Transcription of Bringing Books & Art to Life #254
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Garry: Making art, probably of any kind, but the kind I do, it’s a very organic process, and it’s ongoing. One’s constantly learning new things, rejecting other things, establishing a visual vocabulary, and reaching for … This is why I think the look of work changed. You reach a point where you use up that vocabulary, you spoke as well as you can with it visually.
Chris: That really led into doing the illustrations for the children’s books. It was sort of a natural progression, but it was tough at first, I mean, it was, if the phone didn’t ring, I thought, “Well, I’m going to have to go work at the call center, otherwise, we’re going to starve,” but luckily, knock on wood, it worked out.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show #254, “Bringing Books and Art to Life,” airing for the first time on Sunday, July 31, 2016. Authors, illustrators, and artists fill many roles, from teaching to creating. We enjoy some of their creations in the books we read, both as children and adults. Today, we speak with Debra Spark and Garry Mitchell, an author and an artist who are also college professors and have been happily married for many years. We also speak with popular Maine-based children’s author/illustrator Chris Van Dusen. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa: Today, it is my great pleasure to have in the studio with me a married couple who are both in the creative field, but both also teach. This is Debra Spark, an author, and Garry Mitchell, an artist. Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty, and the recently reissued Coconuts for the Saint. She teaches at Colby College and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth. Thanks for coming in today.
Debra: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: We also have her husband, Garry Mitchell, who is an artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Workcenter, among other places, and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and the Arizona Arts Commission, and the Maryland Commission on the Arts. Garry teaches studio art at Colby College. Thanks for coming in.
Garry: Thank you.
Lisa: We’re borrowing you from Colby College, the two of you, today.
Debra: Yeah.
Garry: Well, actually, I’m on sabbatical, so, yes, you’re borrowing me, but Colby seems extra far away at the moment.
Lisa: Why are you on sabbatical? What are you doing these days, Garry?
Garry: I am working a lot in my studio. I’m experimenting, I’m trying things that either I haven’t had time to do, or am now making the time to do, so essentially some large-scale paintings, and I also make monotypes, which are much smaller.
Lisa: Debra, I know that you are getting ready to release a book very soon.
Debra: Yes, yes, yeah. August 22 is the release date.
Lisa: Tell me about that book.
Debra: I need a quick way to describe it. It starts, a man from Maine goes to Logan Airport to pick up his daughter, who he’s never met before, because his wife left him when she was still pregnant seventeen years earlier, took the daughter to France, and there’s been a lot of battles, and he’s ever been able to see her, and then very abruptly one night, the ex-wife calls and says, “She’s coming to America, and you’re going to take her for the summer.” He goes down to pick her up, and she never arrives, and not only does she never arrive, the wife, who, up until then, called repeatedly at night making harassing phone calls, stops making the harassing phone calls, and he never hears from her ever again. It’s sort of about the mystery of what happened.
I based it, I know three people who had really short, really crazy first marriages, and I sort of combined details of each of their first marriages, and it goes largely backward in time, so that scene at the airport is sort of the first scene in the book, and then it goes backwards, so you figure out what happened to all these people, how they ended up where they are.
Lisa: What I’m really interested in, in both of you, is that you both teach, so there’s this very outward and intentional energy around teaching. You both also have, you essentially have to promote your work as an author and as an artist, but then there’s also this enormous piece of each of you that requires creativity, and that’s a very different space than many people live within. To be able to come up with what you just said, Debra, is more challenging, I think, than people realize. How does that work? How do you balance all of these different things and all of these different roles, and being the parents of a sixteen-year-old?
Debra: We actually do it in very different ways, and I think part of the way we’re able to do it is that we take different roles in the family. Actually, why don’t you say … Maybe you should say what you do first, because I think Garry is better at making time for his art than I am, but he also does a lot of things in the household that allow me to do what I call my “for money work,” so why don’t you say.
Garry: Oh, well, I’m the cook, the designating cook, which is something I really love to do. I’m kind of an intuitive cook, so I just need recipes as a starting point, essentially, so I do that. You know, the various household chores that, as Debra says, she might not have time to get to, which is all good with me. She has a much more full and active professional life than I do, so I’m there with more time. As far as my work, it’s just something I’ve done for so long that it’s a matter of habit, and if I go more than a very short time without putting in some time in the studio, then I’ll start to get restless, so there’s a kind of a check and balance system there, between our household life and the studio. The only other thing I would say, as far as teaching goes, it supports my studio work in really obvious ways, and, at times, not so obvious, but I see that as kind of an extension of my studio practice, really.
Lisa: I’ve been watching Colby as it really takes on this increased visibility in the art world, and not just within the state of Maine, but really all over the country. It’s very impressive, the new art museum, and I’ve spoken with multiple artists who have actually had undergraduate degrees from Colby in art. Actually, the same is true in creative writing, I believe. What do you think is driving that?
Debra: I’m sorry, what are you asking specifically? What’s driving the art?
Lisa: Why is it so important to Colby to invest in art?
Debra: You can answer about the museum better than I can.
Garry: Well, the museum, as you know, with the gift from the Lunder family, which necessitated the extension to the museum in its former state, the museum has become a real jewel in the crown of Colby College.
