First Draft Episode #276: Oliver Jeffers
October 22, 2020
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Oliver Jeffers is a visual artist, illustrator of The Day the Crayons Quit, and author and illustrator of How to Catch a Star, The Fate of Fausto, and Here We Are talks about his newest picture book, What We’ll Build.
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 internationally best-selling picture book author and illustrator, Oliver Jeffers. Oliver is a fine artist and a visual artist as well. And he's the illustrator of many books, including The Day the Crayons Quit series. Among the 18 books he has authored and illustrated himself are How to Catch a Star, The Fate of Fausto, and Here We Are. Oliver joins me today to talk about his newest picture book, What We'll Build.
I so loved what Oliver had to say about the life lesson that you only get out what you put in, the difference between education and learning, and how good design is like good manners. And I loved his kind of exploration of how picture books have become the perfect medium for him to explore something that really nags at him, the theme of human beings' relationship with the natural world. Everything Oliver and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Oliver Jeffers.
Sarah Enni: All right. Hi Oliver. How are you today?
Oliver Jeffers: I'm doing okay, thank you.
Sarah Enni: Great, great. I'm so excited to talk today. I'm going to dive right in and we're gonna talk about your most recent book, What We'll Build. But for my interviews, I really do like to jump all the way back and start at the beginning, which is where were you born and raised?
Oliver Jeffers: Well, I was born in one place and raised in another. I was born in a tiny little town called Port Hedland, which is in Western Australia. And I was raised in Belfast and Northern Ireland. My parents are both from Belfast, and I don't know if you know your political European history, Belfast was a turbulent violent place in the 1970's. They decided that they wanted to try, like a lot of Irish and British people at that point, they wanted to try life elsewhere.
They immigrated to Australia, they spent maybe three years there and I was born in the last year that they were there. And I think I was maybe six to six or seven months old when we all moved back to Northern Ireland. So although I was born in Australia, I know nothing of Australia from my youth.
Sarah Enni: And I wanted to ask about reading and writing when you were a young man, how was that a part of childhood for you?
Oliver Jeffers: Reading and writing for me was a chore at childhood and it was not something I enjoyed doing. I was always just doing whatever I could to get away from doing my homework so I could go outside and play football or climb trees or dig holes. And that was pretty much me the whole way until the very end of art college, where I took a year off between my third and my final year. And I think one of the most important life lessons hit me at around that point, which is that you only get out what you put in.
So if I was spending all of this time doing as little as possible to get by without notice, it was like, who was it really rewarding, who was really gonna benefit from this? And then I went back and did my last year of college making as much effort as I possibly could and graduated with a first class honors, which was quite a miraculous turnaround really. And that's been my attitude ever since.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. That's like a pretty definitive life epiphany. Do you remember what brought that about, or do you have a recollection of what that moment was like?
Oliver Jeffers: It was trying to work in the real world. I think it should be a compulsory thing that if you want to go to university, you should be forced to spend a year in the real world before you go to university - whether that's traveling, volunteering, doing whatever - because you don't know what you want it to do. You don't know who you are when you're just being protected and sheltered by school your entire life. And then you just like, I don't know, keep the party going somehow? What's that [saying]? "Youth is wasted on the young," kind of a thing. You don't really know how to apply any of your education to real life until you try to do so. And then you're filled with regret.
And so I took that year off in between my third and fourth years at university. Cause with our college, you do a foundation year, and then a three year degree. And it struck me, that exact lesson, I was like, "I don't know anything about anything, really. And if I just do just enough to skirt by, it's only me who's gonna suffer."
And that mixed with, I did have this desire to make art and to make important art. And then I started having all these ideas and it was just the simple realization that, "Well, if I don't do this work then nobody's gonna do it for me." So it struck me at that point, but it also struck me how little I knew. I spent, at that point, three years in art college and I didn't know really the first thing about what it meant to make art in the real world, that it was actually a business that you needed to learn how to file taxes and invoice people and all of these practical things.
There's a great saying that I heard once, my dad's an educator, and he always said that the two most important things that a child learns how to do, that a human being learns how to do, they learn as a child, which is to walk and to talk. But yet on day one of school, children are told to sit down and shut up. And it just is counter intuitive. And when you were asking was I writing and reading when I was a kid, and it was more like a chore, I heard somebody once say that, "Education is what somebody else does to you. And learning is what you do to yourself."
Sarah Enni: Wow. I like that. I think that's very true. There's a lot to unpack in what you just said this is so much great stuff. But I want to ask about reading and writing growing up, it seemed like a chore, but art obviously was not.
Oliver Jeffers: No. Art was escapism. Maybe it was escapism, partly cause I enjoyed art, enjoyed making art. I'd always find things aesthetically pleasing and knew what color went with what. And "That looks wrong." Or whatever it might be. And I remember really distinct memory of when I was in P3. So what age would that be? Eight-years-old, maybe? And we were making Christmas decorations with the colored pieces of paper and I had some brown paper and some pink paper and the teacher says, "No, no, no, no brown and pink don't go together." And I was like, "Well, I think it looks good." And she was like, "No, no, no, start again." And I was like, "I think you're wrong."
