Why Not? New Steps to Take

Today, I have done a number of things I have been planning for a long time. I turned one of my limited-edition books into a print-on-demand and then made it available on Kindle. I decided to begin serializing some of my books on this blog. Let me explain all of this.

The print-on-demand book is called Beo-Bunny. It is a spoof of Beatrix Potter’s story about Peter Rabbit. My take is that Peter goes out to fight McGregor, just as Beowulf went out to fight Grendel. After all, if McGregor and his wife ate Peter Rabbit’s father, as Beatrix Potter tells us, then like Grendel and his mother, they, too, must be ogres. The idea came to me just as I finished Beowulf, A Hero’s Tale Retold (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). I decided to have some fun after such a serious project. So, I painted pictures in the style of Beatrix Potter, and wrote a little story in Old English or Anglo-Saxon that was simple enough that anyone could read (but to make sure, I did provide a translation).

Here is the cover to the book.

Here are the first few pages of the story. (To order a copy go to Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Beo-bunny. The Kindle version should be ready by October 1, 2012) 

This was not the first time that I have done such a thing. For The Cloudmakers (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), I published a limited-edition book purporting to show that the story I wrote came from a Tang Dynasty manuscript (which was not true, of course). For Island-below-the-Star (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), I made up a story about a tattooed man from the Marquesas Islands. For Seeker of Knowledge (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), I wrote a twilight-zone story about how the Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered. I have other stories as well in various stages of completion. (For more about this, please go to http://www.manoapress.com)

I guess that all of this just goes to show how much concentration and energy goes into writing and illustrating a book. When a particular project is over, the energy has to be released. My release is to make fun of what I had been doing.

Someday, I’ll make all of the stories available as print-on-demand books, but for now, I’ll test the waters with Beo-Bunny. I’m also testing out Kindle. I don’t have a Kindle myself; so I don’t know how it will look. Kindle is not my first choice, but it is rather easy to do. With CreateSpace, where I did my print-on-demand book, they make converting a paper-edition into a digital edition a simple task. Reading through all of the contractual terms, the pricing modes, royalties, etc, was a bit of a chore, but, in the end, I decided that, since I could cancel at any time, why not give Kindle a try? I figure, too, that at $2.99 a copy, no one loses. 

I did have a fleeting thought, as I was clicking off boxes in my Kindle application: all of the rules and regulations do not augur well for the artist/author/creator. Right now, royalties are great, but I have a feeling that such fantastic deals will not last long. Before we creators know it, we’ll be right back where we were last century with a 10% royalty, if we are lucky. I really do believe that the bean-counters, the Romney entrepreneurs of this world, will do their damnedest to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Here is one example: for Kindle, under certain circumstances, you have to pay to have your book digitally delivered. The price is per megabyte. This “freight charge” seems to me to be just the first step in making sure those guys get most of the money.

Now on to something new—serialized books. 

Why not? Besides the occasional blog entry about some aspect of children’s book writing and illustrating, I thought it would be fun to post some of the books I have written. Why not let people enjoy them? After all, I have more stories in my drawer than I’ll ever get published or want to publish for money. 

The first book I have chosen is a long one called Scrapbook. Scrapbook lies somewhere between a graphic novel and and word novel. As with a graphic novel, I am asking the reader to piece together the story from elements other than a traditional paragraph-on-paragraph story. But, instead of images, I am presenting artifacts: letters, postcards, clippings—the kinds of odds and ends found in a scrapbook that tell the story of a person’s life. 

The story centers around Rozelle G. Hodges, an Indiana Jane, if you will, who went in search of the fantastic beasts, peoples, and plants described in John Mandeville’s medieval best seller, a travel book describing the known world (See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mandeville). Framing the story of Rozelle G. Hodges is that of Kenneth Dore, an eighteen year old who has just lost his parents and his grandmother. How the lives of Dore and Hodges are interwoven is the pith of this story, and I hope that it will be as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write and illustrate.

My plan is to post a portion of this story every few weeks. Happy reading . . . and let me know what you think. I also hope that the format below is legible. [Click on each image to enlarge.]

But Didn’t Gutenberg Have a Beard?

Sound business advice seems to be: give’em what they want and you’ll make money. This is sound advice in publishing as well. Print books people want to read and they’ll buy them. But along these same lines runs a pernicious argument—if arguments can be pernicious: write what people expect to read and you’ll sell books. 