Debra: Really, and the state, because it’s such a fantastic museum.
Garry: Right, and it’s well-funded, and it’s great for any of us teaching studio art. The studio I teach in is, it’s the third floor of the all-glass museum annex, so I literally walk through at least the lobby of the museum every single day, and I take my students down there, and if it’s a low moment in the class, that’s always kind of an ace in the hole, because there’s always something that has to do with what we’re studying. I don’t know if that’s the answer you’re looking for-
Debra: You know, they just acquired the Picassos. Did you see that? That’s, again, the Lunder family doing that, so the museum sort of is driving it, but then, obviously, the students have all the benefit of it.
Lisa: There’s also a lot going on in art as writing.
Debra: Yes, yes, and actually, at least for one more year, I’m the director of the program in Creative Writing, and one of the things that the program has, which is really nice, is a really lively visiting writers series. We bring in a lot of people; actually, just in terms of just keeping it in Maine, Richard Ford came this year, and that was a really great evening, and the president, the … Well, I guess he’s not entirely new, because he’s been there for a few years, but the president had this amazing dinner actually in the museum for him afterwards, with the students, so sort of made it even more of an event than it might have been otherwise, so I think that was really special for the students and for the professors, and the community, because there were a lot of community members there too.
Lisa: In addition to you, there are multiple other people who teach within the Creative Writing department who are published authors. Sarah Braunstein is one person whose name comes to mind.
Debra: I’m sorry?
Lisa: Sarah Braunstein.
Debra: Yes, Sarah’s wonderful, she’s wonderful, I’m so glad we have her with us.
Lisa: Do you think that makes a difference, to be a published author and to know what that process is like, as far as teaching?
Debra: Yeah, and it’s sort of, you have to, now. The standard good practices is you wouldn’t really hire anyone who wasn’t themselves not only a practicing author, but a well-published author, at this point. Actually, like with Sarah, my last class, I was teaching Intermediate Fiction this year, so some of my students will go on to have Sarah for Advanced Fiction next year, so in my last class, I had us all read a Sarah story from the New Yorker. I kind of thought it would be nice for them to be exposed to their work, and to look at the story as carefully as they possibly could, to see some of her strategies and her thoughts before they ended up having her as a teacher.
Lisa: I think I read that story.
Debra: Well, she’s had two. She had one, I think about a year ago, and then one about a year before that.
Lisa: It must have been the one that was about a year ago. I was impressed just with the fact that she had a story in the New Yorker.
Debra: She’s doing incredibly well, she’s a great writer, and as a teacher, she’s just a wonderful, bubbly, lively presence. The students love her.
Lisa: You’ve written an entire book, that I’ve actually read, about fiction writing, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and I found it really interesting, because you wove in your own personal experiences with what you were talking about when it comes to writing. Specifically, I was interested in the conversation about your sister.
Debra: My younger sister?
Lisa: Well, I think that you have a sister that passed away from breast cancer.
Debra: Yes, yeah, yeah, and since I know you’ve had breast cancer, I sort of want to jump in and say right away that that was so many years ago, and before breast cancer treatment has changed so, so dramatically, and also, as you know, obviously, because you’re a doctor, she got breast cancer when she was 21, so obviously that’s highly unusual, and it’s a much more aggressive disease in young women than older women. I’m sure if we knew now, and I’m sure if doctors knew now, what we didn’t know then, we would have treated more aggressively from the start. I think we had made the mistake of going lumpectomy/radiation route initially, I think, thinking she was a young woman, and losing her breast, and that just seemed seemed so horrible then, and I think if it had been treated aggressively from the start, maybe she would still be with us.
Lisa: Does that continue to impact the work that you do?
Debra: I think yeah, you know, everyone in my family, obviously a loss like that, a loss that comes really early, but I do think my second novel was sort of too much based on her, and almost everyone in my family, and actually, most people who have read my work, I mean, who have read all my work, are like, “Eh, that’s not your best book,” and I think maybe I was a little too close to having lost her to write about having lost her. Aside from an essay I wrote about her, which I’m proud of, I think probably I have to write about that experience a little more indirectly to write about it effectively.
Lisa: Is it true that creative work evolves over time, so that something that you might have written about, or some art you might have done when you were in your twenties, is not going to look like something that you will have written about, or that you do when you’re in your forties and fifties?
Garry: I think definitely so. I think that making art, probably of any kind, but the kind I do, it’s a very organic process, and it’s ongoing. One’s constantly learning new things, rejecting other things, establishing a visual vocabulary, and reaching for … This is why I think the look of work changed. You reach a point where you use up that vocabulary, you spoke as well as you can with it visually, and it necessitates … I mean, in my case, it necessitates a change, so you’ll … I’m always a little suspicious when an artist’s work looks unchanged over a period of decades. Generally, I think it’s totally possible, I have nothing against it. Generally, I think it’s from a lack of really pushing onward, and that’s the most difficult thing to do, especially if what you have been doing with your former vocabulary is accepted, people pay money for it, and you reach the point where you can’t make that look of work anymore, you just have to take a deep breath and see what comes from it, and establish a new vocabulary. That’s the change in making, and in the look of the work.
