Peter Brown | The Curious Garden

October 26, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s my pleasure on the show to welcome Peter Brown, who has written a gorgeous book, and the book is called, ‘The Curious Garden.’ Welcome to the show Peter Brown.

Peter Brown: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Your website is equally as fun and fascinating as your book. It’s at once retro and new. Tell me about this book, ‘The Curious Garden.’

Peter Brown: ‘The Curious Garden,’ was inspired by a real place called the High Line which is an elevated railway in Manhattan that was used for about 75 years to transport commercial goods up and down the west side of Manhattan, and then in 1980 they shut it down, and for about 30 years, what happened was all sorts of wildflowers, and plants and trees started growing there, all by themselves. It became this sort of strange urban wilderness area up on this elevated platform in the middle of Manhattan. So I was really inspired by that, and I began noticing other places like that, other examples of nature kind of surviving in unlikely places. So I decided to make a story about a boy who discovered nature living in a really unlikely place - in the middle of his gray, dreary city, and then he takes care of it.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a great word, ‘curious.’

Peter Brown: It means a lot in this book too because the boy’s curious. His curiosity leads him to discover the few scraggly plants in the beginning of the story. The plants in the garden sort of take on their own personality: they’re curious, and the plants begin exploring the forgotten corners of the city. The concept of curiosity is a big part of the story.

Dr. Kent: So you are both the author and the illustrator, which I love because I’m a huge fan of Doctor Seuss, and a lot of those early books kind of have the vibe that your book has. You’re looking at it, and it’s art, and it’s tangible, it’s simple, but it’s also got that level of complexity to it. Who were your role models in figuring out how to do all this, and how do you work in both text and artwork?

Peter Brown: Well, I’ve loved storytelling ever since I was a kid. I had a great time writing silly little stories and drawing pictures for as long as I can remember. Some of the books that really made me want to make picture books were ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak, and a lot Dr. Seuss’s books, and later in life, when I was in art school, I discovered a book called, ‘The Stinky Cheese Man,’ by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith which was really inspirational to me. Those are some of my influences.

Dr. Kent: ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is now a movie. I’m actually planning on checking it out tonight. I’m a kid at heart.

Peter Brown: I actually just watched it a couple of hours ago on the IMAX. It was really great. So you’ll have a good time.

Dr. Kent: It’s one of those books that, when I was a kid, I opened up that book, ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ and you’re transported to a new world. I’m just looking at one of the layouts from your book, and there are these scenes, scenes with all sorts of little fun details, and there’s the kid way in the background. How do you picture these scenes in your mind before you sketch it out?

Peter Brown: This book was a long time coming. I first discovered the High Line, the inspiration for this book, back in 2002, and was kicking around this idea for years. Over the course of about five years, I was visualizing all different scenes of the world that I was slowly solidifying in my imagination. In that period of time, I’d do everything, I’d do tons of different scenes, most of which never made it into the book, the best of which did make it into the book. I had a lot to work with when I actually sat down and sunk my teeth into this project. I had a lot of background material to work with at that point. I really just imagined what it would be like to be this kid, to be Liam living in his dreary, grey city, and there’s not much color, there’s really no parks or trees or greenery or anything like that. Then all of a sudden he discovers a few things that are just barely surviving. I pretty naturally slipped into that kind of perspective and the story began to unravel itself before my eyes once I really got into his mindset. The perspectives in the different scenes just sort of made sense to me. He takes care of the garden and the garden recovers and thrives and spreads down the railway, and then out across the city. It had its own logic to it, and a lot of the illustrations reflect that straight line that I saw from the beginning of the story to the big finale.

Dr. Kent: Do you picture your reader when you’re writing this? Do you go back to being that age - the age of your readers? How do you get into the mindset of writing these books?

Peter Brown: I definitely have a big imagination and I definitely enjoy trying to picture the world from the point of view of my audience. I don’t have tons of interaction with kids. Some people will either have their own kids, or they’ll go to some sort of place where they can read their stories that they’re working on to an audience of children. I actually don’t have that - at least not yet. For me, it’s more about just remembering my childhood and remembering how I saw the world, remembering what was really exciting to me, or mysterious, or confusing, or funny, or silly. I spent a lot of time thinking about the things that I did for fun when I was a kid.

