Out of the Blue

I have no idea how long it’s been since I’ve posted on readia….it seems like a lifetime ago.  Which is cool.  If I were a reptile, I would have shed a couple of skins by now ….  I want to invite my subscribers (if I have any….) to subscribe to my new blog, Imaginerience.  It will be devoted to cultivating creativity–most specifically for kids, but then again, maybe for other, more aged people who believe F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Growing up is a terribly hard thing to do.  It is much better to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”  You can to Imaginerience via my beautifully redone website (courtesy of Winding Oak) http://www.suestauffacher.com

Not only will I be talking about how my books were created, but also throwing out fun ideas for kids to fire up that ‘imaginator.’  It’s like getting to go behind the curtain with the Wizard of Oz.  C’mon…that’s fun.

Fairie-ality

I had a wonderful conversation recently with a 7-year-old girl named Kate. We were walking along the shore of Lake Michigan and we came upon a wedding being held on the beach. This caused Kate to launch into a description of her own wedding dress. Flowers were a central theme. As I watched her describe—using her hands as well as her words—the dress and the veil and the headband in such great detail, I started thinking about children’s book illustrations that would feed her marvelous visual imagination. The moral of today’s post is, ‘the right book for the right child at the right time’ is what we need to do more of… I told Kate, don’t bother to read the words if you don’t want. Just look at the pictures and think about the pictures in your mind.

Of course, I told Kate’s parents about Fairie-ality: The Fashion Collection From the House of Ellwand (Candlewick, $19.99 paper) by David Ellwand, but that wasn’t enough for me. When I got home, I looked through my extensive collection to see what other books would be a combination of flora and fauna and fashion. I ended up putting together a book bag of fabulously-illustrated books that are not necessarily as fabulously written. Some went on way too long, some were copyright-free texts of classics that just don’t play well today. The stories in some were okay, but all of them had lush amazing illustrations.

Sleeping Bunny & A Summertime Song

Two in particular suited my purposes. Sleeping Bunny (Random House, out-of-print) by Emily Snowell Keller and Pamela Silin-Palmer is a silly take on the fairy tale classic, Sleeping Beauty. The paintings are so rich with detail. Carrots cross in coats of armor, good fairies are named after flowers and dressed appropriately. There are some corny plays on ‘hoppily ever after,’ but the brilliance of this book is in the border to border attention to imaginative detail.

The other is A Summertime Song (Aladdin, out-of-print) by Irene Haas. A young child named Lucy is given a magic hat by a frog and when she puts it on, she becomes a wee person whose journey through her own garden is completely changed by her size and new perspective. Animals and insects come alive and the illustrations, set against dark dusky backgrounds have an ethereal quality. Flowers and leaves form raiment for mice and birds.