Man-eating spiders! Martha tells a charming story about how illustrators and authors work together when they make children’s books. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Man-eating Spiders”
I was talking earlier about my conversation with the children’s book author Sarah Pennypacker, and we were talking about the fact that usually writers of children’s books do not collaborate up front with the artists or the illustrators.
John Klassen, her illustrator for the book Pax, was in on that conversation at the university, and he’s the Newbery Award-winning illustrator for books like I Want My Hat, My Hat Back. She was talking about the fact that on other children’s books, she also did not collaborate up front with the illustrator.
And she wrote one book called Stuart’s Cape, which is about an eight-year-old whose family moves, and he’s really nervous about getting locked in the bathroom at the new school, or the other third graders won’t like him. And he was also worried about man-eating spiders in the closet at his new home.
And the manuscript was given to an illustrator whose first language is French. And so when the illustrations came back, there was a picture in the closet. Of a man eating spiders? In the closet.
And what I love about Sarah Pennypacker is she said she loved that. She just changed her language because she loved the image so much. She changed it to what if there were man-eating spiders in his new bedroom closet or a man-eating spiders?
And she was saying that that’s one of the glorious things about working with an illustrator is that they show you things that you would never have thought of yourself. But isn’t that great?
It is great. And it shows the power of the hyphen that you need between man and eating, right? The power of the hyphen. What if English isn’t your first language? You might not pick up on the nuance of that hyphen.
Yeah. That’s cool.