Debra: Actually, Garry and I don’t really ever collaborate on our work, but last year, I wrote a lecture. Actually, all those essays started as lectures for this graduate program in North Carolina that I teach in, and last year, my lecture was called “Jump Already,” and it was about literary artists, but also visual artists who get to a point in their creative life when they find themselves sort of doing and redoing maybe the same thing. I wanted to look at those moments when people have a huge jump forward. I was looking at literary artists mostly, but Garry, and some of Garry’s art colleagues up at Colby, pointed me to some artists who had done that, who had work that you could see, since you can look at a whole career in visual art in a way you can’t in literary art, more quickly, you could see they’d been working in one way for years and years and years, and all of a sudden, there’s this break, and this whole new thing is going on.
I was trying to figure out in my lecture, and now I’m kind of forgetting my conclusions, but what is it that gets a person to the next stage? Especially people who have been working effectively. Rothko would be an example. He was a very successful artist, but then there’s a certain point where he makes this sort of break, and he makes those late paintings which are the paintings that everyone knows him for, the, I guess you call them color block paintings, or … What do you call those?
Garry: They pre-date some of the color field paintings, I mean, that’s the, for lack of a better word, the category. I’m sure an art historian would beg to differ with that-
Debra: I think they come after color field, because Clyfford Still and people like that were already doing it.
Garry: That’s what I mean, I said they pre-date-
Debra: No, they post-date it.
Garry: Oh, they post-date. Thank you. That’s the great thing about living with a writer. You can stand corrected, and justifiably so.
Lisa: I think it’s fascinating to watch, actually. I think every couple has an interesting back-and-forth, but to watch somebody who is an artist and somebody who is a writer, but both of you have also other vocabularies. You teach documentary radio.
Debra: Radio, yeah, up at Colby.
Lisa: There’s an audio component there too. It seems as if you each have completely different languages, or at least dialects, that you’re constantly choosing from.
Debra: I think so. I think when we first got together, which was many, many years ago, I had this idea that we would collaborate on this and that, and we cannot collaborate at all. I mean, we can’t collaborate on cooking, we’re just, we don’t work together well in the kitchen. It’s sort of interesting-
Garry: It’s just a small kitchen.
Debra: … that we’re like parallel play people, like kids. We sort of can play together in the same room, but we can’t work on a project together, which is interesting. I think other artist couples are able to, but we don’t.
Lisa: Well, I mean, that’s okay, really. There’s not really a right or a wrong way to do anything, as long as you’ve developed your own rhythm.
Garry: I know, generally speaking, with regard to my own work, I know things that Debra … I don’t know, but there are things I suspect she might like, and I know there are things she doesn’t like. For example, I’m working on some fairly large-scale paintings, and there’s a lot of black in them, which is neither here nor there, but I know she would not be in any way interested in those paintings. It’s not that I … It just gets factored in, and I know what will appeal to her.
She’s only going to respond to it, as anyone would, based on her own subjectivity, but the payoff for that, I think I get better compensated, because she reads to me everything she writes, and while I’m really a very poor writer, I have to admit, I listen as sort of every person, and when something sounds really corny or ridiculous, I might ask her, “Do you want this character to be obnoxious or annoying?” If she says no, I’ll say, “Well, they really are.” I can give her little bits of things like that, but absolutely, obviously, nothing to do with the craft. However, I get to hear it all through its various stages and drafts.
Debra: Actually, it’s helpful for me to read my work out loud, just because as I’m reading it out loud, I often hear things that I didn’t realize I’d done wrong. It used to be I couldn’t let anything out of the house without reading it to him, so if I wrote a book review, or actually my Maine Home+Design articles, I just couldn’t, I had to read them out loud. Now I don’t write book reviews anymore, and I don’t read my Maine Home+Design articles to you anymore.
Garry: Oh, and I so miss it. I’m being phased out.
Debra: You can read them when they appear. I used to need to; I think I got a certain amount of confidence about my work that isn’t my fiction, that I could send it out the door without Garry listening. I’m actually working on a Chekhov lecture right now, and I don’t think I can make Garry listen, because I don’t think he could stand it.
Garry: It’s like forty pages long.
Debra: No, it’s not. It’s long, though.
Lisa: That actually raises an interesting point, at least one that I’m not sure that many people think about, and that is, you write for Maine Home+Design, it’s a very different sort of writing than fiction writing. How do you move back and forth between?
Debra: I think they use different muscles. I actually love writing for Maine Home+Design, as people here know. It’s actually, when he was talking about painting every day, I don’t write fiction every day, and I often feel anxious about it. Most people will tell you, most writers, I think, will tell you you have to write every day, it’s important to write every day, but I’m the kind of person who cannot do my art until I’ve finished my professional responsibilities. That means I tend to write much more over the summer, and in January, and being able to do the other kind of writing, the writing for the magazine, and my lecture writing, and other things sort of keeps my fingers still doing it, because I don’t like not writing, but I can’t get to “my,” quote-unquote, writing, often, until the semester has ended.