Dr. Kent: In your bio, you talk about your grandfather, who loved to paint. How did you get into this? Of course, at a very, very young age, you crafted some books of your own, and you painted and drew. How did you get into all of this?

Peter Brown: I grew up visiting my grandparents and seeing my grandfather hunched over his desk, painting these little landscapes mostly from memory of places he’d seen on trips. Some things were more abstract as well. So I grew up realizing that making art was a good use of one’s time. I followed in his footsteps. He was never a professional artist, he was just an amateur artist, but I still learned that lesson. So I just drew, and I knew that that was a perfectly good thing for me to be doing. Like most kids, we wanted to be good at something, almost anything would be fine, so the thing that I happened to be good at was drawing. Once I got labeled as the artsy kid in class, I just went with it. I took that as permission to just be the art kid, and I just drew like crazy. That was how I started on my path to making art. A lot of the art that I would make would be telling stories, coming up with interesting characters, or interesting scenes that told a story. It was at a young age that I really fell in love with the storytelling, both with words and with pictures.

Dr. Kent: How do you do your final illustrations? Is it all on paper? Do you use your computer at all? What’s your method?

Peter Brown: I sketch the book out with pencil, and I’ll use the computer to cut and paste different little drawings that I might have done, to put them together in a single composition. Before I ever sit down to paint the final art, I’ll have each page printed out. I’ll have a computer printout of each sketch, but that sketch will be composed of different things that I cut and pasted all together. That’s the extent of my use of the computer. Although I do use the computer for color studies, so I’ll plan out the color for each illustration on the computer as well. Then when I sit down to make the final artwork, which is all done by hand with paint - with acrylic and guasch paint - I have these finished sketches; I have the finished color studies, so all the decision making is done, and really it’s just about me looking at those things as reference and putting paint on the canvas. I don’t paint on paper, actually. I paint on what’s called illustration board, which is essentially heavy duty cardboard with a really nice toothy paper surface to it.

Dr. Kent: How would you describe your style? It kind of has a little bit of - when you said your grandfather painted miniatures - it almost has a little bit of that feel to it, a little feel of American primitive. How would you describe your style in these books?

Peter Brown: I would say, my early books, ‘Flight of Dodo’ and the charter books, it was more dimension, it was more light and shadow and form. ‘The Curious Garden’ is a little bit flatter. For the earlier books, I was really trying to combine naive art, art by self-trained artists that have almost a childlike quality to them - I was trying to combine that sensibility with something like what you’d see in a Pixar movie: these realistic, detailed, rendered, dimensional forms of art. I thought if I could find a way to combine this really modern, hyper-realistic Pixar style with this childlike, naive art style, I could come up with something cool. So that’s what I was doing for the first few books. With ‘The Curious Garden,’ it’s similar to that, but as I said, this art is a little bit flatter, there’s not as much dimension to the shapes. Mostly because I knew there was going to be so much detail: so many flowers, so many bricks, and birds, insects, and flower stems, and all that kind of stuff. I wasn’t going to have time. It just wasn’t going to be practical for me to render every single detail as thoroughly as I had in some of my earlier books. So that’s why this book feels like my art, but with a little bit less dimension to it.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your earlier books. It’s all great stuff. You’ve got ‘Chowder,’ and ‘Barkbelly’ and ‘Flight of the Dodo.’ How did you come up with these concepts? Are they still out there? Are you still promoting them?