I've always been an aesthetic person, but in the later years of primary school which is, I guess, like middle school, it struck me that I could use art as an excuse to not do other things. Like I could get out of studying geography, if I was being used to help decorate the set for the school play.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in how, or when, or if, you have thoughts on when it became clear that art was another way of telling stories, or if that's always been intuitive for you?
Oliver Jeffers: It's always been intuitive. But the penny really dropped when I started making a book with Sam Winston and we made a book together called A Child of Books. And Sam is one of the most terrific human beings I know. He studies mindfulness meditation, he leads these workshops in reconciliation, he does all these things. He's also an extremely talented and recognized designer, but he's primarily known as being a typographic artist.
And he always told me, and always sort of pointed out, that you have to learn how to read an image. It's much more intuitive than words, but still there's some learning to do. And children become aesthetically literate much earlier than they become actual literate. And that should be celebrated, encouraged, and recognized. But he also pointed out to me that one of the reasons that he got into visual typography is that he's dyslexic, highly dyslexic.
And he said that there's a couple of really interesting statistics about dyslexia. And that most of the world's most well-known and celebrated graphic designers and typographers, are dyslexic. And the reason for that is that they see the shape of the word before they see the meaning of the word. So they say how it should look before anything else. And I always thought that was brilliant.
But the other statistic that he shared with me was actually really frightening and depressing. He says that the statistics between kids with dyslexia who end up in either juvenile detention centers or into art college, is very fine. And he says, basically, it's whoever finds you first, whether that's an artistic outlet or a bad crowd. And that really stayed with me.
Sarah Enni: Wow. That's huge. I think I read an interview with you where you were talking about your art, that you were kind of put under the protection of maybe the bad crowd, cause you were able to draw on people's skateboards.
Oliver Jeffers: Yeah, well, that's true. So I went to a school that in Northern Ireland was an integrated school. And it's kind of embarrassing having lived in the USA now for 15 years to explain to people in New York City that, "No, integrated Northern Ireland means two versions of white Christians, basically, are mixed together." That's the height of it. But yet this is still such a taboo topic.
And the school that I went to was one of the first integrated schools that was working class. There was one other one, but it was sort of a posh upper-class school, so it wasn't really about politics. But so few parents trusted this system that the numbers of the school were distressingly low. And in order to qualify for basic funding, they used to have to take in the kids from all these other schools that were being expelled. So the worst kids from the worst schools were getting kicked out and then coming to my school.
And it was an odd thing. And even thinking back to that dyslexic statistic about juvenile detention centers, these kids are some of the smartest kids I've ever met in my life, but just not book smart. But they saw the pattern of street smart in a way which has really, really stayed with me. There was a lightning quick intelligence there that just did not apply to formal education, but nobody was trying to work with them, or see them.
And it's one of the reasons that I fell into art is that I showed an interest in any subject, at all. Because a lot of the other kids that I went to primary school with were always encouraged to get a real job, get a proper job. And that includes being a civil servant or a doctor or a lawyer. And I was never forced to do that. And partly because the school that I went to, was just glad I was interested in anything and my parents were open-minded enough to not ever make us get a real job.
But yes, I did, I fell under the protection of some of the roughest kids by drawing on their skateboards and their school bags. They thought it was cool. So therefore I was left alone.
Sarah Enni: There you go. Well, and if anyone still has those, that would be quite a treasure for them.
Oliver Jeffers: I wonder.
Sarah Enni: And the fourth pillar I was thinking about, about your young life, was humor. And talking about Northern Ireland, you've had many interviews where you talked about, there's a lot of humor and storytelling in growing up in that environment, and also kind of dark humor, which I think we can see in your work.
Oliver Jeffers: Oh, there's a very, very particular Northern Irish sense of humor that's different from British, that's different even from the South of Ireland. And it is a darkness, there's nothing that's not sacred. And it's a form of endearment and it's a form of sarcasm, but not really. It's bleak. But it's very telling it's very revealing and it's very loving at its core, but in a very dark way.
And everybody's funny and it's all in delivery, and it's all in timing, and it's all in sort of not really caring what people think. So that, yeah, that's my whole life really has been steeped in that. My younger brother is one of the best people in the world to pass some time with because he could sit and recite joke after joke for hours.
But the typical Northern Irish sort of humor is not telling jokes, it's more telling stories. And so anytime a group of friends will get together and go to a bar, it's not really a conversation as it's a storytelling circle, you know? And my mum was hilarious, really hilarious. And all my friends growing up were hilarious and everybody in their own different odd, weird way.
And I think that there is something about that, because the political violence was, I think, so directly personal and effective of everyone, that if you don't laugh at something you cry, and nobody really wants to cry. So it's just something, well, maybe you don't have to this, but something that Northern Ireland collectively was able to do, was just to find humor in just about anything.
Sarah Enni: And I'm gonna bring all these things back later, but like I mentioned, my audience is a lot of professional writers and illustrators and people that create books for a living. So I want to talk a little bit about how you got into picture books. In a couple interviews, you've talked about creating a picture book as your final project for art school. Is that how it came about?
Oliver Jeffers: Mm-hm.
Sarah Enni: And then you said, "I finished my first book, How to Catch a Star, as part of my degree and decided after graduation that it was as good, if not better, than anything else out there."
