First Draft Episode #275: Carson Ellis
October 15, 2020
Listen to the Epidsode
Carson Ellis, author and illustrator of bestselling picture books Home and Caldecott Honor book Du Iz Tak?, talks about her newest picture book, In the Half Room.
This episode is brought to you by Everything I Thought I Knew, a new young adult novel from Shannon Takoaka, out from Candlewick Press October 13th. Eight months after 17 year old Chloe has a heart transplant everything is different. Most notably vivid, recurring nightmares about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn't recognize. As Chloe searches for answers, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality. Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takoaka comes out from candlewick Press on October 13th.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Carson Ellis author and illustrator of bestselling picture books Home, and Caldecott Honor book, Do Iz Tak? She's here to discuss her newest picture book In the Half Room out today. I really loved listening back to this conversation not just because, but a lot because, we were able to talk in person, which was one of the last in person interviews I did for the podcast. I'm really thrilled to be able to share it today.
I loved what Carson had to say about forgiving yourself for abandoning projects, as long as you're still finishing some things. On the genesis and evolution of her artistic collaboration with her husband Colin Meloy, guitarist and singer for the Decemberists and a writer and an author in his own right. On changing her perspective to think about what she wanted to draw rather than what story she wanted to tell. And the particular cruelty of stupid picture books.
Everything Carson and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes and these are some particularly rich and fun show notes, so definitely check those out on the website. And as a reminder, First Draft participates in affiliate programs specifically with bookshop.org. That means that when you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, it helps to support the podcast and indie bookstores at no additional cost to you. If you'd like to donate directly to First Draft either on a one-time or monthly basis, you can do that @paypal.me/FirstDraftPod.
Track Changes, the First Draft mini-series that covers all the steps of how your book goes from your laptop to the bookshelf is now complete. You can hear the entire series - nine episodes plus four bonus episodes - @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges. And I simply can't help myself from continuing to hunt down publishing info, turnover publishing news, want more context about what's going on in our industry. I'm just putting that information now into the weekly Track Changes newsletter, which comes out every Friday.
In that I share more of the information I gathered in researching for the podcast mini-series, as well as giving you industry updates, more original reporting, exclusive interviews, et cetera, et cetera. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Carson Ellis.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Hi Carson. How are you?
Carson Ellis: I'm good. Thanks. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me over to your workspace.
Carson Ellis: You're welcome.
Sarah Enni: It feels very cozy sitting in front of a fire here, so it's very appropriate.
Carson Ellis: Awesome.
Sarah Enni: So I like to start my interviews at the very beginning, which is where were you born and raised?
Carson Ellis: I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but I didn't live there for longer than a matter of months. So my parents were hippies. They always say, "We weren't hippies." But they were hippies. They were living in a van and they had me. And then I think there was some crazy situation where they had been living in an apartment and also in this tricked out van with like a wood stove in it. And then they got evicted from the apartment.
They had me in October when they were crashing at a friend's house. And then my grandmother, who is from New York, came out to British Columbia and told my mom, her daughter, that that was a terrible situation to be raising a child in. So they all moved back to New York. My dad who's Canadian, still Canadian, my mom who's a New Yorker, moved back to New York, moved to Brooklyn.
My dad worked for my mom's dad, my grandpa. And eventually we moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs where I grew up. So that's where I was raised, Mount Kisco, New York.
Sarah Enni: I always ask my guests how reading and writing was a part of growing up for you, and then for you, I'd love to hear about art and drawing as well. How that was a part of growing up?
Carson Ellis: Interestingly, because I spend a lot of time making picture books, I don't have as many picture book memories from childhood. I know we had a lot of picture books. I'm sure I loved a lot of them. But my big book memories are more of like chapter books. They made a huge impression. So I read all those Narnia books many times. I loved books about horses. So I read Misty of Chincoteague and all those Margaret Henry books and Black Beauty, the black stallion, was super obsessed with horses. And I was always drawing. I kind of was one of those kids that just never was not drawing, I think it's been a passion since I was tiny.
Sarah Enni: Were your drawings telling stories? I'm interested in when it took the shift into actually creating your own work.
Carson Ellis: Interesting. Some of them were and some of them weren't. If I look at my elementary school sketchbooks, there's comics. There's comics where a cat in legwarmers is dancing and singing Pat Benatar, all of my loves colliding, just the eighties and cats and legwarmers. And then there's short stories. There's a short story in one of my sketchbooks about a girl who gets a horse for her 10th birthday, kind of like aspirational fiction.
There's a lot of horse drawings where I'm really earnestly, trying to figure out how to draw horses well. So they're copied out of books about horses. Sometimes they're labeled with all the horse body parts labeled, they're almost like scientific studies. And then there's also some life drawing. There'd be a portrait of my mom, things where I'm drawing from observation, so it's kind of all over the place.
But I do think by midway through elementary school, I was making up my own stories and illustrating them, never getting very far in them. I was looking at a sketchbook recently cause I had to talk to some kids about art, and so I was looking through my kid's sketchbooks. And there's a lot of projects that were started and then stopped. I got halfway through a comic and then I was like, "Yeah, I've got other things to do." Not a lot of sticktuitiveness.
Sarah Enni: Do you still find endings hard?
Carson Ellis: Yeah, I do. I find finishing hard sometimes. And I have the same proclivity, I think, to really obsessively work on a project, have an idea that I'm so excited about that I can't do anything but it. And maybe to put three or four days into it and then to abruptly abandon it and then never even revisit it. I do that all the time. I did it a couple of months ago and I think it might be part of my process.
Sarah Enni: This is like jumping ahead a little bit, but I think about this a lot because I think sometimes we can beat ourselves up about that.
Carson Ellis: Yeah. I think so too.
Sarah Enni: That feels like failing or something, but it honestly might just be how our brains work as creative people. I don't know. Are you forgiving of yourself for that?
