Transcription of Chris Van Dusen for the show Bringing Books & Art to Life #254
Lisa: My next guest is an individual who I think is pretty well known to Mainers, especially Maine children, little Mainers. I first became aware of Chris Van Dusen when I was working with Raising Readers, because a couple of our Raising Readers books were yours. This is Chris Van Dusen. He is a children’s book author and illustrator based in Camden. His first book, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee, was published in 2000, and he has since written and illustrated seven other books and illustrated eight more. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for coming in and talking with me today.
Chris: Well, thanks, thanks for having me today.
Lisa: Children’s books, I love them, and we were talking before we came on the air, all of our kids are old enough now that they probably wouldn’t tolerate us sitting and reading the children’s books to them, but it’s such a fun thing, it’s such a fun thing to be able to share that experience with little ones.
Chris: It is. Reading, reading aloud, especially, I write and illustrate picture books, and those are the ones that really, that’s when you want to have a kid in your lap, to read the picture books, because the illustrations are large, and the stories are engaging. It’s a great experience.
Lisa: I think I was reading in an interview that you did that one of your inspirations was Dr. Seuss.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: I think you had said something about, “I learned how to do this rhyming mostly by reading Dr. Seuss. My wife would be reading this very serious book, and I would be reading Dr. Seuss with the same amount of intensity.”
Chris: That’s right. We’d get in bed at night, and she’d pick up a novel, and I’d pick up, like, Horton Hears a Who, and we’d be both reading with the same intensity. I did, So far, all the books that I’ve written have been rhyming books, and so I did study a lot of Dr. Seuss books, and I had a lot already, and what I didn’t have, I went out and bought, and so I just would read them over and over again. The only problem with that is sometimes you sort of pick up Dr. Seuss’s voice instead of your own, and so when I started … I think I was writing my third book, which is called If I Built a Car, and that was sort of using a formula that Dr. Seuss had where it starts with the main character imagines something, and then it turns into a fantasy, and each page becomes a part of that fantasy, and then it ends, he’s back in the same place, and it’s all been his imagination.
When I first started writing that book, I wrote a couple pages, and I read them, and I think it was my wife, Lori, that said, “I think you’d better read some Dr. Seuss again, because I think you’re stealing his voice,” and sure enough, it did sound way too much like Dr. Seuss, so I had to back off and find my own way, and eventually did.
Lisa: I wonder, I could be wrong on this, but it seems like those must operate slightly different parts of your brain, to be doing the rhyming and the words, and doing the illustrating that you’re doing to go with the rhyming and the words.
Chris: Right, well, a lot of times, if I’m thinking about a book, I’ll think about an illustration first, and I will pace out the story, and sometimes even do little spot illustrations on a page that has the … I call it the “story map,” or something like that. I sometimes do little sketches, and then I write the words according to what’s going to happen on that page, so I plot out the story first, and then I write according to what’s going to happen on the page. Actually, the visual and the writing go hand-in-hand, but I actually have to write the story completely before I do the final illustrations, if that makes sense.
Lisa: If you map it all out, do you then go back and get more specific with the words that you’re using as you’re-
Chris: Right.
Lisa: I see.
Chris: What I do is I basically have a piece of paper that I draw rectangles, and those indicate the spreads, the two pages open in the book, and most children’s books are 32 pages, because they print them on these sheets of 8 pages, so it’s mostly 32 pages, sometimes it goes 40, I’ve got, my Circus Ship, and I wrote and illustrated a book called King Hugo’s Huge Ego, which was also a 40-page book, but mostly, it’s 32 pages, and so I just have to make sure my whole story fits on 32 pages. Sometimes, I’ll just write on these squares, you know, “Mr. Magee drives down to the harbor,” and then “he goes in boat out to the islands,” or something like that, and I’ll just sort of indicate what’s going to happen on those pages, and then I will write specifically to those pages.
Lisa: There’s an interesting kind of fitting together of different art forms.