Oliver Jeffers: Yeah, I did. That was like the late nineties. And that was a pretty bland period in picture book making, especially in the UK. Photoshop had really sort of come on the scene and everything was a bit flatten and ordinary and boring. And it was a lot of very figurative work, but uninteresting figurative work.
And think back to that movement of the late sixties and early seventies picture books, both in the USA and the UK, where boundaries were really being tested and techniques were really being experimented with. And it was just this beautiful explosion of wonderful books. And everything seemed to get just, I dunno, really boring.
And that's not why I got into books at all. I only noticed that afterwards when I was like, "I think this book is good. Maybe I could get it published." I started looking around and was like, "Whoa, I think I definitely have a chance of getting published. I mean, if this is publishable then absolutely." So I did know what I wanted to do when I grew up, as soon as I figured out that making art was an actual job, that you could do that.
So I went to art college, but I went into art college thinking that I was training to become a painter, just straight up fine art painter, and I do still do that. But I took that break from college and I was traveling around and I came back and the painting style that I had, at that point, was starting to get simpler and simpler and more and more graphic. Almost like trying to paint toy versions of reality, but with three-dimensional light. That was becoming this painting style.
And I had this notion of a story, sorry not a story, of an image of somebody trying to do something physically impossible. Because I loved the art of say Michael Sowa or Mark Tansey who were painting these impossibilities, like people watching a rocket launch, but then an art class doing a light drawing of the rocket launch happening, and it was like not physically possible.
Or somebody doing a still life of a racing car crashing. And it was called action painting. With paint, you could do all these things. So I thought I was starting to do that, paint these impossibilities. And the concept I came up with was somebody trying to stand on a star, trying to catch another one.
And I started doing these paintings. And there's something about the whole idea of that reminded me of stories that I'd heard as a kid, which was the Brer Rabbit and the Millpond stories where Brer Rabbit convinces, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox, that the reflection of the moon on this pond was actually a pot of gold, to try and throw them off his case.
And somebody just sort of made this link between, "Hey, I wonder if this shouldn't be just a painting, or a collection of paintings about this thing, but maybe it's a book." And that really was the switching point where I did, I made it as a book for college. And then went about getting it published.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. I'm interested in so much about that, but you have the idea for it to be a book. Had you written anything at that point? Had writing become a creative part of your process?
Oliver Jeffers: No. Well, privately, yes. I'd written poetry. And I liked putting a word, or a sentence, into the painting. Both because conceptually you could show one thing and say another, and you could flip the meaning of the painting on its head by contradicting or contrasting what you were saying or showing. But also aesthetically, you could have quite a loose, sloppy panting, but then this beautifully executed word. And suddenly that became a graphic, from the designer's perspective. The focal point, the sharpness of that just really drew the eye and locked the whole thing together. So I had been playing with words, but more in a poetic sense than anything else.
And it's only really when I started to write How To Catch a Star, I was like, "Wait, I kind of know how to do this." It's like, "Yeah, it's obvious. These beats are the things that I've been hearing in the playground and the kitchen and in pubs for all my life."
Sarah Enni: I love that. This is kind of a tough question. It's like talking to a novelist about voice, right? Which is kind of an ephemeral thing that's difficult to pin down, but it evolves over time. That's what is brought to mind when you're saying that your painting style was evolving and becoming this, how did you describe that, the toy version of a real thing? I think that's beautiful.
But it sounds like you're obviously very conscious of that, but you're trained as a fine artist. How does it feel to see your style evolve and were you excited about it? It seems very picture book perfect, right?
Oliver Jeffers: I was, I was excited about it. I recognized that there was something about it that felt mine, you know? That was like, "I haven't necessarily seen this before and I'm not trying to do this to copy somebody else." Just even in my sketchbooks, this sort of came up organically. And I love that about it. Even though there was nothing like it, which worried me at the time, I was like, "Maybe nobody will like it." But that's, actually, all everybody is looking for really is uniqueness.
I go between two quotes to describe how it is that you find your voice. One is an Oscar Wilde quote which is, "Be yourself, everybody else is taken." Cause that's the unique thing about how you might say something that's already been said, is the way in which your voice will put it together. And whether that's your voice that comes out the end of your pencil, or the voice that comes out of your mouth, or through words.
But then again, there's another quote by Cher who says that, "All of us invent ourselves, some of us just have more imagination than the others." And I've often thought that even the artists that anybody most admires, didn't start off making the work that they end up being admired for. You gotta go through your experimental phases, you've got to go through imitation and making your work look too much like other people's, then coming back and figuring out your technique and figuring out what your hand likes to do whenever it's left to its own devices.
Cause no single piece of art, no single piece of work I've ever made, has turned out exactly the way that I imagined it would. So it's just a bunch of starting and then reacting to what you see.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Back to the first book, How to Catch a Star, I read somewhere that you really put a lot of care into how this book was sent out to publishers. You had done research on publishers and then you sent it out. Can you just talk about what did that package look like and how did you think about this first chance of presenting yourself to publishers?
Oliver Jeffers: When I realized that the project that I had was publishable, I knew that a lot of people wanted to get their books published. And something that I think I've just been intuitively aware of is, packaging matters. It matters how you dress. It matters how you present yourself. Good design is like good grammar, which is like good manners, which is you don't notice them when they're good. You tend to only notice them when they're bad.