Carson Ellis: I am. Actually, I don't know if I always have been, but this time I had a real moment with it because I spent a week working on a thing that I was so invested in and went a little too far with it. Like, started to show it to people and be like, "What do you think of this?" Only to completely abandon it. But then I realized that the process of going that deep and being all in with something that was kind of ill-fated, or doomed to be abandoned, is a good process for me. I do think I learned a lot from it.
There's been periods in my life where that's been the only thing I do is start and stop projects. But it's not hard for me to forgive myself that when I know that I'm finishing things. It would be a different story, I think, if my whole creative career was just one abandoned project after another.
So like if someone asked me if they thought that was a good trajectory, I would be like, "Totally do that, as long as you're finishing things sometimes too."
Sarah Enni: Yes. Right, right, right. That makes sense. That makes sense. You chose to go to the University of Montana, but there was not an illustration program there.
Carson Ellis: Yeah, there was not, not anything really.
Sarah Enni: What was the pull to that school?
Carson Ellis: So I grew up in Westchester County, New York. I didn't like where I grew very much. And I kind of had a rough time. I was a really unhappy teenager. I went to a giant public school where I just had a hard time. And I think as I was barely graduating high school by the skin of my teeth, I realized the next step could be to just sort of bum around at my parent's house in this town I hated, or to take this small bit of money that my grandpa had set aside for me to go to college, it wasn't a ton of money. And my grades were pretty bad. So I couldn't have gone to a very good school.
I was just really drawn, I mean, you've probably seen pictures of Montana. You can imagine if you were 17 and you hated the town you grew up in and you knew you had a little money to move anywhere in the country and you thought it might be a good point in your life to start anew, that Montana would be the place to do it. So I just was kind of drawn there. I would see pictures of the mountains and that big sky and it just felt like the place to go. I was able to get in there. I could afford going there without taking on a lot of debt.
And I was at a point in my life where I knew that I loved illustration and that that was probably what I wanted to do, but I wasn't together enough to have the foresight to know how important it might be to go to a college where I could study it. You know what I mean? I took the idea pretty seriously, but I was like, "I'll just wing that." And there was an art program there, they have an art department, so I got a painting degree. And for all the good it did me, you know, I'm not really a painter, but I did get to study art, which is an important thing to have that practice and to have a creative community in college.
And then I graduated and had no idea how to be an illustrator, but that just kind of slowly fell into place over the course of many years after I graduated.
Sarah Enni: To be an illustrator could mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. So when you were envisioning what you wanted to do, what were you thinking? What mediums and where did you see your work ending up?
Carson Ellis: I think I certainly saw myself as an illustrator of children's books. I had this kind of kid's book awakening as a teenager, weirdly. Like I said, I certainly had connections to picture books when I was an actual kid, but I had this more deep, resonant, intellectual connection to them as a teenager. So I was a miserable teenager. And the first book that I saw that made me aware of this was the book Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak, which has such a dreamy, poetic, angsty, bizarre book with beautiful illustrations.
And at the time I was probably 16 and I loved to draw and I loved to write my weird, bad teenage poetry. And I didn't know how you merged those two things. I didn't know where those two came together as one. And then I saw this beautiful picture book and I thought, "Oh, it's in books for kids. You can kind of do anything with them." They have this large ambiguous audience, readership. Kids are pretty open to just about anything you want to say or do in a book. Their literary tastes are unformed and they are really open-minded.
And so that dawned on me and kind of kicked off a lifelong obsession with picture books. So I had been thinking about them since I was a teenager. I knew that that was what I wanted to do. And then the other thing that was really formative to me from a really young age, was The New Yorker which I was always looking at in my house. And looking at those illustrations, they're a huge part of my creative consciousness.
So I did not know when I graduated college, even what the term editorial illustration meant or what an art director did or anything. I just didn't know. So I didn't know that The New Yorker is editorial illustration, now I do. But I pictured myself doing that and I pictured myself doing books for kids.
Sarah Enni: That's really sweet. I love that you found kids' books, I mean, we can talk about it later, or maybe now. The evolution of kids' books and the types of kids' books that you found when you were a teen, I'm just thinking of the [pauses], now I'm gonna forget what it's called, but the proclamation about kids' books that...
Carson Ellis: Oh yeah!
Sarah Enni: Do you mind talking about that really quick?
Carson Ellis: No, I don't. It's so old now that I can't remember that much about it. But Mac Barnett wrote a Children's Book Proclamation (more context about that proclamation) a kid's book proclamation that was meant to be sort of like a manifesto (signed by—among others—Carson Ellis, Jon Klassen (listen to his episode of First Draft here), Dan Santat (listen to his First Draft episode here).
The gist of which is basically just, "Let's take books for kids seriously." They're an incredible art form and their readership is incredible. It's broad because it's grownups and kids, but you have this wonderful opportunity when you make books for kids to, I don't know, to me it's such an incredible opportunity.
You're a child's first introduction to art and prose. It's incredible. It's like a huge responsibility, you know? And it's magical and amazing. And so I think that's kind of the ethos of it. There's a bunch of different points. None of which I can remember right now, we could get it out and read it. So Mac wrote it, I lettered it and a bunch of people signed it.
Sarah Enni: And I was just reading, I saved it on my phone, but I don't think we need to get into it, it didn't happen five minutes ago. So I think we can just talk about what you remember from it. Cause what you were speaking to, what the group collective of you were speaking to, I think was maybe a window of time in kids' books where they were doing less, um, I don't want to say risky, but they weren't taking as many chances with kids' books as the kinds of books that you grew up loving. I don't know. I'd just love to hear you speak to that. And if you think it's changed?
Carson Ellis: I think it has, I'm not sure. Sometimes my perspective feels like it might be skewed. So the books, you know, Maurice Sendak for example, a lot of the books that I was emulating, and still emulate, were written in the early mid part of the century. A lot of them were edited by Ursula Nordstrom, who is this infamous children's book editor at Harper. And she was really brave.
