Brian Floca's Blog

A shot across the bow

2012-01-17T12:47:00.001-05:00

Here’s part of an email I received recently from someone who picked up Lightship as a gift for a young reader:

“As I was reading the book, I came to the page with mail being delivered from an anchored ship W227. I know of a steamship lightship tender Lilac and she is in NY City also.... In 1933 my grandfather captained the Lilac, and the book will go to a family member. I was just wondering if I could truly say that was the Lilac.”

I was happy to be able to answer yes! (Are you surprised? Would I be blogging about this otherwise?) Anytime somebody catches a detail like that in a book it’s rewarding, but I certainly never expected to hear from the Lilac’s captain’s granddaughter. I’m grateful she took the time to write. More about the Lilac — and current efforts to maintain and preserve her — is here.

Turkish Delight

2011-12-08T16:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday this arrived in the mail: a paper bag, stapled shut, stamped, postmarked Turkey. The bag arrived in great shape, and got more roughed up by my walking around with it for an hour in the rain than it did in getting here from the shores of Eurasia. Inside were brand new Turkish editions of Ragweed and Poppy, by Avi. The publisher, Hayykitap, took their design cues from the American editions, and so these books are strikingly similar to their domestic kin. Inside, the paper is nice and the printing is good; the drawings have a nice pop to them. Thanks for the great job, Hayykitap!

Hell on Wheels (and Hurdy-Gurdy Dancing)

2011-11-06T13:10:00.001-05:00

AMC premieres a new television series tonight, “Hell on Wheels.” Before I began work on my current project, Locomotive, I knew the phrase “hell on wheels,” but I didn’t know its origin. I think I associated it with motorcycle gangs. Incorrect! It comes, instead, from the 1860s, from the rowdy, ramshackle, dangerous towns — hell — that would spring up alongside construction of the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad and then, as construction moved on, pack up, pick up, and move down the tracks — wheels — to keep up with the workers who kept the town’s bars and brothels running at a profit.

(This was a phenomenon only of the eastern half of the line, where the workers were largely Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The western half of the line, built largely by Chinese immigrant laborers, progressed without benefit of the same quantities of liquor, murder, and prostitution.)

Here are two good bits on hell on wheels towns, both of which I first read in Dee Brown’s Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West. The first is a contemporary description of Benton, Wyoming, by publisher Samuel Bowles. The town was, he wrote, “a congregation of scum and wickedness…almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of the lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce, the chief business and pastimes of the hours,—this was Benton. Like its predecessors, if fairly festered in corruption, disorder and death, and would have rotted, even in this dry air, had it outlasted a brief sixty-day life. But in a few weeks its tents were struck, its shanties razed, and with their dwellers moved on fifty or a hundred miles farther to repeat their life for another brief day. Where these people came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished, and their occupation over, were both puzzles too intricate for me. Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them….”

(An aside: It’s hard, for me, at least, to think of George Lucas ever writing the lines “wretched hive of scum and villainy” without Benton and Bowles having paved the way.)

The second story is set in the new city of Cheyenne when the line has just reached it, one hundred forty miles after leaving the town of Julesburg behind. Dee Brown writes, “The next day, the first passenger train arrived, and from it poured a considerable portion of the gamblers and dance-hall girls of Julesburg. A few hours later, a long train of flatcars rumbled into the station. Every car was loaded high with knocked-down buildings, storefronts, dance-hall floors, tents, wooden sidings, and entire roofs. According to legend, as a brakeman dropped down onto the station platform, he shouted to the waiting crowd: “Gentleman, here’s Julesburg!””

Sadly, none of this material will quite make it into Locomotive, which will be (someday, I promise) a picture book for the 6+ crowd. “Heck on wheels” just doesn’t have the same ring. It makes a fellow want to get into YA.

West Virginia Book Festival

2011-10-20T14:39:00.000-04:00

I’m heading to Charleston, West Virginia this weekend to give a presentation Saturday at the West Virginia Book Festival. I look forward to flying into Yeager Airport, and am remembering the bit from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in which he theorizes that airline pilots across the country speak in a sort of emulation of West Virginia’s own Chuck Yeager:

“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot . . . coming over the intercom . . . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it's reassuring) . . . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'it might get a little choppy' . . . .

Well!—who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it,—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”

I’ll be listening for it. Meanwhile you can, should you choose, listen to me, sounding as if I’m calling from the far side of the moon, in conversation with Mona Seghatoleslami of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. We discuss Ballet for Martha and the themes of the presentation I’ll be giving. The interview is online here.

And if you’re in range of Charleston, I hope I’ll see you this weekend. I’m looking forward to the trip! Festival details are here and details for my presentation are here.

Above: Aaron Copland at work on Appalachian Spring. Not that Copland knew that was going to be the title; Martha Graham surprised him with that.

Return to the Library of Congress!

2011-09-22T16:59:00.001-04:00

Exciting news here is that Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring will be featured on Tuesday, October 4 at an event at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the dance was first performed. Here are the details, via the Library’s press release:

“The ballet classic Appalachian Spring, created by Martha Graham with music by Aaron Copland, is the subject of a new book for young people, called Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (Roaring Brook Press: 2010). The Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress commissioned the work, which premiered in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on Oct. 30, 1944.

A program featuring the creators of Ballet for Martha, as well as a performance by members of the Martha Graham Dance Company of excerpts of Appalachian Spring, will be part of an event on Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 11 a.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. A small display of important items from the Library’s Martha Graham Collection will also be on view. Students from local schools will attend this event but all are welcome.

The book Ballet for Martha was written by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, with illustrations by Brian Floca. These three will present an illustrated discussion of their book, which will be available for sale and signing. The dancers from the Graham Company are Miki Orihara and Tadej Brdnik. Speaking on behalf of the Library are John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book, which oversees the Library’s Young Readers Center, and Susan Vita, chief of the Music Division.”

The full press release is here. It will be an honor to present the book in this setting and in this company. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll be able to make it to the event.

Above, an alternate sketch of the audience arriving at the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building on the eve of the ballet’s debut.

A Dinosaur Draw-Off

2011-09-13T12:38:00.003-04:00

As a boy I loved to draw dinosaurs.

I knew that Tyrannosaurus rex was the king of the dinosaurs, and so I always gave him a crown. Later the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat stole this idea from me and used it for an image that you can now see on a collection of Maya Angelou poems, a box of chocolates, and who knows where else.

But the point is: dinosaurs and drawing, and that I’m pleased to announce that I will be moderating the DINOSAUR DRAW-OFF at the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend. Bob Shea, Matt Myers and Roxie Munro are the artists who will draw for your entertainment, edification, and astonishment.

(And my qualifications as moderator? I’ve been around the block myself. I would say that book was a long time ago, but what’s a long time ago when we’re talking dinosaurs?)

I’m looking forward to the drawing and drawings that we can expect from this very talented group. I hope you’ll join us. We’ll be at the Target Children’s Area, Joralemon and Adams Streets, Sunday September 18, from 10:30 to 11:00 AM. All Brooklyn Book Festival events are free. More details here. I hope to see you there!

No swimming

2011-08-23T10:04:00.011-04:00

I moved my studio last month. I’m excited now to be sharing a space with four great authors and illustrators. The crew here includes — or will include, once everyone (else) gets back from summer vacations and time away and so on — Sophie Blackall, John Bemelmans Marciano, John Rocco, and Sergio Ruzzier. We’re in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, near the Gowanus Canal, a fabled strip of water, infamous for the sludge and worse that industry has poured into it over the years. Thomas Wolfe wrote:

“And what is that you smell?

Oh, that!...It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate putrefactions. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smoldering rags, the odors of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incense of putrefying offal, the fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs.”

Oh, that!

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel...

2011-08-11T16:27:00.005-04:00

...is, well, you know what. The good news, for me, at least, is that I do now finally see light at the end of the tunnel, the tunnel that is my next book as author/illustrator. (Like Moonshot, the new book centers on long-distance travel in the year of ’69.) There’s a lot of tunnel left still, no doubt — someday I’ll blog about what an unexpectedly complicated book this has been to make — but the steam is up and, like the old song says, my hand is on the throttle, my eyes are on the rail.

Countdown: Apollo 15

2011-07-26T08:49:00.004-04:00

Today, July 26, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 15, flown by Commander David Ross, Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden, and Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin.

Earlier this year I had the chance to hear Dave Scott speak about his trip, the fourth manned landing on the moon. Scott was modest and accessible, but listening to him was nevertheless a reminder of the intelligence, education, nerve, and skill that went into these missions. Scott led the first of the J missions — missions that gave the astronauts improved lunar modules, improved backpacks, Boeing-built lunar rovers, more challenging landing sites, more time for exploration, and more ambitious science to perform. (It’s an irony of Apollo is that even as funding cuts had the end of the program in sight, the missions and their ambitions were expanding.)

Once they landed their Lunar Module Falcon, Scott and Irwin settled in for almost three full days on the moon. They would spend over eighteen and a half hours of that time outside their LM, walking (and driving) the lunar surface. (Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon for less than a day, and able to spend only two and half hours on the surface.) Scott and Irwin worked in a dramatic landscape: along the edges of both the Apennine Mountains and Hadley Rille, a deep channel in the moon's surface. The men deployed and performed scientific experiments, took photographs, and collected lunar samples. The most famous of the samples came to be known as the “Genesis Rock” because of its incredible age — 4.5 billion years.

Here is one of the more modest but also more accessible experiments that Dave Ross performed on the moon:

Meanwhile, in lunar orbit the Command Module, Al Worden had his own work to do. His duties included the first “deep space” spacewalk — a trip out the hatch to retrieve film and check equipment on the command and service module. Imagine being alone in lunar orbit while your crew mates are down on the moon, and now imagine being alone in lunar orbit, outside. You can see video of Worden’s EVA on his website, here.

You can also find on that same page of Worden’s website this account of how the Apollo 15 mission patch was designed:

“The mission patch for Apollo 15 was basically designed by the Italian dress designer, Emilio Pucci. We had as a crew evaluated some 540 different designs for our crew patch. They appeared either too mechanical or to have nothing to do with the flight, so finally, through a mutual friend, we asked Pucci if he would help us with the design. Now, Pucci, as I best recall, was an aeronautical engineer and had a good feeling for flight. With his artistic nature, we felt that he would be very helpful in the patch design. He did send us a design which was basically the same as the patch we eventually used, however the colors were in the normal Pucci blues, purples, and greens. We took his design, changed it from a square to a circular patch, made it red, white and blue, and put a lunar background behind the three stylized birds that were the major Pucci contribution.”

First, this makes me wonder who was the go-between between the NASA astronauts and the Italian dress designer. Second, this makes me, and I type this respectfully, just a little glad that Worden became a test pilot and then an astronaut, and not an art director.

