There are bookshelves on all my studio walls, and in their shelves you would find an embarrassing amount of books, some I brought from Peru when I moved. I also have all types of crafts - a lot of them from Peru. I collected them so you would see lots of these. I love old, wound-up toys, and handmade things, dolls especially. I have glass doors and skylights because to me they are a necessity. Juana: Good question, John! I did not expect that. Juana, what would we see if we visited your studio?
That gave me a lot more freedom to include my target words, like “nation,” “landscape,” and “elder,” and build the manuscript around them. Since the book is about family and food, I wanted them to be “there” with me during the process.I sent the first draft to my editor, Connie Hsu at Roaring Brook, who suggested that I take the rhyming out and just work on the beauty of the words. I had pictures of my family in Oklahoma-those living and those who were gone-all around me, so it was a communal effort. I would sit in the kitchen late at night with the window open, listening to the crickets and the sound of the lake while I experimented aloud with word sounds, rhythm and flow, and initially, rhyming. My partner and I had very long parental leaves after our second child was born, and we were in Lake Como, Italy when I started work on the book. In picture books, where every placement of word and art is so crucial, I wanted the letters on the page to have multiple meanings for interpretation, just like a poem. I love to play with how they sound, and how they will make people feel. Did you read it aloud over and over and over again while working on the manuscript?
Kevin, I think Fry Bread is a perfect read-aloud.
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