She championed a lot of really weird books by a lot of unconventional people like Shel Silverstein (author and illustrator of The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic) and Maurice Sendak. And the list is so extensive. It's probably like every game changing, ground breaking work of children's literature she had a finger in somehow or other.
But yeah, I think maybe there is a window of time when the publishing business got a little complacent and a little just money minded, safe. That is still prevalent in a lot of corners of the kids' book industry. Obviously money is the bottom line in publishing. So with kids' books, you have these opportunities to make these really interesting books and take these huge risks and really be out there.
You can write a book in an invented language and a kid will be totally fine with it. They will have no problem going there because they're kids and that's the beauty of writing for them. But also, sales and marketing teams and what people think a book - sometimes people have a hard time making that leap. And I do feel, as far as I can tell, more interesting and exciting books are being made.
I hear a lot less of the kind of feedback that I remember hearing so much when I started, which was like, "This isn't colorful enough." There's a lot of like, "Kids like color. More color!" And I would think like, "What about those Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak books that everybody still loves that are totally in black and white?” (Ruth Krauss wrote and Maurice Sendak illustrated classic picture books such as Open House for Butterflies and A Very Special House). So intuitively I felt like those were misguided sentiments about publishing and I hear them less.
Also I am in such a better place in my career now than I was 15 years ago. So I might be hearing them less because people give me the benefit of the doubt more than they used to. So it's hard for me to tell how much has changed, but I think I'm seeing more books in the world that I think are brave and fascinating and beautiful, than I used to.
Sarah Enni: I appreciate your honesty. It is really hard to tell when the situation has changed or when you have changed, especially when you're deep in it. That can be difficult. So the thread was, you're graduating from college and you know you want to be an illustrator, but you're not totally sure how it's done. So I'd just love to hear how you found your way to it, what was the journey like?
Carson Ellis: So I graduated from college at the University of Montana with my painting degree, which also was really, shortly to become, not super helpful. A lot of what I learned in college was how to take slides of your work and apply for exhibitions and galleries, stuff like this. So not only would I not go on to really be a gallery artists, but also within a few years, everything would be so digital that all this analog stuff that I had learned how to do in college, like writing letters and taking slides with a manual camera, would also be obsolete.
So there were a lot of amazing things I learned at the University of Montana, but stuff that is relevant to what I do was not part of it. So I graduate. And when I was in college, my college roommate, who is now my husband, his name is Colin Meloy (guitarist and singer for The Decemberists and author of the Wildwood series The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kids). We were roommates in college and we collaborated on a lot of stuff for his band at the time.
His band now is The Decemberists back then he had a band in college called Tarkio. And so we would collaborate on album art and I would make flyers for his band and stuff. And we had a lot of big dreams about ways that we wanted to collaborate.
And we went our separate ways after college, I moved around a bunch. I was in Vermont and Minneapolis and San Francisco always working as a cocktail waitress or a bartender doing some kind of service industry job. And I was actually doing paintings and having shows and making a little bit of a supplemental income that way, big paintings on canvas.
And at some point when I was in my mid-twenties, I moved up to Portland where Colin lived and we started more actively collaborating on stuff. And so that's when he started his band, The Decemberists. And I started doing all this art for his band, which I didn't really even realize was illustration at the time, didn't even occur to me. That line was so blurry. I just didn't know what it was.
But it was illustration. And so it kind of got out into the world in the form of posters and album art. I was doing all these pen and ink drawings. He had an album called Castaways and Cutouts and the CD booklet was full of these little black and white illustrations. And I think as his band gained more visibility, that work caught the eye of art directors. And so people started hiring me.
So that was kind of how that got rolling. And I started out doing really abysmally low-paying editorial jobs for weeklies. It'd be like $60 for a drawing or something. And then at some point I quit my job and I just kinda went for it. And then I started to get a lot of work. So I did more and more editorial work until a literary agent named Steve Malk asked me if I wanted to work in kids' books. And I was like, "Yes!"
And he's kind of an amazing literary agent because he has this ability to sort of look outside of the kids' books sphere at these other people who are clearly doing kids' book work, but not in kids' books. And to say, "Don't you think you'd like to be doing this?" And he's always right. The person's always like, "That was the dream!" And he was like, "Come with me."
So I started working with him and ever since then I've been doing books for kids.
Sarah Enni: It's very cool that it came to you, that's really beautiful.
Carson Ellis: I was so lucky in that respect. I didn't know, at the time, how lucky that was because I didn't know how the whole thing worked. At the time, I think I was so impressed that anyone was hiring me, I was so impressed with myself that people were hiring me to do editorial work, that I didn't even realize how helpful it would be to have a really great literary agent. I was like, "I don't know. I think maybe I've got this." Like, "You take 15%?" [Laughs] It was so naive. I came dangerously close to not having this wonderful guy in my life who's helped my whole career.
Sarah Enni: I want to go back to you and Colin beginning to collaborate. I think it's so sweet that you guys were creative collaborators before you were even romantically involved. That's very special. You're still working together, in every way. But I really want to ask about drawing to represent music and collaborating with Colin, who I know is very opinionated as well about aesthetic things.
Carson Ellis: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Music and writing really do flow together in ways that we kind of don't even understand, but what is it like to take someone's music and try to interpret it through your own work?
Carson Ellis: Hmm. That's a good question. I think it depends. It depends on the music, obviously. That album, Castaways and Cutouts which was their first LP, all the songs on it were narrative. So it was like each song was a story. Each story suggested an illustration. It seemed more like illustrating a book than actually illustrating music.
So that's a really different job depending on the music that you're trying to represent. If you think about making a poster or making album art or something, sometimes that is such an abstract conceptual thing where you're just talking to a musician and saying like, "How does this make you feel? And what is the thing you want to get across?"
