RAR #252: The Making of Because Barbara

Sarah Mackenzie (00:00): If I was to ask you, what is your favorite book of all time? Could you answer that? It's kind of a mean question, isn't it? It's also kind of an impossible question for an enthusiastic reader to answer. I mean, just one book? But if you were to ask me, "Sarah, what is your number one all-time favorite picture book on the planet?" I could answer you and in fact I'm going to. (00:31): My favorite things in the world are family, travel and libraries and chocolate and brie and sourdough bread, but those aren't super relevant to our conversation. I also love witnessing someone go after something that seems kind of out of reach in order to make the world better for somebody else. In fact, the very first picture book I wrote is called A Little More Beautiful, and it's about an old woman who makes the world around her more beautiful, and then the girl who grows up to take on that work for the old woman when she can't do it anymore. This little girl though, she knows it's not enough, that there's something that only she can do and it's sort of her mission in the book to figure out what that might be. (01:24): When that book came out, I described it as a nod to my own favorite picture book of all time, maybe by now you know what it is because it too is about a little girl who grows up to make the world more beautiful. That book also has family and travel and libraries. I'm talking of course about Miss Rumphius, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. If I was cast away to a deserted island and was told I could only bring one picture book, Miss Rumphius would be it. The thing is Miss Rumphius is not Barbara Cooney's only work or only picture book, not by a long shot, Barbara Cooney actually illustrated 110 books before she died. (02:15): What I noticed when I was reading her books, Ox-Cart Man, Roxaboxen, Chanticleer and the Fox, Letting Swift River Go, The Story of Holly and Ivy, the Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree, I can keep going, what I noticed is that if you compared Barbara Cooney's books against almost any other picture books on the shelf, Barbara's are always just better, better storytelling, superior art, more effective visual narrative power. Barbara Cooney was able to capture the beauty of the world on the page in a way that very few, if any other illustrators have. (02:59): So I got curious, who was this woman named Barbara Cooney? Well, a cursory online search revealed that Barbara was a mother of four. Hmm, that's interesting. I got my hands on every book of hers that I could find that she'd illustrated. I hunted for articles about her. I read transcripts of the speeches that she gave at award ceremonies. I read and read as much as I could. And as I read and learned about the woman, Barbara Cooney, I became acquainted with a woman who was a force, a creative force in her motherhood and in her life, from making books that won the highest award in illustration to decorating elaborate Christmas cookies or assembling lavish picnics with her children. She was a playful mother. She was an adventurous world traveler. She was an avid gardener and she was committed in every facet of her life to capturing the beauty of the world that she saw, getting it on the page, showing it to her children. (04:07): I decided this woman needed a picture book, but to get to know her well enough to write a picture book, I needed to talk to people who knew her personally when she was alive. And I know I seem like a very confident person on the outside, the truth was, this was back in 2018, I had published zero picture books, so to write to Barbara's family and say, "Hi, you have no idea who I am. I have never published a picture book before, but I am the world's biggest picture book enthusiast, and I want to write a picture book biography about your mom." I couldn't do it. I was way too scared. So instead I did something else, something a little more comfortable in my wheelhouse. I decided to make a podcast episode honoring Barbara Cooney, and so I could write to her son Barnaby Porter and say, "Hi. I'm the host of the The Read-Aloud Revival podcast, and I'd love to talk with you about your mom's beautiful books." Much more comfortable, easy-peasy. Barnaby Porter (05:18): She opened my eyes to beauty in this world. She was always urging me to look at this or look at that, look at the view, look at the landscape. She'd point out little tiny lichens on the forest floor and things like that. She made me very aware of my natural surroundings. Her sense of humor was quite wonderful. I mean, she really, really was funny. We loved her very much. One thing that I was very proud of is there were four of us kids and we all took quite a lot of interest in what she was up to, but my mother always told me that I was her best critic. Now, she didn't necessarily appreciate some of what I had to say as I looked over her shoulder at things, but she really liked my eye for detail and my criticisms, and I knew how to be diplomatic with her. Sarah Mackenzie (06:10): I also called her former editor at Viking, Regina Hayes. Regina Hayes (06:15): The illustrating came more easily to her than the writing, and she labored over the writing, although she was very good at it, very good at it, but I think she was not as confident in it as she was in her illustrating. Although, again, in her illustrating, she loved to tell the story of how one of her early editors had told her she had no eye for color, and I mean, you have only to look at those books to know she had an absolutely exquisite eye for color. Sarah Mackenzie (06:43): And as I assembled that podcast episode, which you might recall, you can find it in your podcast app. I'll also put a link in the show notes if you haven't listened to it. It may be my own very favorite episode of The Read-Aloud Revival, I'm kind of proud of it. And while I wrote and prepared for that podcast episode, I also wrote the picture book, a picture book I hoped would live up to the woman herself. In this episode, I want to tell you about making that picture book, the making of, Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World. (07:26): The hardest part for me about writing this book was actually finding the through line. A good biography isn't just birth to death of someone's life. I mean, some biographies are a birth to death of someone's life, but usually not the good ones, and Barbara deserved better. Also, she was kind of a Renaissance woman, she did all sorts of things. And not just making stories, but a whole bunch of creative things in her life. (07:58): A picture book also doesn't give you a lot of room. You have to tell your story in as few words as possible, so that was my challenge. In a picture book biography, I could tell one story about Barbara Cooney, which one should I tell? Well, I don't know how many versions of this book I drafted, so many, and there were lots of different through lines that I could have run with. Through lines about the kind of mother she was, through lines about how she learned how to illustrate, through lines about all of her different relationships. But I wrote a whole bunch of different ones, and once I was satisfied with one of those versions, I did what I always do when I finish a manuscript, I sent it to a very particular person and asked her to put it through the wringer. Caroline Starr Rose (08:46): I have the edit letter that I wrote to you right in front of me. So I'm going to read how that opened. Sarah Mackenzie (08:52): Caroline Starr Rose is an author of several picture books and middle grade novels, and she is always, always, always the first person I send my picture books to. Caroline Starr Rose (09:03): My name is Caroline Starr Rose, and I critiqued an early version of Because Barbara. Sarah Mackenzie (09:08): Before I let anyone else on the face of the planet see them, Caroline gets the manuscripts first. This particular book wasn't really ready for an edit because the book was going to get an editor at the publishing house whenever it found a publishing house. At this point, I needed a critique. I needed someone who wasn't afraid to tell me everything that wasn't working, everything that wasn't working as well as I probably