Sarah Stewart and David Small are Michigan based husband and wife team who have together written and illustrated multiple award-winning picture books.
Dr. Sue Ann Martin sat down with the couple to talk about their work.
Sue Ann: I’m very happy to have this opportunity to talk with the wife and husband team of Sarah Stewart and David Small, true icons of children's literature. Welcome to you both, thank you for giving us this time. Your collaborations have over time spread a beautiful arc of story and picture over the entire picture book canon. From The Money Tree, The Library, The Gardener, I think that was a Caldecott Honor book. The Journey, The Quiet Place, and now This Book of Mine. When was the first book, was it The Money Tree?
Sarah: Yes it was The Money Tree in 1991. It came on the way home after having seen my mother in Texas. Coming back home to Michigan it spilled out of me as some stories do. It literally came through my heart, mind, experience almost whole. The only thing that changed is my editor asked me to take all of the “money” words out so it would be the story it is.
Sue: Kindness, service, and creative problem solving seem to be important themes in your books. Sarah do you have a favorite protagonist?
Sarah: Oh, heavens no. All of those women are and were people in my life. David, as you know, he’s brought them alive in these beautiful drawings.
David: And made them all look like Sarah.
Sue: You know, I was going to say but thought it was too corny, that look looks like Sarah sitting at the end of the Money Tree.
Sarah: Oh, I like that corny stuff. We need a little of that.
Sue: Sarah, in The Quiet Place you tell the story of young Isabelle and her move from Mexico to Michigan. Her feelings of missing her home and all the culture that she had to leave and how she devises a quiet place inside large cardboard boxes to feel safe, where she draws pictures and sings songs in spanish. As she is accepted by her classmates and her teachers she feels more positive about asking them, her friends and their family members, to come to her traditional Mexican birthday party. It is a lovely story about acceptance and sharing of cultures. Where did you get the idea, where did that spring from for this story?
Sarah: Evia Savace, a very close friend not an acquaintance. Born in Ajijic in Mexico and I wrote that story based on a story she told me about coming to this country with her father and being overwhelmed by all the strangeness and making a safe space out of all these moving boxes.
Sue: David, the five page gate fold of this birthday party with all the sights, sounds, and smells and good times, is eye popping. What pulled you toward the idea of using a gate fold with this picture book?
David: All of the previous pages with the box and the quiet place were all sort of confined and I wanted the birthday scene to open up into this panoramic that showed she had not only been playing in one box but that she had attached so many appendages to it that you could crawl through, stick your head out the windows. To make it a real fiesta.
Sue: It surprised me when I didn't expect it to be there and then it was such the right thing to be there.
Sarah: And if I may add as the writer, and as your wife, I think for me it’s also representing an openness in her life. Her life is building and opening up and out like those boxes.
Sue: This takes me to your latest collaboration, This Book of Mine. It is a gorgeous celebration of books and reading. My favorite illustration is a picture of a woman reading a book aloud to an imaginary audience standing on a dark stage. There are no written words, it is a great illustration for visual literacy as a whole, the whole book is. Many details, including who she is and how she could possibly be feeling could be discovered just by looking at the picture. David, how did you come up with that idea?
David: Good question, where did it generate? First of all, it's definitely an homage to the wonderful hollywood palace movie theaters that populated downtown Detroit when I was growing up. It’s an homage to those places because they are gone forever. I used to skip high school classes to go to the movies, I went to Cass, which was right downtown. I saw many crappy science fiction films at those places back in the 50’s. It was fun to actually paint that because I made such a thing of the woman singing in the spotlight. She’s singing to darkness but then suddenly you look and you can see all the details of the seats and the scrollwork.
Sue: Another favorite picture of mine is the final, powerful picture, of all sorts of people from a variety of cultures from a variety of ages reading their individual books but doing it together on this massive stairway of a big beautiful library. David, how did your imagination come up with this compelling illustration and David and Sarah how did the collaborative process work on this?
David: I got the idea from the hours that we spent at the New York Public Library between those lions and the wonderful sight of people in the summertime released from their apartments and sitting on the steps reading, or not. Just taking in the sun. Gossiping. I love that.
Sarah: And the answer to the other part of the question is that we’ve been married half our lifetimes and we do not collaborate at all and it’s one of the reasons for our long and good marriage. I write a story, I write a lot of stories, and I read them to David. If he likes them I send them off to my editor in New York. If the editor buys it and so far they’ve bought all of them at FSG David Small then gets the words and I don’t say a thing. I stay home and garden and continue to write and after months, and sometimes it takes a very long time, David says “darlin’ I want you to come over and see what I’ve done.” And he has the whole dummy all over the wall of his studio. I wait and I wait anxiously but that studio is his sacred place. I have a tiny room up on the third floor of our old house. He invites me to come when he’s ready, that’s it. There’s no collaboration and as I said in that other great big room it’s one of the reasons for our great marriage.
Sue: David you also illustrate books for other authors. In fact you’ve earned a Coldecott medal for So You Want to be President, that’s a highly popular one. Does the collaborative process then be different when you work with an author you don’t know as opposed to working with Sarah, especially given what she has just said?
David: Most authors and illustrators never meet. Unless the book becomes a success and they sign together at a conference or something. But generally they are kept three thousand miles apart because if an editor is wise he makes that distance and he or she becomes a verser between the two creative egos. Sarah and I have learned to do that.
Sue: Without the editor there…
David: No, with the editor. If I have an objection to the text or I think I could illustrate it better if this word was here, or whatever. If that ever happens, I tell that to the editor and if he or she agrees she takes it to Sarah and same with the pictures. When I was working with, for example, Judy St. George, whom I never met until the Caldecott ceremony, I know she didn’t like some of the things I had in my illustrations but it all came back through my great editor. She never said “Judy doesn’t like this” or “Judy doesn’t like that.” It was always “David would you consider… might you think…”
Sue: Sarah, in closing what would you say is the greatest idea or most meaningful thought about pictures and story you have learned from David?
Sarah: Draw all the time everyday. Fill your life with art. David Small doesn’t go to the studio and draw. He draws in the car, he draws when we’re waiting at a stoplight, he draws when we’re at a party. He keeps his sketchbook under his arm all the time. That kind of drawing brings into the world not only great sketchbooks, which I still enjoy looking at over at the studio, but all kinds of ideas for new books.
Sue: David, if I may, what is the greatest idea or most meaningful thought about words and story you’ve learned from Sarah?
David: What springs to mind is to be, like Sarah, all the time everyday careful with your words. To pick the right one. To know the right one. She talks about how much I draw she reads voraciously, she studied latin, she always has five dictionaries handy in every room. She’s very concise and very poetic in the way she speaks but it also has to be linked with great observations, which she also has.
Sue: Thank you so much for your time today and congratulations on your latest collaboration, This Book of Mine.
David, Sarah: Thank you so much.