And the person is like, "I don't know, purple, the eighties, tap dancing." You're like, "Okay, you're gonna have to synthesize all these weird disparate things in your head and come up with a visual representation of it." Sometimes it's crazy and abstract like that. It's kind of like that with Collin a little bit, you know, he's written a lot of records that feel very narrative where it's so easy. It's like, "There's four characters on this record and I'm gonna illustrate them."
And then others that are way more sort of traditional folk albums, or pop albums, pop songs. And now we've been doing this for like over 20 years. So he doesn't need to sit down and be like, "Roller skating, gray wool," or whatever.
We have a lot of common fascinations that happen in tandem where one of us will get really into something and then the other person will get really into something and then we'll be into that thing together. And then that thing will become part of the album art. And it might be something totally unrelated. It might be like the Buried Giant by Kaszuo Ishiguro. We'll read a book that we're obsessed with and that will make its way into the album art even though it's unrelated.
So those conversations, I don't know, it's like so nebulous now cause we kind of share a brain. We don't even know how we do it.
Sarah Enni: Right, it's so interesting and very unique. So not replicable, in and of itself in any way, but beautiful because of that. I'm interested, Castaways and Cutouts, your style has changed and grown as your career has gone on, but it is still very distinctively, you. Even from very early Decemberists stuff and very beginning drawings.
I'm interested in how you found your voice as an artist, as well as the band finding - you know what I mean? There's so much that's happening at the same time, but still growing and changing and evolving. Do you feel like you were able to hone your own voice within that world?
Carson Ellis: I think so. Yeah. I think The Decemberists album art evolution is always mortifying and fascinating to me because for 20 years, it's a different image each year that represents whatever creative journey I was on. Whatever medium I was experimenting with, whatever u-turn I was trying to make as an artist, whatever opposite of a u-turn, like coming back to something, you know?
The thing I have to do today is design art for a Decemberists’ tour. It's a 20 year anniversary tour. So Colin was like, "Do something that feels like Decemberists art from 20 years ago." Which is so just mind-bending. I'm like, "But don't I...? Do I do that? I don't do that. Will it be cool? Will I hate it? You want me to travel back in time and draw like I used to draw when I wasn't as good at drawing?" Or mine this subject matter that's been over-mined like ships and banners and stuff like this.
So I don't know. I don't even know how to answer it. Yes. I've definitely evolved as an artist on my own within it. I feel like there is something kind of weird and interesting about that dynamic when you're living with, co-habitating with, co-parenting with, co-working with this person that you love and kind of share a brain with. Where it's impossible for me to know who I'd be as an artist if I wasn't bouncing everything off this one person, and hadn't been for 20 years, and vice versa.
Yes, I have evolved on my own as an artist. Colin is one of a lot of voices that I sort of turn to for criticism and feedback in my life, but he's definitely the biggest, most trustworthy voice. So it's almost inevitable that my art is what it is because of him.
Sarah Enni: It makes sense. I'm a fan of the December's too, partly because their music is stories. And when Wildwood came about, I was like, "Oh!" It just feels like this inevitable thing. It was like, "Of course, you would write about..."
Carson Ellis: It's just sort of an extension.
Sarah Enni: Exactly.
Carson Ellis: Which is reassuring. It's nice to know that people switch mediums and they still just do the thing that's in their heart.
Sarah Enni: I was like, "Oh, this is all of a piece." Some people are chameleons and that's very, very interesting too. But I think there's a comfort in people who are sort of cross-mediums and you can always tell like, "Oh, this has got that distinctive stamp on it." That's magical.
Carson Ellis: I think most really great artists do that. You look at someone like David Hockney, who's making these massive oil paintings that are naturalistic. He's making these tiny, bizarre little etchings. He's making abstract work. Everything is so different and the approach is so different, and you can tell that he is always looking for new ways to come to old subject matter. But still, beneath it all, is his really singular, whatever, you know? And it's kind of amazing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. Am I right that you have a Grammy?
Carson Ellis: No.
[Both laugh].
Carson Ellis: I have two Grammy nominations.
Sarah Enni: Grammy nominations! Okay. Not every children's book illustrator can talk about being Grammy nominated. That's amazing. I just was like, "Oh! That's a fun Wikipedia article addition."
Carson Ellis: I actually updated my website with that recently cause I had one and then I got another and I was pretty jazzed about being able to make that update.
Sarah Enni: That's pretty cool. An added bonus. Okay, let's shift over to books. So you said Steven Malk appears one day in your inbox, I'm guessing. And it's like, "Hey!" Who, of course, represents so many amazing children's book authors and illustrators. How did it go from there? How were you able to get into that world? And as an artist, what kind of adjustments did you need to make in entering that space?
Carson Ellis: Hmm, that's an interesting question. So the way it unfolded was I think I was pregnant with my first son, who's about to turn 14, when I began working on my first book. Which was The Mysterious Benedict Society, a middle grade novel, by Trenton Lee Stewart. And that was a big book. I just got very lucky. I got very lucky to fall into the hands of Steve Malk and I got very lucky that my first project was this successful middle grade novel. So I think that's kind of what happened. I got really lucky to work on a book that a lot of people saw and that got me more work.
And after that I worked on a book with Lemony Snicket and I did know Daniel Handler a little bit. So I think he actually, at a party, asked me if I would work on it. And I was like, "Yes!" And from there it just kind of unfolded. I had some lower profile books that I worked on that I loved also, but I got to work on a couple of bigger books that just lots of people saw. And I think that it got me started on a good foot.
And I did that for a lot of years. I probably illustrated books for nine years or 10 years or something before I came up with a book idea of my own that I wanted to write, and that was Home. And I've written three, Half Room is the third.
And then illustrated a lot of people's other books. Worked on those Wildwood books with Colin and another novel with Colin called the Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kids. I don't know, I'm just basically listing every book I've worked on.
Sarah Enni: Well, that's good for context but I want to ask about those years that you were working with other people's vision and other people's books that they created, both prose and children's book or picture book, rather?
