What Is It About Maps?

I love the map you see above, especially its label: “Upside Down World Map.”  As if our standard north-up/south-down maps are right-side-up.? According to whom? If I’m a bird, what perspective do I have? What if I’m walking on the moon? But I suppose standardizing the orientation of maps makes sense. They stabilize us as we spin through space, and as we spin through the spaces of our daily lives.

Many of you know already how much I love maps. I published an essay in the Horn Book about maps in children’s books (“Harbours That Please Me Like Sonnets: On the Pleasure of Literary Maps “) and I led a workshop at Vermont College of Fine Arts about making maps to reflect the location of our stories’ characters.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Map of Treasure Island

For the last few days, I’ve been looking at a lot of maps while 1) flying from Seattle to Vancouver to London to Rome and 2) walking around Florence.

On the flight to London, in a brand new Boeing 777,  passengers had available to them state-of-the-art seat-back touch-screens with every imaginable permutation of where the jet was headed as it crossed Canada, Greenland, parts of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, Scotland and England. Not just the old, tired dotted line showing the progress of the plane. No, there were videos of sunsets and sunrises and Google Earth zoom-ins and zoom-outs, all of it with an inspirational glow, something golden on the edge of every horizon.

Forget the in-flight movies! I was glued to those maps, exploring every angle of this beautiful blue planet as I flew above it.

At Heathrow, maps on a smaller scale: airport maps, terminal and gate maps. Where to enter, where to exit, where to pick up bags, how to get to connecting flights. The omnipresent and omni-useful YOU ARE HERE dots which always save my sanity.

In Rome, there was a map as my husband and I walked into the Pincio, the park above the Piazza del Popolo, We headed for the old water clock and the view across the city to the dome of the Vatican.

In Florence (just arrived yesterday) we were given a map of how to get from the train station to the Piazza Santo Spiritu, onto which the windows of our little apartment open. Today, a map to the Mercato Centrale and the bus route up to Fiesole.

If you’re a writer, you probably care about maps. You think about the lay of the land, you think about settings. How do your characters move through the spaces they inhabit? Maybe you’ve made a map of their houses or their rooms? If not, try making one. Try making a map of their route to school or their route home from their local library. Don’t forget to add a compass – with it you’ll know where the sun rises and where it sets – does your hero wake up to sunshine? You’ll think about the flora of a given season – what is flowering in the yard, what is the look out the window at dusk if that window faces west?

Daphne Kalmar, one of my former students (who has become a good friend) once made a map of a story she was writing about three characters: a dragonfly, a fly, and a bee. The map was completely blacked out – it had only the “points of smell” that her characters might map out: honey, flower blossoms, garbage, dung….now that was a memorable map!

All this is by way of telling you to check out a recent article in The Smithsonian (has there ever been an issue of that magazine that didn’t inspire a poem?) about a man who is mapping river basins (among other things) around the world. Read it and be inspired to make a map of your own. Next time you’re at a school, spending time with kids, show them your map and ask them to make maps themselves of someplace familiar, or of a setting for one of their own stories.  They (and you) might be inspired to write more stories about characters spinning through the daily spaces of their lives.

River Basin Map of Washington (Grasshopper Geography)

First Graders, Cucumber Sandwiches and Foxes

Last month on a beach in Hawaii, I met a fellow grandma named Susie. She has a granddaughter, Hannah, back in Wisconsin. Turns out Hannah’s class was just then reading my book, Zelda and Ivy The Runaways. What a coincidence! Before the week was out, Hannah’s teacher Jaime Charnholm and I set a date so I could meet the class over the internet, using Google Chat.

(The class is following a Lucy Calkins reading program that uses my book as one of its teaching texts, which are read aloud or as shared reading to model effective reading strategies.)

Here was my view of Hannah’s first grade classroom at West Middleton Elementary, Verona, Wisconsin, where the kids told me it was cold!

Using my laptop’s camera, I walked into my studio and showed the kids my computers, monitors and Wacom tablet, and paints and palettes and brushes, shelves of books and the light table, the stack of books that I have authored and/or illustrated, Izzi the dog and her dogbed, and my cozy writing chair.

The students sent charming thank you notes. I love their colorful drawings and creative spelling.

Who wouldn’t like to be proclaimed “the best ather in the wrld”?  Also, I loved hearing that I inspired Paul to write a book.