If a book contains information that runs counter to what people think they know, the book runs the risk of being rejected, if not scorned. This doesn’t happen so much with books for adults. The author uses his skill to craft arguments to overcome the reading public’s resistance. But in children’s books, especially picture books, there isn’t room, time, or the logical tools at hand to change people’s minds. 

Besides children’s books aren’t at the forefront of human knowledge. They are not supposed to present new ideas or theories. They’re supposed to be pre-chewed adult ideas that a child can easily digest. They’re supposed to be a simple version of what an adult already knows so that the adult will have little trouble fending off the “why’s” of little readers. 

If a children’s book runs against the common flow of knowledge, the book becomes suspect and the author’s integrity is questioned. Sure, there are things in children’s books that need to be questioned. There are even mistakes, as there are in all books. Sometimes these mistakes are accidental; sometimes they are due to laziness on the part of editors. All are regrettable. But I am not talking about questioning as a part of healthy reading. No, I am talking about not questioning, of dismissing the book because it seems to run counter to what the adult reader thinks he or she knows.

I remember with my book about Champollion’s decipherment of Ancient Egyptian, Seeker of Knowledge, a museum shop refused to carry the book because the hieroglyph for elephant looked too much like an Indian elephant than it did an African one. Turns out that North Africa had its own species of elephant at the time and what is more, it is reported that one of the pharaohs had purchased elephants from India!  Seeker of Knowledge also raised eyebrows because it did not present the story in the usual fashion. Common knowledge is that Champollion used the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian. While this is true, it is only partially true. It always bothered me, when I was a kid that the books I read stopped after they explained how Champollion decoded some of the letters of the Egyptian alphabet. What I wanted to know was: how did he decode all of the pictures? My book was a start, an attempt at answering that question for the little Jimmy Rumford’s of this world.

Besides, who wants to rehash old information and pre-chew it for kids? Why not present new ideas, new angles, perhaps new research?  Why not make Beowulf [Beowulf, a Hero’s Tale Retold] look like the enfeebled, battle-scarred, unhero-like septuagenarian that he was ? 

Why not tie in the myth of Cadmus [There’s a Monster in the Alphabet] with the way our letters are ordered in our alphabet ? Why not say in my Island-below-the-Star and Dog-of-the-Sea-Waves, that Polynesians loved, above all else, to explore their ocean world instead of reinforcing the James Michener myth of fleeing Tahiti like pilgrims fleeing England for America ? Why not make Gutenberg clean-shaven, even though all the books I have ever seen show him with a full Mosaic beard?

This last might need some explanation, and so, in my book (soon to be out: September 18) From the Good Mountain, perhaps to ward off the wearied reviewer, I told how, according to all of the fifteenth-century miniatures and portraits I have seen, men of Gutenberg’s class did not wear beards and that the commonly reproduced portrait of him was done about a hundred years after he had died—at a time when beards were fashionable.  I even revisited the question of whether nor not Gutenberg had a beard in my companion guide to the children’s book. Here are two pages from that guide[From the Good Mountain: a companion guide for adults and children], which I made available on Amazon.com just yesterday.

 

As an author, I find it always a little chancy to go against what I think people want to hear, especially if I want people to buy the books I write. So, I am back where I started, ignoring sound business advice. To me, it is always better to give people what they need to hear.

Destinations Unimaginable

Just a few days ago, I finished a project that had consumed me these past three months. At the end of April I realized that I had a lot more to say about Johannes Gutenberg and bookmaking in the fifteenth century than I could ever say in my children’s book, From the Good Mountain: How Gutenberg Changed the World, which is due out September 18 of this year.  

At first I thought that I’d write a curriculum guide for the children’s book. But a week or so into it, I realized that my ‘guide’ was going to be much more than that. Instead of a curriculum guide it blossomed into a companion guide as ten pages became twenty then eighty then one hundred fifty. This wasn’t going to be a book for teachers. It was for anyone, twelve years old and up who wanted to find out what we do know about Gutenberg’s life and the details of making late medieval books. I began sketching out in my head the chapters I would write and the diagrams I would have to draw. The result: 12 chapters and 150 drawings and diagrams that would cover paper making, tanning leather, ink making, type casting, press building, typesetting, printing, illumination, and bookbinding.