Lisa: Well, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I have a hard time switching back and forth sometimes between being a doctor and doing writing for Maine Magazine and working on the radio show. I feel like you’re right, there’s many different muscles that we use, and sometimes the switch is harder than others. When you talk about the things that we should do when it comes to being a writer, people say you should write every day, you should write your fiction every day, I’m sure there’s an equivalent in art, can that sometimes make, especially college kids, can that just make people feel a little anxious if they feel like they’re not following the rules?
Debra: The rules, yeah.
Garry: Well, I don’t think there really should be any rules. I have artist friends that work on projects and work in stretches, where they’re doing a particular thing, and then they’re doing what appears to be particularly nothing, but there are things going on. Because I have a particular routine, it works for me, although I have to admit, I waste a lot of time. I don’t think, I’m not much for one, for making rules about how things need to be done in a creative adventure.
Lisa: How do you feel about that, Debra?
Debra: About making rules?
Lisa: Well, about, are there rules, and should people follow them?
Debra: To me, it’s like, I’d like to exercise every day, and I don’t exercise every day. I feel like there are these things that I want to be doing, but I just don’t have the time, and I … I mean, I do want to be doing it, but I just can’t, I’ve never been able to figure out how to do what I need to do professionally, and in the family, and the other pieces. I just think there’s a few too many pieces to try to attend to, so I feel like, just do my best with that sort of thing. Certainly, I wish I was writing every day, and I wish I was exercising every day. I just don’t get to it.
Garry: That notion of time, I think, to do something, to choose to do something, for Debra, to exercise, it means making choices not to do other things, so I realize that for all the time I take in my little world in the studio, there are plenty of things I’m choosing not to do, and that’s the necessity. It’s not really a rule, but I would say to my students, you have to do a certain amount of work, especially since I’m giving them projects, but there’s no real one way for them to get there, I don’t think. I stand to the far side of leniency, I guess.
Debra: I’m probably on the other side. I feel like I feel like a lot of financial responsibility to the family, obviously, so that I feel like right now, I have to make these choices, which is to … I’m not full-time at Colby, I’m three-fifths time, and then I work for the magazine, and then I work for this graduate program in North Carolina, so juggling all those three things, and making the fiction, and trying to be a good friend, and take care of my son, I probably need one fewer ball up in the air, but when I think, well, what do I want to take away, it’s not … I really love writing for the magazine, I love teaching in North Carolina. In some ways, I wouldn’t mind cutting back on my Colby work, but that’s not possible, because that’s health insurance, that’s the bigger part of the paycheck, so sort of where it’s at is the best solution I’ve come up with.
Lisa: It seems like you’re describing something that a lot of people need to consider if they’re going to be artists, really of any sort, is that most people are not, right out of the gate, going to be able to produce works of art that consistently fund their lives.
Debra: Yeah. I mean, you know, most people don’t … We’re friends with Rick Russo, I was just listening to him on Terry Gross last night, I was like, you know, he’s an artist who makes a living at his art, but most artists don’t, and in this culture and this time, teaching has been for many artists, although not all, the paycheck. It’s very time-consuming, and with a college, especially like Colby, they don’t, and rightly so, they don’t want you to just come and teach your class and grade the papers, they want you really involved and completely available to the kids. Certainly, if I send Aidan away to an expensive college like that, I want his professors to be super involved, and writing long comments, and really there, so it’s a lot. It’s a lot.
Lisa: I wish that we had hours and hours more time, because I am really fascinated by this conversation. It’s something that kind of meanders its way through my mind on an ongoing basis, just the balance, the balance between the responsibilities and the creativity, and the balance between two people in a family who are trying to make everything work. The one last question I wanted to ask you, Garry, is you alluded to space, space in a life. In this very delicate balance that we’re always trying to achieve, there is a need for space in which it seems as though we’re doing nothing, but really, there’s some fallow ground that’s, something is happening there. How do you make that work? How do you create that space?
Garry: Well, it’s kind of built in, I think, to other spaces. I’ve said to Debra, and she would be rightfully annoyed at me, a few times, when she’s asked me something, “I’m never not doing anything,” and I don’t think anyone is really-
Debra: You said that, or I said that?
Garry: Well, I might have said it. We’re all occupied with thousands of complicated concerns, and agendas are always circulating around, and I think I would just revisit for a second what I said. The time is what I make it, and I don’t feel like I’m at a disadvantage, but there are other things that I’m choosing not to do so that even if there is a less active time than what I might be doing in my studio, I’m still more thinking about the studio work than any number of other things, but I’m aware of that. I just have to shift gears where it seems appropriate. I hope that answers your question.
Lisa: Yeah, no, I don’t think there is any one answer to the question, I think it is kind of the way that we each interpret our lives and, I guess, commit to whatever answers we come up with as individuals. Seems like it, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Garry: True.
Debra: How do you … I know I’m not supposed to ask you a question, but how do you do it? I mean, it seems like you’ve got as many balls up in the air as I’m saying that I have, so how … I know you run every morning, and run marathons, and …
Lisa: Well, you know, I think it actually has something to do with what Garry was alluding to. I don’t know, it’s the draw of feeling antsy if you don’t sort of fill a certain number of buckets, I guess. I think that for me, I find some different satisfaction out of each of the things that I do, and it would be hard for me to give up one of them, because each of them kind of pings a different set of neurons in my brain, I guess. It’s almost like I … Yeah. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Debra: Yeah.