The first chapter in Zelda and Ivy the Runaways gets going because Dad is making cucumber sandwiches for lunch (again!). The Fox sisters decide they can’t face it and run away.

Although not many of the kids said they have actually eaten cucumber sandwiches, they were great at drawing them.

You can see what the kids remember about our connection by taking a look at their thank-you notes. The story I told about my first grade boyfriend, Danny, who is the basis for Eugene in Zelda and Ivy and The Boy Next Door, seemed to strike a chord. As did our dog, Izzi, and my paint palette.

My Fox sisters are surely thrilled at the many portraits Mrs. Charnholm’s first graders included in their thank you notes.

more portraits —

I feel lucky for all these connections: to have met Susie, which led to meeting the adorable, creative, wonderful kids in Hannah’s class. I answered most of the kids’ questions about the making of Zelda and Ivy, with this exception: How much paper does it take to make your books? Good question! Anyone out there know the average amount of paper it takes to print a picture book?

I smile every time I think of the first graders in West Middleton Elementary. Thank you, each and every one, for your wonderful letters. And thank you, teacher Jaime Charnholm and Hannah’s mom, Nicole, for making the technology work on the Wisconsin end.

I love when technology makes the world as small as the lawn above Napili Beach.

 

 

 

 

 

Paper

Picture books are ideas made of words and art.

They are also objects made of paper, cardboard, glue and ink.

Last week I visited a papermaking workshop in San Agustin Etla. The workshop is in an old building beside a river, in the hills about ten miles from the city of Oaxaca in Mexico.

It is a peaceful and shady place.

The paper is made from cotton pulp. It is mixed with other natural materials such as the fibers from corn husks, bast, mica.

Sometimes it is tinted with cochineal, annatto seeds, indigo or other   natural dyes.

The cotton is soaked and pounded in a machine, forming a pulp.

The pulp is lifted out from the bucket in a wood frame with a screen set into it.

The water drains out leaving the pulp behind.

The paper is released onto a tin sheet, where the moisture is pressed into felt blankets.

The sheets are hung to dry.

When a page is completetly dry it is peeled off of the tin sheets.

The paper is ready. It is waiting for ideas, words and art.

Plates of Flowers and Fruit

I am traveling this week, so I have pre-arranged a post for you. It’s actually a borrowed post from a friend of mine – Jennifer Kennard. Jennifer is an artist, graphic designer, book maker, book lover, book collector, and lovely person. She has a blog called Letterology, from which this post was taken. I chose it because I have been using stencils in my work lately. And it is still Winter and the flowers and fruit make me think of warmer, brighter seasons.

The 19th Century Book Plates of D.M. Dewey

Title page for one of D.M. Dewey’s specimen books. S

Dellon Marcus Dewey (1819-1889) was a bookseller, publisher and art patron in Rochester, NY before he became one of the 19th century’s most enterprising businessmen, printing and selling colorfully stenciled book plates of botanical illustrations “for the practical use of nurserymen, in selling their stock.” He employed teams of immigrant artists and colorists in the mid-1850s to paint and stencil several thousand botanical plates of various ornamentals, trees, shrubs, fruits and vegetables. By 1859, Dewey’s price list contained some 275 different plates. Once completed, the colorful book plates were assembled into handsome octavo catalogs and portfolios customized for the traveling salesmen known as “plant peddlers” of the floral and nursery trade. Dewey was not the first to devise this practice of providing botanical illustrations to sell seeds and plants, but he was the first to expand the process by relying on the time-honored stencil production process which came to be known as “theorem paintings.” Prior to the development of chromolithography, this multi-layered stencil process was the most striking and effective method of producing colored multiples at the time. Although quite rare now, Deweys’ polychromic watercolor artworks can still be found in complete book sets, and continue to be valued for their exquisite beauty. This 1875 plate book of 91 images shown below was sold on eBay a year ago for about $400. S

To produce each stenciled image, artists would use transparent watercolors to build up areas of tone and color. Stems, tendrils and small details such as the small, red paint strokes seen on the peach above, were painted freehand for added effect on many images. The stencils were most likely made of paper, but brass could easily have been used and would have endured much longer. Paint and inks were carefully applied through these stencils using a brush or dauber of sorts—creating vivid color tones and values as layers were added. A similar process to this, called porchoir, was later popularized in Europe in the early 20th century, however that process relied upon a printed “key plate” to which stenciled color was applied. Greater detail of the “theorem” stencil and brush process can be seen in the grape images below. 

