Shaun Tan at the Melbourne Writers Festival

Blogged live at the Melbourne Writers Festival - and tidied up later at home…

Shaun Tan is the celebrated author/artist of the graphic novel The Arrival (which won the CBCA Book of the Year in 2007) and The Red Tree (which was an Honour book in 2002).  His latest book, Tales from Outer Suburbia is an anthology of 15 very short stories superbly illustrated in his own unique style.

The session was accompanied by a slide show of his artwork, starting with an enchanting picture of a dinosaur that he did on his 2nd day at school.  It was remarkably good with a degree of maturity not often seen in young children.  Other pictures in the slide show included early signs of rocket fantasies and the strange creatures that we have come to identify with his work.

Jessica Crispin, who’s from the USA – which she said is not very good at recognising talent from beyond the US – told us that Tan’s work has become enormously successful there.  She asked him if the new market in the US changed things for him, but apart from a couple of nice trips, he thought not.  He doesn’t collaborate much even with his editor, and is mostly alone in his room working on his art.  He wasn’t expecting much from the US market and was resigned to international obscurity.  He was happy enough with the Australian reaction and everything else seems to have been a bonus.   He was a bit shocked by the number of people who turned up to author events there, but the big moment for him was when his art gave him an income that he could rely on, and no longer needed to illustrate other people’s books, which he didn’t enjoy very much. 

Tan’s books defy classification and sometimes booksellers don’t know where to shelve them.  Some topics are dark e.g. depression, but he has never seen himself as a children’s book illustrator – he doesn’t think about children when he’s working and his interest is science fiction and fantasy.  He originally saw himself primarily as a writer, and was influenced by Ray Bradbury – not so much his novels but his short stories.  He had got the impression from secondary school that illustration was a lesser form of the arts – and in fact had only added a picture to the front cover of his first book to attract the attention of editors wading through the slush pile.  (The short story was rejected but they liked the illustrations.)

These days he’s not writing, he’s become an illustrator.  He didn’t have formal art training, but (at what must have been a very good secondary school) had practising artists at tutorial workshops on Saturday mornings.  He never thought he could make a career out of art and did an arts degree to avoid having to make a decision – did history and philosophy – and even toyed with a fine arts academic career.  His start, however, was with fantasy book covers and then illustrations for magazines and then children’s books - and these offered more regular opportunities as an artist.  He learned how to do dragons and SF paintings from browsing at newsagents (because he couldn’t afford to buy magazines) and was eventually able to survive as a freelance illustrator. 

Moving from reproducing other people’s styles to his own involved doing some painting that he hopes no one will ever see but he needed to do it to develop his skills. These are in his parents garage!  He’s doing more of this private personal work as time goes by.

He finds it hard to answer some questions: when did you start drawing?  When does anyone draw?  About four years of age?  It’s an inherent instinctive thing, he thinks.  All artists long to return to that simple childhood unselfconscious stage when they don’t know or care if their work is any good.

It seemed to me that Tan is quite diffident about his talent and his hard work.  He seems over-modest and a bit taken aback by his success.  He calls himself a hoarder – and so is his wife  – so his place is like an antique shop full of stuff.  It’s probably a treasure trove! He admits to being a bit possessive about some of his paintings and doesn’t want to exhbit or sell them in a gallery and never see them again.  He’s also wary of selling them prematurely – he sold some too early and now they’re worth a lot more.

He likes collage because it’s a  way of including random elements and ‘getting himself out of the picture’.  He also talked about the tension between the excitement of the initial idea and the tediousness of doing the work on it.  He was a bit evasive about what he’s currently  working on, but that’s because he’s not too sure  what it’s going to be, except it’s something about relationships.  He’s also doing a short animated film – something for us to look forward to!   He’s not doing the animation, but has done the story-boarding and the design and is liaising with the modelmakers and the computer guys.  He’s learned a lot about working both solo on the artwork and in a team for the animation – but he thinks he’d rather be working on books. The stills of the animation on the slide show look great, so I suspect that there will be some disappointment if he sticks to that preference…but an artist must follow his art.

It will be very interesting to see what he does next…

Vale Kilmeny Niland (1950-2009)

I was much saddened to see from The Age Obituaries that the artist Kilmeny Niland had died on February 27th this year.  She was only 58.

Would any of us know the work of Banjo Patterson today, if not for Niland’s wonderful illustrations?  She brought his poems to life and made them appealing for today’s children with bright colours and zany humour.  The Age says that Mulga Bill’s Bicycle has never been out of print, and I still read it to classes who love it!

Other books she illustrated include the enchanting Blossum Possum, Two Tough Teddies, and The Gingerbread Man.

Her website still shows some of her work, and I hope her surviving family will maintain it somehow because it showcases her enormous talent and delightful sense of humour.