Chris: Yeah, and writing in rhyme is a really weird thing too, because you can’t, well, at least I can’t sit down and start with the first page and write all the way through, because I’ll sometimes think of a rhyme that works best for the end of the book, so I’ll jot that down, and so … I’m sort of working on this new story right now, and I’ve got all these little scraps of paper all around the place, and sometimes I’ll think of one first thing in the morning, and I’ll write it down on my bedside stand, I’ll put it … When it comes time to putting the whole story together, it’s almost like a big puzzle, I have all these scraps of paper, and I just have to make sure they mesh all together and work with the story. It’s not a way I would recommend working, to be honest, but it works for me.
Lisa: Isn’t that kind of an important point, that it works for you? There are always people who ask questions of artists and writers and illustrators, “How do you do this, what’s the process,” thinking that they might emulate it, but you might not find a process from a specific person that you want to emulate yourself.
Chris: Yeah. If people ask me for advice on writing books, I don’t say, “Do it my way,” because it’s, like I said, like you just said, it works for me, but it may not necessarily work for them. I’m always amazed when I hear about authors, for, like, novels, that say, “Well, I never know where the characters are going to take me.” That’s another way of working that just sort of baffles me. I have to lay everything out, and most of my stories are pretty traditional, I mean, you know, they introduce a character, conflict, there’s sort of a climax, resolution. It’s a fairly traditional story arc. A lot of children’s books now are more like long jokes, or don’t have the plot. I still rely heavily on a plot, and so that’s just the way I write it and construct a story.
Lisa: You were inspired to write a book about a true ship that actually capsized in, I believe, a large storm that happened off the coast of Maine, leaving an entire circus, and all the animals in it, stranded and swimming for their lives. After reading this real story that occurred, and I’m not sure exactly when, but in-
Chris: 1836, yeah.
Lisa: 1836. There are times when you take things from reality, and you actually make something out of them.
Chris: Yeah, and I actually really like to do that. I’m always searching for the next hidden Maine story or little gem that might be fleshed out to a story. The book you’re referring to is called The Circus Ship, and it came out in 2009, and it’s probably my most popular book, of all the books I’ve written and illustrated. A lot of people really, really respond to that book. You’re right, I read about this in a magazine about thirty years ago, this story about this shipwreck, or, actually, a ship caught fire, it caught fire off of Vinalhaven, and it was carrying a full circus. It was a huge story at the time, I mean, it made headlines all over the world, really, because it was so unusual to have an elephant swimming in Penobscot Bay.
It was also a real tragic story, and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to turn it into a story that was appropriate for kids. In fact, I have a funny story. I live in Camden, and I was walking down the street one day, and I ran into a friend of mine, Matt, and he grew up on, I think he spent some time on Vinalhaven. He said, “What are you working on?” and I said, “Well, I’m working on a new book about a shipwreck that happened off the coast of Maine. It’s based on a true shipwreck,” and he goes, “It’s not the Royal Tar, is it?” That’s the name of the boat that sank, and I said, “Yeah, how’d you know?” and he said, “Well, I grew up on Vinalhaven, that’s still part of their thing.” He said, “How are you going to do that?” and I said, “Well, I’ve changed it around a lot.”
Basically what I did, I just took the idea of a ship carrying a circus sinking off the coast of Maine, and then I sort of approached it like, “Well, what if instead of the ship catching fire, what if the animals swam to an island?” I sort of took the basic idea and built a story more appropriate for kids around that.
Lisa: You actually have memorized some of the story. Can you share it with us?
Chris: Sure, sure. Let’s see if I remember. It starts: “Five miles off the coast of Maine and slightly overdue, a circus ship was steaming south in fog as thick as stew. On board were fifteen animals who traveled to and fro. The next day it was Boston for another circus show. The captain, Mr. Carrington, was honest and sincere. He thought that they should drop the hook and wait for things to clear. But Mr. Paine, the circus boss, was terribly demanding. He stomped up to the helm where Captain Carrington was standing, and screamed, ‘Don’t stop. Keep going. I’ve got a show to do. Just get me down to Boston Town tomorrow, sir, by two.'” It goes on from there.
