10 Questions with Loretta Garbutt and Carmen Mok
I was so honored that Loretta Garbutt and Carmon Mok, the author and the illustrator of the powerful picture book A Stopwatch from Grampa (Kids Can Press, 2020), agreed to a Zoom date with me last week. These days, I appreciate any chance to speak to people who do not live in my house, but it was especially wonderful to have the opportunity to talk shop with these two amazing creators. Although our chat spanned a satisfyingly broad range of topics—from art notes, to grief, to independent bookstores, to pencil sharpeners—I felt like I could have happily talked to them for hours.
1. I am always curious about how people find their way into the world of picture books. What was that path like for each of you?
Carmen: It was a long path! I had always loved paper, books, stationary, things like that. I had my art training at the University of Waterloo. I lived in Kitchener-Waterloo for seven years. I went to high school there, and then to UW for Fine Arts. I met a very good professor in the faculty who was a ceramic sculptor. She inspired me to major in ceramic sculpture. I wasn’t too crazy about painting and drawing at that time, because in Fine Arts they pursued a more realistic style that was not me. So, I thought maybe I wasn’t a good painter, and in the end I decided to do sculpture instead. After I finished my Fine Arts degree, I didn’t know where to go next. I talked to my professor, and she asked me if I would be interested in making some functional pottery. So I thought, Huh, maybe that is a next step--doing something more commercial.
So then I went to Sheridan College in Oakville. When people hear that I went to Sheridan College, they assume I studied illustration there, but that wasn’t the case at all. I studied pottery making! [Laughs] After that, I worked part time in my own pottery studio, but also I worked for a small dinnerware designer in Toronto. That job turned into full time, and after awhile, I did not have time to continue with my own pottery.
From there, I turned to graphic design. There were a couple of years that I worked as a graphic designer under a subdivision of the Toronto Star. At that time, I learned about illustration. I didn’t work on the newspaper itself—I was illustrating for their weekly magazine. It’s really quick turnover, but I learned that illustration was quite fun! People send out an article and the illustrator came back with a piece of art. So I started thinking that that was quite interesting.
Also at that time, writing blogs was very popular, so I did try to open one. I would write a little bit about what I was thinking and then I would add an illustration—like a quick painting. So, a couple of friends came to me one day, and said to me, “You know Carmen, this blog you are doing--you’re storytelling.” It inspired me. And then I started exploring about storybook illustration, and thought, I want to be a picture book illustrator.
Once I made that decision, it took me another three years to prepare my portfolio because I had no idea about the industry. I was working full time. I would finish my job at 4:30 and come home at 5:00, turn on my computer and start doing my research. I would research how people worked in children’s books, how the industry works, how to start preparing a portfolio. It took a long time, because I changed my style a couple of times. I reached a point where I thought it was ready, and then, looking back again, I thought, No. It’s so crap. So I would start again. I went through, probably two or three cycles before I thought my website was ready, and then I started to email some publishers.
So I was researching what publishers I would want to work with and who I should contact. I was also joining conferences and attending workshops to learn more. When people ask me [about how to break into the industry], I don’t think you need a degree, if you know the direction you want to take. There are a lot of resources out there that you can access. You just need to be really persistent.
Kate: Loretta, what was your entry point into this world of children’s literature? I know that one of the types of work you have done in the past is voice acting. You also worked for a very long time at the famed children’s book store Mable’s Fables in Toronto. How did those roles prepare you for writing stories of your own?
Loretta: I think being a bookseller was my university. Carmen had real school and I had Mable’s Fables! Being immersed there was such an amazing experience that helped me prepare for the whole world of children’s publishing. Honestly, if you can hand-sell a book, and if you can describe to a customer what a book is about, and if you are doing that day after day after day, if you’re trying to get the right book into the right hands—which is like the mantra of any indie store, and why they are so indispensable—if you are doing all that, then you are discovering who your readers are and what they like. You’re kind of formulating your way of thinking. Which is why I loved working there—you are just immersed completely. I don’t think of an indie store as a massive money-maker. People are there because they want to be there.
Kate: Yes! In fact, I am currently drinking from my SHOP LOCAL BOOKSTORES mug by Jon Klassen!