Lisa: I think that in Maine, we’re very fortunate, because we can live lives that have multiple different layers to them-
Debra: Aspects.
Lisa: Aspects, yeah. I’ve been very intrigued by this conversation, and I’m really grateful that you took the time out of your very busy lives to come and talk with us today.
Garry: It’s a pleasure.
Lisa: Well, you are … You guys are so prolific, and I can tell that you’re just so invested in the teaching, and the raising of your son, and I give you a lot of credit for it. It’s something that requires a lot of persistence and passion.
Debra: Thank you, Lisa.
Garry: Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Debra Spark, who is the author of numerous books, and also a teacher at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and also a teacher at Colby College, and also her husband, Garry Mitchell, who is an artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally, who has received multiple fellowships and grants, and teaches studio art at Colby College, and they both live in North Yarmouth with their son, Aidan.
Debra: Aidan, yes.
Lisa: Thanks for coming in.
Debra: Thank you.
Garry: Thank you very much.
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Lisa: My next guest is an individual who I think is pretty well known to Mainers, especially Maine children, little Mainers. I first became aware of Chris Van Dusen when I was working with Raising Readers, because a couple of our Raising Readers books were yours. This is Chris Van Dusen. He is a children’s book author and illustrator based in Camden. His first book, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee, was published in 2000, and he has since written and illustrated seven other books and illustrated eight more. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for coming in and talking with me today.
Chris: Well, thanks, thanks for having me today.
Lisa: Children’s books, I love them, and we were talking before we came on the air, all of our kids are old enough now that they probably wouldn’t tolerate us sitting and reading the children’s books to them, but it’s such a fun thing, it’s such a fun thing to be able to share that experience with little ones.
Chris: It is. Reading, reading aloud, especially, I write and illustrate picture books, and those are the ones that really, that’s when you want to have a kid in your lap, to read the picture books, because the illustrations are large, and the stories are engaging. It’s a great experience.
Lisa: I think I was reading in an interview that you did that one of your inspirations was Dr. Seuss.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: I think you had said something about, “I learned how to do this rhyming mostly by reading Dr. Seuss. My wife would be reading this very serious book, and I would be reading Dr. Seuss with the same amount of intensity.”
Chris: That’s right. We’d get in bed at night, and she’d pick up a novel, and I’d pick up, like, Horton Hears a Who, and we’d be both reading with the same intensity. I did, So far, all the books that I’ve written have been rhyming books, and so I did study a lot of Dr. Seuss books, and I had a lot already, and what I didn’t have, I went out and bought, and so I just would read them over and over again. The only problem with that is sometimes you sort of pick up Dr. Seuss’s voice instead of your own, and so when I started … I think I was writing my third book, which is called If I Built a Car, and that was sort of using a formula that Dr. Seuss had where it starts with the main character imagines something, and then it turns into a fantasy, and each page becomes a part of that fantasy, and then it ends, he’s back in the same place, and it’s all been his imagination.
When I first started writing that book, I wrote a couple pages, and I read them, and I think it was my wife, Lori, that said, “I think you’d better read some Dr. Seuss again, because I think you’re stealing his voice,” and sure enough, it did sound way too much like Dr. Seuss, so I had to back off and find my own way, and eventually did.
Lisa: I wonder, I could be wrong on this, but it seems like those must operate slightly different parts of your brain, to be doing the rhyming and the words, and doing the illustrating that you’re doing to go with the rhyming and the words.
Chris: Right, well, a lot of times, if I’m thinking about a book, I’ll think about an illustration first, and I will pace out the story, and sometimes even do little spot illustrations on a page that has the … I call it the “story map,” or something like that. I sometimes do little sketches, and then I write the words according to what’s going to happen on that page, so I plot out the story first, and then I write according to what’s going to happen on the page. Actually, the visual and the writing go hand-in-hand, but I actually have to write the story completely before I do the final illustrations, if that makes sense.
Lisa: If you map it all out, do you then go back and get more specific with the words that you’re using as you’re-
Chris: Right.
Lisa: I see.
Chris: What I do is I basically have a piece of paper that I draw rectangles, and those indicate the spreads, the two pages open in the book, and most children’s books are 32 pages, because they print them on these sheets of 8 pages, so it’s mostly 32 pages, sometimes it goes 40, I’ve got, my Circus Ship, and I wrote and illustrated a book called King Hugo’s Huge Ego, which was also a 40-page book, but mostly, it’s 32 pages, and so I just have to make sure my whole story fits on 32 pages. Sometimes, I’ll just write on these squares, you know, “Mr. Magee drives down to the harbor,” and then “he goes in boat out to the islands,” or something like that, and I’ll just sort of indicate what’s going to happen on those pages, and then I will write specifically to those pages.
Lisa: There’s an interesting kind of fitting together of different art forms.