SLAV Conference: Concurrent sessions & Featured Address

The first of the concurrent sessions I went to was a presentation by Jan Letta.  Jan is a wildlife photographer who has made it her life’s work to photograph endangered animals in their natural habitat and bring their stories to life for children.  She has produced some very fine little books about lions, cheetahs, tigers and so on, in a series called True to Life Books – each with simple text that makes them perfect for beginner readers.  The ABC persuaded her to document her adventures in Africa, India and China in a magnificent hardcover book, Diary of a Wildlife Photographer but what I found interesting was Jan’s explanation about the economics of publishing books like hers.  The cost of including full-colour photographs is prohibitive for the educational publishing market, but she is able to produce them at a reasonable price because she designs and publishes them herself, selling them at school visits and on the internet.  Another example of cottage industry thriving on the web!

After lunch there was a most interesting presentation by Gabrielle Wang, author of The Garden of Empress Cassia, The Pearl of Tiger Bay, and the forthcoming A Ghost in My Suitcase.  Gabrielle is of Chinese descent, and her fiction explores belonging and shared cultures.  I liked what she had to say about imagination – our culture tends to disparage it, but everything man-made that we see was once imagination.  Reading is an act of imagination that should be cherished.

In the second concurrent session, I heard Jane Godwin’s talk:  Publishing and Writing: How These Worlds Connect. There were lots of auditory distractions in the Function Space – the clinking of crockery in the cafe, and very noisy contruction work outside.  It seems odd that a space like this in an award winning design like Federation Square couldn’t be closed off properly to reduce the noise. Did the architects and designers really think that curtains would achieve this?

Anyway, Jane soldiered on, and I liked what she had to say.  She’s not a fan of what she called ‘heavy-handed social issue picture books’ and I certainly agree.  She says that even though they are well-intentioned,  such books are cruel to little children, because they’re a lesson not a story.  Good literature is not didactic.  If we want to explore these issues we should use fairy tales because they are removed from the child’s real world.  She believes that young people don’t understand hindsight, and therefore although horrors can be examined, they should usually be righted.  Happy endings are psychologically important for children – and why not?

Jane’s work includes Little Cat and the Big Red Bus; The True Story of Mary Who Wanted to Stand on her Head, Millie Starts School, and the young adult novel Falling From Grace.  There’s also the non-fiction title When Elephants Lived in the Sea which looks as if it could be useful for the Life on Earth unit that I am currently doing with Year 5 & 6 because it explores evolution.

Little Cat and the Big Red Bus is an interesting story, because it features a male bus driver caring for a little one who falls asleep on the school bus.  Jane told us that she was asked to change the gender of the driver, but she refused: she wanted to depict the kindness of strangers who care for us when we need it as children, and she wanted to show that men can be good and kind.  I think it is a beautiful book, and I think it is very sad that marketers are so paranoid about child abuse that they are spooked by an image of a man carrying a little child to safety.

Jane finished up by reminding us of something that Ian McEwan wrote after 9/11: Imagining yourself into the lives of another is the beginning of compassion and morality.  It was a most engaging session.

After that, I did something really foolish: I went to the wrong session.  Instead of going to E-Readers and E-texts which I was really looking forward to, I went by mistake to ACMI 2 and not ACMI 1.  It was all about changing the reading culture at a very challenging school in the northern suburbs, but it was not what I wanted to go to! By the time I realised what I’d done, it was too late to barge into the right session so I slithered out of my seat and took an early train home.

SLAV Conference: Tohby Riddle

This keynote address was brilliant. Tohby Riddle is a wonderful author-illustrator of quirky picture books that never fail to engage children’s interest.   He uses literature and art to break out of habitual thinking and enter the world of imagination – with humour, enchantment and surprise.

Fiction, he says, is a word that can be used perjoratively.  The world created must not seem false – it must feel authentic and real.  To create his worlds, he starts out with a real situation, then mixes in the imaginative elements in small steps.  While his animals are metaphors for humans, he says it’s important when anthromorphising animals not to overdo it – he tries to keep his animals as close to reality as possible, and he retains their essential natures: in The Great Escape from the City Zoo, for example, they don’t talk and their undoing happens because they are true to their natures.  (The elephant can’t resist playing in the fountain). 

Tohby recognises that sometimes the ‘emotional feel’ of a book is what stays with us, not the facts, and he gave the example of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I think this is certainly true of Irving the Magician. I read this just recently to Years 3 and 4, and what stays with me from the brilliant images and simple text is the powerful idea that a child who believes in himself can wreak magic on lonely, empty lives around him, but what is heart-achingly real is the sadness of their lives before Irving achieves his little miracle.

Tohby’s art work owes some of its technical brilliance to his studies in architecture. He pointed out that in architecture, every line that’s drawn is something to be built, in 3D. So there’s a discipline to his drawings and even when a situation is quite zany, the pictures seem very realistic. He talked at length about the influences on his art, and in the Great Escape from the City Zoo in particular. I loved the way he references 1930s New York architecture with the Empire State Building and the anteater, but he’s also included ideas from the Steve McQueen film, stills from B/W film noir, and the Beatles Abbey Rd image. There are Nighthawks and Homer Simpson memes, and when his animals set off in the truck there’s even a reference to the John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath film scene .

There are other titles by this brilliant author that I must buy for our library when I have some more money next year: The Tip at the End of Our Street; The Singing Hat; and The Royal Guest.

Books, says Tohby, are old technology you can hold in your hand to go to another world, and return to this one better for it.

This was the best session of the conference.