Transcription of Melissa Sweet for the show Illustrating Maine #180
Lisa: As radio show listeners know, I am a huge fan of children’s books, not just because I have children but also for my own personal entertainment. Today we have with us, Melissa Sweet who has illustrated more than a hundred children’s books from board books to picture books and nonfiction titles. Her collages and paintings have appeared in the New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Madison Park Greetings, Smilebox, and eeBoo Toys. She’s written and illustrated three books Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade, Tupelo Rides the Rails and Carmine: A Little More Red a New York Times best illustrated in 2005.
Melissa lives with her husband in Rockport. Thank you so much for being here today.
Melissa: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: You don’t look that old to me so the fact that you’ve illustrated more than a hundred books and written three of them and working on a fourth, you’re a very productive individual.
Melissa: Well I’ve been doing it for thirty-five years, so if we spread it out, it’s a busy schedule but not un-doable right?
Lisa: Yeah. Well you must like it. I think that’s the thing that strikes me is that nobody can be that productive unless it’s something that you really enjoy doing.
Melissa: I really love it. I always loved the book as an art form. I have such freedom that I can’t imagine doing anything else. I really get to stretch out and create creatively and do exactly the kind of art I want to do and think about the size of the book, the whole nine yards is really mine and the designers after I’m finished, but it’s pretty fun.
Lisa: When we were preparing for this show, we looked in our local paper and lo and behold there’s a picture of you. You recently won a Caldecott Award. That’s a big deal.
Melissa: It’s a really big deal in the children’s book world. It’s definitely the Oscars for the children’s book world. The American Library Association has what they call the Youth Media Awards. Those are announced in January every year and that’s when we find out who … It’s the biggies, the Newbery for the text and the Caldecott for the art. There’s an award and several honor books. This year my book The Right Word was garnered a Caldecott Honor, so there was six books in that category and there’s the award went to a man named Dan Santat for a book called Beekle. It’s a really great book.
Lisa: Yeah, you also won the Robert Sibert Medal for The Right Word.
Melissa: Yeah, so The Right Word is a biography of Peter Mark Roget the man who invented the thesaurus. The Sibert Award is for informational books or nonfiction but it [couldn’t 00:35:10] be a little hazy in that category so it was incredible really. It means that we got the material down basically, that it garnered the Sibert means as far as nonfiction goes we got it.
Lisa: A River of Words which is another book that you illustrated got the Caldecott Honor previously.
Melissa: Yes, that was in 2009. A River of Words is the story of William Carlos Williams the poet and that was, it’s always incredible when the call comes in and you find out that you’ve gotten this award but with each of these books you put a lot into them not just in creating them artistically but there’s a lot of research behind it all, for me and for the author and the publisher. We’re all in on getting it as accurate as possible yet telling a story that’s appealing to kids. To be honest, I knew William Carlos Williams poems, but it never occurred to me that you could do a children’s book for kids.
That’s I think a really exciting part of the industry now is that there’s almost no subject that we can’t if it’s properly crafted become a children’s biography, children’s story, yeah.
Lisa: Of all the books that you have illustrated, you forwarded some books for me to look at which I thought was interesting that two of them were actually about doctors, doctors who were known for not only being doctors but one was William Carlos Williams who was known as Dr. Williams. The other was Roget who we think of as the thesaurus guy, but he was Dr. Roget.
Melissa: Right. I think that’s amazing too. What I love about it is both of those men had to make a living and they chose the profession of medical doctor, really different eras so Roget was fifteen when he went to med school. Med school in the early 1800s was a totally different picture than it is today. Then yes William Carlos Williams was a general practitioner so he would be the doctor that you’ve might have grown up walking to his house where his office was and he delivered something like three thousand babies. I think that’s amazing.
Yet, William Carlos Williams constantly wrote poems. He would be driving to someone’s house for a house call pull off on the side of the road and work on a poem. Roget was really I think the word I want is polymath. He invented the slide rule. He was a doctor. He invented a chess set that could travel. He had his hands in a lot of pies and all this time he’s collecting these words classifying them and then eventually it was fairly late in life when he created his thesaurus that eventually got published.
I love that they had all these creative endeavors yet they also made their mark creatively.
Lisa: With Roget also he was a list maker. It was fun to read about that because I think those of us who like making lists. It’s some way of ordering possibly disorderly world that we live in. This guy did that and he also seemed to like timelines.
Melissa: Yeah, so when Roget was growing up, a young man. He had become a doctor and he was making all these lists. This was around the time of Darwin making all his discoveries. I believe Roget knew Darwin’s father, Erasmus Darwin and also Linnaeus pre-dates him but also a famous classifier. At that time when I think it’s so interesting to think about we look out, we walk outside our door and we look at the world these people, scientists and others were looking at the world and really categorizng it.
Nature for them had all this interconnectedness, these small, small details that we just take for granted. We can open a book and find this information but they were really creating the information for these books. It’s pretty exciting time, the time of enlightenment. I mean I think I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.
Lisa: It’s fun for me to read the books that you’ve illustrated because the words are one thing but then there’s almost like a side story that goes along with the illustrations that you create. It just creates a much bigger picture of the story itself.
