Picture Book Genesis: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak

Picture Book Genesis: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak What I would like to talk about today is really the only thing that's on my mind at the moment, the book I'm working on, and have been working on for three-and-a-half years. It won't be finished for another year-and-ahalf to two-years, so it will be a long project. It is a picture book, which is my favorite form, the third of what I had long conceived of as a kind of trilogy. Trilogy is a fancy word, but there are going to be three variations on this particular theme. The first was Wild Things; the second was Night Kitchen; and now this one. They are all basically the same thing. (I only have one or two things in my head, and I've been able to fool all of you by doing variations on it for so many years.) This book is actually the earliest of them all. It was the most difficult one to deal with, so it's taken me this long. It's about a little girl. She is the heroine of the story. For those people who will now say I'm doing a woman's lib book, I want to assure you it's not true because she was there already back in the Fifties. She's just taken this long to get to the top of the line. I'd like to talk about the genesis of the book because my students in New York and so many people wonder how you begin a picture book for children. Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, it's such a chaotic process that it is difficult to describe how this happens. I've always envied people who can neatly plan their books before writing. I know some people who write books for children, or who just write books, who get up in the morning and feed their dogs and wave their spouses good-bye and get out the typewriter and write: "Chapter One. Nellie walked down the street. The alligator grabbed her, and that was the end." They have a plot; they actually write from chapter one to chapter two. But I don't have that kind of brain, and I don't understand how you can conceive of plot in that particular form because mine works in such a very different way. It works in bits and pieces and sections of memories that don't seem related for a very, very long time. Something in me determines they will be related; they're going to come together come hell or high water. I don't know why, but it's a kind of predetermined thing. Now in the particular case of this book, there were certain elements, and I'll tell you what some of them were. One was the memory of a book. I was four or five years old, and I lived in Brooklyn. Next door was my best friend, Selma, and she had marvelous books like the Big Little Book of David Copperfield with photographs of Freddy Bartholomew in it. That's what I thought David Copperfield was for a very long time. She also had another book which we read continuously. I've no memory of the book title or anything about it except that it was the book that Selma and I read on the landing. It was a ritual book, and it had to do with a little girl who takes a walk and is caught in a storm. She is wearing her mother's raincoat which is far too big for her, and she is carrying an umbrella. Then, suddenly, there is a juxtaposition of her walking in this flowing garment in clear weather, and the very next picture — which, to me, seemed miraculous , like a transformation scene ~ the sky is dark; the wind is blowing against her; she is billowing out like a great yellow cloud, her umbrella is inside out, and she has a look of dismay on her face. I hope it ended well; I have no recollection of the ending, but that picture has stayed...