Grace Lin is the recipient of the Children's Literature Legacy Award and is the bestselling author and illustrator of more than 30 books, including A Big Mooncake for Little Star (a Caldecott Honoree); A Big Bed for Little Snow; Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (a Newbery Honoree); The Year of the Dog; and the Ling & Ting series.
Kate Messner is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 50 books for young readers. Her award-winning titles include the picture books Over and Under the Snow and The Brilliant Deep; novels Breakout and Chirp; nonfiction The Next President and the History Smashers series; the Ranger in Time adventures; and the Fergus and Zeke easy readers.
Their collaboration, Once Upon a Book (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) is a "modern folktale" about the joy and transformative power of reading. Here, Lin and Messner tell us about the unusual and fascinating way this book developed.
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| Grace Lin (photo: Danielle Tait) |
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Grace Lin: Back in 2019, Children's Book Week was celebrating its 100th anniversary. As part of the celebration, Every Child a Reader decided to create a 12-artist collaborative poster, and I was SO honored that they asked me to be one of them! It's always been a dream of mine to do a Children's Book Week poster, so even though it was a bit of a squeeze to put it on the schedule I knew I had to do it.
It was also an opportunity to push my art in a direction I had been experimenting with. In A Big Mooncake for Little Star, I began using a "fadeway" style of art, where the character's figure is defined solely by the pattern of their clothing. (You can learn more about it here). Now, I wanted to see if I could make the fadeaway work even without the clothing pattern.
This felt particularly appropriate, as part of the assignment for the Book Week poster was to show a character reading. To me, reading is such an immersive experience--how many times do we "disappear" into a book?
So, using my daughter as my muse (as I often do), I painted an image of a girl walking while reading (something both my daughter and I are guilty of), "fading away" into her elaborate chinoiserie wallpaper--the exotic birds of her wallpaper just as interested in her book as she is. You can see it here.
And I have to say, when I was finished, I was really happy with it!
I definitely wanted to do more than this one image, but by then the deadline (I was writing Mulan: Before the Sword) that was breathing down my neck had come to roost, and I had no brainspace or time to delve deeper.
But I also couldn't bear to put it quietly away. So, as kind of an impulsive long shot act of creative desperation, I posted the image to a couple of writer's groups I belong to. "Anyone have an idea for a story to go along with this image?" I asked.
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| Kate Messner (Andy Duback Photography) |
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Kate Messner: When I saw Grace's gorgeous art in my feed, my first thought was that I wanted to live in that painting. It was so inviting! I loved the lush green forest and the birds, and of course, the book caught my attention, too. I was busy that day--on deadline, like almost always--so at first, my only response was to post a quick comment ("This is stunning, Grace!!") and get back to work. But I couldn't stop thinking about Grace's art, and it wasn't long before an inkling of a story started following me around. I went back to the post and left a comment with a possible way into that magical world of the painting. I wrote:
"It was cold and snowing sideways but Mae was tired of boots.
So she pulled off her woolen socks and put on her most summery dress. She found the warmest, sunshiniest book on the shelf.
'Once upon a time, there was a girl,' she read to the wallpaper birds. 'A girl who wished for lush green forests where even the morning dew was warm.'
'That sounds like our forest,' said the bird reading over her shoulder. 'Come in...' "
Grace asked me to keep going but that flash of inspiration was short-lived! Over the next week, though, I worked my way through a very rough draft and sent it along to Grace.
Lin: I was so glad to see it! I read it and knew Kate had something great, but I wanted to add something more. I put her story on the back burner of my subconscious and sometime later--probably after I finished the novel--my brain said, "Make it like The Stonecutter!"
The Stonecutter is a very famous Asian folktale where a stonecutter is unhappy with his lot in life and wishes to be a rich man, so the gods make his wish come true. However, soon after, he is unhappy being a rich man and longs to be someone else. His wish is granted, but the Stonecutter soon yearns for more and more. While this does not seem to portend well for the Stonecutter, there's a happy ending, as he ends up where he started and is quite satisfied. To me, this idea, this theme of "what you truly want is what you actually already have" is the spirit of the book. Once I was able to grasp that, the story was like puzzle pieces coming together to me.
I made some light edits locking in that theme (it was already headed there anyway) and sent them to Kate. From there it was pretty collaborative.
Messner: Grace and I continued revising together in Google docs throughout the editing and illustration process, tweaking a line here, trimming a line there to balance text with art, and making sure this story would sweep readers up in the world of our book the same way our protagonist disappears into her own story. So often, people get the idea that picture books are easier than novels because they're shorter, but if anything, it's the opposite. The economy of language is more like writing poetry, and every word matters so much.
It was magical to see this book come together. I've always adored Grace's illustrations, and I'd fallen in love with this piece in particular, so it was a joy to work with her. I love the way Once Upon a Book turned out. Grace's illustrative style manages to feel classic and utterly fresh at the same time.
I honestly can't imagine spending the months between 2019 and 2023 working on a timelier story. Not long after this project sold to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, the Covid-19 pandemic was well underway, and we were all feeling that sense of confinement and restlessness that our character feels in the book. Have we ever needed stories in our lives more than we did during these years? Our beloved books were our escape from the lockdown, from the drudgery and fear of those early days of the pandemic. It felt like such a gift to spend those months working on a project that honors the transformative power of stories.