Here are some pages from the companion guide. 

To find out more click here. To read the last chapter in the companion guide, click here.

I decided early on to make this a print-on-demand book in black and white and use CreateSpace.com to make this happen. As I write this, the book is in the proofing stage, and when the proof arrives this week, I’ll have the ‘fun’ of circling in red the many, many mistakes not just in the text but the captions to the diagrams as well as the six-page index.

Now that the work is largely done, I have a moment to reflect about why I wrote this companion guide. Did I think that the children’s book was deficient? No. Did I think that the children’s book was too difficult for today’s readers? Maybe. Did I think that, if I were reading From the Good Mountain, I’d want to know more? Most definitely. And it is this that I want to emphasize here in this blog: the function of a book is too excite the reader’s interest. 

I sometimes get the feeling, especially with some librarians and teachers that they want books that will not raise questions but answer them, especially for little Johnny, who needs to get his report done, or little Suzy, who is forced to read about something for which she has little interest. Books to these educators are pills. If they can only find the right one to stop the kids from asking questions.

I, like most of the authors that I know, seek to write books for kids with questions. We want them to look elsewhere. Our books are not the end of the line; they’re maps leading to destinations unimaginable. 

I suppose that in times past—way past—when there were fewer books, a book had to be as complete as possible. But this is no longer true today. Hooked up with the internet a book becomes borderless, infinite. If a book doesn’t lead a child to the internet, in my view, that book has failed. If teachers or parents haven’t taught the child that the internet is more than games and facebook and who-knows-what-else, than they have failed.

A reviewer recently wrote that he or she thought that From the Good Mountain was weak because it didn’t have a glossary and that the list of key words that I put at the end of the book specifically for the reader to find out more on the internet was “frail.” How old was this reviewer? Obviously old enough to be behind the times. With e-books, there is no need for lexile analyses. If the kid doesn’t know the word, the ipad or the kindle will look it up for him, even pronounce it for him. If the kid can’t picture what’s being written, one tap will carry him to Wikipedia or the internet. How then can one book be considered deficient or frail or weak? If the book is half way decent, it becomes truly a portal to the world.

In the old days, teachers and librarians used to use such metaphors: portals, gateways, road maps, because that is what they wanted every child to believe. Some children did; most didn’t because to make portals happen before the internet meant going to the library and hauling home a ton of books and becoming the most feared of creatures: the nerd. Today, truly, as I said, books are opening doors unimaginable. Instead of the keys being at the local branch library, they are right in the child’s hand.

Some Do Do's

I can’t believe I am posting another blog so soon. Up to now, my blogs have come out rather sporadically. But tomorrow morning early,  I will be giving a talk in a break-out session at the 2012 Biennial Writers’ Conference presented by the National League of American Pen Women (Honolulu Branch). 

Part of my talk will center on what I posted earlier today, but another part will be to discuss a few simple rules for those considering self-publishing. These rules don’t have so much to do with how to write or illustrate a children’s book. Rather, they have everything to do with layout and design. After all, if you are going to self-publish, make the book look as professional as you can. People will judge your book by its cover, the type you use and the layout . . . then they’ll get to your beautifully crafted story.

Here are my Do Do’s. One for picture books and one for chapter books. My advice: keep the layout simple and do do these things.

10 Do Do’s for Picture Books

1  Pay attention to the rhythm of pictures and words.

There are three basic layouts: words on pictures, words below pictures, words following pictures: If you choose the first layout, put the text in the same place on each page. If you choose the second option, vary the rhythm according to the story.

2  Make sure that your story is evenly distributed through your book.

You can always tell if a book is well-done, if there are the same number of words on each page. This is not a must, but it helps bring order to the book.

3  Keep all of the pictures the same size and make them all either full bleed or with a margin.

4  Trim your story to as few words as possible.

Picture books work because the pictures tell the story as much as the words do. If the book looks word heavy in the layout, it is probably not well-edited. Let the art do the heavy lifting.

5  Make your story look as though it were written in free-verse.

My feeling is that a picture book is a poem. I don’t mean a poem that rhymes, but a poem in the sense that it is a slice of life, a poetic look at some one, some thing, some event. If you think that way, your book will have few words and the pictures will do the work of telling the story. And, if you break up the text so that it looks like a poem, you are inviting the reader to treat your work as poetry.

