Very sad to hear of the death of Malik Bendjelloul, the film-maker whose Searching For Sugar Man, about the hunt for a forgotten musician, won an oscar. It is a stunning and poignant and moving documentary that stays with you. I loved it. “This was the greatest, the most amazing, true story I’d ever heard,… Read more »
Quote of the Week: Open House for Butterflies
One of my favorite pages from one of my favorite children’s books, by one of my favorite children’s book writer/illustrator teams, in one of the golden ages of children’s publishing. Deceptively simple. Perfectly captures a child’s voice. A book that I read and re-read that keeps me on my toes. (I mean, just the title!)… Read more »
Picture books and Pantomime
Pantomime is a participatory form of theater. (Apologies if you are British and I might just as well be explaining to you what tea is.) Pantomime requires your participation for it to work. The audience is expected to sing along with certain parts of the music and shout out phrases to the performers. (Help! Are… Read more »
How To Be A New Yorker
As a New Yorker (trained in unwritten rules and codes of conduct without even realizing it), I do not need NYC BASIC TIPS AND ETIQUETTE. But I wonder. Might you? If you are visiting New York it will come in very handy. And save you from embarrassment. (Indeed, if you master these etiquette tips, you… Read more »
Picture Books and Accounting
One December, I found myself looking back over the year wondering, unhelpfully, in a businessy tax-ish counting sort of way: “Now let’s see, what exactly did I do this year?” (I should have known by that “exactly” where this would go). So I began counting up the number of picture book manuscripts I’d done that… Read more »
Doreen’s First Outing
I had my precious one and only author copy, which I mistakenly showed to my little three-year old friend AE… She immediately had to have it read to her 15 times. And then took it to bed. And has gone to sleep with it ever since. She calls it her fishy book. And says it’s… Read more »
Spaghetti Harvest April Fool
First broadcast on BBC Panorama on 1st April 1957, a very young Richard Dimbleby revealed the wonderful world of Swiss spaghetti production to millions of deprived and hungry post-war Brits. (To be fair, back then Spaghetti was not eaten much and was rather exotic.) Most of Britain were taken in. Even my dad (who is… Read more »
Beauty is for Everyone
When you walk through Central Park you feel like you’ve have escaped out of the city into the countryside—you are surrounded by natural beauty. Except that it’s not. Natural, I mean. The space where Central Park was built was originally a “pestilential, rocky swamp.” The natural beauty of Central Park is completely designed—to seem as… Read more »
Follow the Fish!
We writers are always being asked where we get our ideas. I got this one when I wasn’t looking—when I was trying to write something else altogether. And became my latest picture book, POOR DOREEN: A FISHY TALE. The story I’d wanted to write was going to be elegant and atmospheric and quiet about a… Read more »
Wither into the Truth: creating in old age
Some artists keep on working late in life–and get better with age. Others peak early and then fizzle out. Brooke Allen in the NYT writes, “Creative artists who continue to work late in life so often seem to undergo a sea change: a distillation, a new intensity, a sloughing off of excess and ornament in… Read more »