Loretta: I did a great event with Jon. He went back to his school where he went as a kid. We did so many great author events with people like Barbra Reid, Kenneth Opal, Kevin Sylvester. We set up all these events where Mable’s would go and sell the books. I was also the Storytime lady for about eight years there, so reading to kids on a regular basis, it helped me to know what books worked and what books don’t work.
Mable’s is really cool because it is set up in age sections. So, in the one-year-old section, you have books with rhyme, rhythm, colour, and shapes. In the 3’s and 4’s I realized that kids start to get humour, they start to understand it—books like I Want My Hat Back. And they also start to understand compassion, and books that deal with that, like The Way Back Home by Oliver Jeffers. By age 6 and 7, they start reading chapter books. So you kind of get a feel for how the ages move on—what is appropriate for each age, what works for each age. And I didn’t realize what I was learning at the time, but I was soaking so much up. I did everything! I did book fairs, I did the teacher accounts. I was reading middle grade and YA. Because we were reviewing, I was also picking up books that I wouldn’t normally want to read, and that was amazing, too. I know the industry is constantly changing, and I really miss the closeness of being in a bookstore!
Carmen: Me, too! If you leave me in a bookstore, I can spend, like, three hours.
Kate: Me, too! Three hours and all my money! [Laughs] Since I was really small they have been my favourite place to be. I can’t wait to get back there after the pandemic.
Loretta: There are so many amazing indie stores out there and we couldn’t do without them!
Kate: This is all so interesting to me. I know that university programs and graduate programs in writing for children exist, but I personally don’t know anyone who has attended one. Instead, everyone I have met in the industry has their own story about how they found a way in, and how they cobbled together their own ad hoc education in this field. There is so much to learn about how the form works, and how your own voice and style might fit into the industry as a whole. People seem to find doorways in from all sort of different worlds—from education, or publishing, or fine arts. And even though it is such a hard field to break into, and getting published can be such a long road, people will help you. There are, as you said Carmen, so many resources available, either for free or for a really reasonable investment. Podcasts, workshops, blogs, critique programs or contests through CANSCAIP or SCBWI--these have all been so valuable to me.
Loretta: I think when you know what you want, you’re going to do what you need to to get your answers. You have a drive, you will find out what you need to know. Mable’s had these Writing for Children workshops through George Brown College, which I took. I also did workshops through CANSCAIP, and then just talking and critique groups. I do have friends who have been authors for years, and they have gone to the Vermont College of Fine Arts and attended their MFA for Writing For Children program because they got to a point in their writing where they needed more, and so they have gone back and done that. That program is apparently intensive and amazing!
Kate: That is the one program I hear come up in interviews a fair bit, especially with American writers.
2. As someone who is not at all an illustrator, but who is also a fairly visual thinker, I often struggle with the question of art notes. I’ve scoured the internet for commentary from illustrators and editors about this topic to help me better gauge the acceptability of art notes, to understand when to use them and when to leave them out. I do understand why they are so irksome for illustrators, because it feels bossy, and it feels like we are not trusting you to contribute fully to the storytelling. At the same time, when I am writing I can often lighten the text and cut down the word count if I can move things from the text to the illustrations. I find myself wanting to make art notes, not that describe the characters or the setting, but that communicate an action or joke visually. And sometimes I do that as a temporary step and then later I can let go of a note and realize it is not really needed. But it is something I struggle with.
Carmen: It’s a very interesting topic to discuss, from the author’s point of view and the illustrator’s point of view, and also the publisher. In the end, my experience tells me that the most difficult job is for the editor in the middle. So, when the author talks to the editor about an illustration, they need to handle that wisely to pass on the message from one person to the next.
Loretta: To mediate.
Carmen: Exactly. I think that is another difficult skill that editors have to have.
Loretta: It’s funny, I sold a story recently to Owl Kids for their Chirp Magazine, and when I wrote the story I didn’t put in any art notes because I thought, give them lots and lots of room. Today I got a note back that said, “It might be helpful if you put in a few illustrator notes, just to let them know what you are thinking.” [Laughs]
Kate: I do find that I’m drawn to texts that are written by author-illustrators, because they are able to do all these things that I can’t as the author alone, because they are able to create meaning between the text and the images simultaneously. I’m so jealous of them. They are able to pull off things like visual jokes that are very hard to do when you are just an author trying to avoid illustration notes. I’m I really drawn to the work of people like, say, Jon Klassen.
