This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
You might be familiar with her tales and beautiful illustrations of animals and people from across the globe.
Children's author Jan Brett is headed out on her 2023 Winter Wonderland Tour, and she'll be making a stop in South Dakota. Brett will be coming to Rapid City on Dec. 5.
She shared a conversation about writing, illustrating and cozy animals with Lori Walsh.
Brett's tour features her Winter Collection four book box set.
Learn more about Jan Brett's Winter Wonderland Tour here.
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The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
Sitting down with the great Jan Brett, what a privilege and honor. We're so excited you are coming through South Dakota. Now you travel all over the world for your books. Have you been through South Dakota before?
Jan Brett:
Yes, we have been to the Corn Palace and we have been to, I think, a couple of different cities and it is great. We're on a bus, we're on this great big bus and we're in the back of the bus. And the bus drivers have a great view of everything and we just see things go by really fast. So it's not as good as you would think, but we do get to have some looking out on the side and our bus is wrapped with whatever books I'm working on or am talking about. So that makes it not as clear as it could be. But we do get a sense. We do get a sense, yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Are you able to work on the bus? Do you do any writing-
Jan Brett:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
... or sketching? Tell me a little bit about versus working-
Jan Brett:
I do. I [inaudible 00:01:05].
Lori Walsh:
... at the home studio. What's the studio bus?
Jan Brett:
The studio bus is just the kitchen table, but I do it when we have mornings off or days off or any spare moment. I bring my work. And right now I'm in my studio that's standing still, but I do. And then when the bus is moving, then I usually have a project like it could be knitting or needle point. Those are my two go-to projects.
Lori Walsh:
Now I also needle point, and we could go on a long tangent, so we'll stick to the books, but do you paint your own canvases?
Jan Brett:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
You do?
Jan Brett:
Of course. Yeah, of course. I have needle pointed, other canvases, but mostly I do my own.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, that is fantastic.
Jan Brett:
A lot of dining room chairs. I've done seat cushions and I don't know everything, for years I've done it. It's great to keep your hands busy.
Lori Walsh:
There is this beautiful winter collection that is coming out from GP Putnam and Sons this fall gathering some of your delightful winter books together in one box sex, The Snowy Nap, The Hat, Cozy, and The Three Snow Bears.
Jan Brett:
... what it looks like.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, I love that.
Jan Brett:
Me too. There it is. I worked very hard on the cover because normally a book would have a jacket, but this is like a slip cover, and so they wanted to do something in house and I said, "No, it's got to be special." So I'm really happy with this. It has the little bird bark from, I think it's The Hat, and then it's got Cozy, which is one of the books, a Muskox, which is a very interesting animal. Hedgie in The hat, the three snow bears, which I went up to Nunavut in Canada to do. It's very far north. And then this one is, let's see, it's he nap, The Snowy Nap. And that also starts Hedgie. So we got two Hedgie, bears, and a Muskox.
Lori Walsh:
Let's talk-
Jan Brett:
Which really should be called another name because they don't smell bad at all. I sniffed one.
Lori Walsh:
You sniffed one for the book. Let's talk about Cozy because this book comes out in 20-
Jan Brett:
Oh I love-
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, in 2020, which is a time when a lot of children might have been stuck inside, might have been longing for connection that is demonstrated in cozy for that feeling of family, house rules that have to maybe change and be reestablished for boundaries. When that book came out for you, because you would've written it before COVID-19, how did you see it find its place in the world at that particular time for kids who were pretty stressed out?
Jan Brett:
I thought it was amazing that it happened that way, because first of all, I took a little bit of a leap with the muskox. I just fell in love with them, but whatever I fall in love with doesn't necessarily mean everybody's going to fall in love with them. And so it was a little bit of a stretch. I think the publisher, I won't put words in their mouth. I think a lot of people are thinking about selling books are thinking about bunnies and bears and cozy animals, but the muskox is pretty interesting. And there's certain kind of child that loves to learn about animals from the Pleistocene or dinosaurs or to learn about exotic animals, a platypus perhaps. I know this, because when I talk to kids in the book line I always ask them to break the ice, "What's your favorite animal?" And there's some will say a dog or a cat, but then some will have something that I would like, "Now, what is that?" They'll think of something very unusual.