thought it was, a critique and an edit might sound like the same thing, but they're not, not really. Caroline Starr Rose (09:41): A true critique. I feel like I am attending a one-person master class where I'm the only student. I have this professor who knows me in and out, knows my work in and out, can't anticipate my strengths and weaknesses, and gives me direction, that is, I could have never learned. I could have read 500 books on craft and all my years of knowledge from reading, which are invaluable, it's just condensed in such a way because it's geared toward my work specifically. Sarah Mackenzie (10:16): So I sent my manuscript to Caroline for the critique, and I waited. What Caroline sent back is called an edit letter. Now, this is several pages. It's usually longer than the picture book itself. In an edit letter, the person doing the critique tells you a little about what's working and a lot about what's not. That's what a critique is. Caroline Starr Rose (10:41): What I wrote is, "This is such a gorgeous tribute. It is so, so, so beautiful. Your love and admiration shine through. Your imagery is lovely. I hope you're proud." And this was just one of those gems. This one just really stuck out as something that I knew was going to sell. I knew this book was going to be published. Sarah Mackenzie (11:04): Not everything about it was working though, some of it just wasn't. So Caroline flagged those parts, some word choices, some story choices, some plot points. I read her feedback and I rewrote the story a few more times. This art of giving critique to an author, by the way, is really, really difficult. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to do it. Caroline Starr Rose (11:31): What I'm looking for is a person who really does want to be critiqued because people don't necessarily always know what they are looking for when they send in a story to be read. Sometimes, whether they realize it or not, they're looking only for affirmation, which is perfectly fine, but that's not what a critique is for. Some are looking for small quick fixes to then move on to whatever the next step might be for them in their project. I can sense that somebody is truly looking to do the hard work and to dig in, and I want to be sure... As you said, we're not friends for 24 hours. It can be rough. It can be rough to receive a critique. It's going to be more than a pat on the head. Sarah Mackenzie (12:22): It was not a pat on the head, even with that lavish praise she did give me at the beginning for what was working, and she affirmed the part of the story that I had struggled with the most, that through line, what's the one story? What's the one hurdle that Barbara's going to overcome in this book? What's the one story I want to tell? (12:40): See, Barbara's life was so rich and so abundant I had a lot of different directions I could have taken the book in. I landed on a story about a girl who saw beauty in the world and spent her life trying to get it on the page so she could leave the world more beautiful than she found it. When you read it, you might think, "Well, that's the obvious story about Barbara Cooney." It was not the obvious story when I was digging through all my notes, when I was reading and talking to people and taking notes, that wasn't the obvious through line. But as I produced that special episode of the podcast, that's the through line I found and Caroline said in her critique, "Yes, that's the through line. You got that." Caroline Starr Rose (13:24): I love that idea of being in love with the world, and it makes me think of, there's an E.B. White quote that says something like, "All I've wanted my writing to say is that I'm in love with the world," or something along those lines. I'll have to look it up and find it for you. But it stirs so much satisfaction in looking at these people's contributions, because it is, they're love letters that are heartwarming to the recipients, the people that get to read, and they get to experience these stories. Sarah Mackenzie (13:56): Now, if this book was published by a different publishing house, the story would've changed here. I'd say something like, I sold the manuscript to a publishing house, and two years later I have a book. But alongside my work here at Read-Aloud Revival, I also run a boutique publishing house dedicated to making beautiful read-alouds for families. It's called Waxwing Books, and I think Waxwing is indeed making some of the most beautiful read-alouds you can get your hands on. Waxwing was going to publish this book, so my work was far from over. (14:35): Over at Waxwing we hired a freelance editor. In this case, Michael Green, the former publisher at Philomel, an imprint of Penguin Random House. He's edited all of my picture books so far, and he edited this one as well. Michael and I went back and forth, lots of notes, he gave me lots of suggestions for tightening or clarifying or pacing, and every pass was a rewrite and it made the manuscript better. So several drafts later, it was time to bring on the real magic maker of the picture book world, the art director. (15:14): I like to describe an art director this way. What an editor does for a writer, helping the writer say what she wants to say, an art director does essentially the same thing for an illustrator. An art director helps the illustrator's work be better and helps the illustrator show what they're trying to show. Just as an editor's making an author's words better, writing better, an art director makes the illustrator's work better. You really need an art director to make a great picture book. You can have glorious texts and you can have lovely illustrations, but unless you have a good art director and book designer to pull it all together into one cohesive narrative, the book just won't be as beautiful as it could have been. (16:02): At Waxwing, we're committed to making beautiful books, the kind of books you want to read again and again, and that means we are always committed to hiring a top-notch editor. In this case, I'm talking about Cara Llewellyn. Cara Llewellyn has designed a lot of books you love, The Hundred-Year Barn, Big Machines, The Quiet Book, Built To Last. She designed The Undefeated, which won a Caldecott award not too long ago. Anyway, an art director often chooses the font and the typeface for the book's cover, and in fact, the font for the book's inside. But let's start with the cover. Cara Llewellyn (16:42): I think right away I knew that I wanted to use the Gaudi typeface world for this because I knew... I love that italic OPTI Gaudi that is used on the Miss Rumphius title, and it's just so classic, and when you think of Miss Rumphius, you think of that, at least I think of the typeface on the cover. Sarah Mackenzie (17:03): Maybe I'm just a total nerd. How might an art director choose the font for the cover of a book? Specifically, in this case, how does she choose the font for the title of Because Barbara? Well, that's kind of a trick question because in this case, she didn't use a font. We actually hired a hand letterer to create the title, Leah Palmer Preiss. Cara Llewellyn (17:29): I tried a bunch of different versions, and it was feeling really digital and sort of too clean, so we ended up going with a hand letterer. If you look really closely and you can see all the little... She added this little, you know the texture that you get when you're writing with a fountain pen on a watercolor paper, it's got that little watercolor paper jiggle to the edge of all the letters. Sarah Mackenzie (17:56): So an art director is thinking about all kinds of things that you might not have ever thought about, like whether a title's letter edges feel too clean, too digital, like Cara said. One of the art director's, principal roles is working with the illustrator that the publisher hired for the book. That's something many people don't know about picture books. A picture book author doesn't get to pick the illustrator. That's not how it works. That's not a thing. The publisher does that. (18:26): Usually a publisher buys a manuscript from an author and then pairs that with an illustrator of their choice. So they decide, "We think that this illustrator over here is going to make good illustrations for this story." Now, I just