Peter Brown: Yes. ‘Flight of the Dodo’ was my very first book. It was my first born, which is about a penguin who’s a flightless bird, obviously, and he gets pooped on by a flying bird, and decides that he’s had enough and he wants to see what flying’s all about, once and for all. So he gets his flightless friends together, and they build this hot air balloon. The fact of the matter is that I’ve actually, as silly as it sounds, I’ve actually been pooped on by a lot of birds over the course of my lifetime. One of those times just got me thinking. It was a pretty embarrassing incident: I was on a date, actually, with a girl. I remember being really embarrassed and humiliated, and for some reason I thought to myself: you know what would be even worse than what I’m going through right now is if I were a flightless bird being pooped on by a flying bird. As soon as that idea popped into my head, I knew I had something. So I jotted it down, and from there, that story wrote itself after that point. So that was a lot of fun.

Dr. Kent: You jotted it down on a napkin and impressed your date?

Peter Brown: I always bring my little notebook with me wherever I go. I was in the public restroom and [laughs], I don’t even think I’d finished cleaning myself up before I started jotting down these ideas. I think she was impressed that I was able to turn those lemons into lemonade, so to speak. There was not a second date, unfortunately.

Dr. Kent: [Laughs] At least you got something out of it, exactly.

Peter Brown: I really did. It was probably the best date of my life.

Dr. Kent: There’s a little spot on your website, it’s called, ‘My First Book,’ and then you’ve got this little how to build your own little book for kids. It shows a book that you actually put together at six years old or so.

Peter Brown: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: Were you digging through old materials, and there it was? Or was this something that your folks said, ‘Hey, do you remember you did this?’

Peter Brown: When ‘Flight of the Dodo’ first was published, my mom sent me a little care package, including a lot of artwork that I made when I was a child. One of the things was this book, ‘The Adventure of Me and My Dog Buffy,’ which was the first book that I ever made for fun when I was six years old. I had completely forgotten about it. As soon as I saw it, it really brought me back. The funny thing is, that books is about a tree-climbing dog, and that factors into the story, because he can see out into the forest. Peter and his dog get lost in the woods and Buffy climbs the tree and he can see their house far away. As I was discovering this book that I’d made when I was a child, I was working on ‘Chowder.’ The really weird thing was that at that exact moment I was actually working on this illustration of Chowder the bulldog in a tree, which is a weird coming-around-full-circle back to this idea I’d had as a kid, but I hadn’t even thought about it. So maybe somewhere in the back of my head I have this obsession with tree-climbing dogs.

Dr. Kent: That’s great.

Peter Brown: So, yes, that was the first book I made. I made other books after that, but that book has been really handy because I do quite a bit of school visits these days. I go to schools and libraries all over the country, really, and do these presentations and I brought that book with me, the first book I ever made, and it’s been a great addition to my presentation. The kids get to see this book that I made when I was their age, and it’s a fun little story, but it’s certainly not brilliant; it’s just kind of silly - the kind of things that they’re working on, so it drives home the point that if they like writing and drawing, they should stick with it, because they could really do something with it, the way I have. The teachers of course love that I’m teaching that lesson to their students.

Dr. Kent: Right. All of your websites are fun to play around in also. Your Chowder website is very simple; it looks like a normal webpage, the pictures aren’t moving, and then all of a sudden, Chowder of course is drooling. Do you do those Flash illustrations also?

Peter Brown: Yes, I make my websites myself. My knowledge of Flash is quite limited, but I know enough to add some fun little details to my website. So, yes, the drool coming off of Chowder’s tongue was a lot of fun. On my website, Peter Brown’s Studio dot com, there’s this windmill that’s turning.

Dr. Kent: I like the sheep.

Peter Brown: Yes, you can roll over the sheep with your cursor, and they ‘Baa,’ and they run all over the place. I have a lot of fun with those websites, but they always end up being a lot more involved than I imagine. I always think I can bang it out in a couple of weeks, and six weeks later I’m still sort of slavering away on these things.

Dr. Kent: The books are fantastic. ‘The Curious Garden’ is out there in stores. It’s for children from three to eight, but honestly, I’m a huge fan of children’s books. I think it should be three plus.

Peter Brown: Yes, I agree, thank you.

Dr. Kent: It’s called ‘The Curious Garden.’ Awesome illustrations in there. I hope to chat with you again some time.