Melissa: Thank you. I do start out with the intention of creating depth. There’s the depth of the pictures and also the words but there’s also sub-stories, so for instance you’re holding a spread right now. You see the London in the background, peppered throughout the background. We don’t have to say they’re in London and what time of year it is that can all happen though the art. There’s a small map at the beginning to show a short journey after Roget’s father dies and they go back to the London area. What’s fun in a children’s book is you can do this layering where not everything has to be spelled. In fact it’s probably more potent if it’s not, if we keep the text fairly svelte and we look at other ways to tell the story. I think that we have that freedom in a book like this is amazing.
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Lisa: You wrote a book about the guy who invented essentially the Macy’s Day Parade and you did it at least in part because you had your own interests in puppetry and marionettes and that media. That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?
Melissa: Yeah, possibly. I have always been interested in three dimensional pieces that look like toys or Rube Goldberg S sculptures, that idea of movement. I had marionettes when I was a kid. My cousins gave them to me in a theater and I remember holding them and I couldn’t wait to take them apart and put them back together again. I had really no interest in the theater of puppetry but I wanted to figure out how they were made and how they moved.
I was actually, the story is that I worked for a toy company called eeBoo and the art director there told me about this man Tony Sarg and she said, “Oh, he’s a great puppeteer and he was a brilliant illustrator. Oh, by the way, he’s the man that invented the Macy’s Parade balloons.”
I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, I have never thought about who invented those parade balloons. The fact that he was a marionette maker as well just seemed so incongruous from this very small detailed movable puppet to these gigantic iconic balloons. When I began to research him there wasn’t a whole lot of information about him. I had to really piece together his story which is exciting. I felt like somebody had put an uncut diamond in my lap that I was really careful about not talking about him too much but still trying to find out information about him.
I just felt it was precious information just that I thought there’s really a book here but I have no idea what it is. In the end, I had really fallen for not only him as an artist but the volume of work he created, the house wares, the work he did for Macy’s, the dishes and all the design. Really he was designer. I loved his illustrations. I loved his puppets. Then the idea of the Macy’s parade I had to find out what was the inception of that? Where did that start? He had his hand in it from the beginning.
The story in book and the story we thought would appeal to kids most is that idea of who was he as a kid, a kid who loved motion and was always rigging up things, making puppets. He had a lot of toys. His grandmother had a toy collection so we start there. Then it just seems so natural that this would be the person that would come up with these iconic balloons. Really he was solving a design problem which I loved. It was incredibly exciting. I still am quite smitten with him.
Yeah and that love of movement and three dimensions I used in my collages the idea of you are walking into his studio. The collages were very three dimensional and they were photographed to give the feeling of what it might be like to be amongst this paraphernalia.
Lisa: His work also was influenced by the blimp.
Melissa: Absolutely. We’re going back to the early 1920s now and the Goodyear Blimp was filled with helium and that gave him the idea for the Macy’s Parade balloons. The first balloons were filled with air and they were paraded down the street propped up with sticks like an Indonesian shadow puppet. It would remind you of that. There were handlers dressed in costumes. These balloons were gigantic really, nothing like anybody had ever seen before, but then they wanted to get the balloons higher. No one had ever made a helium balloon. No one had ever thought of it. He goes back to Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company who made the Goodyear Blimp and they say, “Yeah, we think we can do this.”
What I love about this story is there was no dry run. At a time when no one knew were they going to take off? Were they going to collapse? How much helium did they need? There was none of that. They just were winging it. That’s such a refreshing thought I think in this litigious world of ours that they just went for it. It was like the ultimate performance art really. Yeah, so forevermore there were these parade balloons.
Lisa: You’re not originally from Maine.
Melissa: No, I am a New Jersey native. I came here for a summer job to work at the Jordan Pond House. I cooked there for just a year or two and stayed. Back and forth a little bit from Boston but really from then on my toe was in Maine. I’ve lived here full time a long time. I don’t know you judge it because sometimes it was summers and sometimes it was all the time but yeah for the better part of the last thirty years for sure.
Lisa: What was it about the Jordan Pond House or Acadia or Maine or what brought you up here? What kept bringing you up here until you finally settled in?
Melissa: Well I grew up in suburbia so there was a little bit … There was some woods. There was places to go on our bikes but I remember getting north of Boston and into Maine and it just seemed to go on forever, the woods. It was breathtakingly beautiful. I had spent time at the Jersey Shore but never seen the ocean from that granite craggy coastline. Acadia is just magical and to have the freedom to spend a summer there and have all that downtime to take a hike between lunch and dinner or after dinner you go up a mountain, I think that it’s really wonderful. It’s a really, really wonderful place to land in your early twenties. I never get tired of the landscape.
Lisa: You’re working on a piece about E.B. White?
Melissa: I am. I am. I am incredibly lucky. Talk about landscape. If there was anybody that recreated a sense of place I think it’s E.B. White. His writings of Maine, especially One Man’s Meat. I never get tired of them. They take my breath away with every reading I hear something new and I think that I have absolutely seen Maine through his eyes. I’ve seen it differently. I’ve seen it more acutely, not that I didn’t appreciate it before but it’s almost impossible to read E.B. White and not come away altered in some way. This book that I’m working on is an illustrated biography. It’s heavily illustrated with my artwork, archival photos and a lot of quotes by E.B. White so it’s chronological and it’s in chapters, so thinking it’s about starting age seven or eight up.