Next: Apollo 16

Sources: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin; http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo15.html; http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/AS15/a15landsite.htm; http://www.emiliopucci.com/Index.aspx

Marty McGuire at Fuse #8

2011-07-20T11:57:00.003-04:00

Marty McGuire, written by Kate Messner and illustrated by myself, gets a great review over at Fuse #8 today, here. Thank you, Betsy!

Above: the perils of making a wishing well from a trash can.

Nantucket

2011-07-20T11:17:00.003-04:00

Sandra Jordan and I had the pleasure of speaking about making Ballet for Martha at the Nantucket Atheneum this weekend — a beautiful building and institution, with a wonderful staff. Thank you to Maggie Sullivan, Molly Anderson, Bess Clarke and everyone at the Atheneum for the invitation and for making the visit possible.

While in Nantucket Sandra and I also heard of a humpback whale, deceased at sea, washed up on the south side of the island. A bookseller from Mitchell’s Book Corner drove us out to have a look. Thank you, Anne. We had a look, and more. When we were downwind from the late whale, we knew it.

More about the Atheneum here, Mitchell’s here, and whale here.

42

2011-07-20T11:02:00.003-04:00

New Orleans review

2011-07-01T15:28:00.004-04:00

Despite it taking an honest thirteen hours to get there (Delta! LaGuardia! Fog!) I had a great time in New Orleans this past weekend at the American Library Association Annual Conference. Thank you to those who gave reason to make the trip, to Caroline Ward for hosting a panel that I enjoyed being a part of (a little bit more on that via Shelf Awareness, here), and to this year’s Robert F. Sibert Committee for a Sibert Honor for Ballet for Martha. Thanks to Neal Porter and everyone at Roaring Brook and Macmillan for bringing me down and for lodging and feed, and to Simon & Schuster for signing time and a ticket to this year’s Newbery/Caldecott banquet. Between seeing old and new friends, and getting a glimpse of the remarkable books people are making, and trying to get just a little bit of a feel for the city, the days were overfull, in the best way.

New Orleans!

2011-06-22T15:00:00.004-04:00

I’m looking forward to attending the American Library Association Annual Conference this weekend in New Orleans, Louisiana. I grew up next door, relatively speaking, but I’ve never been.

I’ll be on a panel 10:30 Saturday morning with Neal Porter, Jan Greenberg, Sandra Jordan, and distinguished others whom I’m looking forward to seeing and meeting. The moderator is Caroline Ward, and our theme is “Strange Bedfellows: Unusual Pairings of Artists and Writers.” See event details and the full list of participating authors, illustrators, and editors here. Then Jan, Sandra, and I will be signing Ballet for Martha at the Macmillan booth (no. 1115) from 2:00 to 3:00.

Later on Saturday I’ll be signing Moonshot and other of my Simon & Schuster titles at the S&S booth (no. 1139) from 4:00 to 5:00. (And sometime after ALA I’ll start blogging about what I’m working on now for S&S. It’s overdue. The blogging, and the book.)

On Sunday I’ll stray from the convention center to engage in some extracurricular eating, then look forward to attending the Newbery/Caldecott banquet.

Monday morning, I’ll have the pleasure of attending the ALSC Awards Presentation and joining Jan and Sandra in accepting a Sibert Honor for Ballet for Martha.

I feel as if I know an more-than-usual number of librarians, editors, publishing friends, and fellow authors and illustrators who are heading to ALA this year, and I’m looking forward to the weekend!

Dear Japan

2011-05-31T15:54:00.005-04:00

Some artists I’m happy to know have organized “Dear Japan,” an exhibit and sale of small, affordable artwork to benefit victims of the recent disasters in Japan. This small image was created for the show. It’s a pen and ink and watercolor painting of a Texas Ebony bonsai tree in the bonsai collection at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden — a seamless synthesis of Texas, Brooklyn, and Japanese themes into one 4” x 6” image (9” x 12”, framed). That may be a first. (As always, click the image to enlarge it.)

The work will be exhibited and for sale along with many others on Saturday, June 4, from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Art Connect New York Gallery, 491 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY. (From 7:00 to 8:00 the work that has sold will be packed up, and at 8:00 you walk out the door with your purchase.) The maximum price for any piece of work will be $200. Contributing artists include, well, there’s a bunch of us — 170! Read more on Facebook, here, or follow the Dear Japan blog, here. All the event details are on the Dear Japan blog here. I hope I’ll see you at the show!

Salad days

2011-05-26T15:30:00.006-04:00

I’m off to Providence, Rhode Island this weekend for a college reunion. Above, work done for the Brown Daily Herald in the distant and bygone era of my undergraduate education. (Mac Plus: 8 MHz of pure processing power.) My deadline handling has gotten only moderately better over the years. Or is it moderately worse? Regardless, I’m looking forward to the weekend. And as it happens David Scott of Gemini 8, Apollo 9, and Apollo 15 will be there to receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree. He’s already got two graduate degrees (of the non-honorary type) from M.I.T., his bio says, but I don’t guess you can have too many. Probably I’ll cart a copy of Moonshot up to campus in case I’m able to corner him in the refectory.

Destination Moon

2011-05-25T18:43:00.003-04:00

It was fifty years ago today that John Kennedy declared to a joint session of Congress: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” It’s amazing how something that happened half a century ago can still sound like science fiction, but there you are.

It’s also interesting to consider how Kennedy chose the Moon as a goal, out of all of the options for the United States in space. Most advocates of space exploration, Wernher von Braun among them, envisioned that our exploration of space would begin with the construction of space stations around Earth, then move to missions to the Moon, and thence on to Mars — a step by step progression out from Earth. But in 1961, when the United States seemed to lag intractably behind Soviet progress in space, space stations looked like just one more thing that the Russians would be able to do first. Landing on the Moon, though — there was the first big, impressive thing that the United States seemed to have even a chance at doing before the Soviets, and so landing on the Moon it was.

John Noble Wilford had an interesting piece about the speech — and the decision behind it, and the program that followed — in the Times yesterday, here. You can view documents associated with the decision and speech at NASA’s web site, here. None are more interesting than the frank evaluation of the U.S. space program prepared for Kennedy in April of 1961, here. Finally, here’s a little something for all you alternate timeline fans out there: clips from a mock documentary about how things might have gone had we followed the Wernher Braun route, here. The clips follow a plan outlined in an influential series of articles that ran in Colliers magazine in the early ‘50s, with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell. More on him, here.

Above: an early sketch from Moonshot. The MESA panel on the side of the LM should be open here, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Meet Marty McGuire!

2011-05-20T17:35:00.005-04:00

I’m happy to announce the publication of Marty McGuire, a new book written by Kate Messner, which I had the pleasure of illustrating. The book is out now from Scholastic. Marty McGuire is a warm and funny novel of the third-grade, involving frogs, school plays, and princesses. Kate has created a wonderful story and set of characters. I painted the cover art and drew about fifty black-and-white interior pieces for the book.

Kirkus Reviews says:

“When the promised land of third grade does not pan as promised, Marty McGuire finds herself playing a completely new role.

Mrs. Aloi, her maracas-shaking teacher, is putting together the parts for the class play of The Frog Prince, and she decides that Marty is perfect for the part of the princess. Marty, who prefers learning about frog anatomy to kissing or, worse, throwing a frog, is horrified. She gets little support from her scientist mother or her teacher father—a princess she shall be! On top of this bad news, Marty’s best friend has joined the girly-girl group and does not seem interested in playing outside and pretending to be Jane Goodall anymore. Messner gets all the details of third grade right: the social chasm between the girls who want to be like the older kids and the ones who are still little girls, the Mad Minutes for memorizing arithmetic facts, the silly classroom-control devices teachers use and the energy students of this age put into projects like class plays. Floca’s black-and-white sketches are filled with movement and emotion and are frequent enough to help new chapter-book readers keep up with this longer text.

Believable and endearing characters in a realistic elementary-school setting will be just the thing for fans of Clementine and Ramona.”

Thank you, Kirkus! Also please note the Jane Goodall subplot. What is in the water this spring?

Marty McGuire is available now, in both hardcover and softcover. Hopefully you’ll find it at your thriving local independent bookstore. I’ve also put links to all the usual online suspects on my web site, here. You can also read more about Kate Messner, and Marty McGuire, on Kate’s web site, here. I hope you’ll give Marty McGuire a look and that you enjoy the story and drawings!

Happy birthday, Martha Graham

2011-05-11T11:12:00.004-04:00

Today on Anita Silvey’s Children’s Book-A-Day Almanac there’s a review of Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring. From that review — as well as from today’s Google Doodle — one learns that today, May 11, is Martha Graham’s birthday. Happy birthday to her! Thanks to Anita for the thoughtful, generous, and well-timed review. You can read it here, and if you scroll down to the comments you’ll find a link posted by Sandra Jordan (co-author with Jan Greenberg of Ballet) that will lead you to the story behind today’s Google animation — a collaboration (again with the collaboration!) between Google and the Martha Graham dance company.

Happy belated birthday

2011-04-22T19:00:00.003-04:00

So yesterday, it turns out, was Queen Elizabeth’s birthday. Happy birthday to her. Here’s a drawing of HRH, done recently, for an upcoming project which actually has very, very little to do with the queen.

End days

2011-04-05T14:50:00.004-04:00

Saturday, April 9 is the last day for my show at the Brooklyn Public Library. (All about it, here.) Thanks to the BPL for the show, and to everyone who’s been by to take a look!

Clever bird

2011-03-23T14:11:00.005-04:00

After two great school visits in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., last week (thank you, Caroline Street and St. Clement’s!) I was in Vermont for the weekend with friends, and their dogs. At the end of a long day on Friday, at about 1:00 in the A.M., one of the dogs was escorted out back to take care of things and while doing that he got involved with a skunk who was in the meantime doing some work in the compost pile. Man. I’ve smelled skunk in the distance, but never up close. It’s an entirely different experience.

As it happens, the April issue of Click magazine will be all about animal defense mechanisms. Timely! Beatrice Black Bear investigates how killdeers will fake an injury to lead a predator away from a nest. I was happy with how these two characters came out, each pretty sure he has the drop on the other. Only one of them is right. For the text by John Grandits and the rest of the story, you can look for Click at your local library.

There’s more about Click here and more about John here.

Events I am missing (NY, NJ) and attending (TX!)

2011-03-04T10:54:00.004-05:00

I’m sorry to be missing a couple of events with the Book Maker's Dozen this weekend that I nevertheless would like to let you know about: an opening and show (and sale) of original art at powerHouse Books in Brooklyn tonight, Friday, March 4 (details here), and a field trip to Sparkhouse Studios in South Orange, N.J. on Sunday, March 6 (details here).

