At this year’s writers’ festival I was privileged to witness a discussion between childrens’ book authors and illustrators. Two had worked together on a number of books – pictured in John Anderson’s photo to the right – Anna Fienberg and Kim Gamble. You might have heard or read to your children their popular Tashi series, and just recently I reviewed Horrendo’s Curse (charming).

As well, Bruce Atherton author of The Billycart Ride and Sally Heinrich author and illustrator of The Most Beautiful Lantern were part of the discussion. (I couldn’t find a link to Bruce but I did find that of one of the illustrators of his latest book “Tough Old Teddy”.)

So many interesting stories were told…

Bruce told of how precious his first book was – The Billycart Ride – it had been 12 years in the writing and he found it hard to let it go. He spent two years choosing the illustrator (unheard of – thought Kim – for a first time author but it turns out that Bruce knew Bryce Courtney – and he holds some sway!) and eventually set his sights on Keith McEwen who had illustrated Paul Jennings books – yes I think it was a singenpoo illustration he saw.

Anyway, Keith was going through some stuff and it took him four years to do the illustrations and the first ones to come back he’d made the billy cart as big as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! Well that wasn’t what Bruce had in mind… He thinks Keith tried to show him what that felt like by suggesting some words to him! In hindsight, Bruce reckons he would have trusted Keith more and he’s definitely held back with his later books. And if you look on one of the illustrations – Keith has written Atherton on one of the bottles of wine!

Interestingly Anna had the opposite experience with one of her books. It was a story about a little boy, Harold, whose mum was a scientist and he’d been taught to test everything. So one day he heard the phrase a cat has nine lives… he found a rough old cat called Balthazar, and proceeded to test his theory… in the end he comes to his senses having grown fond of the old cat and saves him from certain death.

The last page, the text says that now he’s called Balthazar and he’s Harold’s cat and he sleeps on the bed and he has anchovies and milk for dinner. Harold says that he obviously loves the cat and how could he have done that? Obviously it’s more important to love the cat than to experiment on it.

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They were lovely drawings, but the cat was the most vulnerable, winsome little thing and of course he looked like he wouldn’t survive someone breathing on him let alone throwing him out of a plane. So it was reviewed, “What does Anna Fienberg think she’s doing,” and “Don’t stock this in your library or you’ll have everybody catching cats and tying them up.”

Sally Heinrich was really interesting too. She writes and illustrates her own work and being an artist first the story ideas come to her as an image in her mind first. For The Most Beautiful Lantern she painted all the pages first and then looked about for a writer. She was living with a copywriter at the time and thought he’d be the obvious choice but it turns out he wasn’t so engaged in the project and so after realising that she was spending a lot of energy on nagging him, she decided to write it herself.

Now it seems she can’t stop. I’ve just read Hungry Ghosts which is a novel for early teens I guess on making friends and cross-cultural assimilation. Not bad for a painter huh? (my review? – an interesting story – a little bit preachy toward the end but overall entertaining)

Kim Gamble who illustrates it seems all of Anna’s work now plus quite a few others told of one brief he really struggled with. He’d just split up with his wife and he was asked to illustrate a story called Dear Fred about a family split apart between the USA and Australia. He just couldn’t do it, it was too close to what he was going through, until his publisher suggested he change the family into mice.

It was fascinating to hear these behind-the-scenes stories and inspiring too. (you never know… maybe one day…)

And it leads me on to a special plug for Miscellaneous Mum who is in the midst of having her first book published. W00t!