6  Consider the sound of the words.

This has nothing to do with layout--at least in printed books, but in digital books, where a voice can be recorded, this is extremely important.

7  Use difficult words.

Again, like #6, this has little to do with layout, but in the digital world, where the reader can tap a word and the definition comes up instantly, it makes no sense whatsoever to limit the vocabulary. In the past, teachers and educators put a stranglehold on books. Each book had to meet a grade-level standard. No more is that the case, as far as I am concerned.  A first grader can tap on the word and find out what it means, hear how it is pronounced just as easily as anyone else. What’s so hard about that—unless you enjoy dumbing everything down.

8  Make sure everything is accurate and fully researched.

In the digital world, not only can a reader tap on the word to find out what it means, but the reader can search the word or group of words on the internet….instantly. If your facts are wrong, even the first grader will know it. If not the first grader, the teacher or the parent.

9  Make everything consistent: words, colors used, layout.

Take a good look at books by Chris Van Allsburg and William Joyce. They both have a brilliant sense of color, and, their designers were meticulous, insuring that their books hung together as a whole. This point number 9 is a summary of all I have said above.

10  Go to the library and check out as many different looking books as possible.

Finally, take a look at these books. Match each one with the points I have made above. Some will match up; others will not. Make a note of the variations.

10 Do Do’s for Chapter Books

1 Be generous with margins and consider the following rules when laying out a page.

The standard POD chapter book measures 8 inches tall by 5 inches wide. Use these margins.

Why be generous? Because a few pages added to a POD book don’t add to the cost, and for a iBook, page-count doesn’t matter at all.

2 Be generous with the leading (the space between the lines).

I would say that 14 point type with 18 point leading would be fine for a children’s picture book. Remember that in an iBook the point size is irrelevant. The reader can change type size to fit his or her own needs.

3 Indent the first line of the paragraph as much as the width of the capital W of the font you are using. 

If you make the indentation too wide, you will throw everything off balance and make reading difficult.

4 Start the first paragraph of each chapter about a third of the way down the page.

5 Make a classical title page such as this with everything center-justified

In 1818, this title page was made about the typography of Giambattista Bodoni [1740-1813]. Why not copy its simplicity? 

6 Get someone to check grammars, speling; and punctuation

I know you know about this, but the problem is with books, long ones, there are bound to be mistakes. Proof reading and editing is a must. Spell checking programs can’t distinguish between there, their, and they’re, for example; so read everything over and get a proof-reader. As far as the grammar is concerned, you must find someone who is qualified to make judgements about the way you write.

7 Check and double-check the facts in your book.

This is just good practice, but, in the case of ebooks, absolutely a must. The reader can instantly check up on you by searching the words or phrases in your book on the web.

8 Justify the entire text.

Ragged edges make for a ragged look and feel. Paragraphs, if short, won’t look like paragraphs.

9  Choose two fonts only: one for the titles of the chapters and the title page, and one for the text of the book.  

Be conservative. If you choose a font that is too wild or quirky, the book will be difficult to read. Choose a classical font: Garamont, Caslon, or Palatino. Stay away from Times. It is overused. The choice of font is irrelevant for ebooks. The reader gets to choose the font. 

10 Make everything simple—even the cover.

 What Bodoni did with the title page, you could do with the cover. You don’t always need an image. I would rather see a well designed cover without an image than one with a poorly drawn image that is as confusing as it is amaturish. Book covers are important, but don’t be scared. Simple ones can be powerful.  Here is a book cover for a recent book [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon]. It is very much in the style of Bodoni.

And one last word of advice:  Be innovative—with your next book.

The eBook Tango

A logo I have designed for the Children’s Literature Hawai‘i Conference this coming June, 

in which I’ll talk about my tango with ebooks and PODs

By now I had hoped to have several print-on-demand books [POD’s] available on Amazon and an equal number sitting on the digital bookshelves of the Apple bookstore, but I do not. Not yet, anyway.

It turns out that POD’s don’t quite measure up to my standards of what a children’s picture book should look like and ebooks are just too darn hard to make.

First POD’s. These are quite simple to make. By this, I mean, once you have done the writing and the illustrating and the book designing, it is but a tap of a button, if you are using Adobe InDesign, to turn what you have created into a press-ready PDF and send it off to either CreateSpace [ https://www.createspace.com]or Lightning Source [https://www1.lightningsource.com:443]. Within minutes, or so it seems, either company will send you a paper proof of the book, and, depending on how much you want to pay for shipping, you will see your proof in a matter of days. It is simple and cheap. 