Lisa: I love it! I can just picture you actually sharing this story with children, which is something that you do a lot of. You do a lot of school visits.
Chris: I do, I do. I do a lot of school visits, a lot of library visits, and actually, my Mr. Paine voice, I didn’t want to blow out your microphone here, but my Mr. Paine voice can get really loud, and the kids at the front row, their hair goes back, but no, it’s really fun. It’s a fun read-aloud book, and if you’re not familiar with the book, one of the last illustrations is a giant, it’s almost like a game within the book, because it’s a large double-spread illustration of this town scene, and all the people on the island have hidden the animals from the mean circus boss, who came back to the island to claim his animals. Kids just love to find all the animals hidden in this one picture.
Lisa: You were born, from what I understand, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1960, in Portland.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Maine Med.
Lisa: Did you think when you were younger … Obviously not when you were born, that’s a little too young, but did you think when you were younger that doing illustration and writing books would be in your future?
Chris: Well, drawing was one of the things I always did, and the more I did it, I realized that it was the one thing I could do with a little bit of success. When I was in elementary school, middle school, high school, I kept drawing while a lot of my friends didn’t think drawing was cool anymore. I just kept drawing, and I was the guy who did the posters for the science fair, and the concert programs, and things like that. When it came time to graduate from high school, I realized that was the thing I wanted to do, and so I went to art school.
I actually studied fine art painting, I thought I would be a, my idea at the time was to be a college painting professor, and so I’d have my summers off, and I’d paint, and I’d teach in the winter, but that didn’t exactly work out that way, and so I also took some illustration courses while I was at school, and it was good, because I could fall back and rely on that, and that’s what I’ve done. I really love it, and I still use the skills and the lessons I’ve learned in my fine art, and I’ve applied it to the illustration.
Lisa: Who are some of your inspirations, as far as artists are concerned?
Chris: For fine artists, some of the painters that I’m really inspired by are Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer. They’re all from Maine actually. Some of the realists. As far as books go, I’m probably most inspired by two, and Dr. Seuss, as you mentioned, mostly for writing, and Robert McCloskey for the illustrations. He didn’t really write that many books, I think total eight books, but he won the Caldecott twice, he won the Caldecott Honor like three times, I mean, it was ridiculously, how good he was, and as a kid, I used to just pore over his illustrations. There was so much detail, there were so many things to look at, and it was such a sense of place, when you picked up his books and you saw Sal and Jane running along the shoreline, and waving up at the osprey flying over, you just wanted to be there. It was just a place you wanted to be, and so I just really connected with those books, and I still do, I just love those stories, and especially those illustrations.
Lisa: What was your favorite Robert McCloskey?
Chris: I’d have to say One Morning in Maine. I just really love it. Again, for the reason I just mentioned, it really had an incredible sense of space and place, and I just wanted to be there, I wanted to be on that island, I wanted Dad to row me into Bucks Harbor and get ice cream, and, you know, it was just a great … It’s a very simple story, but it’s just so heartwarming, and I think it’s one of the perfect children’s books.
Lisa: It’s interesting to me, because children books, maybe it’s something that we think it’s, oh, it’s just something the little kids like, and there’s no staying power, but you’ve just described, for McCloskey, obviously, that’s one great, and I think Margaret Wise Brown, and, recently, Dahlov Ipcar, actually, some of her art has been incorporated into children’s books. Actually, these books become classics for us, even as adults, and we read them to our children, sometimes our grandchildren. To be an illustrator and have that kind of an impact over time, that’s really kind of a gift.
Chris: It is, it is, and I would love to have my books stay around for 75 years, like I think Make Way for Ducklings is 75 years old this year, something like that, and it’s still such a great book. A lot of the ones you just mentioned have the ties to Maine, and, yeah, those stories still resonate. I mean, Blueberries for Sal, it’s just the perfect story, it’s just … They’re great, they’re great books. They’re great books, and if they stand the test of time, that’s a real testament.