Chris: Yeah, and writing in rhyme is a really weird thing too, because you can’t, well, at least I can’t sit down and start with the first page and write all the way through, because I’ll sometimes think of a rhyme that works best for the end of the book, so I’ll jot that down, and so … I’m sort of working on this new story right now, and I’ve got all these little scraps of paper all around the place, and sometimes I’ll think of one first thing in the morning, and I’ll write it down on my bedside stand, I’ll put it … When it comes time to putting the whole story together, it’s almost like a big puzzle, I have all these scraps of paper, and I just have to make sure they mesh all together and work with the story. It’s not a way I would recommend working, to be honest, but it works for me.
Lisa: Isn’t that kind of an important point, that it works for you? There are always people who ask questions of artists and writers and illustrators, “How do you do this, what’s the process,” thinking that they might emulate it, but you might not find a process from a specific person that you want to emulate yourself.
Chris: Yeah. If people ask me for advice on writing books, I don’t say, “Do it my way,” because it’s, like I said, like you just said, it works for me, but it may not necessarily work for them. I’m always amazed when I hear about authors, for, like, novels, that say, “Well, I never know where the characters are going to take me.” That’s another way of working that just sort of baffles me. I have to lay everything out, and most of my stories are pretty traditional, I mean, you know, they introduce a character, conflict, there’s sort of a climax, resolution. It’s a fairly traditional story arc. A lot of children’s books now are more like long jokes, or don’t have the plot. I still rely heavily on a plot, and so that’s just the way I write it and construct a story.
Lisa: You were inspired to write a book about a true ship that actually capsized in, I believe, a large storm that happened off the coast of Maine, leaving an entire circus, and all the animals in it, stranded and swimming for their lives. After reading this real story that occurred, and I’m not sure exactly when, but in-
Chris: 1836, yeah.
Lisa: 1836. There are times when you take things from reality, and you actually make something out of them.
Chris: Yeah, and I actually really like to do that. I’m always searching for the next hidden Maine story or little gem that might be fleshed out to a story. The book you’re referring to is called The Circus Ship, and it came out in 2009, and it’s probably my most popular book, of all the books I’ve written and illustrated. A lot of people really, really respond to that book. You’re right, I read about this in a magazine about thirty years ago, this story about this shipwreck, or, actually, a ship caught fire, it caught fire off of Vinalhaven, and it was carrying a full circus. It was a huge story at the time, I mean, it made headlines all over the world, really, because it was so unusual to have an elephant swimming in Penobscot Bay.
It was also a real tragic story, and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to turn it into a story that was appropriate for kids. In fact, I have a funny story. I live in Camden, and I was walking down the street one day, and I ran into a friend of mine, Matt, and he grew up on, I think he spent some time on Vinalhaven. He said, “What are you working on?” and I said, “Well, I’m working on a new book about a shipwreck that happened off the coast of Maine. It’s based on a true shipwreck,” and he goes, “It’s not the Royal Tar, is it?” That’s the name of the boat that sank, and I said, “Yeah, how’d you know?” and he said, “Well, I grew up on Vinalhaven, that’s still part of their thing.” He said, “How are you going to do that?” and I said, “Well, I’ve changed it around a lot.”
Basically what I did, I just took the idea of a ship carrying a circus sinking off the coast of Maine, and then I sort of approached it like, “Well, what if instead of the ship catching fire, what if the animals swam to an island?” I sort of took the basic idea and built a story more appropriate for kids around that.
Lisa: You actually have memorized some of the story. Can you share it with us?
Chris: Sure, sure. Let’s see if I remember. It starts: “Five miles off the coast of Maine and slightly overdue, a circus ship was steaming south in fog as thick as stew. On board were fifteen animals who traveled to and fro. The next day it was Boston for another circus show. The captain, Mr. Carrington, was honest and sincere. He thought that they should drop the hook and wait for things to clear. But Mr. Paine, the circus boss, was terribly demanding. He stomped up to the helm where Captain Carrington was standing, and screamed, ‘Don’t stop. Keep going. I’ve got a show to do. Just get me down to Boston Town tomorrow, sir, by two.'” It goes on from there.
Lisa: I love it! I can just picture you actually sharing this story with children, which is something that you do a lot of. You do a lot of school visits.
Chris: I do, I do. I do a lot of school visits, a lot of library visits, and actually, my Mr. Paine voice, I didn’t want to blow out your microphone here, but my Mr. Paine voice can get really loud, and the kids at the front row, their hair goes back, but no, it’s really fun. It’s a fun read-aloud book, and if you’re not familiar with the book, one of the last illustrations is a giant, it’s almost like a game within the book, because it’s a large double-spread illustration of this town scene, and all the people on the island have hidden the animals from the mean circus boss, who came back to the island to claim his animals. Kids just love to find all the animals hidden in this one picture.
Lisa: You were born, from what I understand, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1960, in Portland.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Maine Med.
Lisa: Did you think when you were younger … Obviously not when you were born, that’s a little too young, but did you think when you were younger that doing illustration and writing books would be in your future?
Chris: Well, drawing was one of the things I always did, and the more I did it, I realized that it was the one thing I could do with a little bit of success. When I was in elementary school, middle school, high school, I kept drawing while a lot of my friends didn’t think drawing was cool anymore. I just kept drawing, and I was the guy who did the posters for the science fair, and the concert programs, and things like that. When it came time to graduate from high school, I realized that was the thing I wanted to do, and so I went to art school.