Loretta: I was going to say, like Jon Klassen or Oliver Jeffers.
Me: Yes! And that’s why I was so excited, Carmen, that you said you would join us, because as much as I love talking to authors, I also am so interested in the illustration side of this form. I feel like understanding it is so crucial to understand.
Loretta: I agree. I learned so much from Carmen from the way that she applied her art. We were so lucky to be paired together on A Stopwatch from Grampa. Carmen just added so much, enhanced the story so much. I say that all the time, because I don’t think that, without Carmen, the story would have had the depth or the sensitivity. We didn’t hit people over the head [with the lesson of the story], and I think that was possible because of Carmen’s illustrations. I’ve had a couple of class presentations this week, and there are a few spreads that I love to show. One of them is that great dragon picture, with that big scribble. You show it to kids and ask, “What is going on here? What does this say?” and you get, “Anger! Frustration! I’m mad!” I don’t have to tell them that child is angry, because that is clear from the picture.
I find in my writing I am now better at getting out of the illustrator’s way. I try not to put any notes unless they are really necessary, like, “The refrigerator is vintage with a big handle on it,” or something. I’ve grown to have so much more respect for their process. And now, like you said, I will sometimes put them in the notes, but just to get them out of my words while I am writing.
3. Carmen, that brings us to the questions of what this process looks like for you. Once you have the raw manuscript, how do you begin to go about making those choices that will add to the storytelling and further the narrative?
Carmen: I really like a manuscript that has very few words. That is just my personal preference, though it does depend on the story. With Stopwatch, Loretta did a great job.
Loretta: Thanks Carmen! [Laughs]
Carmen: She told a story in very few words, and I know that is very, very hard. I am learning to write right now, and it is so challenging. To write a story that is complete but not overdone, and that leaves the illustrator room to add on top of the manuscript, is so difficult, but it makes things a lot easier for me as the illustrator because I have a lot of room to interpret.
If you go read older, vintage picture books, they are so wordy! They describe every single thing. The illustrator’s role in those books was more like just drawing the text. Now it is so much different. I sometimes feel like I am actually writing a story on top of the manuscript, just not in words. In visual language. And that is my job.
Loretta: I like the sparse writing too, because it makes me reach for different language. If I pull out as many words as I can, it makes me reach for a different way to describe something. I think that makes the writing better.
Carmen: And after I finish the sketches, there are minor changes or adjustments to the text that happen. So, at the end, we are talking to each other. The author might look at a sketch and think, “Oh, I have a better word to go with that illustration.” I really like this kind of working relationship. Working together, in the end, to tell the story.
4. Could each of you possibly tell me a little bit about your workspace?
Carmen: This is one of the smallest bedrooms in our home. It’s a corner room so I have windows on two sides, so I can paint with natural light. That is very helpful to me. Right now, I am facing my computer desk. Most of the time I paint here as well, if I am working on small pieces. The table right behind me is a little messy. It’s a heavy duty one from Ikea. I bought it from Kijiji. It can be extended to six feet long, so if I need a bigger workspace for bigger pieces I can pull it out. And that’s my whole world!
Kate: Do you have a favourite tool?
Carmen: Yes! I want to show you this [holds up a very beautiful pencil sharpener].
Loretta: That’s high-tech!
Carmen: I use a lot of handheld sharpeners as well, which are easy to bring with me anywhere. But because I use a lot of colour pencils, Faber Castell, which are expensive—
Loretta: Yeah, you posted when you got a new set!
Carmen: They break so easily if I use those handheld sharpeners. One day I saw another illustrator share about this one. It is from a Japanese store, Muji, in Toronto.
Loretta: I love that store!
Carmen: This one works so good! And right now I am working on an illustration using dry pastel pencils, which are even easier to break than colour pencils, but not with this sharpener. It’s saved my life, it’s so much better!
Loretta: I work anywhere. I've turned my daughter's bedroom into an office, but I like to change it up—dining room table by the window, kitchen counter, back yard. I used to write with a group at a coffee shop twice a week. I miss that a lot!
