June 2024: Q&A with Children's Book Author & Illustrator Deborah Freedman 👩🏻🎨
Writing and reading in a challenging world.
Dear Writers,
Happy June. The world is chaotic and unpredictable, and war is raging in too many places. It’s not easy to find reasons to cheer but we will still celebrate Pride, Father’s Day, and the summer solstice this month. Wherever you are, we hope you’re feeling sunshine on your face and fresh air in your lungs, and have a peaceful place to write.
We have a Q&A this month with children’s book author and illustrator, Deborah Freedman. Debbie is the author of eleven books; her most recent, Partly Cloudy, was published by Viking in March. “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” wrote the Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. The corollary to that might be, “When a writer is born into a family, other family members follow suit.” Debbie and I are second cousins; her grandmother and my grandfather were siblings. Debbie’s aunt, Mary Ann Hoberman, was a National Book Award winner and the author of more than 50 children’s books. My grandfather wrote The Low High Theory of Investment: How to Make Money in the Stock Market and Keep It.
I went on a Lauren Groff tear this week, devoured her short (256 pages) novel, The Vaster Wilds, and did something I hadn’t l done in a long time: Stayed up late and woke up early to finish it. The protagonist is a teenage girl fleeing the starving, diseased Jamestown colony where she worked as a servant. On her journey into the wilderness, she seizes baby squirrels from their nest and grills them on a stick; swipes eggs from under a sleeping mother duck, then breaks the mother duck’s neck and roasts her; eats slugs, sleeps in trees, steals a boat, is chased by men, and interacts with a Mama bear and her cubs. The protagonist, “Girl,” also yearns for the child she took care of in England and the handsome Dutch glassworker she met on the boat over to the new world. As the novel comes to a close, the horrors of what she witnessed in the settlement are revealed. Groff’s short stories are as fierce and invigorating as her novels. If you’ve never read her work, read The Wind, To Sunland and What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf? Q&A with Groff discussing The Vaster Wilds here.
We have just a few spots left in our summer writing retreat on the Jersey Shore, June 24-27. We promise you will receive great feedback on your work, eat delicious food and have fun in the sun. Come write with us by the sea and get that draft of your short story/essay/memoir/novel done!
Generation Women is looking for women and nonbinary voices to perform in their Tuesday, June 18 show, at Caveat Theater. June’s theme is "Anniversary." At Generation Women, women from their 20's to 70's + perform 5-10 minute monologues. Two Sweet Lab writers performed monologues in past shows and were terrific. You can apply to perform with Generation Women here.
What is your writing process?
Since I’m both an author and illustrator, I write with words, pictures, and design. I love being allowed to tell my story with every inch of the book, that wonderful object, from cover to cover – including the endpapers, title page, and even the barcode. Pages can be full and active, or empty and silent. Page turns become part of the rhythm, acting like giant commas.
So I begin by writing and doodling and writing and doodling, spilling my brain into small notebooks until the story starts to gel and I’m ready to lay the whole thing out into storyboards and dummies.
While I’m working all of that out, I also often experiment with art materials or techniques, character design—because I want to find my own best way to visually support the voice of my story. Then, once the writing and editing stage of a book is all done, I get the green light to begin final art.
Do you write by hand? Type from notes? Develop an outline?
I work by hand until I’m ready to isolate, type up, and tinker with the text. The picturebook equivalent of an outline for me is a preliminary, rough storyboard, where I can see all at once the broad strokes of my story and design and how they are pacing out over the allotted number of pages.
Do you have a regular writing practice? If so, describe it.
Ideally, I get started even before I’m out of bed, lying for a while in that dreamy, liminal, early morning state, mulling over my day’s work before I make the coffee and confront what I’ve actually accomplished to date.
When I’m in the writing stage of a book, I tend to get a couple of productive hours in first thing. Once I’m clearly just spinning my wheels, I move on to the business-of-writing stuff that always needs doing, or I fool around in the studio with art. Play is an important part of my process! I want my books to look like I had fun making them.
Once I’m in the studio with final art, I draw and paint all day, every day that I can. When I started out, that could mean 80 hours a week; now I’m at a point where I simply cannot and do not want to do that anymore, so I’ve learned to negotiate deadlines that give me enough breathing room—for the work, and for my life.
Where do you write? (Bed, desk, kitchen table, coffee shop, etc.) Standing up? Sitting down?