I actually studied fine art painting, I thought I would be a, my idea at the time was to be a college painting professor, and so I’d have my summers off, and I’d paint, and I’d teach in the winter, but that didn’t exactly work out that way, and so I also took some illustration courses while I was at school, and it was good, because I could fall back and rely on that, and that’s what I’ve done. I really love it, and I still use the skills and the lessons I’ve learned in my fine art, and I’ve applied it to the illustration.
Lisa: Who are some of your inspirations, as far as artists are concerned?
Chris: For fine artists, some of the painters that I’m really inspired by are Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer. They’re all from Maine actually. Some of the realists. As far as books go, I’m probably most inspired by two, and Dr. Seuss, as you mentioned, mostly for writing, and Robert McCloskey for the illustrations. He didn’t really write that many books, I think total eight books, but he won the Caldecott twice, he won the Caldecott Honor like three times, I mean, it was ridiculously, how good he was, and as a kid, I used to just pore over his illustrations. There was so much detail, there were so many things to look at, and it was such a sense of place, when you picked up his books and you saw Sal and Jane running along the shoreline, and waving up at the osprey flying over, you just wanted to be there. It was just a place you wanted to be, and so I just really connected with those books, and I still do, I just love those stories, and especially those illustrations.
Lisa: What was your favorite Robert McCloskey?
Chris: I’d have to say One Morning in Maine. I just really love it. Again, for the reason I just mentioned, it really had an incredible sense of space and place, and I just wanted to be there, I wanted to be on that island, I wanted Dad to row me into Bucks Harbor and get ice cream, and, you know, it was just a great … It’s a very simple story, but it’s just so heartwarming, and I think it’s one of the perfect children’s books.
Lisa: It’s interesting to me, because children books, maybe it’s something that we think it’s, oh, it’s just something the little kids like, and there’s no staying power, but you’ve just described, for McCloskey, obviously, that’s one great, and I think Margaret Wise Brown, and, recently, Dahlov Ipcar, actually, some of her art has been incorporated into children’s books. Actually, these books become classics for us, even as adults, and we read them to our children, sometimes our grandchildren. To be an illustrator and have that kind of an impact over time, that’s really kind of a gift.
Chris: It is, it is, and I would love to have my books stay around for 75 years, like I think Make Way for Ducklings is 75 years old this year, something like that, and it’s still such a great book. A lot of the ones you just mentioned have the ties to Maine, and, yeah, those stories still resonate. I mean, Blueberries for Sal, it’s just the perfect story, it’s just … They’re great, they’re great books. They’re great books, and if they stand the test of time, that’s a real testament.
Lisa: We’ve spoken to other illustrators, Scott Nash is one, and he’s-
Chris: I love Scott.
Lisa: Yeah, I think he’s really great, and I love the fact that he and his wife are both so into creation, but also the business of art, which is, I think, an interesting balance that is hard for all of us to try to navigate sometimes. One of the things that he has been passionate about recently is the work that’s going on at MECA, the Maine College of Art, and the illustration program there. I wonder if you have thoughts about that, about the fact that we are doing such a great job now of making this art form available to people right within our state.
Chris: Yeah, I think Scott’s actually started the illustration department at MECA, which is great, and a lot of my friends who are also children’s book authors and illustrators are now on staff down there. I probably would be if I lived in Portland, but I’m up in Camden. I think it’s great, and I think it’s especially important that Scott has formed that department using professionals in the field, people that are actually out there in the trenches, doing the work, because they can pass that knowledge on what it’s like, you know, when an art director says, “I need sketches by this day,” and you have to make the revisions like that. I mean, it’s real-world stuff that they’re teaching down there at MECA, and I think it’s a really strong program. Yeah, I think it’s amazing.
I actually went and talked to some of the kids a couple years ago, when they were doing a circus poster idea, because years ago, I had done a circus poster for Ringling Bros. Actually, that was through Scott too, Scott was the one who got me that job. I went down and showed the circus poster and some of the sketches, and some of the work I had done for that, and it was Jamie Hogan’s class, Jamie Hogan is an illustrator, lives out on Peaks Island, and she was the teacher, I think she’s still teaching there. She would take her class every year to when the … One of the circuses, it wasn’t Ringling, it was … I can’t remember the name of the circus, but they would come to Portland every year, and the students would go observe the circus, and then do a circus poster based on the circus. They’re teaching real-world stuff, which I think is really, really important.
Lisa: How about the business of creativity, because I think this is something that not everybody gets as much of an education in. I mean, I’m very close to a couple of people who go to the Savannah College of Art and Design-
Chris: Great school.
Lisa: I think they do talk about the business of living as an artist, and putting your work out there, and actually getting compensated for it, but it seems like it’s complicated sometimes.
Chris: Well, it is a little complicated. I have a friend up in the Mid Coast area who writes and illustrates books, and she always said, and I agree with her, she said, “This is my job, this is what I do.” That’s how I approach it too. I have my studio at my house, and when I’m under a deadline, when I’m working on a project, I have office hours. I go out and try to be out there by 9:00 in the morning, and if I’m on deadline, sometimes I work until late at night. I approach it like a job, but, and this is going to sound like an oxymoron, but I don’t think of it as a job, because it’s so fun.