Kate: Perhaps the only public spaces I miss as much as bookstores are coffee shops. The idea of setting up shop in a local café with my laptop and a latte, maybe a really big cookie, sounds like a dream right about now!
5. I am curious, over the course of the many books that you worked on, how much of your style changes project to project, and what tends to stay consistent?
Loretta: You’ve changed so much.
Carmen: You think so?
Loretta: I think so, yeah. From when I was first introduced to Carmen a few years back, before we did Stopwatch. You’ve just grown so much! I see a real change in your work.
Carmen: I just can’t tell that much. I agree that I do try to take the challenge to the next level each time. I don’t know if other illustrators do this, but I keep my books handy, and I flip through them—just like before this interview today, I pulled out Stopwatch, and I looked at my illustration. I found myself saying, like, “Hey! I think this is not that great.”
Kate: So self-critical!
Carmen: Yes. And I’m the same with my other books, too. I try to critique myself. Sometimes I find mistakes that other people might not see, or I find things that I might not like so much anymore. That’s the way I keep on learning.
Kate: I’ve noticed that for Stopwatch, you used a very limited palette of lots of blue with some greens, browns, and reds. Is colour palette something that tends to change book to book?
Carmen: Yeah. I tend to not have a formula for that—every book is different. But I think when I start reading the manuscript, usually I keep three things in my head. The character, for sure, that’s number one. The second is the colour palette, not even the complete colour palette, but any specific colour that pops in my head that I think goes with the story. That first colour is like an entry point, and I will use that to figure out what complementary colours go with that main colour. That is how I develop the colour palette. The third thing is usually the surrounding—Is it indoor? Outdoor? For Stopwatch, Loretta left me a huge amount of room to decide what the surrounding looks like.
Loretta: Phew!
Carmen: For example, does he live in an apartment, or a house? In the countryside or an urban environment? What does his family look like? Are they a rich family, above average? All these things that I can choose to interpret. Being able to make those decisions makes sure that every story is different.
6. Loretta, I love how you structure this book, starting by drawing attention to the loss on the first spread, but then jumping back in time for the next several spreads to show the relationship between the protagonist and his grampa. In this way you are able to inject a lot of fun and joy into the story, and to allow me as the reader to invest in this relationship, upping the emotional stakes. Can you speak a little bit about why you made these choices?
Loretta: You know it’s so funny when you write a story, so much of it is not planned. I knew it was important to set the tone right off the top of the book. That was, to me, a real grabber, that the child is sad. Why is he sad? I didn’t plan all the back and forth, it just felt natural that it worked out that way. There’s so much play in our own lives, and those memories always feel good. The child wasn’t always sad, so I think [it felt natural to explore] how much he and Grampa enjoyed each other. It just made sense to me, and it also makes the child’s sadness more poignant if I talked about how much fun they had, and what he’s missing. The story kind of started from a fun story in my head, because my brothers and I used to time each other all the time. And then I kind of went backwards when I realized that I wanted to make a story about loss. I knew the story had to be gentle because it’s such a difficult topic.
Kate: Yes, and I think that immersing the reader in this fun set of memories centred around the stopwatch serves that dual purpose of upping the emotional stakes—by making sure we really care about the relationship, and therefore care about the loss that has happened, and at the same time, creating balance in the story, and creating a sense of lightness and joy.
Loretta: Yes! Because I want them to remember the fun. Like, when you say to someone, “tell me about your grandmother,” you will think about the great times you had together, the food you ate. You want to leave kids with that feeling of fun.
Kate: One of the brilliant things about this story is that you use the five stages of grief as a tool for structuring the story without making that visible within the text itself. That is so smart! I think about all the conversations I have had with other parents around how to talk to kids about death and grief, and so many people are so anxious about how they are going to explain what death is, and answer all these big existential questions about death and the afterlife. But really, I have found conversations with my kids around that stuff to be quite interesting and pretty brief. What seems harder to me, and what is talked about less, is how to support kids as they go through the full arc of grief, as they experience that same spectrum of emotion we do. I think it is so powerful that this book talks about those emotions, not as a problem that needs to be fixed by a parent, but as something that is moved through over time.