So I was thinking of those kids when I did the muskox book, when I did Cozy. And my daughter had moved to Alaska and she had gone to the Muskox farm, which is a place where they're semi habituated. And they're almost like an arctic goat, and they comb their under fur to make a fiber called Qiviut. And it's very warm, it's one of the warmest in the world. And you can knit with it. It's really impossible to knit with, I have to say. But the people that live there, the people that are native people, they knit it and they do it like the Russian knitting of those cashmere shawls that have holes in them. And that gives it a stretch. It's so warm, but it doesn't stretch very much like a wool sweater would. So they knit with that, and I have knitted with it, and it's hard, but it's very warm. It's totally warm. And sometimes I put muskox fiber in my mittens and my boots and it keeps them warm.
So back to your question, I was thinking about introducing this amazing animal to children, and then to find out there would be this extra part that I just wrote in because it worked with the story was just a big coincidence. I was very happy with, very happy with.
Lori Walsh:
It speaks to the role that Jan Brett books have in our lives, as parents who are looking for something to really spend time with kids. It's not a book that you go through quickly just read the story. There's so much more. If you're a parent and there's Jan Brett books in your house or a teacher, you're going to come around the corner and the child is going to be exploring all the end papers and the borders and everything, and going back and forth and finding the multiple stories. I think it really speaks to the role these books have in children's lives. They're going to grow up and they're going to say, "What do you remember about the pandemic?" And they're going to be like, "Hedgie or cozy, or ..."
Jan Brett:
You're just making me so moved because I could get really fancy and say that when I grew up, my mother and father both, but my mother was a teacher and she really felt we should have good literature for children. And I always felt that children are not less intelligent than we are, they just haven't had the experiences. But everything is there, their minds are actually more vibrant and absorbing than an adult mind. I mean, Yo-Yo Ma, I just saw an interview with him, his a famous cellist, and he said, "If you're going to learn something, learn it before you're 20." You could probably make that 16 because your minds are so absorbent, they're just grabbing things because as human beings, our intellect is what drives us. And that has to get started with a nice little way of seeing the world. And you can't take a little kid and send them all over the world, but you can give them a book that will send them all over the world.
So I like to think of that as these intelligent little beings that are looking at all these pictures, which they can't read or they are being read too. But what makes me happy and what speaks to what you just said is when they get their pointer finger out and they look at all the different things and the adult, somehow we all want to speed read and get to the end of the book and all of that. So I love that the idea that the children will dwell on a page and notice ... I put little special things in there, sometimes it's the border. Like at this point, the next page, when you turn it, it's going to be the wolverine who's fallen into a lead, which I use the word lead, even though that they won't know what that means because they'll figure it out. And you can see that there's a little smashed place in the ice.
Lori Walsh:
Yes.
Jan Brett:
And then the next page, he's fallen in and he's covered with ice balls. So he comes along, and he asks Cozy if he can get in because he's covered with ice balls. And interestingly enough, I put in my news notes, which is my little letter I have on the internet and I send out to fans and stuff, that the wolverine is the one animal that it's the shafts of the fur are so slippery that ice can't stick to them. So I had to use my artistic license, and this must've been a special case. Maybe the water froze really quickly and stuck to its fur. But most of people that make garments out of fur, indigenous people, they will use that wolverine fur because ice doesn't stick to it. That's kind of a long answer, isn't it?
Lori Walsh:
No, I love that. And I want to go back to what you said about Yo-Yo Ma and starting something in childhood because you decided at a very young age that you wanted to be an artist and maybe even specifically an illustrator of books. But tell me how you found your voice and your artistic vision? Anybody in the world can pick up a Jan Brett book and know that it's a Jan Brett book and we know that you made it. When did you feel like you had said, this is me as an artist, I found how I want to express myself?
Jan Brett:
Yeah. Well, that's a subject we talk about a lot because my husband's a musician and we've been listening to this piano concerto that I really love, it's a Schubert piano sonata actually. And listening to different pianists, it's almost like a different piece, it's number 21. And it's almost like a different piece according to who's playing it. And I could think if you develop the skills, a craft, that somehow your inner whoever you are just comes through, that's what art is. And that we're human beings, and since prehistoric time, that is a natural process that what we like or whatever comes through and that brings our humanity out. And that's why I really encourage children to draw and not always use prefab ideas first. Start from there, your own ideas. I only drew horses until I was in eighth grade because I wanted a horse really badly, and I was crazed about horses. I really, really loved horses.
We used to ride our bikes the three towns around here looking for people that had horses and just look at them, moon at the horses and learn their names and would make ourselves pass them, "Can we pat them? Can we clean out their stall?" This is me and my friend Marla. She was also an artist, and so we would just draw horses over and over again. She was a much better artist than I was. So I would try to up my game so that we could play ... everything we wanted in life we'd put in our drawings. Then my mom didn't think about having us have art lessons. She said we should use our imaginations and gave us lots of art materials. And time, I think time is the biggest thing because "Mom, there's nothing to do. It's raining. What we were going to do today canceled. We're so disappointed." And she'd just say, "Well, just sit up to the counter," and say, "Why don't you draw something or make a block city?" And she didn't really mind if we messed up.
