The Artist as Writer: Marcia Brown

Marcia Brown is a gifted artist, best known as an illustrator of dozens of books for children and as the only three-time winner of the Caldecott Medal. Brown has also written a number of books for young readers. It may come as something of a surprise, however, to learn that she is an essayist, too, and for the most part, a good one. The essays in this collection were nearly all written for oral delivery. The first essay, "What Is a Distinguished Picture Book?" Brown gave at a meeting of the New York State Library Association in 1949, six years before she won her first Caldecott Medal. The last essay in the book, "There's Something in the Air," was the Anne Carroll Moore Lecture for 1984, a year after she won her third Caldecott Medal.

These essays are about children, pictures, and books, about the relationship between children and the books they read and look at and the effect those books have on children throughout their lives. Although the essays are about children, books, and the pictures often found in those books, they are also about Marcia Brown. They are a diverse group of essays, full of ideas, images, thoughts, and philosophies held together by the central idea that Brown expresses in her "Preface": "The ideas and images gathered by children from their books are like lotus seeds, endlessly reborn to bloom in successive seasons of their lives." Brown's essays, though each has a different slant and a different purpose, are finally like the lotus seeds; they bloom in successive seasons, having the common voice, the common concerns of their creator, Marcia Brown, the lotus seed of these essays.

We generally don't expect artists to be good writers though in children's literature, we find a great number of men and women who are both good artists and good writers. Marcia Brown is both. Before Brown became an artist, she taught high school English. In our society, it is axiomatic that English teachers can write. The truth is, however, it is perhaps a rare English teacher who can write. Marcia Brown proves the exception because she does write, and most of the time, she writes well. Her writing styles are as sure as her artistic styles. One of her strengths is her use of strong words harmoniously and rhythmically put together to express her ideas: "Compare [Margot Zemach's] The Three Sillies, Nail Soup, The Speckled Hen with any of several treatments of folktales with the same earthy origins and feel the sureness of her comic vision, the core of warmth in the observation of human foibles and absurdities" (126). Note her use of the imperative verbs, "compare" and "feel" and their locations in the sentence; note her alliteration of the hard "c" and the "k" sounds in "compare," "comic," and "core" and echoed in "Speckled" and "folktales." "Compare," "earthy," "feel," "sureness," "core," "foibles," and "absurdities" are vital and forceful, adding to the strength and cadence of the sentence. Brown's diction is just as sure. Even casual readers of folktales know what kinds of tales she has in mind when she talks about tales of "earthy origins" with their "core of warmth."

Another evidence of Brown's talent as a writer is her frequent use of epigrams, an element of English prose and poetry as old as English itself. She writes, "Many illustrators have tried to write—with varying success—and occasionally authors have tried to draw—with less" (128). Sometimes the truth of her epigrams is caustic as in "The seeking of power demands a putting down to build oneself up" (186). Another says, "Self-appointed experts are often people who are distinguished—for their ignorance as well as for their arrogance" (186).

Marcia Brown sometimes writes in pictures, metaphorical pictures which seem to well up unconsciously in her sentences and paragraphs. In speaking about the lasting effects of books on children, she suggests that those books are like the effects of water on rock. "But the springs from the deep earth...