And I just thought that there's that old saying "Never judge a book by its cover," everybody does it every single day, you do. How something is presented matters. And I wanted to stand the best possible chance of getting noticed, and that included doing research, but it also included presentation. The degree that I studied was called visual communication, and it is what it says on the tin, it's you learn how to communicate visually.
So I made a full version of How to Catch a Star, like a mini version. I ended up re-illustrating the entire thing, after getting published, cause I realized like, "I could do this better." So I made the entire thing and then I made a copy. And my brother had graduated a few years ahead of me in art college, so he was working as a graphic designer. He knew of a printer and he brought me with him when he was getting menus made for a restaurant, or something.
And I met the printer and I asked him, I was like, "If I do a painting, will you print 100 copies of this little dummy book?" And it was only four or five illustrations in the whole manuscript. And then I just did a whole bunch of research on whose desk is this going to arrive on and what publishers will this fit with?
And I had this whole chart drawn up, like "Publishers sent," and I expected months and months and months of follow-up phone calls. Like, "Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?" And it landed on the right person's desk, at the right time. And two days after sending it, I got a phone call from Harper Collins offering to fly me to London to meet them.
Sarah Enni: That's incredible. And at that time, too, when you were pitching books, you were working as a commercial artist, is that right? A freelance artist as well?
Oliver Jeffers: That's correct. So straight out of art college, I mean, not for very long. Although I did do that for a while longer because I thought if I can make a living just making books in about a decade, I'll be doing well. And so yeah, the gun for hire, solving somebody else's visual problems, was preferable to me than working in a pub. So I started doing that.
Sarah Enni: And then How to Catch a Star got you your first book deal. What We'll Build is your 18th book as an author and illustrator, which is pretty remarkable. The first book, I think, came out in 2004, that's a pretty impressive productivity level, I would say.
Oliver Jeffers: About one a year, I think.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, about one a year. And you were also the illustrator of several books, including The Day the Crayons Quit series. So you've been in the game now for a minute. I want to ask specific questions about What We'll Build, but I'm interested in what you've thought, seeing the industry over the period of time you've been in it, I think it has changed. I think there has been a big explosion of a lot of beautiful, interesting voices.
Oliver Jeffers: I think so. I think that this is a new golden age of picture books, on both sides of the Atlantic, in terms of the UK and the USA. And it's brilliant to think that I've sort of been at the forefront of the wave of that. And people always ask me when I do Q&A's or when they meet me in private, it was like, "Does it bother you that so many people rip off your style?" And at periods of time, yes, it does. But it's also really humbling to think that the way that I've had an influence on an entire industry. And so I try to just think about it like that.
But I do think that the intelligence with which some people are approaching picture book making now is vast, and the skill-set, and the breaks from the way things have always been done, the style developments, and the content development, it's all been remarkable.
And I always remember going to the Frankfurt Book Fair, well actually I've only ever been twice. Once was before my first book came out and it just felt massively intimidating because there's books from all over the world. And then I went on the 10th anniversary of How to Catch a Star, which was a very, very different experience, but still there's all these books all over the world.
And I always remember thinking that, "I love French picture books, they're just so beautiful. Why are they not more popular all over the world?" And then there was this very famous department store in Paris called Collette, and that's where all these different companies would go to launch like Dior or Pharrell Williams and Apple and Nike and all these companies. It was a tiny little department store, but it was at the cutting edge of cultural innovation.
And I was really fortunate enough to work with them on an exhibition, a merchandising collaboration, in that last year of their existence. And I remember talking to Sarah who was, basically, the entire personality of Collette. Her mother was Collette, who started it. And she was talking about how much she loved my books and I was going, "Yeah, but French books are fantastic."
And she looked at me and she was like, "Yeah, they look pretty, but the stories are vapid. There's no story there." I was like, "Oh, I guess. Yeah, I can't really read them." So I'd just been judging them just by the way they looked.
But yes, I do think that it's been a tremendous wave of picture books. And, of course, there's always gonna be good and bad that comes with that, it's a moneymaking endeavor. And I think you can definitely see the publishers that are trying to cash in on a style, or a movement, or a particular type of book, or whatever it might be. But still, at the forefront of it all, there are still those brilliant people who are continuing to innovate and continue to just make such terrific work.
Sarah Enni: I don't have kids myself, but I've gotten really into it. And luckily my friends have started to have kids so I can buy all these books and sit there and enjoy them myself. I want to start talking about What We'll Build by talking about Here We Are. Do you mind kind of giving the pitch for that and positioning that within its importance with your own family?
Oliver Jeffers: Well, yes, we can work backwards from the number of their ages. I'd made 15 or so picture books without having kids. And then we had a kid, and lots of people were asking, "Will it change the way that you make books?" And at that point, I knew that I was making Here We Are, and I was like, "Well, yes, but not in the way in which you might think." I haven't actually made a straightforward picture book storybook since my son has being born. So it was like, "I can't quite answer that."