We had to pick up our mess, but we could be creative and it wasn't like the house had to be immaculate all the time. And so that was that thing. And then later, when I got to be older, I just had trouble communicating. And I guess that started as a child, but when I had the time to draw a picture, I could put all the things I wanted in it and I didn't feel like I was being too rushed. So to this day, I always think, well, I'm a slow thinker. I just need a little chance to think about what I'm going to say. And then I'm much happier with what I do, say if I do have that little thinking time. And then, later on, when I first went around with my portfolio, so I'd be in my early twenties then to different publishers, I had the manuscript for Fritz and the Beautiful Horses, which is my first book.
I went in with my artwork and my editor, whose name was Walter [inaudible 00:14:19], he said, "Well, Jan, we can match you up with a writer, but if you write your own stories, it will be much easier to get published." Because he liked my artwork and it was just finding someone to mesh with. And so I went back and I thought, well, I can't write. I'm not a good writer. And he said, "Well, you can tell stories?" I said, "Oh, yes, I can tell stories." I was famous in my family for like, is it true because I would always tell stories. And so he really encouraged me to do the writing part, which I did. And I would encourage other people to just try it. I used to set an alarm for an hour and then make myself stay, not getting up and getting water, just stay for an hour and just somehow your brain says, okay, I think I will make up a story now. I'm never in the mood to do something, I just do it with the artwork and stuff.
I might get inspired other times, but not when I'm just ... And then he said, I put borders, kind of flowery borders, and he said, "Jan, Children's books, they're not a greeting card, that children want pithy, interesting emotional stories, they're are people." And I said, "Yeah." So he really taught me about children's literature filling that need. And so there are certain subjects I will agree that aren't for kids, but the range of emotion are. If you think about when your pet dies or something, those emotions you have when you're a child are so strong. I don't know if you ever really repeat them, that strength of emotion when you're just finding out about the world and discovering things. And so he said, "No borders." But I love the borders. I love putting borders on because it could tell me about what's coming next. And I could put other things. I love showing that if something is in a different country, I can put some of the artifacts that I would find there in the border, that type of thing.
And so the next one, Annie and the Wild Animals, I said, "I did borders, but there's content in them." And it tells about Annie's cat goes off into the woods and comes back with babies, and she thinks the cat is lost. And that actually happened to me with our cat. And so he said, "Oh yeah, that's great. Go ahead and do the borders." And then I just never stopped. So I think that was those pieces of advice, my friendship with my friend Marla, and just drawing all the time and having the time to do it, that was very influential. And my mother not saying you have to draw a certain way with, if you have an art lesson, you take a human being and you say, well, the head is one eighth the size of the body on an adult, they are all these rules and stuff. And then you can go back and look at your work. I went to art school and learn things about negative space, for example, or the different colors.
But I think a lot of it was just I had a natural ability for drawing. I still call it coloring. And if it took a place in my life, I hope this isn't getting too woo woo, but if I'm not drawing, I just have an unease about my life. I just feel like it's just a really important part of what the way I am as a person.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I feel the same way about writing. Yeah.
Jan Brett:
You do? You feel the same way?
Lori Walsh:
Yes, yes.
Jan Brett:
It doesn't sound woo woo at all, right?
Lori Walsh:
No, it does not. It sounds like-
Jan Brett:
I think it's a very human thing. It's a very human thing. I think some people feel that peace or that creative satisfaction when they're fixing cars, if they're really good at making all the little parts go in the right way, or being a doctor and seeing a human being and saying something is off balance and trying to fix it. I think there's many ways that we are creative, but I think it's the part of us that makes us human. It's just amazing to see the different cultures in the world. And I think one of the favorite things to do when I was little, was at Harvard, they have this museum of ethnology and has art from the South Seas and from Native Americans and South America, Egypt everywhere. And the art is so beautiful and they're the best.
The most moving was this show that I went to at the National History Museum in New York, and it was called Bright Fires. It was about early man, and I was just fascinated by the artwork. It was so beautiful and intense because it was meant to be somewhat spiritual. Who knows what they used with did it, so delicate and so beautiful. And the animals are so lovely. I don't think it's ever been surpassed.
Lori Walsh:
Wow.