Peter Brown: Oh, thank you so much. This has been great.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Childrens, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, PODCAST

Peter Brown | The Curious Garden

October 26, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Peter Brown [17:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From the JacketFlap website:

Peter Brown is a published author and an illustrator of children’s books and young adult books. Some of the published credits of Peter Brown include ‘Kaline Klattermaster’s Tree House,’ ‘The Fabulous Bouncing Chowder,’ ‘Snowbone,’ and now ‘The Curious Garden.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Comics, Art, Childrens, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, PODCAST

Tom Edwards | Blue Jesus

October 10, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the author of ‘Blue Jesus,’ a novel by Tom Edwards. Fascinating. It’s about a group of blue-skinned people who live up in Kentucky. So come on back for that. Later on in the show we’ll be talking to Peter Mulvey, so come on back.

[Commercial]

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest on the show today is the author of ‘Blue Jesus.’ His name is Tom Edwards. This is a fascinating tale, and a gorgeous cover. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom Edwards: Nice to be here.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this. There’s a race of blue people in your book.

Tom Edwards: Yes, how about that?

Dr. Kent: Do they have any relation to the folks that are inbred and sort of appear bluish?

Tom Edwards: It’s sort of an inbred thing. I read a story years ago in the ‘Atlanta Journal Constitution.’ They were called the blue people of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. It’s a recessive gene trait. They discovered the blue people about 1820. The civilization moved into the mountains. The blue people kept going back further into the hollows. As a result of their isolation, they became more and more inbred, which meant there were more and more blue people. I just found it fascinating.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the story. It’s a fascinating tale. How did you fashion it?

Tom Edwards: Years and years ago, there was a story in my home town about a woman that threw a baby away in the dump. I was too young to be told any details at the time, but just the image stuck with me. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if the baby came back to life.

Dr. Kent: Yes. What’s the process then that you go through? You’re a very experienced writer of many different kinds of subjects, including plays and scripts, and all sorts of things. What was it like fashioning this tale?

Tom Edwards: It was strange, but I bought Steven King’s book. It’s called ‘On Writing.’ His generosity is just amazing. I still can’t believe he was so generous with his tricks, how he fashions a story. I’d never written a novel before, and I thought, well, shoot! Stephen King sells a bunch of stuff. Let’s see what I can do. This was the first time I’d ever worked without an outline. Doing plays and documentary films, things like that, you just work strictly from an outline. Gosh, years and years ago, I wrote for soup operas. They’d give you an outline that you could not vary from. I just let the story write itself. It was the strangest process I’ve ever been through. There were times I was so surprised and so creeped out, I had to get out of my office. Like, I can’t believe this guy’s doing that! When Buddy tries the slip on, I didn’t know that was going to happen. Man, that freaked me out! It’s like, oh, gees! It’s like the story led me along. Believe me, I’m as surprised as anybody.

Dr. Kent: Did you come up with your cast of characters, and then they just sort of walked around your brain?

Tom Edwards: Exactly. You know, new characters kept coming in. The only thing I really, really knew was that there was going to be a revival scene. That makes me laugh. That was it! Truly, the story just sort of happened.

Dr. Kent: So can you give us a little tip from the book without revealing too much? Why is it ‘Blue Jesus’?

Tom Edwards: It’s about this little boy, Buddy, whose mother dies of cancer. So he moves from Atlanta to the north Georgia mountains to live with his grandmother. That’s where he meets the blue people for the first time. His best friend is this little boy named Early. He’s a blue person, and he’s got special powers. The boys find a baby in the dump that’s been discarded, and the blue boy brings him back to life. That’s how he gets the nickname ‘Blue Jesus.’ His father takes advantage of him and tries to hock his wares all over the town and all over the county.

Dr. Kent: Wow. It’s so fascinating. Of course, the term, ‘Jesus,’ is so loaded. I shouldn’t say ‘term;’ the word, ‘Jesus,’ is so loaded. The Appalachians are so charged with Christianity of a certain kind, you know, very fiery. In exploring this, I’m sure you were surprised at the things that were coming out. Where do you think they came from - the well that you took this story from?

