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 Neela Sakaria: Thanks you for your time Ms. Williams. Please tell us how you began writing children's books.
Vera B. Williams: I am a person like my character Bidemmi in Cherries and Cherry Pits. I have been impelled from my earliest years to imagine and describe my world in words and pictures. I created several handmade books at Music and Art High School (NYC) and at Black Mountain College (NC). I also learned to set type and run an old printing press. I fell in love with lettering and book design. Add to that a feeling that I was (even as a child) an interpreter of a child's view of life, and you have the makings of a children's book writer and illustrator.
I used to create books for my own children, but it wasn't until I was in my mid-forties, my children grown, my nature tugging for new expressive outlets, that I illustrated my first book for publication.
My friend Remy Charlip, a very imaginative creator of children's books (Thirteen, Fortunately Unfortunately, Arm in Arm) invited me to collaborate on Hooray for Me. I illustrated it at a drafting table in my houseboat in Vancouver, B.C. I could hear the howler monkeys in Stanley Park, and the boat swayed slightly while I hand lettered and did pages over and over finally to end up as illustrator of Hooray for Me (first published in 1975 and is presently reissued by Tricycle Press, Berkeley, CA).
A few years later, when Christmas came about and I no longer had kids around to bake with, I wrote It's a Gingerbread House, Bake It, Build It, Eat It. That was the first book I both wrote and illustrated.
Neela: Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart, is a collection of poems and pictures. Tell us about the format and why you chose to set the book up this way. What made you decide to emphasize the drawings and illustrations?
VBW: I'll quote here from the interview with me in the Greenwillow catalogue 2001: "In each of my other books I have tried to create an ensemble in which all elements could sing together. In this book I wanted almost the opposite. I wanted a way for the poems to solo. But I also wanted finally to include the art. The drawings became a set of variations on the theme. I set a very few quiet drawings like occasional notes among the poems. The more vivid colored pencil paintings are in an 'album' following the complete verse narrative. This is an unusual arrangement. The drawings are freed from precisely illustrating the text, and the poems get to speak alone, as I wanted them to. Portraits of Amber and Essie do introduce the book, and a hint of color underlines the titles like a little hum connecting the parts."
Neela: Where did you get your inspiration for Amber and Essie's characters?
VBW: Amber is based on myself, Essie on my sister. My sister Naomi (a distinguished historian of photography) feels that Essie is not as much like her as Amber is like me. That's because the book is fiction. I had to, in the nature of things, make up more of my sister, a.k.a. Essie, than myself, a.k.a. Amber. The characters, events, and scenes are invented just as much as they are based on recollections.
Neela: Can you talk a little bit about siblings and the roles they play in each other's lives, especially when they are children (in the book and also in general)?
VBW: The sisters in Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart are in their plight together. They need each other. Essie truly takes care of Amber. Amber tries to share the delights of her own younger ways with Essie. They BOTH long for the return of their father from jail, but Essie has the parental burden of interpreting the wrongs and rights of a parent who has committed a crime. They give each other the comfort of their solid presences, bodies and spirits against loneliness, fear, and boredom. Of course they do rub each other the wrong way too.
In recent years American children's books have emphasized the resentments of siblings a lot. Through Amber and Essie, I wanted to celebrate the precious and lifesaving roles my sisters and brothers can offer each other. And this has brought me in my 75th year closer to my sister.
Neela: Can you tell our readers who may be familiar with your other books, how this one may be different or similar? What can they expect?
VBW: Recently, a student in a class I was talking with said, "Your characters all live in tough neighborhood, don't they?" I told him, "They live in low rent neighborhoods." They have a hard time earning enough money. Nothing is elegant or fancy, but there's a whole neighborhood life that goes on. Lots of people have come to believe that you either live in an upscale place or you live amidst gunfire and destruction. The people I show in my books are like the people I grew up with in many different neighborhoods (mostly in NYC). Trying to get by from week to week was a major part of life for them. In that way Amber and Essie join Rosa and her family in A Chair for My Mother, Something Special for Me, and Music, Music for Everyone and Elana Rose Rosen and friends in Scooter.
But the new book allows more emotion to show. In Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart, several poems are truly filled with the longing of Amber for her absent father. But along with life's struggles and sadnesses there is the enthusiastic spirit of the characters-jumping on the bed, throwing a ball high, enjoying friendship.
I like people and characters who are glad they were born and are making the most of that singular opportunity. And the end is joyful (I believe that pessimists should write only for adults). But I didn't have to fake the end. Our father, who went away and was almost certainly serving time in jail, as was the father in the book, did return to us. (I do not have certainty about these events, as they were kept secret by everyone in the family and I was very young at the time.)
Neela: What is the writing process like for you? Do you set aside time to write every day/week, etc?
VBW: Right now I don't have a writing/illustrating project. BUT new stories are beginning to bubble up. As I walk, shower, fall sleep or wake, dialogue is creating itself. The Muse is hovering. Of course one does have to pay sustained attention or she won't stay around. At some point I will spend some hours writing (probably on my computer). When I'm convinced that I'm really working on THE story that I want to tell I'll work on it four or five hours a day until I have a manuscript to submit. When it's contracted for and a publication date is set and there are illustrations and designing, etc. to do, I'll work on it most of the time. Though there will be time off for school visits, conferences, meetings, and other pleasures like canoeing and hiking. (Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe is my book that is closest to autobiography.) I also have five grandchildren and many friends that I like to spend time with.Neela: Are you working on any future projects?
VBW: My editor and many readers have asked if I will write a memoir. Other readers want more of Amber and Essie or Stringbean . . . I don't know what will be next. I like to think in the words of my character Elana Rose Rosen at the end of my book Scooter: "And no one in the whole wide world will ever be able to tell all the wonderful places we will go and all the wonderful things we will do."
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