On with the tour

On rolls the Locomotive book tour. Above is the train that brought me to Washington for the National Book Festival last weekend—very similar to the train that brought me to Philadelphia tonight for some school visits and a store appearance tomorrow. (Thursday the 26th! Towne Book Center! 6:00 P.M.!) There have been a lot of flights up to this point on the book tour, so it’s nice to get some honest train travel in, even if a modern Amtrak engine makes it hard to work an 1869 theme. What else on the tour? I have signed books, I have met great readers, I have met great booksellers, I have been to great stores, and at the National Book Festival I had the privilege of giving a presentation on the National Mall with my parents and some friends in the audience. I have done a lot of school visits, and in doing so have seen a lot of kids sitting on their rears on gym floors. (When did we stop building auditoriums in schools, with stages and seats? I oppose this development.) In small bits of free time I’ve seen music in New Orleans, a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Kansas, a county fair in Ohio (horses, rabbits, pigs, roosters), and I’ve been licked on the neck by a ferret in Minneapolis. (Thank you for that, Wild Rumpus.) It has been exhausting and fantastic and the tour is not over yet. (The full schedule is here.) Thank you to everyone who has come by for any part of the tour—from all the friends I was so glad to see at the book launch at BookCourt three weeks ago, on to the nanny and two girls who found themselves rather by accident at a Locomotive reading at Hooray for Books in Alexandria, Virginia, this afternoon. One of the girls, dressed all in pink and sparkles, went and found herself a copy of Pinkalicious as soon as I finished talking trains, and then clutched it to her chest like a life preserver. But the kind nanny bought a copy of Locomotive, and so I think the kid may not be out of the woods yet.

The leaf is on the tree.

Here’s a sketch from this weekend, done at just about the time on Saturday evening that it was becoming pleasant to be sitting outside. So long, heat wave.

4th of July

Fireworks on the Hudson. This is the view from the cheap seats.

Return to the ’20s

One weekend almost three years ago I struck out for Governor’s Island with some reading I needed to get through for Locomotive. I figured that if I had to be working on a weekend I might as well be doing it in an appealing setting. But then, while looking for a spot where I could knuckle down in comfort with the research, I came across a Jazz-Age Lawn Party in full swing, if you’ll forgive the expression. Instead of reading I did some drawing (which I posted on the blog, here.) 

The party was on again last weekend — and will be again in August, if you’re interested — and this year I went by on purpose. I’m hoping that one of these years they can combine this thing with a Civil War reenactment and get all the people who like to dress up in period outfits out there on the island together. In the meantime these ’20s-era weekends offer music, dancing, drinks, oysters, people looking better than they usually do, and old automobiles and trucks like this Citroën H van, which I enjoyed sketching.

There is, incidentally, a faded, former Citroën dealership around the corner from my studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Citroëns are seldom seen. In a neighborhood full of incongruities, the old dealership still stands out.

Sic transit Brooklyn

We’re expecting guests in the studio next week when BookExpo America is in town and so the last few days I’ve been cleaning. Well, “cleaning” suggests cleanliness, and that’s going too far, but improvement is nevertheless afoot. As part of the process, old piles, old files, old piles of files are being examined. Above is a drawing I came across today (click to enlarge), a location drawing of a junk-strewn vacant lot in Williamsburg, down by the East River. This was done in maybe 2004. Now, in 2013, every Saturday, this site is host to the Smorgasburg outdoor food market. (Here.) Now on this site, you can visit dozens of vendors and then on open green fields with a view of the water and the Manhattan skyline you can sit with your friends and enjoy a foie-gras beignet with Nutella powder, or Tunisian pumpkin stew, or a micro-batch of Kurdish labneh flavored with brined garlic shoots, or what have you. But the price of progress: if you’ve got an old GMC or an International 4700 hood you’re looking to dump, you’re straight out of luck.

Parade of Trains

In conjunction with National Train Day (see last post) the Grand Centennial Parade of Trains is on at Grand Central Terminal this weekend, May 11-12. Details here. 

I swung by today. I hadn’t expected vendors selling historic railroading items, but there they were. I bought more than I meant to but less than I might have. (I mentioned idly to one vendor’s wife that I wasn’t buying an antique brakeman’s lantern — reasonably priced! — because I knew in my heart that I had no real use for it. She assured me that her husband had gotten good service from the old lanterns during Hurricane Sandy. With oil and a good wick, the things still work! Well, why wouldn’t they? Still, I stayed strong.) 