Tom Edwards: I think it’s directly from my hometown. I grew up in a small town in northern Michigan. It had about 600, 700 people. In that small town, church life ruled. I mean, it governed our social activities, and pretty much everything between church and 4H. I think it’s more small-town living than it is mountain living, and this universal truth to be drawn from that.

Dr. Kent: Race has come up hugely in the last several weeks and months with our first black president. It’s gotten so charged again. It’s something I’ve not seen in my lifetime. So here you have a blue kid and a white kid.

Tom Edwards: Isn’t it interesting when you put blue into the mix, determining who’s colored and who’s not? I found it fascinating myself, I really did.

Dr. Kent: Did you end up confronting race in here?

Tom Edwards: Yes, I did. Only in the fact that Early insists that the black people, the blue people and the white people congregate together: a revival scene; that’s one of his caveats for making a miracle.

Dr. Kent: You wanted to start this book with the revival scene. What inspired you to do that? Why did you want to start there?

Tom Edwards: It’s not that I wanted to start there, it’s just that I knew there was going to be a revival scene. I was sort of aiming toward that. The book starts with the dead baby, and then goes along.

Dr. Kent: Why the revival scene? Why was that in your brain as a point? Is it something that you’d experienced at some point - you were thinking about?

Tom Edwards: Not at all. It was all about the cross. [Laughs] I had heard a story years ago about people that were doing a passion play. The person who was playing Jesus got sick in the middle of the play, so they had the substitute Jesus go on. But the cross was rigged to lift to the ceiling with fly weights. Well, the new Jesus weighed much less than the other Jesus, and so when they tripped the fly weights, the cross shot right up to the sky.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Tom Edwards: And that made me laugh like a fool! I knew I wanted to include that, and really that was the only thing. You know there’s the whole essence about bullying too, which I think has gained some prominence. I grew up being bullied every day. It’s a wonder I can see, speak or hear. Just beaten up every day for being a sissy. I wanted Buddy to go through that. I wanted to, I guess, rid myself of some demons from my youth.

Dr. Kent: So some of that came in here, then? How does your own personality come through when you’re writing fiction? How does that happen?

Tom Edwards: I’m not that skilled a writer. I’m 100 percent Buddy. Even down to my crush on Tony Dow from ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ I’m sure more skillful writers could craft something that’s distinct and different from their lives, and I did to a certain extent. But, no, Buddy is really me.

Dr. Kent: Let’s talk about bullying. I experienced a great deal of bullying myself. I think a lot of kids do. It’s a real problem in this country, especially - I guess in school systems. I remember the terror that I would have going between classes, you know: what would happen to me today. So talk about bullying a little bit. It is an issue these days.

Tom Edwards: It’s the whole thing about being different. I was a little sissy boy, just a momma’s boy. And boy! In a small town where sports rule, I was just fodder for the bullies. They beat me up every day. Then the beauty of that is I would go home, and my father would hear that I was beaten up, so he would beat me up. It was hideous! I just remember trying to be invisible just to stay out of the way. Just praying I wouldn’t see Dennis Hawkins after school. Early is bullied. He’s blue, he has special gifts. It’s just about being different, which is so weird because I think in the big scheme of things, everyone feels they’re a little different.

Dr. Kent: You portray him as a blue Jesus, and that’s his nickname. But little boys, when they’re bullied or when they’re in these situations, they have to sort of transcend themselves in some way. It’s interesting: as adults, we almost understand it more, and we can say, ‘Oh, well, I’m being bullied’ or this and that. But kids, they sort of have to suck it all in and have to transcend the world somehow.

Tom Edwards: Well, of course! With kids, it’s a hurt you don’t understand. A hurt you didn’t bring on yourself. A hurt that you can’t fix. It’s horrifying.

Dr. Kent: So this character Early. Has he told his whole story? Have Buddy and Early told their complete expose, or do they still live in your head?

Tom Edwards: Oh, they’re still there. You know, I can’t get them out. It’s the weirdest thing. A friend of mine said, ‘You’re going to write a sequel?’ This story’s done, but they’re still good friends that live in my head.