so happen to be, in this case, both the author and the publisher, so I did get to pick. Around this time, I had seen the fabulous picture book by Josh Crute called, Jonas Hanway's Scurrilous, Scandalous, Shockingly Sensational Umbrella!, and I knew I had to get the illustrator Eileen Ryan Ewen to illustrate this book about Barbara Cooney. I saw those illustrations in the Jonas Hanway book and thought, this illustrator, she could do it. Eileen Ryan Ewen (19:12): I have to say, when you first sent me the email with a manuscript, and here's the art director and seeing her line up of past work, I'm like, "Oh," it was intimidating. And they're like, "Okay, we're going to set up a Zoom call." I'm like, "Oh, I have to talk to her face to face?" I was very nervous. I was truly... I mean, you were I think also on the call. I have to say again, she was just delightful, as you know, so laid back, so delightful and so smart. Understanding that different types of writing needs different types of artwork and trusting the artist. So the way that she was able to just kind of guide and encourage was very deftly done. Sarah Mackenzie (19:50): The art director works closely with the illustrator and she's thinking about a lot of things, how the illustrations, for example, fit on the page so that important elements like faces don't fall into the gutter, that's the middle crease of the book, making sure that the words are clear to read, that the illustrations have enough room around them. In this case, there were a few extra particular challenges for our illustrator, Eileen, and the art director helped her navigate that. For starters, illustrating a life about an illustrator is really difficult. You don't want to copy the Illustrator style, you just want to echo it. So Barbara Cooney had a specific illustrative style, and Eileen wanted to make sure it didn't look like she was copying Barbara's style, but she did want to mirror it, echo it. She wanted to give the same vibe. I guess my older kids would say, we wanted this book to give Barbara Cooney without being Barbara Cooney, if you know what I mean. That was hard. Eileen Ryan Ewen (20:57): It was terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And we talked a lot about how should we go about it? I even dabbled for a hot minute on trying to do linocut, just trying on my own. It didn't work well at all. So that died pretty quickly. I don't know how she did it. She actually used dental equipment, but anyway, I just hope it did do it justice. Sarah Mackenzie (21:22): She did do it justice, by the way. Now, when Barbara was alive and making books herself, she was incredibly committed to accuracy, to getting the real beauty she saw in the world on the page. So we decided that Eileen needed to go to Damariscotta, Maine, where Barbara spent many years of her life and meet her place and meet her family. Barnaby Porter, Barbara's oldest son and his wife, Susan Porter, opened their doors to us. So Eileen went to Damariscotta, Maine. Eileen Ryan Ewen (22:03): They were so warm, so lovely, welcoming. We spent hours in their house and their house was beautiful. It was overflowing with their own interests and personality, but also Barbara was everywhere. So many paintings, just personal paintings. And next door is the house that she had lived in. It was the last house she had lived in. They were gracious. They spent hours pulling out photographs and just telling stories. That was probably the best, outside of some photos of their house in Pepperell, which I didn't know because it's actually been torn down now. So seeing photos of their home in Pepperell and her in her kitchen in Pepperell, and then just the stories about their personalities, of the siblings personalities of her personality. That was, I think, my favorite part. (22:50): And I tried to put that in the book, and it's one of those things that maybe most readers don't know, but just his older sister was a hippie before there were hippies and loved music. And so you'll see her with a guitar and you'll see her in the tree with a guitar, that was... His oldest sister and just his younger brother was sort of this wild child, so he'll be the one on the tire swing. And all of these little things happens from sitting with them and just talking. Sarah Mackenzie (23:19): One thing to notice in this book is the way the kind of illustrations manage the story's pacing. You'll notice some spreads have spot illustrations, illustrations that are just a spot with a lot of white around them, and some are full illustrations that take up the whole page from corner to corner. We call that a full bleed illustration, and you might just think we kind of randomly toggle back and forth, so it's not too many spot illustrations or too many full bleed illustrations. But in this case, we actually use the kind of illustration to paste the story, because Barbara starts when Barbara is a little girl, but we needed to get her to adulthood fairly quickly in order to tell this particular story. So to do that, we have full bleed illustrations contrast with spot illustrations to communicate the passage of time. (24:17): Spot illustrations where Barbara woke up in the morning, washed her face, ate breakfast with her brothers, went to school and did her homework. It's kind of like a movie, when you see a montage of events happening quickly in succession, oftentimes with music in the background, it communicates that time is passing. A lot of these things happened in time is what we're trying to say. (24:41): In our book then you turn the page and it's years later because she's grown up now and she's drawing at a desk with a baby at her feet, but there's still a lot of white space on the page here. It's still a half page illustration, not a full bleed yet. Still we can kind of feel time slowing down because the illustration got much bigger. Now, turn the page again, and there's an illustration of Barbara walking in the woods, a full bleed illustration. It slows us down. It fills up the page. And this is good because the story is slowing down for a while here. We spend the next several spreads in kind of a short amount of time chronologically, that's in a close time period that could be measured in days instead of years. Cara Llewellyn (25:27): It's very cinematic that effect. And I love the way you said the spot pages feels like you're going fast, like flipping through camera frames, and then when you hit that full spread, you sort of, "..." It's like taking a deep breath. Sarah Mackenzie (25:44): So what kind of feedback, besides the things I've already mentioned, does an art director give? Well, let's look at the illustration of Barbara winning her first Caldecott Medal. That first sketch wasn't working. Cara Llewellyn (26:00): Barbara's husband was way taller than her in the first sketch, and he was like the first thing you saw and then you sort of saw the kids jostling and joking around her, and she got lost in the middle. And so we went through a couple rounds of sketches trying to get Barbara to be the center of attention, because she's the one who's winning the medal. And so I think a couple of things that helped there, if you can see in the final one, we had her husband bending down, so he's shorter even than her oldest daughter. And then we had her be the only one who's meeting our gaze. So she's looking out at the reader, but everyone else is looking either at her or at one of the other people. So your eye just sort of travels all the ways back to her. The family members are all in cooler, darker colors, and she's really bright yellow, almost the yellow of the gold medal. Sarah Mackenzie (26:58): When I say there is more happening in a picture book than we realize when we are reading one for the first time or the second or third time with our kids, this is the kind of magic I mean. At Waxwing, we're committed to making picture books that are true art galleries for the lab, and that means the arts got to be just right. That also means we are relentless about color proofing. Eileen Ryan Ewen (27:25): Basically, when the first printing comes out, they compare it with the original artwork to make sure that the color is true, as true to the original, it's never going to be 100% as the original, but as true as it can be. So