On the bright side, I’ll be at an arts festival in Killeen, Texas tomorrow, Saturday the 5th. The festival runs from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. at the Killeen Civic & Conference Center. Details are here. I’ll be signing books and spending the day with a great group of authors and illustrators, including (but not limited to!) Kathi Appelt, Chris Barton, David Davis, Shirley Duke Smith, Clare Dunkle, P.J. Hoover, Keith Graves, Mark Mitchell, Jan Peck, Don Tate, Jessica Lee Anderson, Terry Widener, C.G. Young, Jennifer Ziegler, and others. Read all about all of us, here. I'm looking forward to the day. If you’re in striking range of Central Texas, I hope you’ll come by and see us!

Portrait of the Artist

2011-03-01T10:36:00.004-05:00

The March issue of Click magazine (where I have a regular gig illustrating the comic Beatrice Black Bear, written by John Grandits) is about art — looking at it, and making it. I have a piece in the issue on the process of making picture books. The image here accompanies the text, “Sometimes the pictures don’t work out well, and then I try again.” You see in this drawing that I do not duck hard truths just because I am writing for a young audience.

There’s more about Click here and more about John here.

Belated blogging: an exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library

2011-02-25T15:58:00.006-05:00

A few weeks ago I alluded here to installing an exhibit, and I haven’t written anything about it since. Am I really that bad at using blogs and social media for self-promotion? Or does my lackadaisical, half-witted approach make the posts seem all that more “genuine”? Don’t answer that. Here’s all about the show:

I’m grateful to the Brooklyn Public Library for hosting an exhibit of my work in the Youth Wing at the Central Library on Grand Army Plaza. The exhibit opened on February 8 and runs to April 9. In the show are about forty original drawings and watercolor paintings from The Racecar Alphabet; Lightship; Moonshot; The Hinky-Pink, by Megan McDonald; Ballet for Martha, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan; The True Gift, by Patricia MacLachlan; and Avi’s Poppy Stories novels. The exhibit operates under the title “Drivers, Dancers, Mice & Moon: Children’s Book Art by Brian Floca.” I think I had the old rhyme “tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,” in my head while trying to come up with a name for the show. Or was I thinking of John le Carré?

Regardless, I am, again, grateful to the BPL, and especially to Manager of Exhibitions Barbara Wing, for the show. It was an honor to have work in the “Drawn in Brooklyn” exhibit with many talented friends a few months earlier, and it’s an honor to be back in the Youth Wing now. And, it was a surprisingly pleasant thing for me to blow the dust off the files at home and pull out the original art for this show. I’m always impressed by how closely production departments and printers get to the originals — but there’s nothing quite like the actual ink and pencil and paper. Pulling the work out of the files was like excavating old friends. I hope you’ll have a chance to see them!

More on the exhibit is at the BPL web site, here.

How I spent my Saturday

2011-02-05T20:15:00.003-05:00

These boots are made for...

2011-01-31T17:43:00.006-05:00

The word “boots” is context-specific. I was reminded of this last week when I left the howling winds and snowdrifts of Brooklyn for a quick trip to the Cowtown Book Festival in Fort Worth. I had a great time meeting the librarians and teachers of north Texas and visiting with fellow authors and illustrators, friends old and new, including Avi, Jan Peck, Chris Barton, Don Tate, Jeanette Larson, Mark Mitchell, Claire Dunkle, Jennifer Zeigler, P.J. Hoover, Jessica Lee Anderson, and K.A. Holt — a great group. Avi brought some Denver representation to the scene, and Clare some San Antonio, but clearly it was Austin that was in the house. Thank you to Pat Anderson of Texas Overlooked Books, organizer and author wrangler!

Extra credit: What is the New York/Fort Worth connection?

A: The mortal remains of Major General William Jenkins Worth himself lie in repose beneath an obelisk at the intersection of Broadway, 5th Avenue, and 23rd Street in Manhattan, just west of Madison Square Park. Click here to gaze upon the fierce visage that the Major General wore in life.

Countdown: Apollo 14

2011-01-31T16:17:00.008-05:00

Today, January 31, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 14, flown by astronauts Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, and Stuart Roosa.

There’s no Apollo astronaut without an extraordinary story behind how he got to the Moon, but Shepard’s may be the one to beat. Shepard was a Naval Academy graduate, World War II veteran, graduate of the United States Navy Test Pilot School, and test pilot. When NASA invited 110 of the country’s best pilots to apply for astronaut training in 1959, Shepard was one of seven chosen.

On May 5, 1961, Shepard was strapped into the Mercury capsule Freedom 7, atop a Redstone rocket, prepared to become the first American in space. Space then felt central to the nation’s future; a country’s exploration of this new frontier served as a sort of shorthand for its ambition, its technical capability, its willingness and its ability to lead in the world. On this new field, the Soviet Union seemingly could do no wrong; in 1957 the Soviets had vaulted the first artificial satellite into space. They had followed up with other successes, including putting the first man into orbit. For over three years the United States had stumbled in second place.

On the day of Shepard’s flight, it seemed the stumbling might continue. Shepard was to be sent only on a fifteen-minute suborbital arc, but problems with the weather and the rocket led to delay after delay in the launch. The hours ticked by. Eventually there came one of my favorite bits of dialogue from the entire space program — Shepard, growing impatient, radioed down to the launch crew, “I’m cooler than you are. Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” I admire that, even if I cannot guarantee that I would use the same words if I myself was perched atop a flying bomb that might or might not have technical problems. (But I guess you never know until it happens to you.)

Shepard’s flight was a triumph, but before he had a chance to fly again, Shepard was stricken with Ménière's syndrome, a condition of the inner ear that results in nausea, vertigo, and disorientation. He remained actively involved in the Apollo program, serving as Chief of the Astronaut Office, but Shepard, as ambitious and competitive as anyone in the program (and that’s saying something), could not fly.

This was Shepard’s frustration for the next five years. Early in 1969, he took his last chance at regaining flight status, checking into a Los Angeles hospital under an assumed name for an experimental surgical treatment — which was a success. On May 7, 1969, his flight status was restored, and that’s how Alan Shepard came to be eligible for, and received, command of Apollo 14.

The mission of Apollo 14 was inherited from the near disaster of Apollo 13 — an exploration of the Moon’s Fra Mauro range, a landscape more interesting and more challenging than the level plains on which Apollo 11 and 12 had landed.

Some of the smaller distinguishing aspects of Apollo 14: The mission saw the addition of a red stripe to the commander’s uniform, to help differentiate the commander and lunar module pilot once they were on the surface. Ed Mitchell attempted ESP contact with Earth on the way to the Moon, and Shepard famously sliced and then hit a golf ball while on the surface. (How far did he hit it? “Miles and miles and miles!”)

The mission contained just enough hiccups to remind one of how incredible and potentially dangerous it was to fly to the Moon, and yet the astronauts did enough on the surface to remind one of how much could be accomplished there, too. The amount of time astronauts spent on the Moon was growing mission by mission, as was the amount and quality of the science they were performing. Ironically, even as individual missions were expanding and becoming more ambitious, the program as a whole was contracting. Two of the projected Apollo missions had been cut the previous summer. The end of Apollo was coming into sight — but it wasn't there yet. Coming in July: a drive on the Moon.

Sources: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin; http://history.nasa.gov/40thmerc7/shepard.htm; http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo14.html.

And a reminder! This story—and the stories of all the Apollo missions—are told for younger readers in the excellent Mission Control, This is Apollo, by Andrew Chaikin, with paintings by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean.

Where the West Begins

2011-01-20T14:28:00.003-05:00

I’m looking forward to attending the ESC Region 11 Children’s and Young Adult Book Roundup next week, on January 28th, in Fort Worth, Texas. The event has a great line up of authors and illustrators, including Avi, David Davis, Jan Peck, Chris Barton, Don Tate, Jeanette Larson, Mark Mitchell, Claire Dunkle, Jennifer Zeigler, P.J. Hoover, Jessica Lee Anderson, and zombie haiku scribe K.A. Holt. If you’re a librarian in the area (and/or whoever else attends this sort of thing) I hope I’ll see you there! Details are here.

A great week for Ballet for Martha

2011-01-14T10:09:00.005-05:00

It was an honor on Monday to learn that Ballet for Martha has been designated a Sibert Honor Book. Then yesterday came news that Ballet for Martha has been chosen by the National Council of Teachers of English to receive the 2011 Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. (The name — and I like this a lot — comes from the title of the first book published for children. See it on Google Books, here.)

Thank you to this year’s Sibert and NCTE Orbis Pictus Award committees. I’m grateful to them and grateful that I had the chance to be part of the team that put together this book, so thanks also to Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan for their wonderful manuscript, to Neal Porter for thinking of me for the work, to Jennifer Brown for her terrific design skills, and to everyone at Roaring Brook for their support. (That includes an ad in yesterday’s New York Times which featured the book along with Neal’s and Roaring Brook’s Caldecott winner, A Sick Day for Amos McGee. Mainstream media!)

And thank you to everyone who has offered congratulations. They are all appreciated.

Finally, if I’m blogging about this a few days after the fact, it’s not for lack of enthusiasm, it’s because I’ve got a cold, which has made everything here a little foggy, even good news.

The ALA Sibert page is here, and the Orbis Pictus page is here.

2010

2010-12-31T13:00:00.009-05:00

Before the year closes I want to say how grateful I am for the fall and winter that Ballet for Martha has had. In October, Jan Greenberg, Sandra Jordan, Neal Porter and I had the incredible experience of seeing the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra incorporate the book into a performance of Appalachian Spring. Publishers Weekly gave the details here. Thanks especially to Jan and the SLSO for working to make that happen, and to Roaring Brook to sending us all to St. Louis so we could see it for ourselves. This past month, I’ve been grateful to see Ballet make a number of end-of-the-year lists: Booklist Top Ten Art Books for Youth, Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Books, Publishers Weekly Best Children's Books, School Library Journal Best Books, New York Public Library 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing, Fuse #8 Production’s 100 Magnificent Children’s Books of 2010, Horn Book Magazine Fanfare, and the Washington Post Best of 2010: Books for Young Readers. Sincere thanks to those reviewers.

And that’s a wrap for 2010. I look forward to posting soon about some work recently completed, and about the book currently sprawled across my drafting table. That’s my work for the rest of the winter and into spring. But that’s for next year. Happy 2011 to all!

Above: An alternate cover sketch.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T01:10:00.000-05:00

I think I post this video every year. I feel a little badly about that, but not so badly, because I like it so much. Christmas cheer for the lightshipmen, and for you and yours, and best wishes for 2011!

