The Complete Package

Evin Henkes belongs to a rare breed. He's an artist who writes as well as he illustrates—and he's got the credentials to prove it. Ten years ago, Henkes received a Caldecott Honor for his picture book Owen (1993), a sly tale of a young mouse who refuses to surrender his security blanket. And early this year, Henkes nabbed a Newbery Honor for Olive's Ocean (2003), a heartfelt coming-of-age novel about a girl's summer on Cape Cod. Those heady accomplishments have placed the unassuming 43-year-old among some pretty impressive company, including author-illustrators William Steig, Wanda Gág, and Robert Lawson. And lately there's good reason to believe that the creator of the popular Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse (1996) has yet to peak. Henkes's most recent picture book, Kitten's First Full Moon (2004), is distinguished by its spare, lyrical language and lush, black-and-white illustrations. In a world where razzle-dazzle books for preschoolers are fast becoming the norm, Full Moon's simplicity is nothing short of stunning.

Henkes's start in children's books is the stuff of legend. As a teenager, the Wisconsin native set out for New York City, in 1980, determined to land a publishing contract. And that's what he did—after knocking on just one door, Greenwillow Books, which has since published all 33 of his titles.

Henkes, his wife, artist Laura Dronzek, and their two young children live in Madison, WI. We spoke in August about his long career as a children's book creator.

It's rare for someone to receive both a Newbery and Caldecott award. How does that make you feel?

It really pleases me, and it makes me think back to my early life. I was always considered an artist, and that's the way everyone thought of me. In my teens, I began to like writing, too, and it really felt amazing when a teacher would respond to my writing. It just feels like that all over again. Writing is terribly important to me. With picture books, it's the illustrations that most people see. But for me, the writing is absolutely as essential as the pictures, and I work just as hard on the words. I don't just want them to be an excuse for me to make pictures. I want the words to be really good.

When did you first realize that you wanted to create children's books?

I've wanted to be an artist all of my life, and it was in my junior year of high school that I began to think about writing as a possible career choice, as well as being an artist. It was during that year that I rediscovered children's picture books.

What books did you look at?

Where the Wild Things Are was big for me, and Crockett Johnson's books. Going back to them and seeing them again made me think that writing and illustrating children's books would be perfect [for me]. So I researched at my public library [in Racine, WI] with the help of my public librarian. I chose to go to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in part, because the Cooperative Children's Book Center is here, and I continued my research.

What did you discover?

I decided that Greenwillow Books was the publisher that I most wanted to be published by. So the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I went to New York with three portfolios, a book dummy for what became my first book [All Alone (1981)], and just great enthusiasm. It's funny now, looking back, because I was 19 at the time, and I just thought I would go to New York and get a contract for a book. I don't know if I would have that confidence now at age 43. But I was lucky in that Susan Hirschman looked at my work and decided to publish my first book.

The characters in your first two books are human beings. What made you decide to switch to animals?

The thing I always try to do is to match the pictures to the text, and for me the text always comes first. Because I started so young, I was not formed at all—I was forming myself as I was working. My stories were starting to become more humorous, and I remember thinking that I could better match the text or tap [into] the humor in the text if I lightened up my art. One way to do that, I thought, was to use animal characters and to just draw a bit more lightly and loosely. There are things one can do with animal characters that one can't do with realistically drawn human characters.

Can you give us an example?

In Julius the Baby of the World [1990], for example, Lilly screams in her little brother's ear and pinches his tail. I think it works, and I think it's funny. But had I done the equivalent with realistically rendered humans, it might not be so funny. I think one can even overdramatize with animals, and it works.

Even though your picture books are humorous, they deal with topics that young children take very seriously, such as adjusting to a new sibling or starting school.

I think all those things, which at first thought may seem simple or easy to an adult, are absolutely monumental to a child. Those are the things that often strike me when I'm working on a picture book. They're also ordinary, and I think it makes for a good universal experience.

Can you tell us about Kitten's First Full Moon? In some ways, it looks very old fashioned: the art reminds me of Jean Charlot's or Clare Turlay Newberry's. It has a quiet elegance that we seldom see in today's picture books, which tend to be so flashy.

In part, Kitten's First Full Moon came about because of that change in the field. It seems to me that now flash is really important and glitz is really important. Everything seems to be about grabbing the attention of the box-store customer. Sometimes that angers me, because I look back to some of the early books from the 20th century, and think, these are so good and have everything that a good book has. A good book doesn't need to have glitter on the cover. [It] doesn't have to be splashy.

What inspired you to write the story?

When I became a parent, I was drawn to picture books for the youngest child in a way that I hadn't been before. I really grew to love their simplicity and their poetic nature. I became interested in very simple concept books, like [those of] Tana Hoban or Don Crews, and I tried without success to write one. One failed attempt that I kept was called "All About Circles." I wanted each double-[page] spread to somehow have that object in it—a ball, a plate, a marble, a bowl—but I wanted it to be deeper in some way. The book didn't work at all, and it was one of those ideas that I didn't even show [to my editor] Susan Hirschman. One line for a double-[page] spread read, "The cat thought the moon was a bowl of milk." The line stayed with me, and it expanded, and finally it became the words for Kitten's First Full Moon.

