t find the empathy for the text that you needed?

MF: All the time. Most of the time that’s why. I think a lot of texts are overwritten; there’s too much text. It doesn’t give space, like Matthew was talking about, either to the illustrator or to the reader. It doesn’t invite the reader in; it doesn’t invite the illustrator in. That’s one of my main complaints is difficulty connecting. Difficulty finding my place in such a text.

RS: “Is there room for me?”

MF: “Is there room for me, and is there room for the reader too?”

RS: I love all the white space in If the Moon because to me that’s the space for the reader.

MF: Yes. We talked about that with the art director, Celeste Knudsen. If you remember, on the snow page there is actually very deep white space. I think we don’t trust white space as much in picture books these days. I feel like a lot of the classics of the 1960s and 1970s have a lot more trust in that white space, and that gives meaning to the space that you fill. And on the snow page in our book there is an obvious connection of more white space with a feeling of calm. Yes, I love a lot of room for the image to breathe. In fact, one of my issues is trying to hold myself back on the images so we can get more white space.

RS: You’re both talking about restraint. Matthew Burgess is talking about paring away the descriptive words to allow room for the illustrator. Matthew Forsythe, you're talking about paring things away to make room for the reader, the viewer.

MF: I think a book is a breathing thing. There's a rhythm in the white space, in the image. When I talk to students or do workshops, it's, “We always want to fill every corner of the bleed in the page.” No: “This is a breathing thing—you need to give it space to breathe.” Sometimes you have moments where you fill the page, and you should also have moments where you’re inhaling and you’re relaxed and there’s less going on.

MB: What came to mind as you and Matthew were talking about white space was “And it was still hot.”

RS: Right, which stands alone as text on a blank page at the end of Where the Wild Things Are.

MB: Such an amazing choice, which allows the reader so much space to imagine that homecoming, that reunion. Sendak’s choice not to show it lands so beautifully. Imagine what it would be like if instead you saw Max with his mother in a cozy embrace to end the book. But no, you have five words and a period on a completely empty white spread. Roger, was that the first time? I imagine that was the first time such a thing had been done as a stylistic choice.

RS: I certainly remember discussion of it as being revolutionary. Whether it was actually the first time, I don’t know.

MF: I want to go back quickly to your discussion of illustrating lyric poetry, because the flip side of that is I actually agree with the Horn Book’s opinion. I don’t think we should illustrate anything literally. If we're illustrating simply what is written, which is often done, where we're just repeating in the illustrations what is said with the words, that's when we subtract meaning. But if you're illustrating something that's complementary to the text, then you're allowing the viewer to come into it with a third position and interpret it in their own way. That's what I tried to do here and try to do with all my books. I would never, never literally repeat with my illustrations what the text is saying. Giving space to everyone is so important.

MB: It makes me think about the penultimate spread in our book, where the spaceship has landed on the roof and we see the footprints and the open window, but our main character is absent. Then when we turn the page and we arrive at that final spread, Matthew, when we see him snuggled up in bed—we've been looking for him, we spent the previous spread searching for him, and then we get the reward of seeing him peacefully drifting off into dreams across that page-turn. I just love that choice.

More from The Horn Book

• Pokko and the Drum: Matthew Forsythe's 2020 BGHB Picture Book Honor Speech
• Video presentation of 2020 BGHB Picture Book Honor to Matthew Forsythe

More Books from Stonefruit Studio, an imprint of Sourcebooks

Princess Pony Says Nay.

by Jordan Morris 

Does Princess Pony want . . . Fancy food? NAY. A sparkling gown? NAY. A big parade? NAY. NAY. NAY. A hilarious picture book about a child’s desire for quality play time with her dad over any royal horsey delights by creators Jordan Morris and Charlie Mylie.

  
In a kingdom of horses,  
in a land far away,  
Princess Pony’s coronation  
is a grand, special day!  
   
Now King High Horse’s plans  
can get carried away,  
so he might be surprised  
when the princess says—  
“NAY!”

This Is a Door
by Daniel Nayeri 

From National Book Award and two-time Newbery Honor winner Daniel Nayeri comes a groundbreaking hero’s journey told in an inventive visual format. This is the tale of Nothing the Younger—called Ing—a boy with no parents who lives in a mountaintop city with his friends, a dog named Pöppy and a mouse named mOmO. When King Cyrus calls for a hero to defeat a fearsome Giantess, the Wander Prince answers, and Ing follows. 

Their journey leads them through the Land of the Dead, past the terrifying wimmelworm, and toward truths about Ing’s parents. As text twists and transforms across each page, Ing searches for what he’s long sought: his true purpose.  

Firstborn
by M. J. Hastings

In this crossover dystopian romantasy, birth order determines one’s fate: The Firstborn take up arms, the Midborn take up books, and the Lastborn are taken. Firstborn soldier Bryn Ruelle faces the Long Night, the final trial where she must take a life by dawn—or be permanently exiled. But when Bryn uncovers a plot to kidnap her youngest sister, she must determine if the threat is real, or a ruse meant to throw Bryn off her game. Her search for the truth forces her to work alongside an alluring traitor-born enemy. As adrenaline and rage ignite a dangerous desire, Bryn must choose: her country, or her family? Her siblings, or herself? 

PUBLISHER LINK:

Stonefruit Studio, an imprint of Sourcebooks 

AUTHOR LINK:
Matthew Burgess

ILLUSTRATOR LINK:
Matthew Forsythe

CONTACT INFO:
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Information: info@hbook.com

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This newsletter was sponsored by Stonefruit Studio, an imprint of Sourcebooks