Hear me, outer boroughs!

2010-12-08T14:54:00.004-05:00

I have a busy few days of presentations coming up. On the morning of Thursday the 9th, I’ll give a presentation about my work at the Brooklyn Public Library. Details are here.

On the morning of Saturday the 11th, I’ll read at the Brooklyn Heights Montessori School book fair. Details are here.

And on Sunday the 12th, at 3:00, editor Neal Porter, author Sandra Jordan, and I will give a presentation about our book Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. (The circle is complete!) The full event description is: “Ballet for Martha: Making of Appalachian Spring tells the story of the collaboration among Isamu Noguchi, composer Aaron Copeland, and choreographer/dancer Martha Graham to create the iconic ballet Appalachian Spring. In this special program—intended for adults—co-author (with Jan Greenberg) Sandra Jordan, editor Neal Porter, and illustrator Brian Floca will introduce the book and discuss their own collaborative effort to make Noguchi's, Graham's, and Copland's art accessible to a young audience. A slide show of sketches will accompany the discussion.” Details are here.

I hope some of you can come by!

Book Maker's Dozen

2010-11-29T13:32:00.005-05:00

I’m happy to be part of a loose confederation of friends and illustrators here in Brooklyn operating under the moniker “Book Maker’s Dozen.” We are: Aileen Leijten, Boris Kulikov, Brett Helquist, Dan Yaccarino, David Gordon, John Bemelmans Marciano, John Rocco, Peter Brown, Sean Qualls, Selina Alko, Sergio Ruzzier, Sophie Blackall, and myself. You can know that we are a legitimate operation because we have a blog (here) and a Facebook page (here). You can go to the Facebook page, and “like” us, and everything.

This Thursday, December 2, we will transcend the virtual and touch the brick and mortar with a show, an opening, and some wine-fueled conversation about art and literature for young people, all at one of the great local and independent bookstores here in Brooklyn, powerHouse Arena. The powerHouse Arena is at 37 Main Street (corner of Water and Main Streets), in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. The opening will run from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. Full event details are here.

At the opening we will also be selling signed limited-edition prints of our work. Just in time for the holidays, you might say! (More information on the prints is here. Interested parties in far-flung places can order prints through our Etsy page, here.)

I hope you can come by the reception, stop by to see the show, or just follow us online!

Book-A-Day, today

2010-11-28T11:40:00.001-05:00

Last month Anita Silvey launched the Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac — “a daily love letter to a book or author” and a source for “events, trivia, and celebrations for every day of the year, as well as a featured children’s book to explore in more depth.” It’s a great site and I’m happy to see that today’s book is Moonshot. The thoughtful (and appreciated) review is here. Thanks, Anita!

Cover me

2010-11-19T15:43:00.004-05:00

Over at the Fuse #8 blog today Betsy Bird covers the HarperCollins librarians’ preview. One of the books on show is Eric Luper’s Jeremy Bender Vs. the Cupcake Cadets. The cover design is by talented designer (and friend and picture book author) Polly Kanevsky, and I did the spot drawings. This was a small but fun project.

Typing about that work reminds me that I never blogged about another cover I enjoyed working on this year, for the paperback edition of Avi’s The Traitors’ Gate, a story full of twists and turns that I enjoyed taking a crack at illustrating. (Illustrating the cover for, I should say. The interior illustrations are by Karina Raude.) The designer for the Traitors’ Gate cover was the adept Michael McCartney at Simon & Schuster, with whom I also had the pleasure of working on Lightship and Moonshot. (And to whom I owe some sketches for the next book we’ll work on together.)

It’s a gift to be simple (but not that simple)

2010-11-06T16:26:00.003-04:00

Ballet for Martha, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, tells the story of the creation of Appalachian Spring by Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and Aaron Copland. Jan and Sandra end the book with a wonderful line that looks beyond the dance’s premiere and toward performances to come: “And the collaboration will be created anew.”

And how!

Ladies and gentlemen, from mine own home state of Texas, the Stephen F. Austin High School Bulldog Band and Angels Dance Team:

Politics and Prose

2010-10-05T15:38:00.002-04:00

I’ll be presenting Ballet for Martha on Thursday at 10:30 A.M. at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. I’ll show slides, talk process, and take questions. If that’s within your striking range I hope you’ll come by! Event details are here.

Memories of East Texas

2010-09-29T09:36:00.005-04:00

I had a great time at the East Texas Book Festival in Tyler, Texas this past weekend. Thank you to everyone at the festival for the invitation and for managing the logistics!

I returned to the diaspora yesterday. My flight was delayed due to the weather in New York, so I had some extra time in the Austin airport. A sketch and a Five Trucks flashback were the results.

Next stop: St. Louis!

At the library!

2010-09-21T20:09:00.008-04:00

I’m excited to have my work included in a show opening this week at the Brooklyn Public Library, “Drawn in Brooklyn.” The show is curated by John Bemelmans Marciano and features the work of 34 children’s book illustrators who live in Brooklyn. (One of them is the talented Sergio Ruzzier, who put together a list of all the artists in the show, with links to their web sites, on his blog. I suppose I could do the same, but why reinvent the wheel? Sergio’s list is here. Grazie, Sergio.)

My contributions to show are original drawings and paintings from Ballet for Martha, Moonshot, Poppy’s Return, and The Hinky-Pink. Several of us with work in the show are also exhibiting process drawings in display cases in the library’s youth wing. In my case (so to speak) there’s a soup-to-nuts presentation on the making of The Racecar Alphabet: initial inspiration, sketches, storyboards, book dummies, revisions, original art, and a scale model Mercedes-Benz 300SL (1952). It’s an honor to have work up in the show. I hope you’ll be able to come by and see it! Exhibit details are here.

Live from St. Louis

2010-09-15T19:55:00.004-04:00

A great review of Ballet for Martha from Carol Rasco, the CEO of RIF — Reading is Fundamental — ran on Monday. I am (naturally) happy to link to it, here.

The review mentions something remarkable that I’m excited about that’s coming up next month: the St. Louis Orchestra will perform Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite on October 1 and 3, accompanied by images from the book. Will 10” x 11” drawings work at 10’ x 11’? Visit St. Louis and find out! More information on those performances is here. (Scroll down to the header AMERICAN ARTS EXPERIENCE-ST. LOUIS.)

And on October 2, authors Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, editor Neal Porter, and I will give a panel presentation at the St. Louis Public Library on Ballet for Martha and our experience making the book. Information on the panel is here.

Why such favor from the Gateway City? Because that’s where Jan Greenberg lives. More on Jan is here. My thanks to her, as well as to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Public Library, and Roaring Brook, for putting together these events. If any of you are in or near St. Louis, it would be great to see you there!

Brooklyn Book Festival

2010-09-08T11:52:00.006-04:00

This Sunday, September 12, the Brooklyn Book Festival will be held in and around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. I’m glad to be one of the readers this year, and look forward to reading and sketching at the children’s tent at 3:00. I’ll read from The Racecar Alphabet — not my most recent book, but the one I think best suited to the expected audience category: Children of Varying Ages, Energy Levels, and Attention Spans. If there’s a wave of interest in lightships, astronauts, or Martha Graham, though, well, we’ll see what happens. Event details are here. Scroll down to the “Target Children’s Area” header for a full list of children’s book readers. It’s a great lineup (if I do say so myself), including Tad Hills, Michael Rex, Mac Barnett, John Rocco, Sergio Ruzzier, Chris Raschka, and others. It should be a great festival and I hope I’ll see you there!

Sketches from the ‘20s (approx.)

2010-08-30T10:35:00.005-04:00

I was on Governor’s Island yesterday and came across: an orchestra playing ‘20s-era jazz, a flock of flappers, two gramophones, and three vintage cars — a “jazz-age lawn party,” the poster told me. Here are sketches. (Click to enlarge.) The one car is a Ford Model A from 1930, the other a Packard from 1940. The Packard was as clean and bright as it must have been in the showroom window seventy years ago.

Run, don’t walk!

2010-08-23T17:02:00.003-04:00

The benefit auction for 826LA, organized by Dan Santat (more on Dan here) and described in my previous post (which is here) is now underway. You can see and bid on the first round of donated art on eBay, here. Happy shopping!

Oh No? Oh Yes!

2010-08-11T17:30:00.004-04:00

The talented, funny, and, as it turns out, charitable Dan Santat has put together a benefit auction on the occasion of the publication of his and Mac Barnett’s great new book, OH NO! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World). Dan, who did a virtuoso job illustrating Mac’s story, brashly asked thirty illustrators to take their own shot at imagining Mac’s text, with the results to be auctioned off. What Dan’s request had going for it was, one, the story concerns a girl who creates a giant robot for her school science fair, a robot that nearly tears down the city before (spoiler alert) being defeated by a giant frog. Two, all monies raised will support Los Angeles’s 826LA, “a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.”

My contribution is above, a little something I threw together with some leftover Soyuz hardware. (Click to enlarge.) You can see the work of all the contributors and learn how to bid, bid, bid at the benefit auction’s online gallery, here. From August 14 to 17, you can see the actual drawings, paintings, and so on at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California. More information on the Gallery Nucleus exhibit is here. You can read more about the book here, visit Dan’s site here, and visit Mac’s site here.

Thanks for bidding!

EDIT: And! Completists, please note: the auction has a blog, here, and there was a nice piece about it in Publishers Weekly, here.

Ballet for Martha

2010-08-02T20:06:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow, August 3, is the official publication date for Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, written by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, which I illustrated. I’m very happy to report that the book recently picked up its fifth starred review. (The stars have come from The Horn Book, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and, most recently, School Library Journal. Excerpts are on my web site here.) An interview with me on the SLJ site is here. The idea of leaping into the air for the accompanying photo was not mine but I was game, despite the fact that the photo shoot came the day after I tried wakeboarding for the first time, and that I was sore that day in muscles I didn’t even know I had. Other reviews that have warmed the heart have appeared on the Fuse #8 blog, here, and from the San Francisco Chronicle, here. Thank you to all the reviewers!

As I hope I’ve conveyed in the interviews I’ve done for the book, this was a wonderful project on which to work. I’m grateful to editor Neal Porter for thinking of me for it, and for the chance to work with Jan and Sandra on the book. I hope you’ll give the results a look!

I’m hitting the road to research the past…

2010-07-21T13:41:00.001-04:00

...with a road atlas from the future. I hope this thing doesn’t lead me anywhere that won’t be built for another six months.