Then it was on to the modelers, where I spent some time drawing the terrific N-scale setup shown above. I got to speak with Charlie Sanborn, who along with his partner in very small trains Walt Palmer constructed the scene, an imagined town and valley inspired by the landscape around New York’s Shawangunk Ridge. They drove the model in from upstate in the bed of Walt’s pickup truck; this made easier than it might sound because the model was precision designed to fit the truck bed. Like a great, busy, Richard Scarry spread, the model invites the eye to wander, rewards with interesting details, and suggests narratives. There’s a lonely hilltop house, a farm, cows, a city, a bridge, tunnels, hairpin turns, even a bit of graffiti on the cliff face (“Class of ’49”), a whole little world. If you’re near Grand Central tomorrow between 10 AM and 4 PM, it’s worth slogging through the crowds (the considerable crowds) to get a look!

Click the images for larger versions.

An Appalachian Spring Festival

Monday the 8th through Tuesday the 16th, the Baltimore School for the Arts will be presenting an Appalachian Spring Festival, a week’s worth of activities for students and the community centered around Martha Graham, Aaron Copland, and Isamu Noguchi’s iconic masterpiece. The week will be capped by a student performance of the dance, produced with the support of the Martha Graham Dance Company — a first for a high school. Particularly exciting for me is that the book Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring will be a part of the week. I’ll be speaking with students about making the book on Friday the 12th and Saturday the 13th. (I’ll be doing my best to carry the flag for the whole Ballet for Martha team, including authors Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, and editor Neal Porter. While in Baltimore I will also try to eat crabs for the four of us.) I’ll also be speaking more generally about my work at the Southeast Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Friday afternoon at 1:00, and at the Pratt’s Central Branch on Saturday at 2:00. My thanks to the Baltimore School for the Arts for the chance to be a part of this exciting and ambitious festival. I hope to see some of you there!

More about the Baltimore School for the Arts is here, and details of the Appalachian Spring Festival are here. The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s web site is here. Visit the Martha Graham Dance Company’s web site here, and read more about the book on my web site, here.

Metaphors, gathering steam

Publishers Weekly’s Fall Sneak Previews are online here. 

On the list: “Candlewick climbs aboard for How to Train a Train by Jason Carter Eaton, illus. by John Rocco, which provides information on finding, keeping, and training a pet train” and “Orchard Books rides the rails with Train by Elisha Cooper, in which trains race across the country, coast to coast” and “Atheneum pulls into the station with Locomotive by Brian Floca, a look at the transcontinental railroad.” 

Clear the tracks, folks!

Happy Presidents’ Day

Here is a drawing-in-progress of Abraham Lincoln for the endpapers of Locomotive, coming in September from Atheneum/Simon & Schuster. On July 1, 1862, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, which put government support behind the construction of the country’s first transcontinental railroad. (Nods toward this interest and work of Lincoln’s in the recent Spielberg film: a model steam locomotive on the desk in Willie’s room, and a quick bit of conversation between husband and wife about what they’d like to do postwar. “You’ve an itch to travel?” asks Sally Fields. “I’d like that,” says Daniel Day Lewis. “To the West by rail.”) Ground for the railroad was broken in Sacramento on January 8, 1863, 150 years ago last month. 

A closer look at the Pacific Railroad Act is online at the Library of Congress, here. 

Sketch the vote

This morning I walked to my neighborhood elementary school and exercised my franchise. The lines were long, the lines were slow—not a good situation in many ways but good for sketching or for staring at a phone and especially good for sketching someone staring at a phone. Click the image for a larger version.

Happy birthday, Martha Graham

Today is May 11: happy birthday, Martha Graham! And thank you to Anita Silvey for marking the day by highlighting Ballet for Martha at her Children’s Book-A-Day Almanac! You can read the review of the book on the Almanac here.  

Wild blue yonder

My hometown sources tell me that the Central Texas Air Show is on this weekend in Temple, Texas. I’ll be in the studio this weekend, in Brooklyn, drawing trains, but last year I was back in the old country when the show was on and I went out to see the planes and to do some sketching. It was hot, it was dry, the sun was beating down and the (simulated) B-25 bombing runs were setting off grass fires, but I enjoyed it all. The planes were fascinating, even to someone as temperamentally and experientially civilian as yours truly. (“Fly the Friendly the Skies” was the motto of none of these aircraft.) I left the air show with some drawings which I meant to post here. A year later, here are a few. Click to enlarge. Happy flying.

Hell on Wheels (and Hurdy-Gurdy Dancing)

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.

Destination Moon

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.

Happy birthday, Martha Graham

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

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.

2010

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.

Politics and Prose

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

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!

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.