CreateSpace charges about $10. LightningSource: $75. Unfortunately, the results are pretty dismal for both. They both use the same presses. The colors are not always bright. CreateSpace uses cheap, thin paper, and both companies won’t let you put any words on the spine, which seems ridiculous to me. How will a person find the book on a home bookshelf let alone at a public library?

The results for chapter books are more encouraging. In fact, the whole POD way of making books is actually geared for making books with lots of words. Because that is the case, and because the technology just doesn’t meet my standards, I’ve put my dozen or so books with CreateSpace on hold, believing that things will get better rather soon. 

In the meantime, I have turned to making electronic books. I have looked at Kindle and Nook and iBooks. Only iBooks shows real possibilities for me as a picture book maker. The colors are bright. There is more functionality, because after all, the iPad, on which you have to view the iBook, is a mini-computer, while Kindle and Nook are simply screens for viewing static pdfs. 

iBooks does have a catch, however: it is pretty difficult to turn a book you have created into an epub document. An epub uses html coding and makes a mini-web page out of your book. It is the coding that is difficult. Adobe InDesign will turn your book into an epub document in the blink of an eye, but the results aren’t always what you might expect. Pictures show up in odd places in the iBook. Sentences can end up anywhere. This is because iBooks are not really made for picture books….unless you understand the present functioning epub formatting. 

It turns out that there are two kinds of iBooks. One in which the text and pictures flow as you turn the digital pages. The other is one in which the formatting is fixed. It is the fixed formatting that you must have to make a picture book work; otherwise, pictures and text get separated in weird ways after they have gone through the epub meat grinder.

You have several options at this point. You can learn html coding and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and all of the other necessary codes to turn your book into an epub. You can hire someone like Telemachus Press ( http://telemachuspress.com ) to do this for you for a small bag of money. Or you can use some of the software out there which claim to be able to turn your book into an epub. 

The best software I have found—and one of the cheapest—is a little app for the iPad called Book Creator [http://www.redjumper.net/bookcreator]. It is only $5. With it, you can design pages, put text on top of pictures, and do a fair amount of things before the little thing runs out of steam. For example, you can’t use italics and roman in the same sentence. You can’t put pictures on top of pictures and you are stuck with only three different book sizes: square, portrait, and landscape. Still, you can do a lot. Check it out at the website mentioned. There’s a simple video to watch. After you see the video, you’ll have a million ideas of your own. 

The one nice thing about Book Creator is that it is DRM-free. DRM means ‘digital rights management.’ I don’t pretend to understand all of the legal ramifications of DRM, but I understand that if you use software that is not DRM-free, you may run into problems down the road. You may not be able to sell your books in all of the venus you would like. 

iBooks and iTunes have come out with iAuthor

 [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iauthor/id439057242?mt=8]. 

This is really cheap software, but it is not DRM-free. If you create something with iAuthor, you can only sell what you create as an iBook. Apple is not the only one doing this. Many companies that claim to help you out have DRM clauses. Unless you are a lawyer, I’d be wary of giving any of my rights away.

Even so, in order to sell books for the iPad, you have to sign an agreement. I signed the agreement which contained some pretty scary stuff about rights. Why? Because either party can break the agreement with a 30-day written notice. I figured that was fair. After all, when I sell through iBooks, I come away with a 70% share. See if a legacy publisher will give you that much. And with a legacy publisher you sign everything away.

Story Pictures

The other day, during an interview, I was asked, “What makes a picture narrative?” I remember pausing . . . for quite a while . . . before answering. No one had ever asked me a question like that. So, marshaling what few thoughts I had in my brain under the category “picture + narrative,” I tried to respond as best I could. I blathered out something, and interviewer and I found ourselves exploring the relationship between picture and story, between image and words—you know: René Magritte’s famous picture that either destroys the bond between word and picture or reinforces the notion that pictures are not real by saying “this is not a pipe.”

My interviewer and I also explored the yin and yang of words and pictures: if a word is worth a thousand pictures then a picture is worth a thousand words. (It has just occurred to me that I could illustrate this with my own take on Magritte’s picture.) 