Loretta: Well I will say that the book kind of revealed itself over time. After I wrote it I thought, Ok this is a really sweet story, and I remember [my editor] Katie [Scott] saying that this was a really important story for Kids Can, and I thought, Okay. And as I have been dealing with classrooms full of kids—I have a class of JK kids tomorrow—we talk about the happy feelings, and the memories that we have that make us feel good. We talk a little bit about what we can do when we feel sad. We don’t really get into the grief aspect of the book too deeply, because everyone deals with grief in their own way. Some people don’t even go through all five stages, some people are just angry the whole time, or sad and depressed the whole time. You are revealing to me parts of the book that you see, as other people have revealed parts of the book that they see. The book has many layers. Editors see those layers. I have to give Katie huge credit, because she was interpreting those layers, even if I wasn’t. She helped to direct that message. From my own experience, I really remember the calm of lying on my bed, and watching shadows pass along the ceiling. I think there is a lot of our childhoods in our picture books.
Carmen: So Loretta, were you planning on using the five stages of grief from the beginning?
Loretta: No! I had taken what I had to a workshop. My husband and I were in London, and we were walking by a daycare and there was a sticky note on the door that said, “For how long can you stand on your head?” and it reminded me of my brothers, and the games we used to play timing each other. You had to run across the street and back in the pouring rain. And I remember that. So, I wrote this story as a fun story, and I took it to a workshop, and the teacher said, “Well, it’s not really a story, it’s really just a series of events.” And I went, “Darn! I thought it was so brilliant!” And then I got the idea of the connecting the stopwatch to the idea of time and loss—all those layers. And then when I looked up the five stages of grieving, that gave me a framework to work with, which helped me figure out the story.
Kate: I think it is so powerful that as a reader I’m sensing all of those layers, for example, of how time functions as a metaphor in the book. But because you don’t call them out, because you leave space for both Carmen and the reader to participate in creating the meaning of the text, those meanings are all able to exist at once, whereas if you were more didactic, it would have closed off some of those possibilities. As I was reading it, I was thinking about how time is representing both how the passage of time is healing for the character, and also how this experience is introducing them to the idea of mortality, of time not being infinite. And that is a milestone of childhood as well, when we come to understand that experiences are meaningful because they happen within a limited span of time that we have with a loved one. So, whatever the reader brings to the story, whether we are 5, or 8, or an adult, we are able to take what we need from the story, because we are not all funnelled towards the same moral or narrow message.
Loretta: For sure. I find those books that really obviously teach a lesson difficult. I kind of get my back up when I come across them. We talk about that quite extensively in critique groups. When someone has an ending that amounts to, “So, you see, don’t eat animals!” or something like that, I feel like I am being told what to think and what to do.
Carmen: I remember when I was little, I read lots of children’s books with that kind of approach. Almost like textbooks. At the end, there would be an exercise, with questions like, “What did you learn from the story?” and, “How will you act if this happens to you?”
Loretta: I would rather have a discussion at the end, letting the kids voice their own conclusions, instead of me telling them what to think and feel. Who am I to tell them what they should feel? I’d rather them get an idea in their heads, like, “Maybe I can deal with a situation this way?”
Kate: And if we want to write stories that kids will want to return to again and again, which I think is always the goal, kids don’t want to read moralistic stories again and again. Once they have read it once, they have probably gotten all they can from it.
Loretta: I did some classes with grades 5 and 6, so with kids who are 10 and 12 years old, who are generally way out of picture books, but we had great discussions about how picture books can deal with really difficult topics in a simple manner. We talked about books like My Heart in a Bottle—another Oliver Jeffers one!—about how [picture books] are still really important, even if you’re older, and about how they can help parents talk to their kids about difficult topics like grieving.
And the stopwatch was such a poignant image for me. I remember thinking to myself that I had to be careful how I write, because I could go off in so many different directions, there were so many avenues I could take—time, healing, knowing without a doubt that time will move forward. That the world is waiting for you, and when you are ready, when the time is right, you can be part of the world again. That’s where the hope is!