But at that time, we brought a two-day-old home from the hospital, and I did what I always do when somebody new visits our home, I give them the tour. And there was something quite comedic about this, which turned into like a heavy realization that, he actually knows nothing. He knows nothing at all. And it's up to me to teach him everything that he will know, and that's quite intimidating, it's overwhelming really.
But I started taking these notes of the things that I was saying to him as we were walking around. And initially I'd intended to write him a letter just like, "Here are my thoughts," as I'm juggling wrestling with this idea of being responsible for a brand new life. But that time, there was a dark cloud rumbling over Europe - Western Europe - Britain, and the USA, with sort of fear-mongering and xenophobia and racism and hatred of all sorts. And it just felt ugly and unnecessary.
And so the book was a reaction to a lot of those things by pointing out just really these simple truths that people I think have forgotten, you know? And I do think that we are living in a period of vast, vast, accelerated, grand, almost overwhelming change right now, but it might be necessary. Because if you think about what this period of history is known as, as the great peace since World War II, there hasn't been any really huge conflicts that have been on a globally historic scale prior. And so it's known as The Great Peace.
But since that time, Western culture, Western life has really exploded into this luxurious, this affluent, indulgent period of existence, where it's always about more, bigger, better, newer, faster, stronger, now. And it's been based on economic models of growth. And as part of this idea of individual liberty, people, and the market is always right, people have been taught to think about themselves. And you know, "How can I make my life better?" And so on and so forth.
And that was fine until we realized that the cost of that, both in terms of our environment, but also in terms of just individual psychology, where if people are only thinking about themselves, they're not thinking about anybody else. And they kind of forget that they're attached to a system, a culture, and so on.
And you see these shocking figures of suicide rates where people just feel isolated and left behind, and it's because this ever accelerating world, doesn't have a place for people. And I think that we have now, just been handed the bill for this 50 yearlong party. And this was going to change, one way or the other, but it might have taken a long time as we slowly came to terms. Or, as it turns out, it's all happening in one year.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It feels like that might be the case.
Oliver Jeffers: But the point being, I was trying to address a lot of these points in that book Here We Are. And so that was really just explaining the basic principles of what it is to be alive on earth in the 21st century. And just some of the really simple truths of that. Even on the back cover, it shows a picture of earth and it just says, "All the people live here. And there's the moon, which no one lives here." And I ended up making a giant sculpture of that for political reasons, or apolitical reasons rather, later on.
But that was that book. And then when my daughter came along, it was another period of contemplating the right now, but in a different way. And I was thinking of how the rhythm and the way in which this poem was taking shape, which I was writing sort of in my subconscious as I was interacting with her.
And at that point, the whole "me too" movement was really ramping up. And it was like, "Not only is this the first time I've had a daughter, this is the first female Jeffers in four generations, which is a long time." And it was like, "What was the world like back then?" It was like, "Is this actually a good time to be raising a girl? And maybe we have a bigger role to play in the shaping of the future that we want, than we're admitting to ourselves."
Sarah Enni: So What We'll Build, do you mind just giving us the kind of pitch for that story? And then I'll ask about more specifics.
Oliver Jeffers: Well it's called, Plans For a Together Future, and it's just simply this very, very succinct poem that opens with the question, "What shall we build, you and I?" And it's me talking to my daughter and you see our hands. And then it's this whole list of stuff that we will build. And then it concludes. It's really that simple. But through it, it talks about some of the fun and obvious stuff like building a home, and good times, and adventures. But it also goes into trepidation and fear and anger and all of these potential scenarios and emotions.
And it was all made in a world pre-pandemic when I was just thinking about a parent in a new child relationship and just the unknown future that that has. And I didn't really realize just how relevant it would be in an environment now, where every single human being on earth is unsure of the future. Massively unsure of the future. But, as the book sort of says, with hope and love you can navigate that more easily, I feel like. And it's not really even a parent and child relationship. It could be about the space between any two loving people, this book.
Sarah Enni: I'm so mad, I'm not gonna have the name of the essay, but there was an essay that has been circulated all year about building, and that we're entering a time of building. And people are using that as a mental framework for how we can positively move forward from this moment where things feel broken down to the foundations.
Oliver Jeffers: If you do remember the name of that essay, I'd love to read it, cause I haven't read it. But I do think that there is something really, really powerful in that. Even looking back to this time last year, just the speed at which things are changing, and the shallowness, and the short attention span, and the what's-it-all-for aspect. And now it's become very clear that the two greatest problems that humanity faces, don't care where you live.
There needs to be a united effort to combat them, both germs and weather. And really in that new world, if we need to rebuild everything, there is a part for every single person to play. A friend of mine, Tom Carnac, gave this TED Talk where he talks about how the stories that we tell govern our existence, govern our identity. And how Britain, during the second World War, managed to absolutely u-turn on its sense of identity. Because early in the war, everybody was sort of denying what's happening, or putting their head in the sand.
And all of a sudden, through a conservative effort, it became the story that we now know. Which is, even the simple act of planting a potato, had meaning. And it was towards this shared future that was going to be good for everyone. And it's how that suddenly went from half to maybe three quarters of the nation feeling isolated and distant, to everybody coming together and a sense of community spirit. Really, Britain hasn't seen since.