Carson Ellis: Yes. I mean, The Mysterious Benedict Society was the first novel. Then I did a bunch of picture books then I did those Wildwood books.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. We just talked about collaborating with The Decemberists and with someone who's so close to you, this is a whole other kind of collaboration. A little bit more distance there. For anyone that's not familiar, can you just talk about how this works when you're hired to illustrate someone else's work?
Yeah, I can, cause it's not intuitive to most people. I think when people see a picture book that's been written by one person and illustrated by another, they're envisioning this collaboration between the two people. But typically an author sells a book to a publisher and then it's got an editor assigned to it. That editor is gonna find the illustrator for it. And then the illustrator, I feel like more often works with an art director than with the actual editor. I've done both. But I think typically you work with an art director.
So you're kind of removed and you're definitely removed from the writing process. You typically don't know the person who wrote the book and you're not in contact with them while you're working on the book. And it is not unusual to finish up the whole book before they even show the author the art. Or maybe to have done all the sketches and they give the author an opportunity to give some notes and then that's it.
Which is frustrating on both sides, I think. I think that happened with a book I illustrated called Stagecoach Sal by Deborah Hopkinson, which was really early on in my career. I think it was the third book I illustrated. And it's funny cause she lives around here too. She lives like one town over from me, but yet we never really talked throughout the whole process.
And then at some point she was like, "I just saw the final art. It's great!" And I was like, "Had you seen it leading up to it at all?" And the answer was no, she had seen it for the first time when it was totally done. And I thought, ""Wow! You're really invested in this story. You wrote it. You must have some sense of how you want to see it illustrated, even just what that character looked like in your head."
So yeah, I feel like there's a big disconnect there. I think that it's done the way it's done - maybe it wasn't done this way back in the old days. If you know those Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak books like A Hole is to Dig and You Be Me and I'll Be You, I think infamously, they sat down across the table and went back and forth.
And that's why those illustrations and that text feel so interdependent in that book. And I think maybe people used to collaborate more that way. And my hunch, though I don't really actually know, is that publishers just realized that it was a much less sticky, difficult, and much more streamlined thing to kind of keep those two entities separate.
You can imagine just asking strangers to collaborate with each other. It's hard. It's a gambit. I bet it came to a terrible end more than once. So this is how the process works now. This is how it's been streamlined. I've never been working on a book and wanted to be in touch with an author and been told like, "No, you can't bother that person."
I just illustrated a book about the winter solstice (The Shortest Day) by Susan Cooper, who is this incredible, brilliant British woman in her eighties who wrote The Dark is Rising, this series of middle-grade fantasy books, in the sixties. And I didn't know her at all, but I really wanted to be in touch with her. I had so many questions about the book and I'm kind of at a point in my career where I don't really want to work with people that I'm not either really enthralled by or that I know personally.
So I was just like, "Can I be in touch with her?" And they were like, "Of course." And so we went back and forth and talked about the book and it was incredibly helpful. It would have been a much, much lesser book if I hadn't talked to her about it.
Sarah Enni: That's so cool! Let's talk about getting to writing your own work. Had you always had that in the back of your mind? I know you always wanted to be an illustrator, but had you thought like, "I do one day when I write my own work as well?"
Carson Ellis: Yes. Yeah, for sure. In fact, I have lots of ideas, illustrated stories stopped and started going back to high school. It was always the goal. Again, I feel like Colin comes into play here again because part of my creative block about writing was like, "We're a creative collaboration. He's words, I'm art." You know what I mean?
And then at some point I was like, "Oh, I don't think that's true. I think I'm words too." Colin is a really good storyteller. He knows how to come up with a story and flesh it out into this long, crazy, like fantasy novel. I actually am not narratively inclined. It's why, I think, all the picture books that I have written myself are pretty un-narrative.
One of them is a poem, cataloging different homes. One of them has kind of a loose narrative running through it, but it's about bugs and there's no language in it except invented language. There's just dialogue that's not in a language anyone understands. And then this new book, The Half Room that I just wrote, definitely not much of a narrative, more like a dream-scape. So I don't think it's that he's words and I'm pictures. Or that any collaborative relationship, or romantic relationship, needs to break down that way. It's kind of a goofy idea though it's easy to fall into that trap.
But I do think that storytelling, as much as I love stories and I love books for kids, I have to force myself to come to it from different angles and different places in order to be able to say something that's meaningful to me. Because a story with a beginning, middle and ending, is frankly, maybe not something that I'm very good at.
I'm a mom. So I'm telling stories to my kids a lot and I see how Colin and other people around me sort of effortlessly sit down and tell these stream of consciousness stories to their kids. And that's really hard for me. For all the ways that I think of myself as creative, sitting down and just making up a story is really hard.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. I mean, that's a good thing to know and recognize because I think a lot of people - or just unusual narratives - feel more in line with what you want to say. I think your books do a great job of, and my favorite picture books do this, love being so open to interpretation. Then kids get to fill it in for themselves and read it over and over and over because it means something different to them every time, I think
Carson Ellis: That's kind of my jam. That's how I solved that problem. It's like, if you make this open ended thing that other people read their own stories into, then you don't really have to be a good storyteller. You let the people reading tell the story.
Sarah Enni: And it's not good/bad, it's just a different kind of engagement. And it feels poetic, which picture books are kind of holding hands with poems, I think a lot of the time. But I want to ask then, Home was the first book that you did on your own, how did that idea come to you? What made you feel like, "Oh, this is the one I can do on my own."
Carson Ellis: So I ran a bunch of ideas by Steve. Most of which he was either like, "No." Or, "You need to flesh that out. That's just a germ of an idea." Or things that I ran by him and then was like, "Actually, no, I think that sucks." And that happened a lot. And something about collecting and obsessing about picture books from the time I was a teenager, I was always reading them in this academic way and just studying them.
And you can really overthink a thing if you love a form so much, and you've spent so much time thinking about it. The thing that I always was telling myself was like, "Do you really have something valuable to add to this heap of amazing books that already exist? If you have something mediocre to add, you shouldn't do it."