What I get to do is just stay home and draw these incredible pictures, and, well … I don’t know if they’re that incredible, but to be able to draw subject matter that’s really fun, like for the Mercy Watson books, I remember I did a whole book that was a pig dressed up in a pink dress, and it was just, how many people get to stay home and draw princess pigs all day long? It’s really fun. There are times when the deadlines get a little bit much, and I am working until 1:00 in the morning, and frantically trying to get some work out, but for the most part, I’m so lucky, and I’m so blessed to be able to stay home and do what I do.
Lisa: Tell me about starting out. What was that like for you? What was it like to be a young artist, and trying to get your work out into the world?
Chris: I actually was working for a greeting card company … Well, let’s go back before that. I went to school for fine arts, like we talked about before, so painting, I was actually a painting major, and when I came out of school, I thought, “Well, I’ll just paint and have gallery shows, and that’s how I’ll make my money.” Well, it doesn’t exactly work out like that, so I started taking some illustration jobs. This was right out of school, so I was doing logos for friends, things like that, and then I got offered to work at a magazine for high school … Well, teenagers, high school kids, and they wanted me to be the cartoon editor, which meant people would send cartoons in, and these were professional cartoonists, like from the New Yorker and stuff, and I’d go through the cartoons and pick which ones to put in the magazines.
I also started doing illustrations for the magazine at the time, so that’s really where I started my illustration career. After that, I moved back to Maine, and got a job at a greeting card company, and I was doing illustrations for greeting cards. This is during the 80s, when it was kind of alternative greeting cards, and some of the subject matters were a little risqué and stuff, but anyway … I was doing illustrations for that, and that company was bought by a large company in Jersey, and I was given the choice of either staying with the company and moving to New Jersey, and since I had just moved back to Maine, I said no, that’s not for me, I’m going to stay in Maine, so I went out on my own, I started freelance illustrating.
That was tough. That was taking every job you could possibly get. I remember one of my very first illustration jobs was I did these exploded diagrams for wooden swing sets, and so I brought all these giant pieces of cedar back to my house and tried to figure out how they went together, and illustrate them so it would make sense. I was taking every job I could get. Eventually, over time, you start doing more and more work that you really enjoy, and I found out that I really like doing stuff for kids, kind of like cartoons, humorous illustrations for kids, so I started getting some work for kids’ magazines, and that really led into doing the illustrations for the children’s books. It was sort of a natural progression, but it was tough at first, I mean, it was, if the phone didn’t ring, I thought, “Well, I’m going to have to go work at the call center, otherwise, we’re going to starve,” but luckily, knock on wood, it worked out.
Lisa: You actually brought your wife with you here today, and you have two children, 25 and 22, so somehow, you guys figured this out as a family, how to kind of really get …
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, my wife Lori worked, when I was first starting out, she was still working. She worked at National Fisherman in Rockland, and she was the circulation manager.
Lori: Advertising promotion.
Chris: Advertising, she was the advertising promotion person down there, and so she was bringing in the paychecks while I was waiting for the phone to ring, but it eventually worked out.
Lisa: It seems like that that’s not an uncommon thing, that you actually have to be dedicated to this idea as a family. One person has to be doing something, and the other person’s doing something, so it’s never a unilateral decision. That doesn’t tend to work out very well.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. No, we work pretty well together.
Lisa: What are your kids doing now? Do they have any interest in, or are they in the art field?
Chris: They’re both artistic, but I don’t think they’ll be doing it for a living. They share an apartment, they have an apartment up on Munjoy Hill, and they both work up at Freeport. My oldest son, Ethan, works at the Patagonia store up there, and my younger son, Tucker, just got a job at the L.L. Bean Outdoor Discovery School, and so he’s working out there. He just graduated from Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, this May, so he’s just starting out.
Lisa: What does the future look like for you? What do you see happening with your art and with your business?
Chris: Well, I’m just going to keep going as long as I can. I have three books at printers right now, two were with other authors, and one I wrote, and I’m working on a new story right now, and I’m just going to try to keep going as long as I can. As long as the publishers still want my books, as long as kids still want to read them, I’m going to keep making them.
Lisa: Chris, how can people find out about the books that you’ve written and illustrated, or the books that you have illustrated?
Chris: I have a website, which is just chrisvandusen.com, and I’ll spell that, it’s C-H-R-I-S-V-A-N-D-U-S-E-N.com, and all my books are listed there. All local bookstores in Portland, I believe, carry my books. Longfellow, I sure know, and Nonesuch carries my books, Sherman’s as well, so they’re definitely around, they’re out there. You can also order them online, if you can’t find them locally.
Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Chris Van Dusen, who is a children’s book author and illustrator based in Camden. His first book, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee, which is actually a personal favorite of mine, so thank you for writing that one, was published in 2000, and he has since written and illustrated seven other books and illustrated eight more.
I look forward to your upcoming books, there are three that are at the printers, and I thank you for coming in and talking to me today.
Chris: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show #254, “Bringing Books and Art to Life.” Our guests have included Debra Spark, Garry Mitchell, and Chris Van Dusen. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. 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 as doctorlisa, and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram.
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Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Paul Koenig, our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick, our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.