41

2010-07-16T11:22:00.003-04:00

If it occurs to me that today is the 1st anniversary of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, does that make me nostalgic for last year’s nostalgia? Don’t answer that. Now other books are coming out (Ballet for Martha, next month) and other books are in the works (It’s 1869, not 1969, on the drafting table these days) but Moonshot will always have a special place on my shelf, and I do appreciate my memories of last year, especially of listening to NASA’s real-time internet broadcast of the original mission transmissions. Through that broadcast and through all the attention the anniversary received I got to share with friends what I had worked on for so long in relative privacy of my studio, and that’s worth remembering. Happy 41st, Apollo 11!

ALA recap

2010-07-07T17:49:00.008-04:00

Recently I’ve been trying to spend (a little) less time on the great and terrible internet, so I’m late in saying thank you to Simon & Schuster for sending me to Washington for ALA, where I had a wonderful time, and thank you to this year’s Sibert Committee for the Sibert Honor for Moonshot (a considerable contributor to the wonderful time), and thank you to Roaring Brook for a chance to have a Ballet for Martha signing while at the conference. (Ballet for Martha! Coming next month!) Thanks also to everyone who came by and picked up a book!

After conference duties were done I spent a day at the National Gallery, and after seeing a few great things, I happened onto the museum’s collection of Renaissance Portrait Medals. The medals, given as “tokens of esteem,” were created very deliberately on the model of ancient Roman coins. (Click to enlarge the sketch.) I looked at these for a minute before I realized, ah ha, here are the great grandparents of the Newbery, the Caldecott, the Sibert (the Pulitzer, the Nobel) and so on. Today’s children’s literature medals have fewer swords, less nudity, and no elephants, but the connection is clear. That discovery made a coda to ALA, and I left Washington satisfied. (Also, the exhibit was an opportunity to to brush up on usage for the word “obverse,” so that was another bonus.)

ALA 2010

2010-06-25T10:40:00.004-04:00

I’m preparing today to leave the sweltering, muggy weather of Brooklyn, New York to attend the American Library Association Annual Conference in the sweltering, muggy weather of Washington, D.C. (I learned something about library budgets years ago when I realized that the January conferences are always in places like Boston and Chicago, and the July conferences are always in places like Washington, D.C. or Anaheim, CA.) I’ll be signing Moonshot at the Simon & Schuster booth on Sunday, from 1:00 to 2:00, and advance copies of Ballet for Martha at the Macmillan booth on Monday, from 12:30 to 1:00. And on Monday morning, I’ll be happy and honored to receive a Sibert Honor Award for Moonshot. I’m looking forward to seeing old and new friends and to a weekend full of librarians, authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, and books. If you’re going to be in D.C., I hope I’ll see you there!

More Martha

2010-06-14T12:14:00.006-04:00

Some recent good news for Ballet for Martha: last week Elizabeth Bird, aka Betsy, alias Fuse #8, posted some generous thoughts about the book in her recap of a Macmillan preview for librarians, here. And now there’s word that Booklist’s July issue will give the book its second starred review. Ilene Cooper’s review says: “The book as a whole beautifully captures the process of artistic creation…what readers will surely want after putting this down is to see and hear Appalachian Spring for themselves.” An interview with authors Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, editor Neal Porter, and myself will run with the review.

Thank you, Fuse and Booklist!

Horn Book

2010-06-01T21:42:00.004-04:00

Jump for joy! A starred review of Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, illustrated by yours truly, will appear in the July/August Horn Book Magazine. Thanks, Horn Book!

Hey Bidder, Bidder

2010-05-14T15:18:00.004-04:00

The Association of Booksellers for Children holds a silent auction of children’s book art each year during BookExpo America. Monies raised help underwrite projects that benefit the ABC independent booksellers, a group for which I’m glad to try to do my small bit. My donation is above (click to enlarge): a riff on Moonshot, with a nod, executed in humility, to Hergé, who sent Tintin to the moon well before Apollo 11 got there. (Please don’t infer from the drawing that I speak French, but I thought that if I was going to butcher a Hergé cover I ought to at least work with the original.) The auction will be part of an evening event featuring a keynote speech by David Wiesner, and will be held in New York on May 25. More information is here.

A lightship on the move

2010-05-10T22:27:00.003-04:00

If you happen to be reading this blog, in Boston, and a fan of lightships, then this is the post you’ve been waiting for! Light Vessel 112, which for years languished unwanted in Oyster Bay on Long Island, is on its way to a new home in Boston Harbor, traveling via Long Island Sound, Buzzard’s Bay, and the Cape Cod canal as I type. The latest word is that she’s expected at the Charlestown Naval Shipyard dock around 7:00 tomorrow (Tuesday) evening. So if you’re in range and you’ve ever wanted to see a lightship come into port, now’s your chance.

Why is this happening? I’m late to these events but it seems that the United States Lightship Museum (itself a developing story, I believe) has rescued the ship from Long Island limbo. According to the museum’s handsome web site, here, they are moving LV 112 to Boston where the ship “will serve as a floating museum and learning center for the general public, chronicling the maritime history of the U.S. Lightship Service from its inception in 1820 to its end in 1985. Visitors will experience what lightship service was like for crewmembers living aboard these “floating lighthouses,” whose duty was to stay on their station regardless of conditions, faithfully and courageously guiding transoceanic shipping to and from the United States through dangerous seas.”

Fantastic!

Theoretically I could wait until I know a little more about this story before posting it, but some of you will want as much advance notice as possible to aid with rescheduling your Tuesdays, so here we go. I’ll follow up when I have additional information. Set those RSS feeds!

Coming Soon

2010-05-06T15:42:00.004-04:00

I got to visit the Roaring Brook offices yesterday (in the eternally fantastic Flatiron Building) and was able to pick up a copy of their Fall 2010 catalogue, which includes Jan Greenberg’s and Sandra Jordan’s (and my) Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring. I also got to pick up an unbound copy of the book itself. It was great to see the book handsomely treated in the catalogue, and also to see how beautifully it’s been printed. (Thank you, Neal and Susan.) It was one of those good moments when you realize that those drawings you worked on for so long are actually going to be a book. Coming in August!

Guenter Wendt, 1924-2010

2010-05-03T11:08:00.007-04:00

From friend and Apollo obsessive (I use the term with affection) Sharyn November I learned that Guenter Wendt passed away this morning. Wendt was the “pad leader” for the Apollo flights, the man who ran the White Room at the top of the launch tower and who oversaw the astronauts’ ingress into their spaceships. Several astronauts describe riding up to the White Room on launch day as the moment that it hit them that, yes, this is really going to happen. Wendt and his closeout crew were waiting for them at the top, a last set of trusted hands and eyes to see them on their way.

Wendt (someone playing Wendt, I should say) appears briefly in the movie Apollo 13; Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell gets the line, “I vhonder vhere Guenter vhent?” (It’s a joke that was actually made by Donn Eisele on Apollo 7, but who’s counting?) Wendt’s German background and accent seem to have been a running source of comic material for the astronauts, with mixed results; he was affectionately known as the “pad führer,” and there’s a photo out there somewhere of Alan Shepard giving him a WW II-era German helmet labeled “Col. Guenter Klink” as a gag gift just before the liftoff of Apollo 14. The image is a little jarring and apparently Wendt wasn’t thrilled with the gift, but I suppose nobody ever said Al Shepard was hired for his cultural sensitivity.

Wendt is not mentioned in Moonshot, but I included him (and his glasses and bow tie) as the man sealing the hatch in the drawing above. An obituary today at the web site Collect Space, here, points out that Wendt never actually closed the door himself (So do I tell you that the drawing includes a mistake, or artistic license? Okay, mistake.) but also helps give an idea of why I wanted him in the book.

Wendt’s personal web site is here.

Coloring in Queens

2010-04-30T19:59:00.003-04:00

Here’s something that was nice to see during my visit to the Queens Central Library last week, and not just because I like crayons, the Duomo of Florence, or astronauts (though I do). What’s nice is that these particular coloring pages are from my web site, here. The event was a success in other ways, too: well and energetically attended and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Thanks to Legal Aid/Books for Kids for the chance to be there!

Come to Queens

2010-04-22T15:14:00.000-04:00

I’ll be reading and sketching this Saturday as part of a Literacy Carnival sponsored by the Legal Aid Society and Books For Kids.

Books for Kids is “the only literacy program specifically targeting children involved in the New York City Family Court system. Many of the Juvenile Rights Practice clients come from impoverished backgrounds, are in the foster care system, lack access to the world of reading and have few, if any books of their own.”

And here’s the event description: “The Legal Aid Society’s Books for Kids Project will hold a Literacy Carnival on April 24 at Queens Central Library, 89-11 Merrick Blvd., Jamaica, which promises to be a spectacular event. It is a special day for court-involved children and their caregivers and families in the community — to enjoy literacy-related activities, meet two children's book authors and illustrators, learn about local literacy and library resources and hear from successful role models in the community. There will be a magician, a bubble wrap fashion show and a balloon sculptor plus teaching artists from the Children's Museum for the Arts and volunteers from Legal Aid and Goldman Sachs doing face painting, seed planting, and book give aways. The Carnival will be held from noon to 4pm.”

I’m on from 1:15 to 2:00. All are welcome at the Literacy Carnival. F train to 169th St. Come on by! More information here.

TLA

2010-04-12T16:09:00.001-04:00

Librarians of Texas! I’m happy to say I’ll be at the Texas Library Association Conference this week. I’ll be there courtesy of Pat Anderson of Overlooked Books, at booth no. 1341. I’ll be signing there on Thursday from 10:15 to 12:30 and from 2:00 to 4:00, on Friday morning from 10:00 to 12:00, and on Saturday morning, 9:00 to 12:00. We’ll have Moonshot and The Hinky-Pink, by Megan McDonald, fresh from the 2010-2011 Texas Bluebonnet Award Master, and other titles, too. Additionally I’ll have with me an advance reader’s copy of my next book, Ballet For Martha, by Sandra Jordan and Jan Greenberg, so come by for a look at that. I hope to see you in San Antonio!

Countdown: Apollo 13

2010-04-11T14:04:00.004-04:00

Today, April 11, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13. Apollo missions 11 and 12 had landed on the moon’s open plains. Apollo 13 was designed to touch down among the Fra Mauro range — more interesting for the geologists studying the moon, and more challenging for the pilot landing on it.

The crew of was James Lovell, Commander; Jack Swigert, Command Module Pilot; and Fred Haise, Lunar Module Pilot. Lovell had written his thesis at the Naval Academy on liquid-fuel rocketry, flown jets off carriers for the Navy, and tested experimental jets at the Navy’s Aircraft Test Center in Patuxent, Maryland. He’d applied early for the astronaut program, but wasn’t selected for NASA’s first class of astronaut trainees, the group known as the Mercury Seven; during physical fitness tests performed on astronaut candidates at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Lovell’s bilirubin was found to be a little high. An arcane reason not to be chosen, perhaps, but then again many of the tests at the clinic were arcane, bordering on simply odd (including fertility tests and up to six diagnostic enemas per day). By the time NASA was ready to recruit a second class of astronauts, the Lovelace tests were considered unnecessary, and Lovell was admitted to the program as part of the group dubbed the New Nine. By the time he was assigned to Apollo 13, Lovell had already flown three flights into space — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, and Apollo 8. No one had spent more time in space or logged more miles there, but none of those trips would turn out to be anything like Apollo 13.