Jan Brett:
On an antler, it's just amazing, and these were people 40,000 years ago. So this is what we come from. This is what we're evolving from or maybe going backwards. I don't know. I think it's really important to draw and work with our hands. I think there's something about the brain hand manipulation connection that is a happiness for us.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What was it like for you then to see your art on display at Norman Rockwell and outside of the pages of the book? Certainly you have your own collection at home, but to go into a museum such as that and say, here is the Jan Brett experience, the world of Jan Brett. Yeah.
Jan Brett:
Yeah. It was really funny. I would always joke about when I do a book, when I pass it into the publisher, I always go, "Oh, this is the worst thing I've ever done. I'm so [inaudible 00:20:23] Paris. I'm so shit. This just isn't what ... I just need another year to work on it." And then a little while will go by and I'll see that same book and I'll say, "Oh, I'll never be able to do it this good." I don't know. It's very close. So what you're getting at is really important is that when you step away from it and see it again, it really does make an impact because there's so many little thinking processes in every page. And I think that kids, I think they get that. I like to tell them when I go to, the one I'm going to, I'm not sure what the venue is going to be. I think it might be at Rapid City.
Lori Walsh:
Yep. You're at Rapid City.
Jan Brett:
And I do a little drawing for them. And then I tell them the best part about being an artist is sometimes I'll work late into the night, or it could really be any part of the day. I just get so carried away with being in the picture, meaning deciding what their expression is going to be, which way their eyes are going to be looking, what their clothes are going to look like, if they're blue here, maybe I want to have a background in another color. All these little things going on and just the world around me will just melt. And then all of a sudden I might go to bed or I'll just go take a walk or something and I'll come back and I'll go, oh my gosh, it looks like elsewhere here. I won't even be conscious of it becoming what it is because I'll be so intense on it.
So then you go to something like the Norman Rockwell and you go, "Oh my gosh, what was I thinking?" I do listen to talking books sometimes, but I listen to music if I'm doing the designing part. But right now I'm working on Alice in Wonderland in the Arctic. And I'm doing some background stuff, so then I can listen to an audio book. But then if I'm doing a face or something then I have to [inaudible 00:22:29].
Lori Walsh:
I love that. You mentioned Annie and the Wild Animals and the cat, and I just want to close with this idea of how we see ourselves in your books and then how also we see what is possible. So with the cats in that book, this was my experience growing up with my brother, there was a cat, we just called her Mamacita. Pretty much all she did is have farm cat babies. And she would go away and then she would come back and we would know. We would go looking and sometimes we'd find them, most of the time not. And then someday she would bring the babies in to introduce us. And then the scene in the mitten where the grandmother is like, first, I will check to see if you are okay and then I will check to see if you have your mittens.
That would not have been my experience growing up. I would've been in trouble for losing them. So in some ways you see yourself, but then you also see the kindness reflected by a loving adult, when maybe the adult in your family is impatient or would not respond that way. It's what life is and it's what life can be, and it's all in-
Jan Brett:
That's very well said. Very well said.
Lori Walsh:
It's all in the world of Jan Brett.
Jan Brett:
I love that it's not a simple answer because I say to the kids when I'm drawing, I'll make some faces and say how important the eyes are because that's where we look for what's going on in that person's head.
Lori Walsh:
I love that.
Jan Brett:
And I say that exact same thing to them.
Lori Walsh:
I am so-
Jan Brett:
Humans are more complicated. Humans are complicated, sometimes we hold many ideas at the same time.
Lori Walsh:
You have been very generous with your time. I know you have many things to do today. I appreciate you spending so much time here for South Dakota listeners. And boy, the buzz is exciting. People are thrilled to come see you.
Jan Brett:
[inaudible 00:24:25]. I hope I can do a great job getting kids to draw, and I am hoping that a lot of children that want to be artists, or are doing some artwork, or writing, I can't really speak to the writing part, I'm not that great a writer, but I love to draw.
Lori Walsh:
You're a fantastic storyteller. Yeah.
Jan Brett:
Yeah, more of a storyteller. So I'm looking forward to meeting everybody, encouraging them. And if they want to bring pictures, I love to admire their pictures. Because we all look for those moments when you're young and you just are freely thinking and all that exuberance is just great to see. It's inspiring for me.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Well, I think Jan Brett is an excellent writer and one to be admired and emulated and enjoyed. So thank you so much for your time with us today.
Jan Brett:
Very wonderful questions. Thank you for having me.
Lori Walsh:
We'll see you later. Thank you.
Jan Brett:
Okay, bye-bye.