It goes from his youth to Cornell University and the genesis of him as a writer and the New Yorker and on. His love of Maine and New York. I think we’ve peppered it with his quotes to give kids first of all an opportunity to read him, read his more adult work which I think is completely accessible for lots of ages. We’ve picked pieces that are appropriate to wherever he was in his life, some are in hindsight, some of right when he was a certain age he wrote them and that’s the quote we’ve used. I think that that gives it, we were talking about depth and the right word I think it’s giving this book the depth we were hoping for. It’s not really a simple biography. It has a lot of layers.
Lisa: It’s really wonderful that I as an adult can sit down and spend ten minutes, fifteen minutes with a children’s book and learn something that I didn’t know anything about before. I mean obviously I’ve heard of the poet, William Carlos Williams and heard of Roget and his thesaurus. I know about the Macy’s Day Parade, but it’s something so simple yet it just expands one’s mind in such an interesting way. The fact that it’s so accessible not just to children but to adults.
Melissa: Yes, thank you. That’s a huge compliment and I think that my editor and publisher would love to hear you say that. We work E.B. White said something I’m not going to get this quote exact but it’s something that children are a demanding audience. They’re the hardest audience. You can’t talk down to children. You have to talk up really. I think that that’s the key is that you can tell stories simply and honestly and it does have and when it is done that way it has a wide appeal. Somebody can now say you were thirteen and you read a River of Words about William Carlos Williams, that’s an invitation to go see more of his poems or read an adult biography.
For a kid a young child maybe six or seven to read that biography, then an opportunity to find other poets, other doctors who did other things. I think they have this wonderful, it’s almost like a web. You land on this one book that makes you want to find out about all sorts of other things, so thank you for saying that.
Lisa: It’s also so important as an adult reading to a child to be able to capture both of them. I mean before a child can read himself to be able to sit down and have a book that you both enjoy and maybe for different reasons but it’s something that we don’t think about. We think okay our audience is kids. Somehow you’ve managed to pull both of those in with these books.
Melissa: Thank you. It’s intuitive. I don’t think about that when I’m creating the art. I’m thinking what do I like? Here’s another E.B. White quote. He wrote for an audience of one. I would like to think that when I really am sure how to approach a book I am doing it for … It is for me knowing that if I nail it everyone will love it, but I’m the ultimate critic. I shoot for making art that pleases me to no end that I’m really engaged with and that I will go to any length for. It’s not a job that way, it’s a lifestyle.
For instance, just an aside with the right word I knew on the cover I needed it to look like a book. I needed it to look a thesaurus, but I didn’t have the ability to work to make a leather binding that might look like an eighteenth century binding. I went to great lengths to find the right book binder to create that for me and other pieces in the book. Now that small detail is everything. You just don’t cut any corners.
I think in the end all of those details come together to make the book sing in a way that might not if you just were under deadline and just going to get out. I’m not really saying that very well what I want to [say that 00:55:34]. I think it just shows up that you take that kind of care in crafting the book.
Lisa: As I was reading about you learning more about you, I was very glad to hear that you enjoy doing spirograph and colorforms and paint by number kits when you were younger. These are all things that I remember doing myself. Actually, I went and bought a spirograph just the other day so I could do it again as something year old older lady here.
Melissa: That’s fantastic.
Lisa: I think that the nice thing about things like that is that they make art accessible to all of us even those of us who maybe don’t feel like we have an artistic bone in our bodies.
Melissa: That’s a great way to say it actually because each of those things that you just talked … They’re toys and we’re playing. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is. The fun of it is learning how to use the tool or play with those shapes and really you’re designing. You’re creating a design in spite of yourself and that’s a fantastic thing so you’re learning two dimension design, pattern, texture, that’s all there is to do to become an artist. I mean you have to play with those concepts. I think those toys are amazing. I hope kids are still playing with them.
Lisa: Well they are at my house.
Melissa: That’s awesome.
Lisa: It’s not just me even though my children are all older now, they all look at my spirograph and they all want to take out their pens when they come over. Well it’s really been a pleasure to speak with you today.
Melissa: Thank you.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Melissa Sweet who has illustrated more than a hundred children’s books. Melissa how can people find out about the work that you’re doing?
Melissa: You can find me at melissasweet.net and when you’re on my site you’ll find my books and it’s easy to find me on Amazon as well.
Lisa: Well congratulations on your well deserved Caldecott Award and thank you so much for coming in and talking to us today.
Melissa: Thank you Lisa. It has been great.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number one eighty Illustrating Maine. Our guests have included Scott Nash and Melissa Sweet. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Read about Scott in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as [bountiful1 00:58:05] on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Main Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Illustrating Maine Show. In upcoming weeks, look forward to our conversations with Anne Gable Allaire, Bill Allaire, and Deborah Heffernan and learn how their lives were forever changed by the heart transplantation process. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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