But the central question—what gives a picture its narrative quality?—I don’t think I ever fully answered. 

Pictures have been used to help tell stories from very ancient times. The cave paintings at Lascaux, the friezes at Luxor, the mosaics in Libya all attest to that. After the Renaissance, painting was all about story telling, or so it seemed. Huge paintings were done not only to remind the faithful of biblical stories but the literati of the myths from Greece and Rome. Somewhere along the way, perhaps from the schools that flourished in the low countries, another type of painting emerged. One that could generate a story never told but understood by all who viewed the painting. I am thinking in particular of Vermeer’s work.

By the nineteenth century, this type of narrative painting was in full flower. Tired field hands, laboring peasants, lonely women sipping wine all became worthy subjects like this one done by Ramón Casas i Carbó about 1891. 

Along with this, printing techniques evolved to such a point that book illustration took off. For children, this was the time of Randolph Caldecott, N. C. Wyeth, and Kate Greenaway. 

Then, suddenly, or so it seems to me, a split occurred. People began to differentiate between illustration and painting, between narrative painting and real art. Narrative painting was the stuff of book illustrators, advertisers, propagandists. 

Let those guys tell the stories. Let the world go to blazes. Real art doesn’t need to tell a story. Real art exists to arouse the non-story neurons in the brain, the ones sensitive to color and design, darks and lights, dynamic and static compositions. After all, every one accepts that music is non-narrative. Why couldn’t people accept that art is as well? By 1950, the answer was: they’d damn well better. Here’s Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist”:

Sometime in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have won a bet to see who could write the shortest story. His winning story: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” I mentioned this to my interviewer and wondered whether anyone had attempted to tell a story with just one picture using the least visual information possible. You have probably seen a million of these, but these “minimal” illustrations have accompanying words. But what if there are no words, just one threadbare image that tells a story? If any one has any candidate, I’d like to see it. 

On the other hand, if you were allowed more than one image, it would be easy to string a series of them together to tell a story. This is what graphic novels do. This is what some of the best children’s books ever to come out do. With a series of pictures the illustrator can establish all the elements of a story: the beginning, middle, and end as well as arouse emotions much in the same way that Hemingway’s six-word story did. Here’s a fine example by Monique Félix, called The Plane, done in 1980.

I have never actually written a wordless picture book, although I have made several attempts. The closest I have come is my book Mango Rain, which has recently been published in English. (It has up to now only been available in Brazilian Portuguese.) In this book, the words and pictures by and large tell the story of Thomas, who makes a toy pick-up truck. But the pictures tell an additional story: of the mango tree and how it blossoms and produces fruit.

There is nothing unusual here. Good illustrators often show something outside of the words, almost beyond the words. Look at Olga Dugina and Andrej Dagin’s work. Here are some examples from their interpretation of the brave little tailor:

Then there are pictures that words can never describe no matter how hard one might try. These pictures assail those parts of the brain that have nothing to do with words but have everything to do with how we interpret the world around up. Chris Van Allsburg’s illustrations for his The Mysteries of Harris Burdick are part of a whole genre of visual art that takes us to Escher and back to Magritte, where I started.

Of course, the ability to interpret illustrations, to know what is paradoxical or contra-factual and what is not depends a large part on one’s culture. There have been a lot of studies about how poor children interpret illustrations vs how middle-class children look at pictures. When I was a professor at the Université Nationale du Rwanda, some of my graduate students were very much interested in how textbooks for teaching English printed in Europe presented Rwandan children with real problems. One student chose a lesson from a French-printed English language book that showed Johnny taking a bath. “How,” my student asked, “was a Rwandan child going to interpret a scene so different from his own experience of taking a bath?” My glib answer was: if the picture is not too obscure, such a picture becomes an occasion to teach the students about a world different from the one they experience.

I often think about these “cultural problems” when I illustrate my own books. In the opening scene of my book Rain School, I purposely presented the viewer with a picture which would be very easy for a Chadian to interpret but very difficult for an American to fully appreciate. Whenever American students ask me about the picture, I am happy to tell them what I drew. Here is that scene with notes overlaid.

Culture, paradox, the imaginative interpretation of the text by the illustrator, the emotions aroused—these are all part of what gives a narrative quality to a picture. They are what makes a picture tell a story. And telling a story is what makes us human. 

Illustration by Charlynn A., Kapolei Elementary School, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.