The mission began routinely enough — not without glitches, but with no major problems. Then, at fifty-six hours into the mission, on April 13, a routine maintenance procedure set off an explosion in one of the ship’s oxygen tanks. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” Lovell told Mission Control. (It was the movie that put the phrase into the present tense.) The explosion transformed Apollo 13 into a harrowing and sustained test of men and equipment. It sent a crippling blow through the systems of the command module, created shortages of electricity, water, heat, and oxygen, scrubbed any chance of landing on the moon, and threatened the astronauts’ chances of returning to Earth.

For the next half week, the astronauts, mission control, and the engineers who had designed and built the components of Apollo 13 worked together to perform a sort of sustained miracle of educated improvisation, putting ships, equipment, flight plans, and engines to uses for which they were never designed. Since the explosion had cost the command module all but a bare reserve of power, the lunar module became a “life raft” in which the crew spent most of the flight. They used the LM’s engine — designed for landing on the moon — to adjust and speed their flight back to Earth. (During the crisis a wag at Grumman, which had built the LM, circulated a billing form to be sent to North American Rockwell, which had built the command module. Fees included: “Towing, $4.00 first mile, $1.00 each additional mile. Total charge, $400,001.00.”) Finally, on April 17, after four cold, dangerous, and nearly sleepless days, Lovell, Swigert, and Haise, returned safely to Earth. The last fears of the teams on the ground were that the command module heat shield or parachutes had been damaged in the explosion, but both worked flawlessly.

The mission was, by some obvious standards, a failure. Commanding a landing on the moon was to have been the capstone of Jim Lovell’s career; now that was not to be. The mission’s scientific objectives had all been lost. And yet Apollo 13 became known as a “successful failure” for the way in which the agency, contractors, and astronauts worked together. In a situation that could easily have turned tragic, they found a way to bring the crew safely home to Earth. And though at one point in the mission Lovell let loose the impolitic observation, “I think this is going to be the last moon flight for a long time,” in fact NASA diagnosed and corrected the failures of the mission with what now seems like remarkable speed. By January of the next year, Apollo 14 was on its way, its destination the Fra Mauro range.

Above: A view of Apollo 13’s damaged service module, its innards revealed by the explosion onboard. Sources: Lost Moon: The Perilous Flight of Apollo 13, by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger; A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin; and http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/ap13acc.html

Books for NYC Schools event

2010-04-08T14:26:00.001-04:00

Books for NYC Kids is an event being held this Saturday, April 10, sponsored by ReadThis and the Center for Fiction. On the table will be a slew of readings, panels, and workshops by authors of books for both adults and kids: Elizabeth Gilbert, Rick Moody, Kurt Andersen, Sam Lipsyte, Jamaica Kincaid, Elise Broach, Miriam Cohen, Tad Hills, Veronica Chambers, Fran Manushkin, and Bob Morris. And! At 3:30, I’ll be reading Moonshot and answering all your questions to the best of my ability. The price of admission is two or more new or gently used books, pre-K through grade 12 level, which will go to kids and schools in New York in need of them. The event will be held at 17 East 47th Street in Manhattan, from 11:30 through the afternoon. The event website is here. It’s a great cause and should be a great event. I hope you can come by for some or all of the day!

Blue Moon of Kentucky

2010-04-06T18:43:00.000-04:00

This just in: Moonshot has been named to the 2011 Kentucky Bluegrass Award Master list for grades K-2. Thank you, Kentucky! I’m cranking up the Bill Monroe.

Sundress, by Joey Fortuna

2010-04-06T11:12:00.003-04:00

My talented friend Joey Fortuna has a concert tonight, Tuesday, April 6, on the occasion of the release of his new CD, Sundress, at the Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen Street, New York, N.Y., from 7:00 to 7:45. What makes this on topic for blogging purposes is the album art (by me). You can listen to some of Joey’s music at his website, here, or his Facebook page, here. Further venue information is here. You should go give him a listen. But don’t look for me there. I’m home with a nasty sore throat. ^%$#@!

Bank Street

2010-03-19T11:22:00.002-04:00

I want to thank the Children’s Book Committee at the Bank Street College of Education for yesterday — for their recognition of Moonshot with a Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and for the chance to attend a reception, ceremony, and lunch for all the authors and illustrators of this year’s award books. It was an honor to take part in the day and a pleasure seeing friends there and making new ones. Thank you!

Ballet for Martha

2010-03-16T11:20:00.004-04:00

I hit the blog hard last year with Moonshot, but on the desk it was a different story; I was working on drawings for a story by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan (more on this team here). Their subject: how choreographer Martha Graham, composer Aaron Copland, and sculptor Isamu Noguchi together created a landmark piece of American art, the ballet Appalachian Spring. It was a wonderful manuscript to work with, and a great chance for me to work with material a little different from what I’ve worked on so far in my books. So that was last year, and now I’ve received a copy of the advanced reader copy of Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, and the good news that the book is a Junior Library Guild selection. Thanks, JLG! Ballet for Martha comes out in August from Flash Point/Neal Porter Books/Roaring Book Press.

Robert McCall

2010-03-12T14:54:00.006-05:00

Author Andrew Chaikin’s appreciation of artist Robert McCall on NPR, here, clued me in, belatedly, to the news that McCall passed away on February 26, at the age of 90. You can’t dig too far into NASA or Apollo before you have the pleasure of bumping into McCall’s work, and you’ve seen his paintings if you’ve ever been to the Air & Space Museum in Washington, where he created a six-story-high (!) mural, or if you know the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m sorry that he’s gone. His obituary in the Times is here.

Hello, Brooklyn!

2010-03-05T12:15:00.002-05:00

Here’s a plug for my reading this Sunday, March 7, at powerHouse Books. That’s in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, at 37 Main St., Brooklyn, NY, 11201. I’ll be reading, signing, and sketching. Author Randall de Sève will be there, too. Event details are here. If you’re in range I hope you can come by!

Addendum: Thank you Susanne, Ryan, and Maggie at powerHouse, for a great visit!

Nominations (x2)

2010-03-04T13:40:00.009-05:00

It is, in all honesty, a (great) surprise still to have new Moonshot news to report, but here it is: The Children’s Book Council, in association with Every Child a Reader, Inc., has named the 2009 finalists for the Third Annual Children’s Choice Book Awards, and Moonshot is one of five finalists for Fifth Grade to Sixth Grade Book of the Year. More here. And! The American Booksellers Association has announced finalists for the 2010 Indies Choice Book Awards, and Moonshot is one of six finalists for Book of the Year in the New Picture Book Category. More here.

Either nomination would be exciting news. The two nominations together are, ah, double exciting news! Thank you to the organizers, booksellers, and young voters!

Above: From the cutting room floor, a sketch of Eagle, Armstrong, and Aldrin on the Moon.

Thanks!

2010-03-04T13:39:00.001-05:00

I had the chance last month to speak to the fantastic Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C. about my work, and then just over a week later to appear alongside some great authors and illustrators at the second annual Killeen Salutes the Arts festival in Killeen, Texas, near my hometown. Both events were a chance to meet authors, illustrators, librarians, and booksellers and to have some great conversations. (And in Killeen, thanks to bookseller and master of the culinary arts Pat Anderson, I got have some great enchiladas, too.) Thanks to the organizers of both events and to everyone who attended!

Bellissimo, come si vede in un film di fantascienza!

2010-02-21T20:40:00.005-05:00

This sure beats the windows on the Apollo modules. It’s the new cupola on the International Space Station, built by the Italians, installed last week, “the largest window ever built for space,” says NASA. An article and slide show at the New York Times is here. The design made the Times think of Monticello and the Millennium Falcon. “TIE fighter!” was my first reaction, but to each his own.

Image is from NASA, via the Times.

Edit: Title edited to correct my Italian. Or perhaps to introduce new errors. I’m never sure, but I keep trying.

The Flora Stieglitz Straus Award

2010-02-15T18:54:00.001-05:00

Each year the Children’s Book Committee at the Bank Street College of Education gives the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award “for a nonfiction book that serves as an inspiration to young readers.” Usually one award is given, but two books written for different ages can also both receive the award. This year, I’m happy to say, Moonshot has received the award for younger readers, with Almost Astronauts, by Tanya Lee Stone, receiving the award for older readers. That’s great news! Thank you to the Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street!

More about the award and Bank Street is here.

PEN panel

2010-02-04T15:44:00.004-05:00

I’m glad to have been asked to appear on a panel this coming Monday on the theme “Crafting a Career as a Children’s or Young Adult Author—Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” The panel is sponsored by PEN and includes Richard Peck, Jane O’Connor, and Marilyn Singer. The conversation will be moderated by David Levithan. I will answer questions to the best of my ability. Come by! Monday, February 8, 7:00 PM, at the Cervantes Institute, 211 East 49th St., New York City. Free, with book signing to follow.

More information at PEN’s site, here.

Addendum: Publishers Weekly’s coverage of the panel is here. Thanks to PEN and everyone who came!

Moonshot is a Sibert Honor Book

2010-01-18T09:38:00.004-05:00

The annual wave of ALA awards hit shore this morning, and I am happy and honored that Moonshot is a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book. The book is in excellent company: Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, by Tanya Lee Stone, is the Sibert Medal winner. The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors, written by Chris Barton, illustrated by Tony Persiani, and Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, by Phillip Hoose, are the other Honor Selections. The ALA press release is here. Thank you to this year’s Robert F. Sibert committee!

Hinky-Pink, or Blue, or Red, or…

2010-01-06T18:07:00.005-05:00

To be honest, I have no idea whether anyone ever makes use of the coloring pages up on my web site. But I don’t let that stop me, and the sort of recent news that The Hinky-Pink is on the 2010-2011 Texas Bluebonnet Master List has spurred me finally to post some Hinky-Pink coloring pages, something I’ve been meaning to do since the book came out. (Sometimes I get behind.) You can color a princess in a dress, or you can color Anabel, or you can color some architecture. Or you can color all three. All are up on my web site, ready for downloading and crayons, here.