And I always thought, "I could do it if I want. I'm a pretty good illustrator. I think I could get a book deal for a beautifully illustrated book that had kind of a dumb idea behind it." Like, "I think I could swing that, but I don't want to do that." So that's why I kept abandoning ideas.
And then at some point I realized that, this idea that I didn't know how to tell a story I was really excited about, was the thing bogging me down. And so I decided to come at it from a totally other angle, which was to figure out what I wanted to draw instead.
And I was looking around at books. There was a book around the time I wrote Home that came out maybe the year before, called People by Blexbolex. He's, I think, a French cartoonist and it's ostensibly a book for kids, but it just juxtaposes these beautiful illustrations. It's just about the juxtaposition of characters on either side of the page. So you have character on one side and a character on the other side, I'm not explaining it very well, but your listeners should check it out.
And I was also thinking a lot about Richard Scary (author and illustrator of Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town, and Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks From A to Z), who writes these books that they are so exuberantly drawn, you know, you read them and you're like, "This guy just wanted to draw. He just wanted to draw cars with faces and vacuum cleaners with faces and animals." The cars and trucks and things that go there is a narrative that runs loosely through it, but it's just an excuse to draw all these other things.
And those books are so beloved. And part of what is so beloved about them is all the detail and all of the information that kids can kind of glean from those books and pick out and use their imaginations to flesh out those stories.
So I was like, "I'm coming at it from the wrong angle. I should come at it from the drawing angle." And then I was like, "If I'm gonna spend a bunch of time drawing a book that I wrote, it should be making drawings that I really, really love."
And so then I thought about homes and I thought about environments. And then I thought about the idea that you could fill these places with details that would suggest who lived there and would help kids make guesses and use their imagination while they're reading. And then the idea just opened up to me and I was like, "Oh, I just need to write a short poem about homes and then it'll be all about the art."
Sarah Enni: I love that. And I think I read that you said you wrote it really quick.
Carson Ellis: I wrote it really quick. Yeah. I wrote it in probably like 10 minutes and then the illustrations were kind of as fast cause they were in my head while I was writing it. I don't even remember thinking them up, or something. Which is really different than when you illustrate someone else's book and you're just banging your head against a wall trying to figure out what comes on this page and that page.
Sarah Enni: And you appear in the book.
Carson Ellis: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: So, that was obviously always kind of the plan to include yourself?
Carson Ellis: No, so I turned to the last page where it says, "An artist lives here, and it's me." Initially it said, "A child lives here." Cause I wanted the reader to see themselves in the book. And the child would be in a room, like my studio is in that book, where there's little sort of souvenirs from everywhere else in the book. And then a lot of editors who looked at the book just felt like it was so disjointed. There wasn't anything holding it together.
And so I think that was part of the problem, I guess. I had people tell me, "Why can't it just be all the homes of mythical creatures?" Or, "Homes around the world,” or something. "Why does it have to be so all over the place?"And I was like, "It's kind of the point of the book."
It's absurd that it's so all over the place and that we're supposed to take the idea of Valhalla as seriously as we are to take the idea of a Slovakian mansion, you know? But people didn't quite get it. And still Candlewick was gonna publish it. And my editor, Liz Bicknell was pretty happy with it, I think. But then I was talking to Mac Barnett and he is one of my readers of everything, him and Jon Klassen both, and Colin, are like my three main readers. And my sister-in-law, Maile Meloy (author of The Apothecary, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, and more), four main readers. They kind of cover all the bases. I feel like if I show everything to those four, they will figure out any problems that it has and I'll be good.
So Mac saw that and I think he told me that it should be me on the last page. He was like, "Why isn't that you?" And I realized, "Oh, that's the thing that ties the whole book together." So then it becomes a book not just about using your imagination and thinking about homes, but it also becomes a book about being an artist and the kind of inspirations that you're drawing from your whole life. Like your obsessions that are the threads that run through your creative life and imagination since you're a little kid.
Sarah Enni: And I think twofold, right? Because it identifies that the book is all equally serious because you're taking it all equally serious.
Carson Ellis: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: And then it turns around and says, "What about you?" I mean, the final word is like, "Where are you? What do you think?" Which is so fun. That's the tipping off point where I can imagine every kid just kind of thinking about that and engaging with the book in a different way.
Carson Ellis: I hope so. That's the idea.
Sarah Enni: It was so fun. I was like, "Oh! She got the chance to draw herself. How fun!"
Carson Ellis: I know! And it's not an intuitive thing. But then when I worked on The Half Room, I was like, "I'm gonna put myself in there too!" Like, "Why not just make bizarre psychedelic autobiographical books for kids?" There's no rules.
Sarah Enni: So I want to ask about Du Iz Tak, or is that, how do you say it?
Carson Ellis: You said it right. Du Iz Tak.
Sarah Enni: Because I understand that that was a really different process for you.
Carson Ellis: Yeah, it was a different process, it was just more laborious. The concept of it, which is basically this idea that there's a seed that sprouts, and then a plant that grows on every consecutive spread throughout the book. This plant gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it turns into a flower and then it dies. And then all of its seeds sprout the following spring.
So it's kind of a life cycle of a plant thing. But it's got all of these insects in this kind of microcosmic world that's revolving around the plant. So that idea came to me pretty quickly. I was lying in bed and thinking about gardening and I thought, "Oh, that would be a good idea."
And then it felt kind of static and quiet. I didn't imagine it with text. I imagined it as a wordless picture book cause I wanted it to feel immersive. I wanted you to feel like you were in that world. And I feel like with this omniscient narrator voice, it would remove you from that.
So I didn't want it to have a narration, but then it felt static, kind of boring. And so I added this language that was invented. And that part all actually was pretty easy and came to me pretty quickly. It wasn't that hard to write. But then the art itself, which almost works as animation because the plant grows a little bit on each spread and there's all of these tiny little details that I had to keep painting over and over and over again, it was really laborious, arduous, and I hated it.