that's what you do, piece by piece, you examine, and I would have my original art next to me, Carol would have proofs and I would have proofs. So we would sit there and look over the pieces, compare it to... And we would kind of go back and forth. And she had, I think the original scans maybe, so she had something she was comparing them to as well, and give our thoughts of, "This isn't quite as... This is a little bit blotchy." Or, "This is really strange." Or, "The blues here," blues are really hard. Blues and purples are really hard to reproduce accurately. And so say, "This is faded." And then I would take those notes back to the Cleveland Institute of Arts and just say, can you pull these colors a little bit more? Sarah Mackenzie (28:16): Yeah, we did that a lot of times. We had multiple rounds of proofs, many thanks to our printers at RRD and the art scanners at the Cleveland Institute of Art for their excellent work and their patience until we got those exactly right. The finals are stunning. So now we have our book and we can send it to the printer. And now our in-House team's attention turns to making the audiobook. Here at Read-Aloud Revival we work with the awesome audio and video producers at yellowhouse.media, and their commitment to high quality is something we really appreciate around here. Tara McMullin (28:56): I'm Tara McMullin, and I'm the audio and video producer on Because Barbara. Sarah Mackenzie (29:01): Now you might be wondering why we need a video producer, well, if you're watching this episode on video right now, you are watching something that Tara at Yellow House Media produced. If you are listening to this episode, you're listening to something that Sean at yellowhouse.media produced. But in the case of, Because Barbara, we wanted to make an audiobook and a video book. A video book basically meaning the book read aloud on video with some very subtle but very lovely animations that bring the story to life. And because Barbara did whatever she set her mind to, every detail in the art represented what had really grown in the time of knights and castles. (29:59): This time, the beauty Barbara held inside her did show up on the page. This time, her publisher agreed to print her art in color. The video book and audiobook, by the way, are available to you for free when you purchase the book. That's not something you usually get when you buy a book, but we just love you and we think sometimes your kids should be allowed to read aloud, have a read aloud experience that is worthy of their attention, even if you don't have the time right this second to do the reading aloud. So you read aloud the book, but when you can't, you can just scan the QR code on the back of the book to access your free audiobook and video book. And yes, the audiobook comes with a version with page turn cues. You know what I mean? Because more kids should have those. I love working with Sean and Tara and the Yellow House team because they're committed to excellent sound design. Tara McMullin (31:05): Sound design is the sort of creative process of imagining yourself in whatever the environment is, whether real, imagined, internal, external, where the story or the essay or the idea is taking place and then layering in sound to make that environment come to life. So for instance, with, Because Barbara, the book opens with her as a little girl on the edge of the ocean in Maine, and I've been to the edge of the ocean in Maine, and so I'm sort of putting myself into that space and imagining, what am I hearing here? I'm hearing seagulls. I'm hearing waves lapping up on the shore. I'm hearing maybe some rustling in the leaves or in the grasses. And so then I go looking for those sounds that I can layer in to create that environment. (32:14): And then on top of that sound design also is going to include music and any way that we're kind of manipulating the script track, so what you are actually saying, how you're actually narrating the book. Again, I'm thinking about what is the kind of music that I would hear if I was in this scenario, and what is the feeling that I want to create in this environment? What is the feeling of Barbara Cooney's origin story? What music is going to fit this really, really well? And with that, it's thinking about tempo. It's thinking about key. It's thinking about instrumentation. It's thinking about how it's arranged so that the music is either following the action up or maybe it's coming down with the action and all of those things. So all of that is sound design. Sarah Mackenzie (33:04): I'll just say Tara knocked this audio and video book out of the park. Tara McMullin (33:09): One of my favorite parts of Because Barbara are a couple of places where there are fall leaves that are just kind of floating on the wind as they go through. And that was something that I added, that there are leaves, there are fall leaves in the illustrations themselves, but to have that moving element on top just gives it a little bit more life. Sarah Mackenzie (33:33): Tara, by the way, used to manage a Borders Books and Music store back in the day, and she has some fond memories of helping customers find picture books. Tara McMullin (33:43): The picture book section is just, what a delight. Taking people and showing them a book that they couldn't have dreamed existed, something so often, so sparse, so simple has so much depth and potential to connect with people, it's really incredible and to be able to see inside of that in just a little tiny way has been really, really incredible. Sarah Mackenzie (34:19): Susan Porter, Barbara Cooney's daughter-in-law and one of her closest friends wrote to me after seeing the book for the first time. It was an email where the subject line was all caps, "Wow." She said, "This book is a winner. You've pulled it all together with enchanting pictures and a story to intrigue young children, Barbara would applaud you." I hope this inspires you to read Because Barbara with your kids. I hope the story, Because Barbara, inspires your kids to see the beauty of the world all around them. And I hope it inspires you as a mother to be creative, to, as I say in Because Barbara, teach your kids to see what you see, to love what you love to take in the delicious wide world. Eileen Ryan Ewen (35:14): I remember telling my mom, I think my second child was born and I had a drawing table in the corner of a playroom, a family room. I'm like, "Oh, I guess I'll put that away." And she's like, "Don't, don't you dare. They need to see you doing this, and you need to keep doing it even if they see you once a year doing it." So I did, and she was right by keeping it out and listening to those words, and just even if it's whenever you can at night or on a weekend or, just keep doing it. Tara McMullin (35:46): Honestly, I can't think of a better way to be spending my time, what could be better than making watercolor images come to life so that children can watch them while they're reading a book or listening to a book? Like, come on, this is the best thing ever. Sarah Mackenzie (36:04): So there you have it. It took us about four years and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but Because Barbara is out in the world, it's ready for you to read aloud with someone you love, and I hope you love it. (36:21): We are committed at Waxwing books to making books you want to read aloud again and again, books you want to give as gifts, books you want to keep forever. Books you can trust to be worth your family's time. If you haven't yet, might I suggest you order a copy of Because Barbara anywhere Books are sold, order one or two for a friend as well. You can keep up with us and find out when our next books at Waxwing are taking flight, do that at waxwingbooks.com. Spoiler alert, four brand new books are coming from Waxwing in the coming year. The first two are coming in January, and I cannot wait to tell you about them. (37:05): A special thanks to episode guests, Caroline Starr Rose, Eileen Ryan Ewen, Cara Llewellyn, and Tara McMullin. This episode was written and directed by me, Sarah Mackenzie, and produced by Yellow House Media. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode for you. In the meantime, you know what to do, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books. Sarah Mackenzie (00:00): If I was to ask you, what is your favorite book of all time? Could you answer that? It's kind of a mean question, isn't it? It's also kind of an impossible question for an enthusiastic reader to answer. I mean, just one book? But if you were to ask me, "Sarah, what is your number one all-time favorite picture book on the planet?" I could answer you and in fact I'm going to. (00:31): My favorite things in the world are family, travel and libraries and chocolate and brie and sourdough bread, but those aren't super relevant to our conversation. I also love witnessing someone go after something that seems kind of out of reach in order to make the world better for somebody else. In fact, the very first picture book I wrote is called A Little More Beautiful, and it's about an old woman who makes the world around her more beautiful, and then the girl who grows up to take on that work for the old woman when she can't do it anymore. This little girl though, she knows it's not enough, that there's something that only she can do and it's sort of her mission in the book to figure out what that might be. (01:24): When that book came out, I described it as a nod to my own favorite picture book of all time, maybe by now you know what it is because it too is about a little girl who grows up to make the world more beautiful. That book also has family and travel and libraries. I'm talking of course about Miss Rumphius, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. If I was cast away to a deserted island and was told I could only bring one picture book, Miss Rumphius would be it. The thing is Miss Rumphius is not Barbara Cooney's only work or only picture book, not by a long shot, Barbara Cooney actually illustrated 110 books before she died. (02:15): What I noticed when I was reading her books, Ox-Cart Man, Roxaboxen, Chanticleer and the Fox, Letting Swift River Go, The Story of Holly and Ivy, the Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree, I can keep going, what I noticed is that if you compared Barbara Cooney's books against almost any other picture books on the shelf, Barbara's are always just better, better storytelling, superior art, more effective visual narrative power. Barbara Cooney was able to capture the beauty of the world on the page in a way that very few, if any other illustrators have. (02:59): So I got curious, who was this woman named Barbara Cooney? Well, a cursory online search revealed that Barbara was a mother of four. Hmm, that's interesting. I got my hands on every book of hers that I could find that she'd illustrated. I hunted for articles about her. I read transcripts of the speeches that she gave at award ceremonies. I read and read as much as I could. And as I read and learned about the woman, Barbara Cooney, I became acquainted with a woman who was a force, a creative force in her motherhood and in her life, from making books that won the highest award in illustration to decorating elaborate Christmas cookies or assembling lavish picnics with her children. She was a playful mother. She was an adventurous world traveler. She was an avid gardener and she was committed in every facet of her life to capturing the beauty of the world that she saw, getting it on the page, showing it to her children. (04:07): I decided this woman needed a picture book, but to get to know her well enough to write a picture book, I needed to talk to people who knew her personally when she was alive. And I know I seem like a very confident person on the outside, the truth was, this was back in 2018, I had published zero picture books, so to write to Barbara's family and say, "Hi, you have no idea who I am. I have never published a picture book before, but I am the world's biggest picture book enthusiast, and I want to write a picture book biography about your mom." I couldn't do it. I was way too scared. So instead I did something else, something a little more comfortable in my wheelhouse. I decided to make a podcast episode honoring Barbara Cooney, and so I could write to her son Barnaby Porter and say, "Hi. I'm the host of the The Read-Aloud Revival podcast, and I'd love to talk with you about your mom's beautiful books." Much more comfortable, easy-peasy. Barnaby Porter (05:18): She opened my eyes to beauty in this world. She was always urging me to look at this or look at that, look at the view, look at the landscape. She'd point out little tiny lichens on the forest floor and things like that. She made me very aware of my natural surroundings. Her sense of humor was quite wonderful. I mean, she really, really was funny. We loved her very much. One thing that I was very proud of is there were four of us kids and we all took quite a lot of interest in what she was up to, but my mother always told me that I was her best critic. Now, she didn't necessarily appreciate some of what I had to say as I looked over her shoulder at things, but she really liked my eye for detail and my criticisms, and I knew how to be diplomatic with her. Sarah Mackenzie (06:10): I also called her former editor at Viking, Regina Hayes. Regina Hayes (06:15): The illustrating came more easily to her than the writing, and she labored over the writing, although she was very good at it, very good at it, but I think she was not as confident in it as she was in her illustrating. Although, again, in her illustrating, she loved to tell the story of how one of her early editors had told her she had no eye for color, and I mean, you have only to look at those books to know she had an absolutely exquisite eye for color. Sarah Mackenzie (06:43): And as I assembled that podcast episode, which you might recall, you can find it in your podcast app. I'll also put a link in the show notes if you haven't listened to it. It may be my own very favorite episode of The Read-Aloud Revival, I'm kind of proud of it. And while I wrote and prepared for that podcast episode, I also wrote the picture book, a picture book I hoped would live up to the woman herself. In this episode, I want to tell you about making that picture book, the making of, Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World. (07:26): The hardest part for me about writing this book was actually finding the through line. A good biography isn't just birth to death of someone's life. I mean, some biographies are a birth to death of someone's life, but usually not the good ones, and Barbara deserved better. Also, she was kind of a Renaissance woman, she did all sorts of things. And not just making stories, but a whole bunch of creative things in her life. (07:58): A picture book also doesn't give you a lot of room. You have to tell your story in as few words as possible, so that was my challenge. In a picture book biography, I could tell one story about Barbara Cooney, which one should I tell? Well, I don't know how many versions of this book I drafted, so many, and there were lots of different through lines that I could have run with. Through lines about the kind of mother she was, through lines about how she learned how to illustrate, through lines about all of her different relationships. But I wrote a whole bunch of different ones, and once I was satisfied with one of those versions, I did what I always do when I finish a manuscript, I sent it to a very particular person and asked her to put it through the wringer. Caroline Starr Rose (08:46): I have the edit letter that I wrote to you right in front of me. So I'm going to read how that opened. Sarah Mackenzie (08:52): Caroline Starr Rose is an author of several picture books and middle grade novels, and she is always, always, always the first person I send my picture books to. Caroline Starr Rose (09:03): My name is Caroline Starr Rose, and I critiqued an early version of Because Barbara. Sarah Mackenzie (09:08): Before I let anyone else on the face of the planet see them, Caroline gets the manuscripts first. This particular book wasn't really ready for an edit because the book was going to get an editor at the publishing house whenever it found a publishing house. At this point, I needed a critique. I needed someone who wasn't afraid to tell me everything that wasn't working, everything that wasn't working as well as I probably thought it was, a