 Thanks to Irene at Live Your Poem for hosting the first Friday of National Poetry Month. The theme of my poetry month is 'doubleheaders". Double interview Fridays and double videos on my Saturday Matinees featuring my TWU students. World Aquatic Animal Day was April 3 so the first two books feature sea animals. First up is an interview with David Elliott and his gorgeous new book, At the Poles.  JRM: What was the seed for writing poems about the two poles? DE: At the Poles is the eighth book in the series, so it might be more fruitful for your readers to understand how it all began. Some years ago, a book friend, through no fault of her own, was in a bit of financial trouble. So someone – I can’t remember who – came up with the idea of New England authors writing a short piece that would be illustrated by local artists. The finished work was framed, hung in a gallery, and auctioned off, the proceeds going to our friend. My contribution was: The Robin/ sings from her branch/but wants to roar./Small cousin of the dinosaur./ This was early(ish) on in my career, 2006 or so. At that point, I hadn’t written a lot of verse. But the exercise opened a door for me. “Hmmm,” I thought. ”I wonder if I can write more of these.” As it turned out, I could. Who knew? The result was On the Farm, published by Candlewick in 2008 and illustrated by the late and irreplaceable Holly Meade. I included that robin poem in the original draft of OTF, but Liz Bicknell, the fabulous editor of the series, nixed it -- can’t remember why, but I know she was right. But all was not lost. A version of the poem found its way into the fourth book, On the Wing, beautifully illustrated by then newcomer, Becca Stadtlander. On the Farm did well (still selling, and is now available as a board book) and led to In the Wild and In the Sea, both illustrated by Holly, who was also under contract for the next two – On the Wing and In the Past – when she was diagnosed with the illness that eventually took her from us. Our hearts broke the day we got her note saying she was no longer able to work. The rest, as they say, is history. Becca bravely took up her brush for On the Wing, and the incredible Matthew Trueman signed on for In the Past. It was the dinosaur book, too, where we began to add backmatter with notes on each of the animals. Next the consummate artist, Rob Dunlavey applied his wonderful story-telling art to In the Woods. Amy Schimler-Safford’s luminous art was perfect for At the Pond. That brings us to At the Poles. (Finally! I hear you saying.) Without ever making an actual decision, we had begun to look at our planet’s biomes as the settings for the books, and so the poles seemed like the next logical choice. The book, like each in the series, had its particular challenges. In this case, it was the extreme climate, which makes the animals who live there somehow more distant from us. (Think of the difference in how you might feel about a panda, say, and an elephant seal.) This is just one of the reasons why I am so grateful to Ellen Rooney. The warmth she brought to the fauna of the poles is exactly what was needed. These artists! They’re amazing! There are two more books in this series on the way. In the Desert, illustrated by the young British artist, Gordy Wright, and the final volume, At the Edge, poems about those strange creatures that live at the edge of our imaginations, animals like the axolotl and the pangolin. I’m over the moon to share that Clover Robins will do the art. By the time all ten books are published, I will have written over 150 poems about the other lives with which we share the planet. Reading, and then writing, about these amazing animals has been one of the greatest privileges of my writing life. JRM: When you wrote Antarctic Shag, did the words look as they do on the finished page with the illustration? (It’s one of my favorite pages) how much say do you have for the way the poem is placed on the page with the illustration? DE: Yes, the physical form of the poem is exactly as I wrote it and is as much a part of the poem as its vocabulary. One of the most difficult things for young writers to learn is that everything on the page conveys meaning. Everything! Every word. Every line break. Every comma. Every period. Every capitalization. Everything. And that includes empty space. Liz is an editor who understands that and gives me a lot of freedom. JRM: What was the most surprising tidbit of information from researching these animals? DE: One of the great pleasures in writing these books is what I have learned about the fauna that tread the earth’s surface, sleep in its caves, burrow into its soil, swim in its waters, fly through its skies. I was well into my sixties when I was working on In the Wild. From my earliest days, I had seen photos of lions, paintings of lions, lions in cartoons, lions in picture books, lions in zoos, in films, in wild animal parks. These magnificent creatures have populated my life since childhood, and yet my learning about them seems to have been arrested nearly from the time I knew they existed. To write about the lion, I had to make up for my many years of ignorance. Now I know that along with tigers, leopards, jaguars,lions are one of the four great cats. And why? Because they are the only cats that can roar. I love to think about the Greenland shark, one of the animals featured in At the Poles and the longest-living vertebrate on Earth. Scientists estimate these fish live between 250 and 500 years. Think of it! There are Greenland sharks swimming today that were around when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine chapel. I love Ellen’s shark, by the way. We often talk about how books change readers. But they change their authors as well. Writing these books has taught me that every creature on the planet, from the magnificent elephant to the tiny dung beetle deserves my admiration and respect. If we knew more about our fellow creatures, perhaps we wouldn’t be so intent on their destruction, destruction, which will, of course, bring about our own. JRM: Students asked, “Why is narwhal only a two line poem?” DE: But they might just as easily have asked, “Why does the narwhal get to be a two-line poem?” In other words, they could also see the brevity of that poem as a way of honoring the narwhal rather than some kind of diminution. The books in the series are about the animal world, for sure, and I hope they will help young readers get closer to, respect, have admiration for, and even learn to love all of life in its infinite forms. But the books are also about our language, its power, its buoyancy, its playfulness, its malleability. The narwhal is only seven words, but hopefully those words carry with them many layers of meaning. That kind of surprise is what our language can deliver. I hope teachers who use the books in their classrooms will help their students understand that their language, English, is a precious gift, and one which will help them to discover who they are in this wide and wonderful world. By the way, Candlewick has created a fantastic Teachers’ Guide for the series. It’s jam packed with exercises and ideas for classroom activities, all aligned with Common Core standards. Beautifully designed, too. Downloadable and free. Anyone who wants a copy can email me, and I’ll send them a copy tout suite. JRM: Was there an animal/poem you wanted but had to cut? DE: The opposite really. Because the conditions at the poles are so harsh, there were fewer animals to pick from. Unlike say, the Amazon which has over 10,000 species of beetles alone. Choosing the animals for each book has been an interesting exercise. On the Farm was relatively simple. You can ask any child anywhere in the U.S. what animals live on a farm and they will shout “Horse!” “Pig!” “Cow!” But think of undomesticated creatures. Now it gets complicated. A quick Google search will tell you that scientists estimate there are close to nine million wild animal species living on earth. Which of them should be included in a thirty-two page book, a picture book where each creature will appear on a double spread. In practical terms, that means somewhere around fifteen animals per book. Fifteen vs. nine million. You see the problem, right? The animals had to speak to me. But in each of the books, I also had to be aware of the illustrator’s job. Was I able to choose animals of different sizes, with a variety of forms, and shapes? This was especially challenging in books like In the Sea and At the Poles, where the setting and palette was nearly the same for each animal, water in the first case, ice and snow in the second. On the surface, picture books seem so simple. In fact, their production is an amazingly complicated process, requiring so much consideration and decision-making on the part of the author, the illustrator, the editor, and the designer. It’s this collaborative effort that makes a good book. It’s one of the reasons I love to write them. JRM: Would you have an early draft of a poem and then the final draft so readers can take a peek at the process? DE: This is difficult since I revise as I go along. That is, I don’t finish a poem, put it aside, and then go back to it. Well, that’s not entirely true. I do return to each poem. Again and again. But the poem I go back to has already been rewritten many, many times. I’ve already edited, amended, subtracted from, added to, and in general fiddled with hundreds of times. For better or worse, I don’t save each draft. But it’s an interesting thing to think about, revision. Emerging writers often don’t understand it, thinking that it means changing where a comma might go, or replacing one word with another. But revision means to see again. And often when you do that. Everything shifts. For example, here is the first poem I wrote about the Emperor Penguin, a poem by the way that went through many revisions. Some might say you are absurd -- a bird who cannot fly, a blooper in the history of feathered aviation. But you’ve acquired other skills on which you can rely and are a master of the art of close cooperation. Not bad, I guess. But then I started to think about the penguin’s name. Emperor penguin, and I re-saw the poem, capitalizing on the idea of emperor, which led to the poem we see in the book, and is, I hope, a much better tribute to the bird. JRM: What is it like to go between writing a novel in verse and a collection of poems? Do you have both projects happening at the same time? DE: Here, I’ll paraphrase what my good friend and writer (for adults) Hester Kaplan says about the difference between a short story and a novel. A collection of poems is like a date, or more accurately a series of dates, but a novel in verse is like a marriage. To continue with that simile, as in my actual marriage, I don’t cheat. JRM: What do you have in the works currently? DE: Maybe the easiest thing to do here is make a list.
JRM: Thank you David, for your thorough and insightful answers. I love this : If I’m not writing or thinking about writing. I’m not myself. I may not be talented, but I am dogged. Next up, an interview with Randi Soenshine. And I am hosting Friday, April 12.
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AuthorAll photos and poems in these blog posts are copyrighted to Jone Rush MacCulloch 2006- Present. Please do not copy, reprint or reproduce without written permission from me. 
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