I think it's the first book you've done where the main character is truly an animal, rather than an anthropomorphized animal.

I think you're right. And it's funny, because I still think of kitten as being a child, but I know what you mean. I secretly called the kitten Clare, for Clare Newberry, because I was thinking about her art, although this is very dissimilar. I loved the velvety lush black of her books.

Is that why you did Full Moon in black and white?

From the very beginning, I pictured it with black-and-white illustrations. I wanted it to have bold sans-serif type. I wanted it to be a square book. I wanted soft, creamy paper. A lot of people have asked about the lack of color. I love color. I love bright colors—even candy colors—in most of my picture books. But this time I thought color was unnecessary, and that by keeping the book as spare and simple as possible, it would be better and it would be tighter. It would be a more complete book. I liked the idea of having a white moon, a white cat, and a white bowl of milk surrounded by black. It just seemed right.

One of the book's strengths is its pacing and repetition.

I love rhythm in picture books. I love repetition. And when I'm writing a picture book like Kitten's First Full Moon, I read it aloud again and again and again and again. The right rhythm just seems to find itself. I love the poetic nature of a really good young [children's] picture book, and that's what I want. What sometimes happens is, after I've written it and I think it's exactly right, I will cut up the words and put it into book form. Then sometimes I have to fix [the text], because I think the turning of the page is essential. The words and the page turning have to be perfect, or else you break the rhythm, you break the magic. Sometimes when I think it's perfect on a piece of paper, it needs to be reworked to make it fit into book form. I do all of that before I begin working on pictures. For me, it's the only way to work, because I want to get those words absolutely right first.

I know that Susan Hirschman encouraged you to become a writer. Do you feel you owe your success as a novelist to her?

Yes. Even though the desire was there, I don't know if I would have tried it without her great enthusiasm and encouragement. I had had years and years of training as an artist, but I'd never had any real training as a writer; so I was learning a lot in a pretty concentrated amount of time. Susan was so good with her encouragement. She was great at creating an atmosphere in which I, as a writer and an artist, felt that everything I did mattered. And not just each individual book, but me. I mattered. That's a great environment to create for a writer and an artist.

Does a particular experience stand out?

The third book I did was called Margaret and Taylor [1983]. It actually began as a picture book, and Susan liked it. I remember sitting in her office in New York, and she asked, "Do you know more about these kids?" I said I did, and she said, "Go and write more." That was the book in which I think I began to grow as a writer, because it was longer and I had to sustain character. It was the first book in which the characters had names, and it was written in [the] third person. So even though it's a very short book for younger readers, it was the bridge to longer books.

How does writing a novel differ from writing a picture book?

The thing that's most different for me is that when I'm writing a picture book I will sometimes see the complete book in my head. With a novel, I don't at all. I know perhaps a character and an opening situation. I think I know where I want to end, but I have no idea how I will get there or who will populate the book in terms of people, other than my main character. I write very, very, very slowly when I'm writing a novel. I usually think about it for about a year, and then I'll take notes for a year, which is happening while I'm working on something else. Then when I write the novel, I write paragraph by paragraph, very slowly. I know other people who write many, many drafts, but that's not the way that I work. I go very slowly and have just one draft, even though I may write one paragraph 15 times before I get it absolutely the way I want it to be. Because I do write in such small chunks, I do read it aloud as I'm going, at least in my head.

Your novels present less-than-perfect parents, such as in Olive's Ocean, where Martha's father is a failed writer.

I've never liked books where the adult characters are one-dimensional—either all good or all bad. Even if kids are at a point in their lives when they're completely annoyed with their parents or embarrassed about their parents, they're essential to their lives, and I want them in my books. So I'm starting from that point of view, I suppose. I don't think it's wrong-headed to put the adults in there. I like that. The thing that I have to be mindful of, of course, is that it's Martha's story, it's not her parents' story.

Did you have an entire back story in mind for her parents?

I have a back story for everybody. There are so many things about Martha and even Olive [a secondary character] that weren't in the book, because the structure of the book couldn't bear the weight. But I think it makes me write better to know everything that I know about them. I think with a character in a good book, you really sense that their lives extend beyond the book in every direction. The more that I know about the characters, the more they will come across as people who have lives and whose lives will go on. Even if it's a minor character, that minor character will seem all the more true and real if I know everything there is to know about them, even if it doesn't show up in the book.

With all that you know about the supporting characters, have any ever threatened to take over a novel?

Yes. That happened in my book Words of Stone [1992]. Joselle was just going to be a blip when I began, and she became just as much a main character as Blaze. And in Olive's Ocean, when I began, I didn't know that there would be Jimmy or Tate. It was essentially going to be a book about a girl and her grandmother. Because I needed to put real life around my main characters, I started creating this world and those two characters became significant in a way that I hadn't known they would when I began.

Have you noticed any change in your books since you became a parent?

Not really, and that's interesting. I think it just proves what I've always thought, but didn't really know for certain—and that is that someone doesn't have to have children to write a good children's book; it comes from someplace within. I think that's why I love writing about kids who are interested in being a writer or an artist because then I can look at the world through the eyes of a young artist. That's what I was, so I think I understand them.