critique and an edit might sound like the same thing, but they're not, not really. Caroline Starr Rose (09:41): A true critique. I feel like I am attending a one-person master class where I'm the only student. I have this professor who knows me in and out, knows my work in and out, can't anticipate my strengths and weaknesses, and gives me direction, that is, I could have never learned. I could have read 500 books on craft and all my years of knowledge from reading, which are invaluable, it's just condensed in such a way because it's geared toward my work specifically. Sarah Mackenzie (10:16): So I sent my manuscript to Caroline for the critique, and I waited. What Caroline sent back is called an edit letter. Now, this is several pages. It's usually longer than the picture book itself. In an edit letter, the person doing the critique tells you a little about what's working and a lot about what's not. That's what a critique is. Caroline Starr Rose (10:41): What I wrote is, "This is such a gorgeous tribute. It is so, so, so beautiful. Your love and admiration shine through. Your imagery is lovely. I hope you're proud." And this was just one of those gems. This one just really stuck out as something that I knew was going to sell. I knew this book was going to be published. Sarah Mackenzie (11:04): Not everything about it was working though, some of it just wasn't. So Caroline flagged those parts, some word choices, some story choices, some plot points. I read her feedback and I rewrote the story a few more times. This art of giving critique to an author, by the way, is really, really difficult. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to do it. Caroline Starr Rose (11:31): What I'm looking for is a person who really does want to be critiqued because people don't necessarily always know what they are looking for when they send in a story to be read. Sometimes, whether they realize it or not, they're looking only for affirmation, which is perfectly fine, but that's not what a critique is for. Some are looking for small quick fixes to then move on to whatever the next step might be for them in their project. I can sense that somebody is truly looking to do the hard work and to dig in, and I want to be sure... As you said, we're not friends for 24 hours. It can be rough. It can be rough to receive a critique. It's going to be more than a pat on the head. Sarah Mackenzie (12:22): It was not a pat on the head, even with that lavish praise she did give me at the beginning for what was working, and she affirmed the part of the story that I had struggled with the most, that through line, what's the one story? What's the one hurdle that Barbara's going to overcome in this book? What's the one story I want to tell? (12:40): See, Barbara's life was so rich and so abundant I had a lot of different directions I could have taken the book in. I landed on a story about a girl who saw beauty in the world and spent her life trying to get it on the page so she could leave the world more beautiful than she found it. When you read it, you might think, "Well, that's the obvious story about Barbara Cooney." It was not the obvious story when I was digging through all my notes, when I was reading and talking to people and taking notes, that wasn't the obvious through line. But as I produced that special episode of the podcast, that's the through line I found and Caroline said in her critique, "Yes, that's the through line. You got that." Caroline Starr Rose (13:24): I love that idea of being in love with the world, and it makes me think of, there's an E.B. White quote that says something like, "All I've wanted my writing to say is that I'm in love with the world," or something along those lines. I'll have to look it up and find it for you. But it stirs so much satisfaction in looking at these people's contributions, because it is, they're love letters that are heartwarming to the recipients, the people that get to read, and they get to experience these stories. Sarah Mackenzie (13:56): Now, if this book was published by a different publishing house, the story would've changed here. I'd say something like, I sold the manuscript to a publishing house, and two years later I have a book. But alongside my work here at Read-Aloud Revival, I also run a boutique publishing house dedicated to making beautiful read-alouds for families. It's called Waxwing Books, and I think Waxwing is indeed making some of the most beautiful read-alouds you can get your hands on. Waxwing was going to publish this book, so my work was far from over. (14:35): Over at Waxwing we hired a freelance editor. In this case, Michael Green, the former publisher at Philomel, an imprint of Penguin Random House. He's edited all of my picture books so far, and he edited this one as well. Michael and I went back and forth, lots of notes, he gave me lots of suggestions for tightening or clarifying or pacing, and every pass was a rewrite and it made the manuscript better. So several drafts later, it was time to bring on the real magic maker of the picture book world, the art director. (15:14): I like to describe an art director this way. What an editor does for a writer, helping the writer say what she wants to say, an art director does essentially the same thing for an illustrator. An art director helps the illustrator's work be better and helps the illustrator show what they're trying to show. Just as an editor's making an author's words better, writing better, an art director makes the illustrator's work better. You really need an art director to make a great picture book. You can have glorious texts and you can have lovely illustrations, but unless you have a good art director and book designer to pull it all together into one cohesive narrative, the book just won't be as beautiful as it could have been. (16:02): At Waxwing, we're committed to making beautiful books, the kind of books you want to read again and again, and that means we are always committed to hiring a top-notch editor. In this case, I'm talking about Cara Llewellyn. Cara Llewellyn has designed a lot of books you love, The Hundred-Year Barn, Big Machines, The Quiet Book, Built To Last. She designed The Undefeated, which won a Caldecott award not too long ago. Anyway, an art director often chooses the font and the typeface for the book's cover, and in fact, the font for the book's inside. But let's start with the cover. Cara Llewellyn (16:42): I think right away I knew that I wanted to use the Gaudi typeface world for this because I knew... I love that italic OPTI Gaudi that is used on the Miss Rumphius title, and it's just so classic, and when you think of Miss Rumphius, you think of that, at least I think of the typeface on the cover. Sarah Mackenzie (17:03): Maybe I'm just a total nerd. How might an art director choose the font for the cover of a book? Specifically, in this case, how does she choose the font for the title of Because Barbara? Well, that's kind of a trick question because in this case, she didn't use a font. We actually hired a hand letterer to create the title, Leah Palmer Preiss. Cara Llewellyn (17:29): I tried a bunch of different versions, and it was feeling really digital and sort of too clean, so we ended up going with a hand letterer. If you look really closely and you can see all the little... She added this little, you know the texture that you get when you're writing with a fountain pen on a watercolor paper, it's got that little watercolor paper jiggle to the edge of all the letters. Sarah Mackenzie (17:56): So an art director is thinking about all kinds of things that you might not have ever thought about, like whether a title's letter edges feel too clean, too digital, like Cara said. One of the art director's, principal roles is working with the illustrator that the publisher hired for the book. That's something many people don't know about picture books. A picture book author doesn't get to pick the illustrator. That's not how it works. That's not a thing. The publisher does that. (18:26): Usually a publisher buys a manuscript from an author and then pairs that with an illustrator of their choice. So they decide, "We think that this illustrator over here is going to make good illustrations for this story." Now, I just so happen to