7. That brings me to my next questions, which is about the stopwatch as a sort of touchstone, a mechanism for remembering. I can imagine that in a classroom, that is a great way into this story with students, asking them about what objects hold special memories for them. I am wondering if either of you have particular objects that you hold close because they remind you of someone.
Carmen: I have a pen from my father. He passed away when I was 17, and when we tidied up his stuff, I found the pen that I bought for him one year as a Fathers’ Day gift. It is an 18K gold Cross pen. When I look back, it is not really that expensive, but it was quite something for a kid to buy as a gift. He used it every day, put it in the pocket of his shirt. So I needed to keep that because it was quite memorable to me.
Loretta: For me, my grandmother, she was Ukrainian, and she left me the coat she wore to church. It was one of those lamb skin coats with curly black fur. The arms are too short, but I love it. I wore it to all the hockey arenas when my kids were young, because it was the best. I feel warm when I’m in it. I just adored my grandmother, my baba. My dad, I have his medals from World War II. Also, my dad was a chef, he was Italian, and I have all his recipes. There is nothing more important than seeing your grandparent’s or your parent’s writing on a recipe. I also have this little bird vase from a close friend that was retrieved from our cottage fire. It went from blackened to white again. Now it’s more special than ever.
Kate: One of my objects would be my Grandmother’s cookbook, the one where she wrote all of her recipes, and it is stuffed full of recipes she has ripped out of Chatelaine. I wasn’t very close with her—she died when I was quite young and she was sort of a difficult woman, but that book feels like a way into her world. I also have a little blue Le Creuset that was my Nana’s. She died when I was three. Of all the grandparents in my life, I was actually closest to my husband’s Oma, who was in my life for longer than any of my own grandparents. She passed away a few years ago, and I have a lot of her kitchenware, including her Pyrex mixing bowls from the 70’s.
My kitchen is full of treasures passed on from family and friends.
Loretta: I love that.
Kate: I think I am a person who really feels closest to people I have lost when I am using things that they used, and I think kids are often like this, too. In Stopwatch, you really root the sense of comfort you offer kids in the here and now, rather than in a more intangible idea of the afterlife. It is a thing the child can hold in their hand and understand in a concrete way.
Loretta: And kids love to share in the classroom visits. One kid recently shared a Power Rangers toy that he had, and he was so excited to talk about it. And I show them my things. Its fun to have that exchange.
8. What story do you remember being really important to you as a child?
Loretta: We had mostly fairytales and rhymes, and we had this big book with mostly fairytales—those long, long stories. I don’t know what the name of it was, but we called it The Goosy Poosy Book. I do remember the togetherness of reading a book, and that quiet. Because my mother is Ukrainian there were also a lot of oral stories and songs.
Carmen: I think it is probably because of the culture I grew up in, but I did not read a lot of picture books when I was little. My parents did not do bedtimes stories. But I remember when I was little I was a big fan of Snoopy and the Peanuts comics. I am still a big, big fan. I still have my first Snoopy soft toy that I bought myself when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. I saved all my cash and I went to a store down the street and bought that Snoopy doll and went back home without telling my mom. I still remember my hand was shaking when I paid for it, because that was all the money I had. I just wanted it so badly.
Kate: Where did you grow up?
Carmen: I grew up in Hong Kong, and then my parents sent me to Canada to finish my senior year of high school at 16 years old. My older brother was studying at the University of Waterloo at that time. That’s why I landed in Kitchener-Waterloo.
9. What current picture book or picture book creator are you in love with right now? Who do you think we should all be reading?
Loretta: My favourite book right now is The Truth About Wind, by Hazel Hutchins and Gail Herbert, Illustrated by Dusan Petricic (Annick, 2020). I wish I had written it! It’s about a child who has to make a difficult decision. He loves something, and he aches for something, but it is not his, and he has to be honest about it. It’s just beautiful.
Kate: That is such a great topic. We are really working through that with my youngest daughter, the idea that we can love or admire something and not have to own it.
Loretta: Yeah, this kid steals it! He takes it because it was lost, and he knows it doesn’t belong to him because he sees all the signs up in the neighbourhood, but he just can’t give it up!
Kate: I know that feeling of, “I wish I had written it.” I often have to contend with an overwhelming sense of jealousy that I wish I had created a book.