Sarah Enni: You're bringing to mind for me, the sense that growing up, having stories to entertain, stories to bring humor to an otherwise very dire situation. But there's also stories for instructions on how to live a life, right? And stories to give you a framework to how to be in the world. That's what I was thinking about with these two books. They literally are a framework for you thinking about your family, but it's a big thing for you to kind of say like, "Here's a guidebook for people who might be searching for words."
Oliver Jeffers: Hmm. Yeah. And I do these things partly for my own benefit and I try not to think too much about an audience, but ever since I started posting about social and political issues on social media, I hadn't quite realized how helpful that was being to people who agreed with me, but could never quite find the language, or quite find the feeling. And what I realized is that I was helping people articulate. And that was a very, very powerful thing, a powerful realization.
Sarah Enni: I've been thinking a lot about how art can be a conversation starter and how it can help. It's very functional to say like, "I want to talk to my kid about the world and the dire state that it's in, but that's very scary. What's a way in that's a little bit less tense as we know the reality is."
Oliver Jeffers: Direct.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to talk about the specifics of creating the book, cause it's an unbelievably gorgeous book. And it does feel so akin to Here We Are. Did you think that you wanted them to be kindred spirits in visual presentation?
Oliver Jeffers: I did subconsciously, I think, cause they're the same size, the same page count, different papers - no, the same paper stock. There's a lot of similarities. And the decision really was nailed home whenever, in the final art, I wrote the line from that page on the actual physical piece of art.
Because with The Fate of Fausto, that was made prior, it was made using traditional lithography techniques. So there's no real original piece of art. And with Here We Are, some of it was done digitally, which is a whole other conversation. But with What We'll Build, I had written the line of the poem that was appropriate to each spread underneath it, and was like, "That looks really good. I think I'll probably use this handwriting in the actual book."
And at the very end I decided not to, just so that the books really were siblings. So it's the same font that is used in Here We Are.
Sarah Enni: I read somewhere that your brother designs your books. Is that right?
Oliver Jeffers: He does. Yes, he does. He's my older brother. He's the one who graduated two years ahead of me and helped me find that printer. And he designed How to Catch a Star.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. What does it mean that someone helps you design? Just as someone who doesn't know how that stuff works behind the scenes.
Oliver Jeffers: It changes book by book. So with him, it's getting a print ready and laying out the type and then the title page. Sometimes the designer will just be, "Here's the art." And then when the book comes out and there's words on it and somebody had to put them there. But with my brother, it's much more involved than that where I'll bounce things off of him all the time, even though he lives in Belfast and up until recently I've lived in Brooklyn.
We would just be on the phone and on FaceTime calls and emails and be like, "What do you think of this?" And he'd be like, "Nah." And the conversation was with him when we decided to go with the font rather than the handwriting in What We'll Build.
Sarah Enni: Anytime it's a family affair that makes it feel even more special. That's so great. And you touched on this a little bit, but you have, with the last few books, done some very different things, as far as how you produce the art, how the books are created. I'm interested in how you decided on the way of creating What We'll Build and for someone who may not understand how books come together, if you can talk about your process for creating this one.
Oliver Jeffers: Well, as I say, each one is slightly different. I've never really hit on one technique and stuck with that. There's a few things that pop up more often than not. I used Photoshop for the first time ever with Stuck simply, practically, because I didn't have a studio. We got kicked out of one studio in New York and I was looking for another one. So I designed this method that I had used for some advertising gigs prior, where all the marks were made on a black piece of paper, scanned, and then composited in Photoshop. So that's how Stuck was made.
With Here We Are, I was writing this book about being a new parent for the first time but then, I don't know, it felt a little strange to be talking about this and then just being in my studio the entire time and leaving him at home. Apple and the iPad, and I've had a relationship with Apple for a while, so they sent me an iPad with an Apple pencil. And I'd heard about this software Procreate, and I started experimenting with it and I was like, "This could work."
And so the way Here We Are worked for me was that I painted the backgrounds and did a bit of a composite in Photoshop to make the landscapes and the big ships, and then I would import those into Procreate and then bring the iPad home so that I could be at home making this book and be there as a parent. With The Fate of Fausto, the technique was lithograph and completely different and a complete experiment, the whole way through, and I had no idea what I was doing at any point.
It was all, not even educated guesswork, it was just complete guesswork. But the reason that I did that is cause The Fate of Fausto was written before Here We Are, but it's a dark story and it's not necessarily hopeful. There's sort of an aggression to it that, at the time, I thought, once it occurred to me, that Here We Are was gonna be a book, I was like, "This is the message the world needs right now, not The Fate of Fausto."
So I shelved that and moved on. And then after Here We Are came out it was just after the US had withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, and it was like, "Now it feels like the actual right time to be seeing this book. And right away there was all sorts of comparisons of Fausto, in the UK to Boris Johnson, and then the US to Trump. But the case is that it was neither, it was written before either of them came to par and it was just like, "He is a caricature of classic, capitalistic, white male par."
And then it just so happens that arguably two of the most powerful countries in the world elected that caricature into office, and so it became prophetic in that way. But it felt like an old story. It felt like an old fable and one that had been around maybe for a hundred years or so. And partly in doing that, I wanted to make a book that honored those old traditions. Cause if I'd be at an estate sale, or yard sale, or an old secondhand bookshop, and I'd find these old picture books, I'd get them. And I kind of wanted the book to look and feel like that, you weren't really sure from what era it came from.