Whereas making the art for Home was really fun and lovely, I loved making those paintings. Making the art for Du Iz Tak was repetitive and made my back hurt and made me super grumpy.
Sarah Enni: I heard you describe, in one interview, you said that you sometimes feel imprisoned by work.
Carson Ellis: Yeah, [laughs]. I don't remember saying that, but I'm sure that's true.
Sarah Enni: I appreciate the honesty. I'm just interested in how you think about the work. Because you have also said that you are very careful to work on one thing at a time, and yet then that leads to being stuck with one thing at a time. So I dunno, how do you think about that?
Carson Ellis: I try to be conscientious about what I take on, and not take on work that I feel will make me feel imprisoned. It's like a good first step. In the case of Du Iz Tak, I had that idea. And then I was aware, you know, I feel like all projects, they have these sort of moments of inspiration, and then they have moments of drudgery. If you make books, it's not like you're just in a world of creative inspiration for like 12 months. That's absurd. Nobody can do that. It doesn't make any sense.
So there's a lot of drudgery and that's part of the practice. I think being able to just sit down at your drawing table and draw those stupid tiny blades of grass one after another, it's like a meditative practice and it's part of your job. And you have to be able to do the boring part that you don't care about in order to also do the wonderful part that you do.
And in the case of that book, it all felt in service of this idea that I thought was good. I was like, "It's okay that this makes my back hurt and I'm tired of doing this. And I dread going into my studio because when it's finally done, I'm gonna be proud of this book." I knew I would like it.
That's a miserable feeling when you don't think you're gonna be proud of it. And I have been known to bail from projects because I'm like, "The mental anguish of this isn't worth the thing that I'm working on."
Sarah Enni: So let's talk about In the Half Room. Do you mind pitching the, pitching the book for us?
Carson Ellis: Well, oh gosh, I don't know how to pitch this book. I don't even know how to talk about it really. But instead of pitching it, I'll just tell you a little bit about how it came to be. Does that make sense?
Sarah Enni: That's perfect.
Carson Ellis: It was my son's idea, my son Milo who is going on seven, he'll be seven by the time this airs. And he and I were drawing together and he often will give me drawing requests. He'll be like, "Draw this. Draw that. Draw the Salopicon." And I'll be like, "What is the Salopicon?" He'll be like, "It flies through space. It has wings. It's got one big eye." And I'll draw and he'll be like, "Nice. Now draw this."
So he was like, "Draw the half room. And I was like, "What's the half room?" And he was like, "It's this room and everything in it is half." And I was like, "Oh, that's super cool." So I drew it and it was just this tiny little pencil drawing, and I looked at it and I was like, "I think that that seems like a picture book." So it was just a jumping off point, but I wrote a poem around it. And it's a real stream of consciousness poem.
It's sort of like, "Where do you go with that idea? There's a half room." Colin's idea was like, "It should just be a room and everything in it is half: half chair, half table, half shoes. And then it ends." And I was like, "I just kinda can't. I feel like it needs to have something more that happens there." So it's a half room. Everything in it is half. You'd see the half chair you see the half table, you see the half cat.
Then there's a line that says something like, "Half a window, half a door, half a rug on half a floor." And then there's a page turn. And it says, "The light of the half-moon shines down on the half room." And then you see the whole half room and everything in it is half including me. I'm in the room and I'm half, and I'm reading a half book with my half cat and the light of the half moon is shining into the room.
And so then the story, basically, is that you see some more half things and then there's half a knock on half a door. And then half me goes and answers the door. And there's another half of me. And we "shoop" together and like run off into the night.
Sarah Enni: I love the "shoop".
Carson Ellis: I like the "shoop" too. And then the cat is left alone in the half room, the half cat. And then another half of a cat comes to the door. It's like the front half of the cat is left behind and a cat butt comes to the door, basically. And you think they're probably gonna shoop together, but then they don't, they get in a fight, like a cat fight. And then they go to sleep together on the half rug.
Sarah Enni: We were talking before we started, before we hit record, that that just feels so perfectly cat-like.
Carson Ellis: Yeah, it did feel cat-like. I had so many thoughts about it. As I was coming up with the idea, which makes so little sense to begin with, I was like, "What should be the other half that comes to the door?" Like, "I'm a woman. Should my other half be a man?" Like, "What is the thing that I shoop together with?" And everything that I came up with felt so loaded and felt like it had this sort of deep, in some instances, problematic subtext, you know?
And I really didn't want to tell the story of a person who was half until they find their other half, and then they become whole. I don't even feel like this is a story about being a sad person who just needs to be whole to be happy. I just really didn't want this story to be dogmatic. I wanted it to be weird and absurd. I felt so strongly about that.
So I came at it from all these different angles, trying to figure out the perfect way to be utterly ambiguous and not have it have a message, cause I didn't want it to. And at some point the two halves of the person shoop together and they run off into the night, but one half might come back later and the other half might go off where it came from. I don't think the point is that it has this neat and happy ending.
And so that was part of the thing with the cat. Cats are so weird. If you introduced a cat to the literal other half of its body, it would probably would get in a cat fight with it. And then reluctantly fall asleep on a rug and nap with it. But also I wanted there to be other outcomes at the end of the book. I didn't want everybody to just shoop together.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I like that. It prevents it from having an air of inevitability or predictableness.
Carson Ellis: Yeah, that too.
Sarah Enni: When I was reading the book, I interpreted this page where they shoop together, you run out into the night as like kind of dancing and being excited.
Carson Ellis: Yeah. It's meant to be kind of an ecstatic moment.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it's so fun.
Carson Ellis: Thanks.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about representing yourself again, because you look different in this book than you do in Home.
Carson Ellis: Oh, well, I don't feel like you really see me in home. You only see me from the back.
Sarah Enni: Well, you're in the window when...