Carmen: I’m a big fan of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen.
Kate: Me, too!
Carmen: They are always writing my favourite things.
Kate: I have a minor Mac Barnett obsession. He has a weekly book club on Instagram, and my children and I all have hats! This is my one daughter’s [hat] that my dog ate last week. I was so mad at him, because it took so long to arrive in the mail.
I love both of them [Barnett and Klassen], and I love listening to interviews with them, because they have so much insight into the history of picture books, and they think so deeply about the form.
Carmen: They have a very unique approach to picture books. I think they have pretty much created a new trend; very few words, sometimes the ending is left quite open. And sometimes they put in sneaky stuff, the stuff that we are told we should not show to kids.
Kate: Yes! We love his early reader series of Jack Books, but I have read so many reviews of them that say, “I like this, but he is a bad character and he never gets punished for his behaviour, and we shouldn’t show kids bad behaviour that doesn’t have consequences.” And he responds by saying that he empathizes with sneaky kids, and that his job as a writer is not to teach your kids how to behave. I actually keep his picture book proclamation, that he created with Jon Klassen and a whole bunch of other picture book people like Carson Ellis and Sophie Blackwell. It is sort of a manifesto about the importance of writing picture books that are inventive and bold. I keep it here to remind myself not to write boring books.
Carmen: Look what I just took out from the library! [Holds up a copy of Jon Klassen’s new book, The Rock that Fell from the Sky.] I am so looking forward to reading it tonight! It is so thick!
Kate: It is! It’s like five little vignettes. Such a cool form. I actually tutor students of all different ages, and I force them all to read picture books. We have been watching a YouTube video this week of Klassen reading this at his launch, and it is great. I find it so interesting, though, that he does that cool thing where he doesn’t use quotation marks or speech tags in his writing, but when he reads it out loud, he adds them. I was fascinated by that.
His work is what I mean when I say that I wish I could draw. I am so jealous of the comedy that he is able to create just by playing with the tension between what the text is saying and what the images are saying. It is so hard to achieve that when you are just an author and you are trying avoid adding too many art notes!
10. Launching a book during Covid comes with its own challenges. What have you had to do differently to get your book out into the world during this strange and challenging time? What are you looking forward to being able to do once it is finally over?
Loretta: The regular process has been replaced with Zoom launches, and mine was fun but I was hoping to have it at a bookstore. Thanks to help from my kids, I've been marketing through social media, which I wouldn’t have done but I think it's great and gets me more involved with other people in the writing community, like you Kate! Looking forward to going into classrooms for an author visit, but the Zoom presentations have been fun too.
11. Ok, I know you are on deadline and are busy-busy, so I am going to let you get back to work after this very last question: What food brought you the most comfort and joy as a kid? How about these days?
Loretta: Pierogies or grilled cheese were my comfort foods as a kid, now those are guilty pleasures! These days? Soup! I love all types, and making it is a comfort.
Carmen: I loved vanilla ice cream when I was a kid. Now my most comforting food (snack) is 85% dark chocolate.
Loretta Garbutt has been a writer and voice performer for over 30 years. She is the voice of Valerie on Max and Ruby. A Stopwatch from Grampa, published by Kids Can Press, April 2020, was given a starred review from Kirkus and was recognized as one of their best books for 2020. Her second book, It’s in Me to Win, tells the story of a child’s journey through a bone marrow transplant. April/2021 through AAMAC. https://aamac.ca Her next book J.J. Slept is forth coming from Kids Can Press in April, 2020
Website: booksbyloretta.com Instagram: @Loretta.Garbutt Twitter: @LorettaGarbutt
Carmen Mok studied studio art at the University of Waterloo and craft design at Sheridan College. Her illustrations have been published in magazines across Canada and the U.S., as well as on greeting cards, stationery and children's home accessories. She now dedicates herself to children's book illustration. She has received several illustration awards, including the SCBWI Canada East People's Choice Award for Illustration in 2017 and the Exceptional Portfolio Award and the Storyteller Award in 2018. Carmen lives in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, with her husband and a cat.
Website: CarmonMokStudio.com Facebook: @CarmenMokStudio
Twitter: @CarmenMokStudio
Instagram: @CarmenMokStudio