So I worked with a marbling expert who made bespoke marbled end papers. And I worked with a typographer, David Pearson, my brother Roy and I, who used this font, he handset the type using hand-led fonts, a handset led type, in a font that had never been digitized before. And then for the printing process it was like, "How were old books made?" And lithography is really the first way that books were made. And I had made this one art print in this printing shop in Paris with the French artist JR, so I went back to him to ask him some questions. And Patrice, the master printer, read the story and he just says, "We would love to work on this with you."
He guessed that it would take maybe two weeks to make all the art. And it took, I think, from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM every day for three months to make it all. We massively underestimated just how complicated it was. So then with What We'll Build, I was like, "I gotta just go back to my safe space." And so it was just straight paint on paper.
Sarah Enni: There are a couple of videos and long interviews where you talked about The Fate of Fausto's process, which are totally fascinating. So if someone wants to hear more about that, I'll link to those. But I'm glad you brought up The Fate of Fausto, and thank you for going into [that]. I love process questions, so it's always really fun to hear how things come together.
But I was looking at the recent books, What We'll Build, Here We Are, The Fate of Fausto, and This Moose Belongs to Me, seems also in a family of stories of a bit of an interrogation about how human beings interact with our planet and the natural world. It kind of seems to be something that's on your mind in a pretty distinctive way. I'm just wondering if that was conscious or how you feel about this kind of growing body of work of yours.
Oliver Jeffers: Well, it was a little bit conscious. I was with a friend, and we were visiting his family up in Maine and his mother woke us all up really early one morning, she's like, "Come and look!" And out their back garden was this moose just standing there. And I was like, "That thing is enormous!" I've never seen a moose with my own two eyes before and it was like, "That is huge!" I could probably walk underneath it.
And about a week or so later, I was just on a phone call and drawing, and I drew a moose with a kid standing underneath it and I just wrote, "Rule number seven, getting protection from the rain," or something like that. And that sat there in my sketchbook. And my editor, Helen, saw that drawing and she was like, "What's that?" And I was like, "Ah, I don't really know. I was just sort of imagining there was like a set of rules for how to be a good pet." And she was like, "Let's pick this apart." And so there was that structure through the book of the rules of being a good pet.
But really, at that point, the essence of the story is that I was reading a history of the seal of the Island of Manhattan from the Native Americans to the Dutch and how these two totally different systems of beliefs and economics completely clashed. Because the Native Americans were like, "Yeah, sure. We'll take your money, but nobody really owns anything anyway." And then the Dutch gave them the money and then were really confused why they wouldn't leave.
And I just thought, "Here's a wonderful opportunity to talk about the different ways people can view the same thing." And it's funny, I was signing stock from What We'll Build in a closed book shop this morning, and I was talking to one of the people who work there and she just goes, "I always just assumed it was like a cat." I was like, "Ah!" I was like, "I wonder how many people thought that?" And it's actually this whole big philosophical, historical rant on capitalism.
Sarah Enni: Oh, that's really funny. No, it seems very of a piece with a lot of the work you're doing now. Which also, I think, is picture books can be so uniquely profound, right? Because you're talking about the ways in which we've created mental structures to impose order on a wild, natural world. And I think kids could just as easily understand what a country is or say, "That's totally insane. It means nothing." So in some ways, those are picture books that feel like more for the parents than the kids.
Oliver Jeffers: It's almost like the less you can say about something the better. And picture books are really great for that. Because if you can create the idea and set out the pieces, the breadcrumbs, when somebody arrives at that conclusion themselves, it's a much more powerful moment than had it been spelled out for them.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. I want to ask just a little bit about other things that you have going on, but was there anything more about What We'll Build? I mean, this is the book for your daughter, so was there anything special you had to do for her or any considerations like that?
Oliver Jeffers: Yes. Also a lot of her favorite things are in there, just in the objects. And when a copy of the book came through, my early edition, she would just look through it and she would point out all her favorite toys. And then she kept going to the back to the photograph of her.
Sarah Enni: Oh yeah. I love that. I want to ask about workflow. In an interview, you had talked about that after having kids, "On the practical side, I no longer work at weekends or evenings which used to be my most productive time. And I try to keep traveling to a minimum." We'll talk about traveling in a second, cause I think you've had kind of a nuts year when it comes to that. But what was it like to transition? Creative types, sometimes it's like, "The muse visits me at 2:00 AM," or whatever, but that's not always compatible with life.
Oliver Jeffers: It's not always, although, that's the way it was since Aaron was born. But then in that last year, before we traveled, I had a phenomenal amount of work to do, which included finishing the art for The Fate of Fausto and What We'll Build. I had two solo exhibitions, one in New York, one in London of paintings. And then I had that giant public sculpture to do, and all this work to do with the Here We Are film. So it was an extreme amount of work.
And I knew I had a hard deadline if we were gonna go travel for a year, and then not work at all. So we had my wife's cousin come over and help us with the kids. And then I really just did work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for about a year.
Sarah Enni: Wow. How did that go? Are you okay?