Source In the wake of Dewey’s successful enterprise, the nursery trade flourished in Rochester, NY, bringing with it many imitators of botanical plate books. Skilled craftsman and printers soon followed and by 1871, the first chromolithographic company opened in Rochester, which forever changed the landscape of the nursery business in the US.

Small newspaper ad and advertising envelope for D.M. Dewey’s “colored fruit and flower plates.”S

This 1872 D.M. Dewey plate book shown above appears to be stenciled plates. Later editions, such as this handsome edition below were entirely printed with chromolithographed plates. This stenciled book happens to be in reasonably nice shape and still available here for a rather large sum. I just have my eye on that sweet grape arbor below.

By 1881, Dewey’s company offered over 2400 varieties of book plates of plant specimens. In the wake of his successful enterprise, the nursery trade flourished in Rochester, NY, bringing with it many imitators of his botanical plate books. Skilled craftsman and printers soon followed and by 1871, the first chromolithographic company opened in Rochester, which forever changed the landscape of the nursery business in the US. Confident that chromolithography was the solution to “a greater variety and better plates,” Dewey consolidated his nursery supply business with the Rochester Lithographing and Printing Company in 1888. One year later he died, “but the demand for plate books did not” according to Tim Hensley of the Urban Homestead, and “no less than a dozen Rochester printing companies would follow in his wake.” Hensley points out that each printer had a style uniquely their own as they each employed their own team of individual artists. Some particularly stood out such as the work of the Stecher Lithographing Company (1887-1936) who went on to produce posters, labels and trade cards for seed companies. The Stecher plates of the Salway peach and Le Conte Pear below from Hensley’s site, Rood Remarks, are so exquisite, I find it difficult to believe they are chromoliths. I’m fairly certain they are a combination of chromo and stencil artwork of the tendrils and leaves. The last image of the Greensboro peach printed by the Vrendenburg & Company of Rochester is most certainly a chromolith plate. They are all mighty fine fruit plates. 

Posted by Jennifer Kennard at 6/03/2014

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You Can’t Use Up Creativity

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows.”  
— Jim Jarmusch

Come tax season, I’m tempted to write off everything I do, because what isn’t creative fodder? We never know what’s going to click off an association, an idea, an insight, a solution.

Can I charge myself by the hour and write off that walk around Greenlake? What about that mobile I bought in Africa? Those paper cutouts from Paris? The feather I found at the beach?

Or how about the two hours this week at the Tacoma Museum of Glass watching glass artist Preston Singletary create one of his pieces (you can click the link to see a video of him at work), and then viewing his amazing show in the museum’s main gallery?

It was so peaceful to sit in the peanut gallery watching Singletary and his crew create something from what was once sand. Singletary works with Northwest Native American motifs from his Tinglit heritage–ravens, carved boxes, baskets, a canoe, totem poles. On this day he and the crew were making the body of a raven.

It began with a chalk sketch on the floor. Then he began to shape the molten glass.

The glass etching that characterizes so much of his work will happen in Singletary’s private studio, but the end result are objects like these on display at the Tacoma Glass Museum, some barely looking like glass:

Preston Singletary

Preston Singletary

Preston Singletary

Preston Singletary

If you’re in the Puget Sound area it’s easy to look to glass for inspiration. The Pilchuck Glass School founded by glass artist Dale Chihuly was instrumental in the development of the whole American glass art movement. Countless glass artists like Ginny Ruffner, Joey Kirkpatrick, William Morris, Flora Mace, Benjamin Moore and Lino Tagliapietra have studied or taught there making the Puget Sound region a birthplace and a showcase for glass art.

There’s also the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum at the Seattle Center.

Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum

In addition to the Tacoma Museum of Glass,  the Tacoma Art Museum just opened up a new Benaroya Wing based on the donation by Rebecca Benaroya of her and her late husband Jack’s private glass collection.

How many different directions can you take glass? Well, if you’re an artist open to inspiration from “bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows”, well, the possibilities are just about endless.

Cappy Thomson

Debora Moore

Lino Tagliapietra

Jack Storms

Ginny Ruffner

Marta Klonowska

William Morris

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
— Maya Angelou