Dr. Kent: Isn’t that wild? It’s a pleasure speaking to you. What are you working on now? Are you doing any more films?

Tom Edwards: You know, I’ve just finished a new book. I’ve been waiting tables to support myself. I wrote a book about it. It’s called, ‘Slinging Hash: True Confessions from a Four-Star Toilet.’ It’s an expose of fine dining, but it’s very, very funny, and very, very true.

Dr. Kent: Where can we find out more about you?

Tom Edwards: Gosh, if you go on Amazon, there’s a bio there. Or, I think you could just Google ‘Tom Edwards’ and see what pops up.

Dr. Kent: Great. This book, ‘Blue Jesus,’ has a fantastic cover, amazing premise. It’s so cool. What a great story about a child dealing with religion, race, small town bullying. It’s a real all-American story.

Tom Edwards: Plus, it’s funny, isn’t it?

Dr. Kent: Yes!

Tom Edwards: Good!

Dr. Kent: It’s such a pleasure to talk to you, and I can’t wait until the next time. I hope to hear about the next one, ‘Slinging Hash,’ you said, right?

Tom Edwards: All right. Well, gosh, thank you so much! I sure appreciate this.

Dr. Kent: Have a wonderful afternoon.

Tom Edwards: OK, you too. Bye bye.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Tom Edwards | Blue Jesus

October 10, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Tom Edwards [15:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Broadway Play Publishing website:

The first episode of Della’s Diner premiered in Atlanta in 1978 at Showcase Cabaret in Ansley Mall. Fresh off the hit memory musical, Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces, Tom continued to write for Showcase, authoring six full-length musicals, among them Mistress of Meadowbrook and Della’s Diner II. In 1980 at Showcase Cabaret, Tom wrote Scarlett Fever, a musical comedy version of Gone With the Wind. This musical spoof prompted lawsuits by the Mitchell Family Estate, MGM, MacMillan Publishing Company, and Trust Company Bank of Georgia. Time Magazine said it was “like going after a gnat with napalm.” Soon thereafter Tom came out of hiding and decided to concentrate on strictly original works. In 1983 Warner Brothers bought Della’s Diner IV: Blue Plate Special and produced it at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Warner Brothers Television moved Tom to Los Angeles in 1986 to develop Della’s Diner for television. Since that time he has written for television’s Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light, Growing Pains, Divorce Court, and worked extensively in comedy development at Orion Television and Republic Pictures. He co-authored two CBS pilot scripts, Mason/Dixon and Business as Usual and is also the author of the audio script for Bantam-Doubleday-Dell’s How to Speak Southern. Mr. Edwards wrote Sobbin’ Women: The Making of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for Turner Home Entertainment. Mr. Edwards recently released, Blue Jesus, a Blue Ridge folk tale.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Spirituality, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Tony Fucile | Let’s Do Nothing

October 9, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. We have some great guests on the show today. It’s a brand new show format. This week, the featured guest is Peter Mulvey. I’ll be talking with him for upwards of half an hour later on in the show. He’s put out his latest album called ‘Notes from Elsewhere.’ Actually, ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ They’re both recent albums. I’ll be excited to talk to him and play some great music. On this show, I talk to both Sound Authors and Authors of Sound, so before that, I’ve got a couple sound authors indeed on the show, at the very beginning. Right after my first guest, I’ll be talking to Tom Edwards, who’s the author of ‘Blue Jesus.’ It’s an incredible folk tale. It explores faith, miracles and racial divides in Appalachia. That’ll be fascinating. But my first guest is the incredible author and illustrator Tony Fucile. He’s written a fantastic picture book called ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ It’s absolutely hilarious and beautiful. Welcome to the show, Tony!

Tony Fucile: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: How do you pronounce your last name?

Tony Fucile: ‘Foo-chili,’ like chili beans.

Dr. Kent: Fucile. I like that. Tell me about this book; it’s awesome.