Lisa: We’ve spoken to other illustrators, Scott Nash is one, and he’s-
Chris: I love Scott.
Lisa: Yeah, I think he’s really great, and I love the fact that he and his wife are both so into creation, but also the business of art, which is, I think, an interesting balance that is hard for all of us to try to navigate sometimes. One of the things that he has been passionate about recently is the work that’s going on at MECA, the Maine College of Art, and the illustration program there. I wonder if you have thoughts about that, about the fact that we are doing such a great job now of making this art form available to people right within our state.
Chris: Yeah, I think Scott’s actually started the illustration department at MECA, which is great, and a lot of my friends who are also children’s book authors and illustrators are now on staff down there. I probably would be if I lived in Portland, but I’m up in Camden. I think it’s great, and I think it’s especially important that Scott has formed that department using professionals in the field, people that are actually out there in the trenches, doing the work, because they can pass that knowledge on what it’s like, you know, when an art director says, “I need sketches by this day,” and you have to make the revisions like that. I mean, it’s real-world stuff that they’re teaching down there at MECA, and I think it’s a really strong program. Yeah, I think it’s amazing.
I actually went and talked to some of the kids a couple years ago, when they were doing a circus poster idea, because years ago, I had done a circus poster for Ringling Bros. Actually, that was through Scott too, Scott was the one who got me that job. I went down and showed the circus poster and some of the sketches, and some of the work I had done for that, and it was Jamie Hogan’s class, Jamie Hogan is an illustrator, lives out on Peaks Island, and she was the teacher, I think she’s still teaching there. She would take her class every year to when the … One of the circuses, it wasn’t Ringling, it was … I can’t remember the name of the circus, but they would come to Portland every year, and the students would go observe the circus, and then do a circus poster based on the circus. They’re teaching real-world stuff, which I think is really, really important.
Lisa: How about the business of creativity, because I think this is something that not everybody gets as much of an education in. I mean, I’m very close to a couple of people who go to the Savannah College of Art and Design-
Chris: Great school.
Lisa: I think they do talk about the business of living as an artist, and putting your work out there, and actually getting compensated for it, but it seems like it’s complicated sometimes.
Chris: Well, it is a little complicated. I have a friend up in the Mid Coast area who writes and illustrates books, and she always said, and I agree with her, she said, “This is my job, this is what I do.” That’s how I approach it too. I have my studio at my house, and when I’m under a deadline, when I’m working on a project, I have office hours. I go out and try to be out there by 9:00 in the morning, and if I’m on deadline, sometimes I work until late at night. I approach it like a job, but, and this is going to sound like an oxymoron, but I don’t think of it as a job, because it’s so fun.
What I get to do is just stay home and draw these incredible pictures, and, well … I don’t know if they’re that incredible, but to be able to draw subject matter that’s really fun, like for the Mercy Watson books, I remember I did a whole book that was a pig dressed up in a pink dress, and it was just, how many people get to stay home and draw princess pigs all day long? It’s really fun. There are times when the deadlines get a little bit much, and I am working until 1:00 in the morning, and frantically trying to get some work out, but for the most part, I’m so lucky, and I’m so blessed to be able to stay home and do what I do.
Lisa: Tell me about starting out. What was that like for you? What was it like to be a young artist, and trying to get your work out into the world?
Chris: I actually was working for a greeting card company … Well, let’s go back before that. I went to school for fine arts, like we talked about before, so painting, I was actually a painting major, and when I came out of school, I thought, “Well, I’ll just paint and have gallery shows, and that’s how I’ll make my money.” Well, it doesn’t exactly work out like that, so I started taking some illustration jobs. This was right out of school, so I was doing logos for friends, things like that, and then I got offered to work at a magazine for high school … Well, teenagers, high school kids, and they wanted me to be the cartoon editor, which meant people would send cartoons in, and these were professional cartoonists, like from the New Yorker and stuff, and I’d go through the cartoons and pick which ones to put in the magazines.