My favorite spot to write is a comfy chair in a sunny window, though I can take words anywhere. Because my projects are short, I can pretty much hold them in my head, like a poem. I especially like to think about them to the rhythm of walking, since cadence is so vital to books that are ultimately read aloud.
What books or stories or essays have you read recently that have inspired you?
I’m currently reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which is loaded with potential story ideas. I’m also re-reading Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, and can’t wait for Laura Marris’s The Age of Loneliness: Essays, out in August.
But one of my all-time favorites that I often return to is Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (edited by Leonard Marcus). Nordstrom was an editor of children’s books, of many of the books we now consider classics. Her letters are brilliant, nurturing, funny, and inspiring to read. Among my favorite letters are those she wrote to the writer Ruth Krauss, who did lots of wonderful collaborations with Maurice Sendak, like A Very Special House and I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue. In a letter about Krauss, Nordstrom said, “…grownups and children together with a Ruth Krauss book can be closer than they can be without a Ruth Krauss book”. Isn’t that great?
Do you read actual books, read on Kindle, read on Audible, borrow from library?
All of the above! I try to support authors as much as I can by buying books from independent booksellers or Bookshop.org. But one of my favorite ways to procrastinate is to “shop” my regional library system and put piles on hold at the library, giving me an excuse to stroll over to the local branch and chat with the librarians.
If you have an agent, how did you find this person? Or how did this person find you?
After my first book came out an agent at Writers House contacted me, and I ultimately ended up with two different agents there. I feel truly lucky to have had agents who not only have given me spot-on career guidance, but truly “get” me and appreciate my work in all the right ways.
If you have had a story, essay or book published recently, how many drafts did you revise before you finally submitted it? How many hours/months/years (roughly) did you spend on it?
My latest book, Partly Cloudy, came out in March 2024. The first draft went out to my agent in August 2021 and my editor shortly after that. I did roughly 4 significant revisions with my Viking team, before completing final art almost 1 ½ years after initially playing with the idea.
What are you working on now?
After over a year of revisions with my agent, we just sold a new picture book to Viking. It’s about making art, and for now all I’m able to say is that the deadline is set so that it can come out in time for Mother’s Day, 2026. Wish me luck. ;)
If you want to do a deep dive into your writing and work towards getting published, join us! In the past few months, these Sweet Lab writers have published their work: Hilda Chazanovitz, Bringing Passover Back to the Town Where the Nazis Killed Our Relatives (The Forward), Ilene Goldman, Tomato Soup for the Soul (Eat, Darling, Eat), Lisa S. Greene, Where’s My Knife (Eat, Darling, Eat); Jennifer Door-Moon, Nice Stuff (Herstry); Kate Levin, Life Lessons (Marathon Lit); Elissa Caterfino Mandel, Our Passover: Why this night is different from all others (The Forward), Leslie Dannin Rosenthal, Entertaining Fish (Eat, Darling, Eat). Zelly Ruskin’s first novel, Not Yours to Keep, will be published by She Writes Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster, in October. Other Sweet Lab writers have work coming out in Eat, Darling, Eat and Kveller.
About: Join us for a 3.5 day, 3-night writing retreat, Monday, June 24 through Thursday, June 27. Mornings, we’ll meet for 3-hour workshops, and then have lunch, dinner and ice cream together. Afternoons will be spent writing, sunbathing, paddle-boarding, kayaking, swimming , and walking the jetties. Writers can submit up to 40 pages (10,000 words) for line edits, feedback & discussion. Submissions due June 10.
Cost: $1,800, includes three writing workshops, three lunches, three dinners, and welcome cocktail party. Exclusions: Hotel room and alcohol.
You can also pay via Venmo or Zelle.
Booking: We have a block of standard queen rooms at Daddy O’s, priced at $425/night. Please book your room using the code ZINFRO. Daddy O’s is a fun place to stay and offers free “grab n go” breakfast. Of course, you can stay anywhere you like. Other options include Sandcastle, Hotel LBI and Drifting Sands.
The Book Blueprint: June 13, August 1 and October 3; Thursday nights, 6-7 p.m.
We’ve launched a bimonthly, online book club. We will discuss how a book is structured and why it works. The cost is $150($50/session). We will read Nathan Hill’s novel Wellness, Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story and possibly Essie Chambers’ debut novel, Swift River, out June 4.