Oliver Jeffers: Yeah. It's taken its toll. It has. I'll never worked that hard ever again. But we actually temporarily moved apartment to be closer to the studio so that I could go home for lunch, go home for dinner, go home for bedtime, and then just pop back to the studio. So the honest answer to that, of what it's gonna be like going forward? I don't know.
Because we went traveling for a year fully expecting to go back to Brooklyn to just go into a slightly easier version of that life. But we are now based in Belfast and I don't have a studio there and I've been trying to start doing some work from the kitchen table which hasn't been straightforward or easy. So right now I don't have any system at all. And I'm trying to figure that out.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in that, and we just have a few minutes left, but do you mind explaining? You were intending to travel the world with your family and then were abruptly sent home.
Oliver Jeffers: So it took about five years to prepare, and that doesn't mean where we were gonna go travel, that was just to get everything into a position where we could leave. So getting the studio taken care of, and wrapping up all the projects, and getting our apartment subletted.
And then the intention was, my wife and our two kids, we were gonna travel around the world. And we did, we got six months in until COVID-19 hit. And we were in Japan at that point, and I think we realized how serious it was, maybe before the USA and Europe. And so we retreated and we ended up going back home to Belfast to be closer with family. And we've been there since, that's seven months ago.
Sarah Enni: How has it been being home?
Oliver Jeffers: It's been lovely in a lot of ways. Belfast is geographically, a wonderful city, because you can drive five minutes in really any direction and you can get mountains, forest, beach, grass, whatever. But from, I think, almost the moment that the extreme lockdown ended and people were allowed to go outside, it rained every single day for two and a half straight months.
Sarah Enni: Oh no. Oh, that's a bitter irony. You had talked, at some point, about being maybe reticent for a while to incorporate Photoshop or digital, especially an entirely digital process, but it sounds like is maybe now the time to look into that more?
Oliver Jeffers: Well, no. I've been using digital for a while. And I think at that point it was maybe a reaction to what I said at the start of the interview, which is, those books of the late nineties, early two thousands, which were all Photoshop and there was just a flatness and a blandness as to them.
Have you ever heard of, there was a technical term I read once, I thought it was brilliant when it applied to technology in the arts, and it's called the Mariah Carey syndrome.
Sarah Enni: No.
Oliver Jeffers: Mariah Carey has a 16 octave range, but she will not sing a single song without using all 16. And the point is, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. So I think all those early books were showing off what people could do with Photoshop. Whereas now it's just settled into a rhythm and it's not the means to an end, it's just another tool for making art, just like watercolor is, just like oil paint is, just like pencil is.
Sarah Enni: Right. I think that's a wonderful place to come to, kind of a holistic like, "Use all the tools in your box if you need them." Well, I like to wrap up the conversations with advice. So, you've become the first person on my podcast to reference Cher and Mariah Carey in one conversation, which I'm so pleased about. I can't believe that hasn't happened before.
But I'd love to hear advice you have for someone who is interested in becoming a picture book artist. Maybe someone who is a fine art background, like yourself, who is interested in moving into this world, what you would tell them.
Oliver Jeffers: Somebody from fine art moving into picture books. Wow. I don't really know. I think with all art, it's about questioning authenticity. It's Like, "Why do you want to do something?" Are you doing it because you have an idea that you just can't shake and you have to do it? Then absolutely do it. Are you doing it because it's the cool thing that you think you should do? Then maybe you should question really why.
I did a little bit of teaching at an art college in Belfast years and years ago, and I used to ask people, you know, I think one of the toughest questions any creative has to ask themselves is, are you good enough? And just because you want something badly enough; every film and every book that we read tends to reinforce the idea that if you want something badly enough, you'll get it. That's not true. And just because you want something badly enough, doesn't mean that you're good enough to accomplish it.
And if you have the conversation you believe that you are, it's gonna set you up well, because you're not gonna care too much about what other people think. Cause you're never gonna please everybody. And so it's just about, I think, being sure that you're comfortable with the reasons why you're doing anything.
Sarah Enni: I think that that's wonderful. And one last kind of selfish question, as someone who has illustrated books written by other people, is there anything that you wish people who just wrote, but didn't illustrate picture books knew about the words they were sending over to an artist. Is there anything they could do to make it easier?
Oliver Jeffers: I don't think I'm qualified to answer that question because anytime I've worked with a picture book that I haven't written, I've worked very closely with the author, or really sort of jumped in and edited and rewritten and reworked with. So I've never worked with a script that's just been, "Here. You're not allowed to change anything, just do it." But I do think allowing room for the illustrator to bring some essence to the story rather than just decoration would be something.
Sarah Enni: That's great that you've been able to be so collaborative. Sometimes publishing houses keep a separation.
Oliver Jeffers: I know, I think they like it that way. I think I like it that way.
Sarah Enni: This has been such a joyful conversation. Thank you so much for all your time this morning, Oliver. And I hope you and your family stay safe and healthy.
Oliver Jeffers: Thank you, Sarah.
Thank you so much to Oliver. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @OliverJeffers and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). And thank you again to our sponsor, Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takoaka, out from Candlewick Press now.
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Hayley Hershman produces First Draft 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, among many other things that she's helped me out with, Julie Anderson.
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