Tony Fucile: Well thanks, thanks a lot. The idea of doing nothing didn’t come right away. That was kind of a product of two bored kids. I just sort of invented these two kids that were bored out of their minds, and then had them talk to each other. Out of that came this idea of trying to do nothing.

Dr. Kent: I can recall, when I was a kid, summer vacation was all about doing nothing, to my parents’ chagrin.

Tony Fucile: Oh, yeah. It’s one of those things where I feel like I discovered what I love because I had nothing to do. I was just sort of trying everything on a whim. Drawing was the thing (and eventually the animation) that I found. That may not have happened had I been overscheduled, like a lot of kids are.

Dr. Kent: Now you’ve worked on a bunch of big films, and some really cool stuff. One of my favorite movies ever is ‘The Incredibles.’ You were on that film as well. Now you’re a children’s book author: are there similarities, differences?

Tony Fucile: They’re amazingly similar in a lot of ways because you’re telling a story. In a sense, the picture book is more like a short film. You’re coming up with an idea, and you’ve got a beginning, middle and end. You’re staging everything, and you’re designing props. For me the comfortable part of course was animating the character. If you want, look at the book; you can see that it’s very similar to animation poses: key expressions; what we call ’storytelling poses’ when we’re animating. Every scene in an animated film has a ‘key pose,’ that kind of describes what the character’s feeling or thinking; kind of a mix of a lot of emotions, a lot of the other drawings. So the book is a little bit like a bunch of key poses. So there are a lot of similarities. The one thing that I have to get used to is the solitude because animated film, a feature film especially, takes hundreds of artists. We all do our own thing, so it’s a bit of a shock for me to have to figure out color, because all these years I’ve been drawing basically in black and white. The experts, painters and color specialists, do all the other stuff. Also, staging, that’s something that an animator generally doesn’t do. Also designing the world; in this case, the room or backdrops, and the props and things. It was fun, but very different in that regard. You’re not really collaborating as much. There is collaboration with your editor and art director, but not nearly the same as being on a film.

Dr. Kent: When you’re writing for children, and when you’re animating for children, or drawing for them, what do you think about? Do you get yourself back in that summer vibe of not having anything to do? How do you get yourself back there? What do you do?

Tony Fucile: You know, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t think I’ve ever really left. I started really young; I started making films when I was 12. I knew I just wanted to be an animator early on. I even had the notion of making storybooks too, but animation was the thing that got me going. So I never really got out of that. I never had that thing where I would go to an animated film and feel all sheepish about it: you know, the 17 year old guy going into the Disney film and feeling a little embarrassed. It’s always been a part of my brain; it’s been stuck in that childhood way of looking at things.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about this book. What do you do as a children’s author to support it? Do you do readings for kids? How did you end up writing in the first place?

Tony Fucile: I had another idea for a film, for a storybook, that I wanted to do first. Then, while I was working it up, I saw that someone else had done it: Jules Feiffer had done it, ‘The Daddy Mountain.’ I was a little bummed about that. I had such a strong idea for this thing. Then this idea came to me one night in bed, and I told my wife; it was midnight, or whatever. She told me to write it down, and I said ‘I’ll remember it tomorrow.’ Of course, she kicked me out of bed and said, ‘Write it down, write it down.’ So I ended up writing the whole thing that night. The basic beats are pretty much what I came up with that night. I definitely wanted to do picture books; it’s something that I’ve been sort of quietly thinking about for a long time.

Dr. Kent: How about the characters themselves? You look at the front cover of this thing: I feel like I know these two kids.

Tony Fucile: Sal is sort of based loosely on me and a little bit of my son, Eli. So it’s kind of a combo. It’s really based on me and my friend, Steve Kerr, who’s my buddy. He’s almost a year younger than me, and we were neighbors. We grew up together. I remember he and I going through moments like that, where we felt like we were losing our minds; we were bored. You just sit there and you lay on the ground and writhe in pain because it’s so awful. So it’s really based on him. He was always much smarter than I was. He was kind of like Frankie; he was always a little bit ahead of the curve. I was maybe the enthusiastic one, but he was a little bit ahead. So they are loosely based on him and I.