Carson Ellis: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true. Maybe I do. I think that it wasn't necessarily... when I'm in the window, I'm so tiny. I'm almost just like a little smiley face. I had a little more room here. I don't know that this really looks like me, but I'm a distinctive person in a way because I have long red hair and I wear red lipstick. So I feel like no matter what you make the person look like, if you give them long red hair, bangs, and some red lipstick, people will know I'm trying to draw myself, but it's like a cartoon-y version of me.
Sarah Enni: It's sweet. I just wasn't sure if there was a particular catharsis to drawing yourself or figuring out how to draw yourself. It's kind of cool because every book is its author in time. So you get to kind of say like, "Right now I'm drawing myself as myself right now." Which is kind of cool.
Carson Ellis: It was a bit of a revelation. Also, it wasn't always gonna be me. So when I was trying to figure out what the two halves should be, when I figured out that it would just be a half of a person shooping with their other identical half, you know? So it's clear that it's just two halves of the same person. Then I decided I wanted it to be me and the whole book just made a little more sense to me.
Sarah Enni: And the other thing, I mean, because you chose to represent yourself again, instead of a kid. And I think, tell me if I'm right, but my interpretation based on what you said, would be like if you had half a kid than it would seem more dogmatic or moralizing?
Carson Ellis: Moralizing. If you just think of any of the possible scenarios, if you have the grownup you shooping together with the child you. If you have your feminine side shooping together with your masculine side. It's not that any of these concepts are bad. They just are a bit prescriptive or something. I don't know. They have a strong message and then you know what the book's about.
And I know it's counterintuitive to be trying to strip the meaning out of a book that already is so meaningless [laughs]. It's a book that already doesn't make that much sense. It's like, "Just give it something so people know what it means at the end!" But that's not what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be very interpretable. I wanted to take all the obvious interpretation out of it, and we'll see how it flies. Honestly, kids might be like, "Yeah, no with this. It's too much."
Carson Ellis: I mean, my kid was like, "I loved it until the cat didn't shoop together and then you lost me." Like, "Why? That doesn't even make sense." So we'll see, it's an experiment. It's definitely, as books that I've written go, and I've written weird ones, it feels like I took risks here and we will just see if people like it as much as I do. But I really love it, that feels like the important part.
Sarah Enni: Well, I think it's really beautiful and I'm excited to have it be out in the world. So I like to wrap up with advice. If there's someone listening who is at the beginning of their career as either a writer of children's books or an illustrator, what advice you might have for those people?
Carson Ellis: Well, as we discussed, my career unfolded in this pretty untraditional way, and late in life. I didn't graduate from college and start off on my fabulous career. I worked in bars for years and years before I could even quit them and make a living off of illustration.
So I am leery to give advice. A few things that I would certainly say are, if you're an illustrator draw all the time, of course. If you want to make books for kids, read millions of books for kids. Know exactly what you love and don't love about them. Understand where what you want to do fits into the context of picture books, or books for children. Spend a really long time with them and collect them if you can. That always seems like one of the biggest things.
And then another big thing I feel like is reading to kids. You can fall in love with books, and a lot of the time the books that I fall in love with that are picture books, are not the books my kids love. And the books that my kids love aren't necessarily [pauses]. It's not like I love these super weird books from the early part of the century and my kids just love Lego Ninjago. A lot of the books they love are really interesting in their own way, but I'm surprised by the stuff that resonates with them and that they engage with.
So I think hanging out with kids and reading to them and seeing how they interact with books. One thing that I learned from that is that kids love details. They love to pick things out and they love to speculate about them. And kids read so differently at different ages. A kid that's 18 months old is just gonna be so jazzed that they recognize a cat in a book and can say the word cat. And a kid who is in fourth grade is a totally different story. They want to know a lot about who's in the story and what's happening. So spending time reading for kids, maybe knowing what age you're writing for but maybe not overthinking that either.
And then also of course, thinking about grownups when you write for kids, because at least if you're writing picture books, grownups are probably reading them. And it is cruel to write really stupid books that are only appealing to like an 18 month old and then to expect adults to read them over and over. Think about it as writing a poem that you would picture a librarian reading to kids at story time again and again, and still loving.
Sarah Enni: I think that's really great advice. And reading it out loud and getting the feel for it. This has been so fun. Thank you so much for giving me all your time this morning.
Carson Ellis: Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much to Carson. Follow her on Twitter @CFEllis and on Instagram @CarsonEllis. You can follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). And thank you so much to our sponsor, Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takoaka out from Candlewick Press October 13th. So it's out now. The book is out. You can go get it. Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takoaka.
A quick and easy way you can support First Draft is to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening right now and leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts. First Draft was recently named one of Apple podcasts top 25 podcasts for book lovers. There's no way that was possible without everybody who left ratings and reviews, to draw attention to the show and I'm incredibly grateful.
First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni and Hayley Hershman and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks also to transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And, as ever, thanks to you half cat fighters for listening.
I want to hear from you!
Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998 or send an email to mailbag @ firstdraftpod dot com!
Subscribe To First Draft with Sarah Enni
Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds; Leigh Bardugo, author of Ninth House and the Grishaverse series; Creator of Sex and the City Candace Bushnell; YouTube empresario and author Hank Green; Actors, comedians and screenwriters Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham; author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast Linda Holmes; Bestselling authors and co-hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish and co-host of the Sciptnotes podcast; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.
Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Track Changes
If you’re looking for more information on how to get published, or the traditional publishing industry, check out the Track Changes podcast series, and sign up for the Track Changes weekly newsletter.
Support the Show
Love the show? Make a monthly or one-time donation at Paypal.me/FirstDraft.
Rate, Review, and Recommend
Take a moment to rate and review First Draft with Sarah Enni in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your honest and positive review helps others discover the show -- so thank you!
Is there someone you think would love this podcast as much as you do? Just click the Share button at the bottom of this post!
Thanks again!