I also started doing illustrations for the magazine at the time, so that’s really where I started my illustration career. After that, I moved back to Maine, and got a job at a greeting card company, and I was doing illustrations for greeting cards. This is during the 80s, when it was kind of alternative greeting cards, and some of the subject matters were a little risqué and stuff, but anyway … I was doing illustrations for that, and that company was bought by a large company in Jersey, and I was given the choice of either staying with the company and moving to New Jersey, and since I had just moved back to Maine, I said no, that’s not for me, I’m going to stay in Maine, so I went out on my own, I started freelance illustrating.
That was tough. That was taking every job you could possibly get. I remember one of my very first illustration jobs was I did these exploded diagrams for wooden swing sets, and so I brought all these giant pieces of cedar back to my house and tried to figure out how they went together, and illustrate them so it would make sense. I was taking every job I could get. Eventually, over time, you start doing more and more work that you really enjoy, and I found out that I really like doing stuff for kids, kind of like cartoons, humorous illustrations for kids, so I started getting some work for kids’ magazines, and that really led into doing the illustrations for the children’s books. It was sort of a natural progression, but it was tough at first, I mean, it was, if the phone didn’t ring, I thought, “Well, I’m going to have to go work at the call center, otherwise, we’re going to starve,” but luckily, knock on wood, it worked out.
Lisa: You actually brought your wife with you here today, and you have two children, 25 and 22, so somehow, you guys figured this out as a family, how to kind of really get …
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, my wife Lori worked, when I was first starting out, she was still working. She worked at National Fisherman in Rockland, and she was the circulation manager.
Lori: Advertising promotion.
Chris: Advertising, she was the advertising promotion person down there, and so she was bringing in the paychecks while I was waiting for the phone to ring, but it eventually worked out.
Lisa: It seems like that that’s not an uncommon thing, that you actually have to be dedicated to this idea as a family. One person has to be doing something, and the other person’s doing something, so it’s never a unilateral decision. That doesn’t tend to work out very well.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. No, we work pretty well together.
Lisa: What are your kids doing now? Do they have any interest in, or are they in the art field?
Chris: They’re both artistic, but I don’t think they’ll be doing it for a living. They share an apartment, they have an apartment up on Munjoy Hill, and they both work up at Freeport. My oldest son, Ethan, works at the Patagonia store up there, and my younger son, Tucker, just got a job at the L.L. Bean Outdoor Discovery School, and so he’s working out there. He just graduated from Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, this May, so he’s just starting out.
Lisa: What does the future look like for you? What do you see happening with your art and with your business?
Chris: Well, I’m just going to keep going as long as I can. I have three books at printers right now, two were with other authors, and one I wrote, and I’m working on a new story right now, and I’m just going to try to keep going as long as I can. As long as the publishers still want my books, as long as kids still want to read them, I’m going to keep making them.
Lisa: Chris, how can people find out about the books that you’ve written and illustrated, or the books that you have illustrated?
Chris: I have a website, which is just chrisvandusen.com, and I’ll spell that, it’s C-H-R-I-S-V-A-N-D-U-S-E-N.com, and all my books are listed there. All local bookstores in Portland, I believe, carry my books. Longfellow, I sure know, and Nonesuch carries my books, Sherman’s as well, so they’re definitely around, they’re out there. You can also order them online, if you can’t find them locally.
Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Chris Van Dusen, who is a children’s book author and illustrator based in Camden. His first book, Down to the Sea with Mr. Magee, which is actually a personal favorite of mine, so thank you for writing that one, was published in 2000, and he has since written and illustrated seven other books and illustrated eight more.
I look forward to your upcoming books, there are three that are at the printers, and I thank you for coming in and talking to me today.
Chris: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show #254, “Bringing Books and Art to Life.” Our guests have included Debra Spark, Garry Mitchell, and Chris Van Dusen. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as doctorlisa, and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram.
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