be, in this case, both the author and the publisher, so I did get to pick. Around this time, I had seen the fabulous picture book by Josh Crute called, Jonas Hanway's Scurrilous, Scandalous, Shockingly Sensational Umbrella!, and I knew I had to get the illustrator Eileen Ryan Ewen to illustrate this book about Barbara Cooney. I saw those illustrations in the Jonas Hanway book and thought, this illustrator, she could do it. Eileen Ryan Ewen (19:12): I have to say, when you first sent me the email with a manuscript, and here's the art director and seeing her line up of past work, I'm like, "Oh," it was intimidating. And they're like, "Okay, we're going to set up a Zoom call." I'm like, "Oh, I have to talk to her face to face?" I was very nervous. I was truly... I mean, you were I think also on the call. I have to say again, she was just delightful, as you know, so laid back, so delightful and so smart. Understanding that different types of writing needs different types of artwork and trusting the artist. So the way that she was able to just kind of guide and encourage was very deftly done. Sarah Mackenzie (19:50): The art director works closely with the illustrator and she's thinking about a lot of things, how the illustrations, for example, fit on the page so that important elements like faces don't fall into the gutter, that's the middle crease of the book, making sure that the words are clear to read, that the illustrations have enough room around them. In this case, there were a few extra particular challenges for our illustrator, Eileen, and the art director helped her navigate that. For starters, illustrating a life about an illustrator is really difficult. You don't want to copy the Illustrator style, you just want to echo it. So Barbara Cooney had a specific illustrative style, and Eileen wanted to make sure it didn't look like she was copying Barbara's style, but she did want to mirror it, echo it. She wanted to give the same vibe. I guess my older kids would say, we wanted this book to give Barbara Cooney without being Barbara Cooney, if you know what I mean. That was hard. Eileen Ryan Ewen (20:57): It was terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And we talked a lot about how should we go about it? I even dabbled for a hot minute on trying to do linocut, just trying on my own. It didn't work well at all. So that died pretty quickly. I don't know how she did it. She actually used dental equipment, but anyway, I just hope it did do it justice. Sarah Mackenzie (21:22): She did do it justice, by the way. Now, when Barbara was alive and making books herself, she was incredibly committed to accuracy, to getting the real beauty she saw in the world on the page. So we decided that Eileen needed to go to Damariscotta, Maine, where Barbara spent many years of her life and meet her place and meet her family. Barnaby Porter, Barbara's oldest son and his wife, Susan Porter, opened their doors to us. So Eileen went to Damariscotta, Maine. Eileen Ryan Ewen (22:03): They were so warm, so lovely, welcoming. We spent hours in their house and their house was beautiful. It was overflowing with their own interests and personality, but also Barbara was everywhere. So many paintings, just personal paintings. And next door is the house that she had lived in. It was the last house she had lived in. They were gracious. They spent hours pulling out photographs and just telling stories. That was probably the best, outside of some photos of their house in Pepperell, which I didn't know because it's actually been torn down now. So seeing photos of their home in Pepperell and her in her kitchen in Pepperell, and then just the stories about their personalities, of the siblings personalities of her personality. That was, I think, my favorite part. (22:50): And I tried to put that in the book, and it's one of those things that maybe most readers don't know, but just his older sister was a hippie before there were hippies and loved music. And so you'll see her with a guitar and you'll see her in the tree with a guitar, that was... His oldest sister and just his younger brother was sort of this wild child, so he'll be the one on the tire swing. And all of these little things happens from sitting with them and just talking. Sarah Mackenzie (23:19): One thing to notice in this book is the way the kind of illustrations manage the story's pacing. You'll notice some spreads have spot illustrations, illustrations that are just a spot with a lot of white around them, and some are full illustrations that take up the whole page from corner to corner. We call that a full bleed illustration, and you might just think we kind of randomly toggle back and forth, so it's not too many spot illustrations or too many full bleed illustrations. But in this case, we actually use the kind of illustration to paste the story, because Barbara starts when Barbara is a little girl, but we needed to get her to adulthood fairly quickly in order to tell this particular story. So to do that, we have full bleed illustrations contrast with spot illustrations to communicate the passage of time. (24:17): Spot illustrations where Barbara woke up in the morning, washed her face, ate breakfast with her brothers, went to school and did her homework. It's kind of like a movie, when you see a montage of events happening quickly in succession, oftentimes with music in the background, it communicates that time is passing. A lot of these things happened in time is what we're trying to say. (24:41): In our book then you turn the page and it's years later because she's grown up now and she's drawing at a desk with a baby at her feet, but there's still a lot of white space on the page here. It's still a half page illustration, not a full bleed yet. Still we can kind of feel time slowing down because the illustration got much bigger. Now, turn the page again, and there's an illustration of Barbara walking in the woods, a full bleed illustration. It slows us down. It fills up the page. And this is good because the story is slowing down for a while here. We spend the next several spreads in kind of a short amount of time chronologically, that's in a close time period that could be measured in days instead of years. Cara Llewellyn (25:27): It's very cinematic that effect. And I love the way you said the spot pages feels like you're going fast, like flipping through camera frames, and then when you hit that full spread, you sort of, "..." It's like taking a deep breath. Sarah Mackenzie (25:44): So what kind of feedback, besides the things I've already mentioned, does an art director give? Well, let's look at the illustration of Barbara winning her first Caldecott Medal. That first sketch wasn't working. Cara Llewellyn (26:00): Barbara's husband was way taller than her in the first sketch, and he was like the first thing you saw and then you sort of saw the kids jostling and joking around her, and she got lost in the middle. And so we went through a couple rounds of sketches trying to get Barbara to be the center of attention, because she's the one who's winning the medal. And so I think a couple of things that helped there, if you can see in the final one, we had her husband bending down, so he's shorter even than her oldest daughter. And then we had her be the only one who's meeting our gaze. So she's looking out at the reader, but everyone else is looking either at her or at one of the other people. So your eye just sort of travels all the ways back to her. The family members are all in cooler, darker colors, and she's really bright yellow, almost the yellow of the gold medal. Sarah Mackenzie (26:58): When I say there is more happening in a picture book than we realize when we are reading one for the first time or the second or third time with our kids, this is the kind of magic I mean. At Waxwing, we're committed to making picture books that are true art galleries for the lab, and that means the arts got to be just right. That also means we are relentless about color proofing. Eileen Ryan Ewen (27:25): Basically, when the first printing comes out, they compare it with the original artwork to make sure that the color is true, as true to the original, it's never going to be 100% as the original, but as true as it can be. So that's what you