Dr. Kent: Cool. Are you the one with the goofy glasses, or the one with the cowlick?

Tony Fucile: I have the cowlick: the skinny guy. He has a little paunch on him. He didn’t have the glasses, though. I added those. I needed a prop for him.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got these characters. In your brain, do you know what they look like from every angle? Because a weird thing for children’s illustrators is of course that as he goes through the book, when you look at him from different angles, he’s got to look like the same guy, right?

Tony Fucile: Yes. Especially the little square-headed guy, Frankie. So I sculpted their heads; I did little sculptures. Starting with a square, and I put some yellow hair on it. Yes, so it was rough. I needed that reference to figure out how to draw him from various angles. We had that in animation a lot, especially the hand-drawn animation. We would have mockups that would help us draw particular angles.

Dr. Kent: You actually sculpt the head, like out of clay, or on the computer, or what?

Tony Fucile: I sculpt them with clay.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Tony Fucile: Then I’d stick them on top of a pencil. Then I would grab the pencil, and if I was having trouble with an angle, I would use it as a prop.

Dr. Kent: So every character you’ve ever created, do you have little pencils with little heads on them?

Tony Fucile: In the studios we had professional sculptors come in and do work with us and do our characters for us. Then we referenced those during production. It’s one of those things that they’ve been doing since ‘Snow White.’

Dr. Kent: Really?

Tony Fucile: Yes, because when you’re trying to get something, you can get away with it with a children’s book because things aren’t moving through space as much. You want it to feel solid and that it looks like it’s fairly substantial and it’s dimensional quality there. With animation you have to actually move through space. You really have to pay attention to where things are attached, and the perspective of the head. It’s one of those really tough challenges for hand-drawn animation especially.

Dr. Kent: So you do draw by hand? You’re not one of the folks that does the digital animation part of it?

Tony Fucile: Do you mean digital drawing?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Tony Fucile: Well I do a mix. Strangely, I started this on the computer, on a tablet. I like that because you can maneuver things around quickly, shrink things, and then organize things which is good. But the final art, I like to draw it as much as I can. ‘Let’s Do Nothing’ is drawn and painted: painted with acrylic and ink.

Dr. Kent: This kind of has the vibe of the old Dr. Seuss books. It’s got the real tactile feel of real illustration.

Tony Fucile: Well, thanks! Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Cool. It’s a pleasure to chat with you about this. Where can folks pick up this book? Are you doing any kind of traveling around? I know Candlewick Press put it out, and they’re a great children’s publisher. The book, of course, is called, ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ What are you doing to back it up?

Tony Fucile: I did a couple of school events, and that’s really about it. I went to the ALA last summer; that was interesting - that was fun.

Dr. Kent: Fun. What kind of feedback are you getting?

Tony Fucile: Pretty good. A lot of Internet blogs are reacting to it well. It’s been reviewed fairly well.

Dr. Kent: Any angry parents who are saying, ‘We don’t want our kids to do nothing!’

Tony Fucile: [Laughs] I haven’t had that yet. Kids, it’s so fun to read it to them. I’ve learned how (well, I’ve only done a couple of these now), but I’ve learned to let them kind of do the page turn. When you see that the dog’s about to take a pee on him, and all that stuff, they really like to get in there and yell at me: ‘Hey, wait a minute! The dog’s in the corner!’ So I kind of play dumb when I read it, and they tell what’s going on. It’s really fun. So that’s a blast seeing the kids react.

Dr. Kent: You actually see your audience, yes.

Tony Fucile: They get the whole idea that you can’t do nothing. There’s no way to do nothing. It’s a lot of fun to see that.

Dr. Kent: That’s awesome. I’ve been chatting with Tony Fucile and his book’s called, ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ It’s out on Candlewick Press. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Tony Fucile: Thanks for having me, thank you.

Dr. Kent: I can’t wait to see what he does next. This is a great little book: ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ Check it out.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Childrens, Comics, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST