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Matt Raymond:

Each year tens of thousands of book lovers of all ages visit the
nation's capital to celebrate the joys of reading and lifelong literacy
at the National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress and
hosted by first lady Laura Bush. Now in its seventh year, this free
event, held on the National Mall, Saturday, Sept. 29, will spark
readers' passion for learning as they interact with the nation's
best-selling authors, illustrators and poets. Children will be greeted
by their beloved storybook characters like Clifford the Big Red Dog. In
addition to readings by your favorite authors, there will be book
signings, musical performances and more. Even those not attending the
National Book Festival in person can access the event online. These
prerecorded interviews with well-known authors are available through the
National Book Festival Web site in podcast format. To download or listen
to those, you can visit www.loc.go/bookfest.

We now have the pleasure to talk with three-time winner of the Caldecott
Medal, Mr. David Wiesner, who will be appearing in the Children Pavilion
at the festival on Sept. 29. Mr. Wiesner has truly perfected the art of
visual storytelling. His latest book is a fantastical watercolor journey
call "Flotsam," which tells a story of a young boy who discovers an old
camera washed up on the Jersey shore, and his adventure after this
wonderful find. "Flotsam" was recently on the "New York Times Children's
Bestseller List."

Mr. Wiesner, thank you very much for joining us.

David Wiesner:

Thanks for having me.

Matt Raymond:

And now, while I was looking at this book it occurred to me there are no
words. I mean, do we call this reading? What do you call it when you
look at a picture book? \[Laughs\].

David Wiesner:

You absolutely do call it reading; you're just reading pictures instead
of words. It's a different way of telling a story. There's actually a
relatively long history for wordless books. And, you know, they don't
offer a better or worse reading experience, just a different one. And I
think really the difference comes in the fact that each person reading
the book tells the story in their own words. There isn't the text, the
author's voice, telling you the story. Each reader can complete that
themselves, which is really a neat thing to see. Everybody brings
something a little different to the way they tell the story. You know, I
view it as I'm just using different tools than words. I'm using
pictures, but the writing of the book happens in a very similar manner
as to writing a text. I'm concerned with the same sorts of story
elements and character and beginning, middle and end to the story as I
would with text, except I'm using pictures.

I think it can be a little \-- maybe intimidating, usually not for kids,
more I think often for parents who aren't quite sure what to do with it.
But I found when I'm in a bookstore or something and I read the book out
loud, there's often \-- you know, you see the light of recognition in
the eyes where they go, "Oh, you know, I didn't know how to do that, but
that makes sense," because when I tell the story I throw in dialogue and
description and anything I feel like, you know, to tell the story. It's
very open to whatever you want to bring to it.

Matt Raymond:

Yeah, I think in some ways it's almost even more compelling because it
does cause the reader to sort of create their own internal dialogue
within it.

David Wiesner:

Yeah, and there's, you know, there's no right or wrong here, it's an
interesting phenomenon. It's something that I came to, as a, you know,
an art form that I was intrigued by and wanted to explore. And it really
wasn't until I started to publish, because I've done four of them now
\-- wordless books. The first -- and started to get letters back from
teachers and librarians and kids, obviously \-- that I began to see, you
know, how they're really used.

And it's been great to \-- I've recently got a package from a school
that wrote a play around one of my wordless books. And they sent me
photos and the text, the script for their play. It was amazing. It
really seems to want to inspire kids to then turn around and write their
version of the story, which I hear a lot from teachers. Also, huge use
in English as a Second Language classes, and I like that the kids who
might be a little intimidated by a text sort of get freed up to just
sort of tell the story in their own words. So that's been very
interesting for me to see how they're actually used.

Matt Raymond:

I think that inspirational element is really a big reason why we like to
put on the book festival. Can you talk a little bit about why you think
the book festival is important, and why you're coming?

David Wiesner:

Oh, I think anything that inspires people to want to read and get
involved with books is just a wonderful thing. It's the world, the
worlds that are offered within books and the journeys you can take,
whether it's, you know, using your imagination, or in nonfiction books
into history, you know, it's a pathway that engages the mind in a very
active way. I'm not going to completely, you know, slam movies and TV
and things. I certainly love them, but it's, that's a very passive sort
of medium to deal with. The books, you know, really engage the child's
mind and gets it stimulated and thinking.

And the fact that the National Book Festival is happening on the grand,
national stage I think is just a wonderful thing. And, you know, I'm
delighted to get to be a part of it. It's really, you know, an amazing
place to meet and see the wide variety of books, and get to meet the
people who actually make the books, too. And it's always a neat thing. I
certainly never met any authors or illustrators when I was a kid, and
that's so great now that, you know, you can see that there are real
people who create the books. And you know, who knows, some of them might
want to do that themselves.

Matt Raymond:

Well I really appreciate what you're saying about the active versus the
passive experience. I mean, I found myself really lingering on some of
the images in a way that's you really can't easily do with TV and
movies. Talk a little bit, if you would, about your illustrating
process. What goes into creating these unique drawings? I mean, I read
that you use storyboards, and for instance, clay models of frogs for
your book "Tuesday*.*\"

David Wiesner:

The process for a picture book is just, you know, it's an amazing thing.
It's a really unique art form. And it, for me, just \-- I bring to it
\[unintelligible\] often a response that's, "Gee, I never realized how
much work went into putting a picture book together," almost as if it's,
well, it's just something for kids. And, you know, these books are the
first part that kids see, and, quite frankly, I think it should be as
good as it possibly can. So I bring everything that I've learned over
the years as far as picture making and storytelling, you know, to bear
when I put a book together. And I have a great time doing it, which is
even better. There's a very cinematic quality, I think, to my work, so
I'm laying out the entire book in very rough form in a sketch book, in
pencil studies, really just creating a rhythm to the pictures that
hopefully will make, you know, an interesting reading experience.

So there are pages with many little panels of different action going on,
followed by a big double page spread of a single image that has a whole
load of material \-- stuff happening, characters, things in the
background, things in the foreground, so that, you know, your eye kind
of scans these pages with lots of \[unintelligible\] very quickly. It's
a very quick thing. But when you then follow that up with a page full of
detail, it's a place where you really \-- you know, the eye lingers over
the page and kind of gets lost back in the pictures. I like to put
things in there that, you know, maybe you don't see the first time
around, and later you'll read it again and go, "Oh, you know, I didn't
notice that the last time." So the reading \-- you know, I'm really
thinking about the act of reading the book, and how quickly or slowly
your eyes are going to scan the pages.

And that is the great thing I find about the book compared to, say, you
know, a moving image on TV or so, which, you know, goes by in a flash.
With a book you can really hold it steady and examine it and see what's
happening, because particularly in a wordless book, everything in the
picture is telling, is being part of the storytelling process, because
the text is not there.

So in the opening double-page spread in "Flotsam," we see our
protagonist, the boy who the story is about, sitting on the beach and
he's got a, he's found a sand crab, and he's looking at it through a
magnifying glass. Everything else in the picture there is to immediately
tell you who this kid is. He's \[unintelligible\], he's lying on the
beach towel, but he's got a collecting box, he's got buckets and
shovels, but he's also got a big bag with a butterfly net and snorkel.
He's got binoculars, his magnifying glass. He's even got a microscope in
a Ziploc bag there. And so you can see this is one serious collector
\[laughs\]. He's a really curious kid, who's really into this.

So, you know, I put all that stuff in there to immediately describe his
personality in picture form as opposed to with words. So I'm thinking
about all of that as I'm creating the rough version of the pictures.
Well, then I have to go and make the pictures, draw them the way they're
really going to be in the book. That's when the fun part starts, because
then I just go out and I find really neat things to draw, things that
I'd like to, you know, spend time drawing. So, but I also have to, in
that page I just described, I have to go get microscope and binoculars.
I always like to look at the real thing obviously that I'm drawing,
because there are kids out there \[laughs\] who know what everything
looks like. If you make mistakes, you hear from them, and they'll send
you a letter and say, "You know on this page you drew this and it's
wrong."

Matt Raymond:

Yeah.

So I always, you know, want to make sure that I'm very careful. And
often just in a desire to see more clearly what it is I'm going to be
drawing, I'll make models of things. In my book "Tuesday," which is
about frogs flying on lily pads, I didn't really want a frog on my
drawing table, and I couldn't pick it up and turn it around and draw,
you know, as I needed it, so I made clay frogs that I could use, which
worked just fine. As I've built, you know, structures or buildings, you
know, it's very rudimentary, but it's enough to give me a sense of what
it is I'm really trying to draw and how I want to view it. So it's just,
you know, anything that needs to be done to help further create,
hopefully, a believable universe within my book, you know. I'm happy to
do it.

Matt Raymond:

Yeah. I think that readers will see a lot of influences from the past,
from maybe some past artistic movements in your work. Can you talk about
who have been some of your influences in terms of painters? And I think
I also heard that the Renaissance and the Surrealistic movements have
influenced you as well.

David Wiesner:

Yeah, when I was a kid I would go down to my local library, the Bound
Brook, New Jersey, public library \[Bound Brook Memorial Library\], and
they had the great big series of Time-Life Books on the great artists
and the art movements. And I just loved to sit and look through these
books. It just often seemed like each painting was full of stories. And
particularly the drawings of the Renaissance painters, you know, da
Vinci and Michelangelo and Dürer, and people like them. And, you know,
if you look in the back of the "Mona Lisa," you know \[laughs\] she's
painted pretty well, yeah. But if you look in the back of her there's
this landscape that clearly da Vinci just made this up because there's
no place on Earth that looks like this. It's almost looks like Mars.
It's wild, and I love that sort of thing going on in the back of a lot
of the paintings.

Painters like Pieter Bruegel, who, you can start in the very foreground
of the paintings and follow roads and paths, and little people all the
way back through roads and forests and things to the very, very
distance. And I love that level of detail, that you can just get sucked
all the way through into the deep recesses of the picture. So that sort
of painting style always appealed to me.

I then discovered that Surrealists, a number of whom painted in that
very academic style as well \-- but the stuff they were painting was
really, really strange. And certainly to me at 12 or 13, or however old
I was, that was really appealing to, not only see their technical
ability but just all this really weird stuff, and that if you could see
the things that I was painting and drawing at that age, it clearly
reflects the influence of the Surrealist painters. You know, it was just
a very believable dream world that they were showing, which is something
that I have, I think, tried to capture.

Although, you know, for myself, I am this \-- you know, I think I began
to realize after the fact the fantasy that I create is all pretty much
set in the ordinary world, sort of the day-to-day. I grew up in suburban
New Jersey, and it seems to be where roughly a lot of my stories take
place; just kind of out, and you know, suburban America. And I love that
fact, that if you could just maybe look around the corner at the right
time or be in the right place or right time, something really amazing
and fantastic was happening, would be happening, whether it's, you know,
something as silly as flying frogs or, you know, giant vegetables flying
through the sky, or picking something up off the beach and discovering a
whole world revealed beneath the ocean. Just that ordinary, that simple
act of plucking something up off the beach, you know, leads to this
whole other thing. I love that fantasy based in the sort of everyday
reality.

Matt Raymond:

Yeah, I really was fascinated by the interplay between those, especially
in "Flotsam." Can you talk about \-- do you have any favorite
illustrations from "Flotsam" or from previous books like "Tuesday" or
"The Three Pigs?" All of which won the Caldecott Medal, of course.

David Wiesner:

I don't know. It's all \-- well, first and foremost it's the story for
me, and as much as I try to make each of the individual images as well
as I can, they are part of the bigger thing. But there are certain
recurring things that come back to me. The image of the octopuses
reading under the water there has been in my mind; the octopus in sort
of the overstuffed chair. I've been drawing that in my sketchbooks for a
couple of years trying to figure out what to do with it. And I was
thrilled to be able to, you know, find a place to use it in this book. I
have several other variations on the scene where I wasn't quite sure how
it would take place, but in the end I like this idea.

I tried to root it a little more in \-- it's kind of hard to use the
word reality in that picture, but if you look in the back of the
picture, there's a moving van that has fallen off a barge or some ship,
somehow ended up in the water, so that in fact the octopuses have gone
in there and taken that furniture \-- the little living room set there
and set it up directly from that. So I was attempting to create a story
within the picture that if you, you know, look at all the elements, you
can get a sense of how this came to be, rather than just, you know, at
one point I had a house under the water, you know, sort of a whole
living room of walls and things, which looks really neat. But I like the
idea of somehow taking the story aspect of that image a little farther.

Matt Raymond:

Yeah, I found that was probably one of my favorites, too. If you were a
young boy right now and you were just starting out as an artist, what do
you think are some of the new influences that you might be able to find
in the world today? Or are there? You know, or are we just bombarded by
too much nonsense?

David Wiesner:

Yeah, it would be \-- boy, it would be interesting. I clearly spent huge
amounts of time as a kid outside, playing with my friends in the
neighborhood. We went out and ran around and had a huge imaginary life
out there. But I also watched a lot of TV, old movies and stuff. I loved
\-- you know, they filled the schedules back then with, you know, "King
Kong" and old science fiction movies and flying saucers. And you know,
my favorites were the giant bug movies; the atomic, mutated giant
insects. It seemed like there were dozens of those movies.

And they look so old fashioned now. They certainly were magical as a
kid, that what kids view now is so incredibly, realistically rendered. I
don't want to sound like a curmudgeon, but I wonder sometimes whether it
takes some of the wonder out of it to make it appear so real. I don't
know. There's a lot more visual input in the world today. And I don't
know that that's bad, I don't know that that's good. I'm not sure how
\-- that's an interesting question \-- how that would affect a kid who
was inclined to draw, inclined to create. My own kids, I know, read
voraciously, and a lot of their inspiration comes out of what they read,
which is great.

Matt Raymond:

Yeah, that actually leads to my next question. As you're an adult now, I
mean, do your own children inspire the work that you do? Do you get
feedback from them? Or do they even enjoy drawing themselves?

David Wiesner:

Oh, they're both very much creative kids, incredibly creative and doing
\-- I've always made a point of having just all the art supplies are
there and available, and you know, encourage them to use them. You know,
"We're not saving them, so do what you want." And they're wonderful
feedback people. I always show them \-- they see everything I'm doing
through the early stages when they're very rough pencil drawings, you
know, right through to the end. And it is a little unnerving when they
were younger at first because, you know, really other than my wife,
nobody ever gets to watch me work. And suddenly, you know, my kids were
coming into my studio going, "What are you working on? Let me see."

So, and it was fascinating how immediately engaged they were, even in
the very rough stages; just, you know, some quick pencil drawings,
really just wanted to hear the story, wanted to see it in that form. And
so they were sort of the first line of defense. My wife and my two kids
always kind of know what I'm doing. Sometimes I'll mull over what I'm
thinking about in terms of the story and where I want it to go, just to
kind of get some initial response from them. I have a story that I
abandoned, because the story \-- it started great, started great, but I
couldn't, just couldn't get it to go anywhere equally as good as the
beginning. My daughter loves it \[laughs\]. And she says, "When are you
going finish that alien story?" So, you know, there's a part of me
that's trying really hard to bring that book together, because she just
really responded to it in its very early stages.

Matt Raymond:

Now, in reading your work, I saw a lot of similarities to another genre,
the graphic novel. Do you have any plans to move in that direction, into
that market?

David Wiesner:

Obviously comic books were an enormous influence on me, and had the
graphic novel, sort of been in existence when I came out of art school,
I could have imagined going down that path. I didn't want to go into
creating comic books mostly because \-- certainly at that time it was,
you know, superheroes, and it was pretty much all aimed at a 14-year-old
boy level \[laughs\]. The graphic novel now has the range of the
audience, and what's being done, I think, is fabulous and wonderful. The
problem I find is that it's just an enormous amount of work, and it
takes me a very long time to do a 32-page picture book. To do a graphic
novel could take forever. I have a couple of stories that are too long
to be picture books, and I'm mulling over the reality of trying to
create a graphic novel, but it mostly depends on whether there's a way
to streamline the process. So that it won't take an endless number of
years to do. But yes, I'm really excited by a lot of the work that I see
out there.

Matt Raymond:

Can you talk about any other projects that you have in the works? Or is
that all hush-hush?

David Wiesner:

I've only got, let me see, two of my contracts that have on them the
name of the book that I actually produced. I have a habit of getting
into something, and if it doesn't work out, switching and changing.
"Flotsam" is not the book I was contracted for. "Tuesday" was not the
book that I was contracted for. So, I don't like to talk about stuff too
early in the game, because you never know if that's what I'm actually
going to do. Although I will just say there's a couple of things that
I'm working on, and so far looks promising \[laughs\].

Matt Raymond:

Great.

David Wiesner:

That's about all at the moment. I did recently complete a new set of
covers for "The Chronicles of Narnia," which was a very different and
interesting project to get involved with; you know, taking a classic
like that and seeing what you can do with it. So that was an interesting
sort of sidetrack for a little while. Those are up this summer, I
believe.

\[music\]

Matt Raymond:

Well, thank you very much, Mr. Wiesner, and of course we look forward to
hearing more from you at the National Book Festival on Saturday, Sept.
29, on the National Mall, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The event is free
and open to the public. For more details and a list of participating
authors, you can visit www.loc.gov/bookfest. That's all we have time for
from the Library of Congress. Thanks for listening.

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