The End is Near

2009-12-31T13:52:00.006-05:00

The end of the year has come, bringing with it, among other things, Best Books of the Year lists. I’m very happy that Moonshot appears on several: Kirkus Reviews’ Best Children’s Books of 2009 (Requiescat in pace, Kirkus), Book Links’ Lasting Connections of 2009, School Library Journal’s Best Books 2009, Horn Book Magazine’s Fanfare Best Books of 2009, Booklist’s Editors’ Choice 2009, and the Washington Post’s Best Kids Books of 2009.

My sincere thanks to all, and best wishes to all for 2010!

Above: an alternate sketch for Moonshot’s Mission Control page. Looking at this again I’m reminded how hard it was to choose an angle for the drawing. For some of us, Mission Control looks good from any point of view.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T11:34:00.006-05:00

I’ve posted this video, “Christmas Cheer for the Lightshipmen,” on my web site in the past, but I still like it, so here it is again. Happy holidays to all, on land and sea (and space), and best wishes for 2010!

The Racecar Alphabet book dummy

2009-12-09T17:36:00.006-05:00

Recently I was tweaking my school visit slide show, or what we used to call slide shows. These days I give my presentation using Apple’s Keynote program; no slides are harmed. A benefit to having the show on a computer instead of in a carousel is that video can be incorporated into the talk, and after years of fumbling to show a roomful of students what a book dummy looks like — my old dummies tend to fall apart as they’re being held up — it occurred to me that I could instead or also simply show some video of a dummy in action.

Here, then, is the dummy I submitted when I pitched The Racecar Alphabet. (You can see the video in higher resolution on YouTube here.) When laying out a book now I sometimes fiddle with InDesign but the media here is strictly old school: pen, ink, pencil, paper, photocopies, tracing paper, tape, glue, staples.

More about The Racecar Alphabet is on my web site here, and images from the final book are here.

Moonshot on The Early (Too Early) Show

2009-12-05T13:48:00.003-05:00

Here’s a great way to start the day: Jon Scieszka sharing holiday book ideas — including Moonshot — on CBS’s The Early Show. (A great way to be told that the day started, actually. I don’t get up early enough for this sort of thing, and let’s not talk about my television reception.)

Brooklyn signing

2009-12-03T17:33:00.001-05:00

I’ll be reading and signing Moonshot and signing The True Gift at Brooklyn’s BookCourt bookstore on Sunday, December 6, from 11 AM to Noon. The address is 163 Court Street, between Dean and Pacific. The store’s web site is here. Come on by!

The True Gift

2009-11-30T10:37:00.006-05:00

The way I was raised, the Christmas decorations don’t come out until after Thanksgiving — I’m talking to you, CVS — so I haven’t mentioned until now a book I was glad to have the chance to illustrate that came out in October, The True Gift: A Christmas Story, by Patricia MacLachlan. I did a cover painting for the book and eight pencil and graphite drawings for the interior. Here’s the School Library Journal review:

“Lily and her younger brother go to their grandparents’ farm for Christmas, as always. This year something is different; White Cow is the only animal in the field. Liam, certain that she is lonely, sacrifices his beloved books to buy her a calf companion, and Lily overcomes her fear of the large animal. The simple, elegant prose tells a warm family story with a classic holiday theme. Floca’s graphite and ebony pencil drawings are lush with evocative detail and perfectly complement this lovely offering.”

The drawings were done with a feeling similar to those in Avi’s Poppy books. It was nice to make drawings in that vein featuring people, something I haven’t had the chance to do before now for a book. On my web site there’s more about the book here and images from it here. Happy holidays!

Almost heaven, West Virginia

2009-11-18T13:17:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow, schools in West Virginia will celebrate Read to Me Day, part of West Virginia Children’s Book Week. Each year for the past nine years Appalachian Power has chosen a book to read and donate to West Virginia schools as part of the day. This year, I learned from an out-of-the-blue e-mail several weeks ago, the selection is Moonshot. The book has had a lot of nice things happen to it this year, I’m grateful to say, but this is one of the nicest. 13,000 students will hear the book tomorrow. Incredible! I'm cranking up the John Denver. Thank you to Appalachian Power and to all the volunteer readers!

An article about the event is here.

11/20 EDIT: And a couple of photos from the day are here.

Countdown: Apollo 12

2009-11-14T17:31:00.008-05:00

In the months leading to the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, I put up posts on the anniversaries of the missions that led to Apollo 11. The posting is a hard habit to break, and there’s no real reason to, anyway; the Apollo missions only became more ambitious and interesting as they went on. Which brings us to today, November 14th, the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 12, flown by astronauts Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean.

When John Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon, he said nothing about what, if anything, would be done there. The idea was to demonstrate American ambition and ability, to wrest the mantle of leadership back from the Soviets, who at the time of Kennedy’s announcement were logging victory after victory in the nascent space race. And so for some, the Apollo 11 mission was enough, thank you. The point was made. But for NASA landing was just the beginning; real goals of science and exploration had been woven into the Apollo program by the engineers and scientists who planned it. As their experience and abilities grew, so did the ambitions and potential of Apollo.

Consider that Apollo 11 touched down a full four miles from its intended landing site. In the months that followed, systems for navigating the moon were so improved that Conrad and Bean were assigned an incredibly precise target for their landing. They were to set down their LM, Intrepid, within walking distance of an unmanned probe that had been sent to the moon a year and a half earlier, Surveyor 3. True to their task, the astronauts landed within 600 feet of the probe. During two space walks that added up to seven hours walking on the lunar surface (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had spent two and a half hours on the surface in one walk), Conrad and Bean, in addition to other experiments, collected material from the Surveyor probe to see how it had been effected by exposure to space.

Beyond the science and accomplishments, there’s plenty else that makes the mission fascinating. Not least is that Apollo 12 was hit by lighting — twice — during liftoff. “What they had done, they realized later,” Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox write in Apollo: Race to the Moon, “was to launch a 363-foot lightning rod, with the equivalent of a copper wire in the form of a trail of ionized gases running all the way to the ground.” While the Saturn launch vehicle was undamaged, the astronauts spent a harrowing few moments (or it would have been harrowing for me, anyway) watching the electrical systems in the command module go haywire. As the mission teetered on the edge of an abort one of the flight controllers, John Aaron, realized which switch to throw to reset the system. An obscure switch, but Bean knew where to find it. The fix worked, and the mission continued. The lingering question from the strikes was whether the parachute deployment systems had been damaged, but that concern wasn’t allowed to interfere with continuing the mission. Andrew Chaikin writes in A Man on the Moon: “The rationale was simple: Conrad and his crew would be just as dead if the parachutes didn’t work now as they would be after coming back from the moon….”

EDIT: A nice bit about the lightning strike and how it was handled is on YouTube here.

And then there were the dynamics of the crew. Pete Conrad was an effusive, joyful astronaut. You can hear the excitement in his voice at the 1:20 mark (and elsewhere) in this video of the landing, when he first sees that mission planners have delivered Intrepid to the exact intended landing site. “Son of a gun!” “Amazing! Fanstastic!” Not being a particularly tall astronaut, as he climbed down from the LM to the moon he uttered: “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” In doing so he won a bet with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who had insisted to Conrad that NASA dictated to the astronauts what to say on landing. And Alan Bean, after Apollo 12 and service on Skylab, became a painter. You can visit his web site and see his work here. He recently collaborated with author Andrew Chaikin and editor Sharyn November on a beautiful book for young readers about the entire Apollo program, Mission Control: This is Apollo.

After the success of Apollo 12 — the parachutes were fine — NASA was primed to keep on with its goals of exploring and understanding the moon. The next mission was scheduled for April of the next year: Apollo 13.

Happy Birthday

2009-11-13T11:34:00.001-05:00

to Robert Louis Stevenson, born today, 1850, or so says Garrison Keillor. I picked up Treasure Island a couple of years ago figuring to do some Duty, check a box, etc., but, oh, it’s fun. If you haven’t ever tried it, put it on your list. It’s the best heist movie you’ll ever read.

A good week

2009-11-07T10:49:00.005-05:00

I haven’t had too many good news weeks like the one I had this past week. First, while I was in Austin, the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List was announced, and it includes The Hinky-Pink, by Megan McDonald. This means good air time for the book in Texas libraries, which is great news. Second, Moonshot was selected for the 2009 New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing list, an honor I’m very glad for the book to have. Third, Moonshot was chosen for The New York Times 2009 Ten Best Illustrated Children’s Book list. (It looks like I picked the wrong weekend to put a vacation stop on my subscription.) Just yesterday I was listening to Adam Gopnik describe the selection process here and though I knew how it all turned out, it still made me anxious to hear it discussed, as though the panel members might yet change their minds. I think that means that this great news hasn’t quite sunk in. Thank you to the Texas and New York librarians (librarians from my native and adopted lands!) and to the committee at the Times!

Buzz

2009-11-07T10:42:00.002-05:00

Here’s where I got to see Buzz Aldrin interviewed at the Texas Book Festival. (He was at the Festival with his new book, Magnificent Desolation.) I arrived late, the line literally stretched around the block, and I was sure I wouldn’t get in. But not only did I make it in the door, the reserved rows were being opened up by the time I was finally on scene and looking for a place to sit, and I ended up on the second row. Sometimes it pays to be late.

Texas!

2009-10-29T15:40:00.003-04:00

I have left the diaspora. On Sunday, November 1st at 11:00 I’ll be reading and signing Moonshot at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. It’s a great festival — with much better barbeque than the Brooklyn Book Festival, it has to be said — and it’s great to be part of it this year. The Festival web site is here, and the specifics on my reading are here. Come on by!

Science!

2009-10-29T15:38:00.001-04:00

In another bit of Moonshot news, I’m pleased to report that the book is now a finalist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Prizes for Excellence in Science Books for children and young adults. (Say that ten times fast.) I’m happy to see the book in the company of some great science books for kids that came out this year. You can read more about the prize and the other finalists here.

Society of Illustrators Original Art show

2009-10-23T12:41:00.003-04:00

It was a pleasure and an honor to receive a silver medal last night from the Society of Illustrators. The medal was for Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, and was presented at the opening of the Society’s annual Original Art show. Thank you to the Society and judges, and to everyone there for the generous congratulations!

You can read more about the show here. I’m very happy to be a part of it, and to know so many other talented people who are, too. If you’re in range of New York and interested in children’s book illustration, it’s well worth the visit!

Above: A detail from the image from Moonshot that’s on display at the show.

At the Library

2009-09-10T10:28:00.007-04:00

At the New York Public Library, Elizabeth “Fuse” Bird hosts the Children’s Literary Café, “a monthly gathering of adults who are fans of children’s literature. Professionals, librarians, authors, illustrators, publishers, booksellers, teachers, and anyone else interested in the field are welcome to attend our meetings. The Literary Café provides free Advanced Readers galleys, a rotating series of talks with professionals in the field, and great conversation. This program is for adults only.” A literary salon! Think Paris in the ‘20s, New York in the ‘50s, Brooklyn in the ‘00s. (Yes? No?)