do, piece by piece, you examine, and I would have my original art next to me, Carol would have proofs and I would have proofs. So we would sit there and look over the pieces, compare it to... And we would kind of go back and forth. And she had, I think the original scans maybe, so she had something she was comparing them to as well, and give our thoughts of, "This isn't quite as... This is a little bit blotchy." Or, "This is really strange." Or, "The blues here," blues are really hard. Blues and purples are really hard to reproduce accurately. And so say, "This is faded." And then I would take those notes back to the Cleveland Institute of Arts and just say, can you pull these colors a little bit more? Sarah Mackenzie (28:16): Yeah, we did that a lot of times. We had multiple rounds of proofs, many thanks to our printers at RRD and the art scanners at the Cleveland Institute of Art for their excellent work and their patience until we got those exactly right. The finals are stunning. So now we have our book and we can send it to the printer. And now our in-House team's attention turns to making the audiobook. Here at Read-Aloud Revival we work with the awesome audio and video producers at yellowhouse.media, and their commitment to high quality is something we really appreciate around here. Tara McMullin (28:56): I'm Tara McMullin, and I'm the audio and video producer on Because Barbara. Sarah Mackenzie (29:01): Now you might be wondering why we need a video producer, well, if you're watching this episode on video right now, you are watching something that Tara at Yellow House Media produced. If you are listening to this episode, you're listening to something that Sean at yellowhouse.media produced. But in the case of, Because Barbara, we wanted to make an audiobook and a video book. A video book basically meaning the book read aloud on video with some very subtle but very lovely animations that bring the story to life. And because Barbara did whatever she set her mind to, every detail in the art represented what had really grown in the time of knights and castles. (29:59): This time, the beauty Barbara held inside her did show up on the page. This time, her publisher agreed to print her art in color. The video book and audiobook, by the way, are available to you for free when you purchase the book. That's not something you usually get when you buy a book, but we just love you and we think sometimes your kids should be allowed to read aloud, have a read aloud experience that is worthy of their attention, even if you don't have the time right this second to do the reading aloud. So you read aloud the book, but when you can't, you can just scan the QR code on the back of the book to access your free audiobook and video book. And yes, the audiobook comes with a version with page turn cues. You know what I mean? Because more kids should have those. I love working with Sean and Tara and the Yellow House team because they're committed to excellent sound design. Tara McMullin (31:05): Sound design is the sort of creative process of imagining yourself in whatever the environment is, whether real, imagined, internal, external, where the story or the essay or the idea is taking place and then layering in sound to make that environment come to life. So for instance, with, Because Barbara, the book opens with her as a little girl on the edge of the ocean in Maine, and I've been to the edge of the ocean in Maine, and so I'm sort of putting myself into that space and imagining, what am I hearing here? I'm hearing seagulls. I'm hearing waves lapping up on the shore. I'm hearing maybe some rustling in the leaves or in the grasses. And so then I go looking for those sounds that I can layer in to create that environment. (32:14): And then on top of that sound design also is going to include music and any way that we're kind of manipulating the script track, so what you are actually saying, how you're actually narrating the book. Again, I'm thinking about what is the kind of music that I would hear if I was in this scenario, and what is the feeling that I want to create in this environment? What is the feeling of Barbara Cooney's origin story? What music is going to fit this really, really well? And with that, it's thinking about tempo. It's thinking about key. It's thinking about instrumentation. It's thinking about how it's arranged so that the music is either following the action up or maybe it's coming down with the action and all of those things. So all of that is sound design. Sarah Mackenzie (33:04): I'll just say Tara knocked this audio and video book out of the park. Tara McMullin (33:09): One of my favorite parts of Because Barbara are a couple of places where there are fall leaves that are just kind of floating on the wind as they go through. And that was something that I added, that there are leaves, there are fall leaves in the illustrations themselves, but to have that moving element on top just gives it a little bit more life. Sarah Mackenzie (33:33): Tara, by the way, used to manage a Borders Books and Music store back in the day, and she has some fond memories of helping customers find picture books. Tara McMullin (33:43): The picture book section is just, what a delight. Taking people and showing them a book that they couldn't have dreamed existed, something so often, so sparse, so simple has so much depth and potential to connect with people, it's really incredible and to be able to see inside of that in just a little tiny way has been really, really incredible. Sarah Mackenzie (34:19): Susan Porter, Barbara Cooney's daughter-in-law and one of her closest friends wrote to me after seeing the book for the first time. It was an email where the subject line was all caps, "Wow." She said, "This book is a winner. You've pulled it all together with enchanting pictures and a story to intrigue young children, Barbara would applaud you." I hope this inspires you to read Because Barbara with your kids. I hope the story, Because Barbara, inspires your kids to see the beauty of the world all around them. And I hope it inspires you as a mother to be creative, to, as I say in Because Barbara, teach your kids to see what you see, to love what you love to take in the delicious wide world. Eileen Ryan Ewen (35:14): I remember telling my mom, I think my second child was born and I had a drawing table in the corner of a playroom, a family room. I'm like, "Oh, I guess I'll put that away." And she's like, "Don't, don't you dare. They need to see you doing this, and you need to keep doing it even if they see you once a year doing it." So I did, and she was right by keeping it out and listening to those words, and just even if it's whenever you can at night or on a weekend or, just keep doing it. Tara McMullin (35:46): Honestly, I can't think of a better way to be spending my time, what could be better than making watercolor images come to life so that children can watch them while they're reading a book or listening to a book? Like, come on, this is the best thing ever. Sarah Mackenzie (36:04): So there you have it. It took us about four years and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but Because Barbara is out in the world, it's ready for you to read aloud with someone you love, and I hope you love it. (36:21): We are committed at Waxwing books to making books you want to read aloud again and again, books you want to give as gifts, books you want to keep forever. Books you can trust to be worth your family's time. If you haven't yet, might I suggest you order a copy of Because Barbara anywhere Books are sold, order one or two for a friend as well. You can keep up with us and find out when our next books at Waxwing are taking flight, do that at waxwingbooks.com. Spoiler alert, four brand new books are coming from Waxwing in the coming year. The first two are coming in January, and I cannot wait to tell you about them. (37:05): A special thanks to episode guests, Caroline Starr Rose, Eileen Ryan Ewen, Cara Llewellyn, and Tara McMullin. This episode was written and directed by me, Sarah Mackenzie, and produced by Yellow House Media. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode for you. In the meantime, you know what to do, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.