Anyway, I’m happy to say that I’ll be on a panel at the next Café, this Saturday, September 12th, at 2:00 p.m., in the good company of Marc Tyler Nobleman, Michael Rex, and none other than the mighty Jon Scieszka. The event will be at the New York Public Library, Children’s Center at 42nd Street, Room 84. If you’re in the area and have no taste for heckling then I hope you’ll come by.

Aaron Space

2009-09-08T16:00:00.005-04:00

A sort of coda to my astronauting runs this month in the September issue of Ladybug Magazine, a small work of light verse, with drawings, titled “Aaron Space.” A.S. appears with apologies to my friend S.L., who grew up near D.C. not sure of the exact name of the museum with all the rockets in it.

The poem begins, “Aaron Space the astronaut/goes where you and I do not./Atop a rocket he is shot/into space where you have got/the sky, the stars, the moon, whatnot.”

Maybe the best part of this little job was the chance to revisit and draw again some of that great space hardware — but this time without the effort of aiming for accuracy. Aaron’s spaceship is built from a little Mercury here, a chunk of Apollo there, and, finally, a dash of Sputnik, for extra flavor.

I hope you’ll look for Ladybug and check it out!

Dance Fever

2009-09-03T12:30:00.006-04:00

No blog posts through August, not one. Because I took the month off? No. I’ve been working on drawings for a new picture book, Ballet For Martha, written by the team of Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, to be published next year by Neal Porter Books/Roaring Brook. Ballet For Martha will tell the story of how Martha Graham created the dance Appalachian Spring. She did it in collaboration with composer Aaron Copland, who wrote the score, and sculptor Isamu Noghuchi, who designed the set. If that sounds like heady stuff for the picture book set, those who know Jan and Sandra’s work won’t be surprised to read that the story is told in interesting, honest, accessible fashion. There’s a real narrative arc to the piece, a fine sense of process, and a rewarding payoff at book’s end when the dance is premiered. It’s a great text, and I hope that with the illustrations I’ve added a piece to the puzzle. The interior art is now complete — that’s a rehearsal scene from the book, above — and all that’s left now is the cover.

Splashdown!

2009-07-24T15:07:00.001-04:00

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 11 astronauts completed their return from the Moon, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean. Helicopters carried them from their bobbing Command Module to the USS Hornet, where they entered the Mobile Quarantine Trailer in which they would spend the next three weeks — long enough to be sure they weren’t carrying Moon germs. Above, the trip home as presented in Al Reinert’s “For All Mankind,” with music by Brian Eno.

And that's it. We’ve reached the end of what President Richard Nixon called “the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.” If Nixon got a little carried away, let’s not blame him. It was a remarkable trip!

Are we there yet?

2009-07-23T11:56:00.001-04:00

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth,” John Kennedy said in 1961.

Forty years ago today, the landing had been accomplished, but not yet the return; the astronauts, having earlier fired their CSM engine to push themselves out of lunar orbit, were riding the long transearth coast back to home. The big event still to come: the insane (says me) plummet into the Pacific that was the reentry procedure — what that other Buzz (Lightyear) might call “falling with style.” That’s tomorrow!

Fit to Print

2009-07-21T12:41:00.008-04:00

About a month before Moonshot came out this spring, I received a rather wonderful gift from one of my enablers at Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, a July 21, 1969 edition of The New York Times. (Thank you, E.D.D.) The coverage is as thorough and as interesting as you’d expect from the Times during the glory days of newsprint. The entire first section and a special supplement of the paper are devoted to Apollo; there is a wealth of informative articles about the landing itself and about how it was planned and carried out, and indeed about the whole evolution of space flight. It’s the pre-Internet Times, when the paper, in its newspaper of record role, would run pages and pages of transcripts of important events — in this case all the back and forth between Mission Control and Columbia and Eagle. There is also a description by the administrator of NASA of the moon bases, nuclear rocket shuttles, and space stations to come (by the mid ‘80s), and there are poems and commentaries on the occasion of the landing, both for and against. (Buckminster Fuller: FOR. Jesse Jackson: AGAINST.) It is, in short, a totally fascinating time capsule view of the mission and of America at the moment of it. But since there are so many sources out there, especially this week, for understanding what Apollo was and how it worked, and for ideas about what it did or didn’t mean, I thought that I’d share from the paper something a little lighter: some advertisements, which provide their own odd, narrow window into the period. I hope you’ll enjoy them, and perhaps even join me in raising a horn of mead and saying, “Thank you, Norway!”

Walter Cronkite (1916—2009)

2009-07-18T15:39:00.006-04:00

From the New York Times obituary, here:

“As anchorman and reporter, Mr. Cronkite described wars, natural disasters, nuclear explosions, social upheavals and space flights, from Alan Shepard’s historic 15-minute ride to lunar landings. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, Mr. Cronkite exclaimed, “Oh, boy!””

At the risk of seeming as if I am (revealing that I am) seeing everything this week through the lens of Apollo, here was a man who would have enjoyed the 40th anniversary of the mission. Cronkite’s interest in the space program was not a ginned-up show-business enthusiasm, but the real thing. He had the bug. It would have felt fitting if he had made it through the week, and I’m sorry he didn’t. A bit of his CBS coverage of the landing is here:

EDITS:

1. Actually, Cronkite said “Oh, boy!” when the Eagle landed. The Brian Floca News Blog regrets the error. So does the New York Times.

2. Looks as though CBS has had this YouTube footage pulled. You can still get a little bit of Cronkite and the landing here, but CBS has packaged it to within an inch of its life and made it into something like an informercial, with guest appearances by current anchors, etc. Short of a visit to a place like the Paley Center for Media in New York or Los Angeles, I don’t know if there’s a way to get the flavor of the original footage, which seems to me a shame.

Does anyone remember where we parked?

2009-07-17T19:20:00.002-04:00

Apparently, yes. Remarkable new photos from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, here, show the Apollo landing sites. Incredible!

Radio Days

2009-07-17T11:51:00.004-04:00

Of the links listed in yesterday’s post, the one I’ve been enjoying the most is the link to Apollo 11 Radio — the “audio time capsule” of the Apollo 11 mission that NASA is webcasting in real time this week. Listen here. I’m keeping it on in the background while working on my current looming deadline. I had no idea how much I’d enjoy it, but you can’t beat primary sources. Yes, there are long stretches of nothing but a low, humming static, but that’s all right; you could do worse than a little white noise in the background. Then, unexpectedly, the jargon comes on, most of which I can’t understand, but somehow that’s all right, too. You still get the gist. It was fascinating yesterday listening to Mike Collins and Charlie Duke try to figure out why a set of information on the ground wasn’t matching up with a set in Columbia. Sometimes the whole operation seems to have gone so smoothly that its success seems preordained, but then you listen to those guys try to get their numbers to square, while flying through space, pointed away from Earth, traveling at thousands of feet per second, and you’re reminded of what was really going on. A high tip of the hat to author, illustrator, Brooklyn neighbor, and fellow moon book maker John Rocco, who first sent me the link. Thanks, John!

Countdown: Apollo 11

2009-07-16T08:02:00.000-04:00

9:32 AM EDT today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11.

A few of the very many ways out there to enjoy the week's commemorations of Apollo 11: You can follow along a virtual reenactment of the Apollo 11 journey — from liftoff to splashdown — at We Choose The Moon, here, from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. Or listen along with Apollo 11 Radio, here, a webcast from NASA that will relay in real time the audio from Apollo 11. How much of the audio? All of it! NASA describes it as an “audio “time capsule”.... Audio from the entire Apollo 11 mission will be replayed and streamed on the Internet at exactly the same time and date it was broadcast in 1969.” Bring it, NASA! That is going to be the soundtrack to my week.

For more from NASA, see their 40th anniversary Apollo site, here. A good list of other online anniversary sites has been compiled by science writer Alan Boyle, here.

Offline, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., today remarkable astronaut/artist Alan Bean will be celebrating the opening of an exhibit of his paintings at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Also there will be author Andrew Chaikin; together they will sign copies of their fantastic book for young readers, Mission Control, This is Apollo. (If you buy only two Apollo books this summer, buy Mission Control, This is Apollo.) I am proud to say that you can even catch readings (not by me) of Moonshot today at the museum, at 11:00 and 1:30. Details for all those events are here.

And, keep your eyes open for a NASA press conference this morning — more on that here — and for a better look at the Apollo 11 moonwalk than anyone has ever seen.

Now, if you follow this blog — well, first, if you follow this blog, then you’re part of a small, select group. But what I really wanted to say is, if you follow this blog, then you might know that I’ve been posting summaries of each of the manned Apollo missions on their 40th anniversary launch date. (Summaries to date are here, and they will keep coming. Watch for Apollo 12 — but not till November.) So what to say now that we’ve finally reached Apollo 11, the first manned landing on the Moon, the subject of Moonshot?

I hope it’s no slight to the other books I’ve been lucky enough to work on to say that I’ve never felt the pull of a book as deeply as I did on Moonshot. What fascinates me most and what moves me most about these voyages to the Moon, I tried to express in that book. Anything I didn’t get into Moonshot, I’m not going to find words for here. (No offense, Blogger.)

So, serve yourself up some steak and eggs (the astronauts’ breakfast before launch), crank up the audio time capsule, and Godspeed Apollo 11!

Today’s Moon News

2009-07-14T10:40:00.008-04:00

Highly recommended: Today’s Science Times section of The New York Times. John Noble Wilford, A.O. Scott, and others reflect on the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.

(A few years ago I got to see Wilford interview director (and fellow Texan) Al Reinert at a screening of Reinert’s beautiful, captivating film “For All Mankind.” If you want to spend a little time this anniversary week with images of Apollo, you won’t do better.)

Highly appreciated: Yesterday’s Fuse #8 review of Moonshot, here. For all the kindnesses within the review, I especially appreciated that Fuse tipped her hat to our taking the time to design the book’s endpapers around the fact that some libraries glue down the jacket flaps on their books. (I don’t know why they do it, but I know that they do it.) For Moonshot this meant coming up with a jacket flap-sized panel that would show readers something they might enjoy if they could see it, but that they wouldn’t miss if they couldn’t.

A final small note about the endpapers: In the last panel on the bottom right, you can see a figure, slightly hunched, speaking to the astronauts while they’re still in their trailer-like Mobile Quarantine Facility. It’s not the best likeness, but that figure’s identity can now be revealed.

Hey, People

2009-07-08T10:27:00.003-04:00

From the current (July 13) issue of People. Buy it for the Michael Jackson photos. Cherish it for the book reviews!