This article was published in Canadian Children’s Book News, a publication of CCBC (the Canadian Children’s Book Centre) on March 2020. (PDF at the end of this article.)
Three picture book collaborations, two international trips, countless presentations and endless hours spent working, laughing, brainstorming … Jan Dolby and Joyce Grant are planning their next magical project.
Illustrator Jan Dolby and I sat down in January 2020 for a long Skype chat. We were looking back at the decade we have spent creating together. Our partnership has taken us to the rainforest, across Canada and into hundreds of classrooms. We’ve met some of Canada’s most talented–and supportive–writers and illustrators and tens of thousands of children. All the while striving to create magical stories that kids will love.
Jan kicks off our conversation with a quote from Roald Dahl: “Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
We believe in it, that’s for sure. We both feel that magic has touched our work, our relationship and our friendship.
“We’re friends and all that, but you’re like my industry sister,” says Jan, from her Stouffville, Ontario studio. I am in Hamilton, 130 km away. But as always, whenever we chat it’s like we are in the same room.
“We think in shorthand with each other,” I say. “We’re always on the same page.”
The pages we’re on, specifically, are in our Gabby books. Three picture books about a girl who puts letters together and whatever she spells, comes to life. I wanted to create a fun story, but also help kids learn that words can be ‘things,’ using the concept of kinesthetic learning. The text needed to be sparse, almost transparent to the reader. It would be up to the illustrator to bring the whole thing to life, adding quirkiness to the character that was in my head. I had no idea that it would come together as well as it did.
It was magic that brought me to the Fitzhenry & Whiteside booth at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference, where I met Cathy Sandusky and Christie Harkin, who gave me my first-ever book contract. And it was a type of magic that kept an old postcard from Jan Dolby on Christie’s office wall until the exact moment it was needed.
I remember where I was when I got the call that Fitzhenry wanted my manuscript. Similarly, Jan says she remembers her call. “I was in the coffee shop down the street and Dave (Jan’s husband) called me and said, ‘There’s an editor who wants to talk to you.’ Well, I booted it home–and she put me on the project. The whole thing was just magical.”
I’ll never forget Christie taking Jan’s postcard down from the wall. “This is who I was thinking of for the illustrations,” she said. Seeing Jan’s drawings, I told Christie, “Yes. I think this artist could do a good job with it.”
A good job? I cried when I saw the first drawing of Gabby! It was so exactly, precisely what was in my head when I wrote the book. How could Jan have known?
Jan had given Gabby an anthropomorphic flower that feels what Gabby feels. And a hidden frog, holding letters that spell something at the end of the book. And socks, because “Gabby doesn’t like to wear shoes,” Jan told me later. And she invented an inspired team of other characters: a cat that’s completely bonkers, best friend Roy who wears an earring, and a wacky neighbour that Jan says is based on Phyllis Diller.
It must have come from the long discussions I had with Christie and Cathy at Starbucks in those early days, fleshing out the character, figuring out her name (changed from Sarah, which I’d proposed) and trying to determine the perfect tone, look and feel for the character.
“From what I recall, I’m not sure I had any of those ideas,” says Jan. “Christie gave me the manuscript and said ‘Go with it, Jan.’ She gave me, really, no restrictions.”
“I think that the Gabby character came together so well because the manuscript was so good. I found the magic in it and because of that, the character just flowed out of my thoughts–because honestly, the way that I attacked the first Gabby book, well, I’ve not done that since in quite the same way.”
What Christie knew, and what I had no way of knowing, was that when you hire a great artist, you have to give them the room to create. Tying them down with too many illustrator notes is one of the fastest ways to kill the magic. And it was especially true in Jan’s case. To this day, we both make sure I stop talking before I ruin a project with too many suggestions.
Jan and I finally met in person in 2013 at our unboxing of Gabby at Fitzhenry & Whiteside’s office in Markham, Ontario. The first time seeing our first book, holding it in our hands after three years. Look at our faces. Those are the faces of two people who know they are heading out on an adventure but have no map.
Our adventure began in earnest in the rainforest. We both got an email out of the blue saying Gabby had been chosen for the Rainforest of Reading Readers’ Choice Award. The Rainforest of Reading Festival had only begun the year before, and neither of us had heard of it. We were both suspicious. We were each one click away from deleting that email, dismissing it as spam.
Thank goodness for authors Kari-Lynn Winters and Lisa Dalrymple who convinced me that it was an amazing opportunity. I called Jan to let her know that maybe, just maybe, this was ‘something.’
Something? It was everything. We would be going to St. Lucia, a place where the rainy season wiped out storybook collections and poverty prevented the building of libraries. We would be bringing thousands of books to children in St. Lucia, Grenada and Montserrat and presenting to more than 7,000 children and teachers. Jan and I would be travelling with some of the most accomplished and talented kidlit creators in the industry: Rebecca Bender, Eugenie Fernandes, Eric Walters, Suzanne Del Rizzo, along with Lisa and Kari-Lynn.
We have countless memories from that trip. One of our favourites was when a young boy was shyly pushed to the front by a friend who declared that he “knows how to draw Gabby–maybe better than Ms Dolby!” We gave the boy a marker and offered Jan’s flip board. And he blew everyone away. Because, not only did he draw the character beautifully, from memory, “He didn’t do it by shape,” says Jan. “He did it by contour line …”
“… He drew Gabby’s outline!” I laugh. “And then he filled it in.” “You never see that. Ever! That was fun,” says Jan.
Thousands of children dressed up as Gabby in St. Lucia is a sight neither of us will ever forget. Children with orange yarn-hair, pipe cleaner glasses and cut-out letters. Some of them wore striped socks, like Gabby. And when we marched in the book parade, they would start chanting GAB-BY! GAB-BY! GAB-BY!
Jan goes to hold up a photo to the Skype camera, saying to me, “This one really did it for me.”
“Wait,” I say. “Let me guess if it’s the same picture I’m thinking of.” It is. It’s the first classroom Jan and I visited on our second trip to the rainforest–this time to Montserrat a few years later. Gabby would ultimately win the Rainforest of Reading Reader’s Choice Award that year, but first we had the opportunity to visit the students in their classrooms.
We’d developed a workshop where kids create a story combining a main character, two obstacles, a magical thing that helps solve the problems, and a happy ending. When I’d done the workshop in Canada, a typical storyline would be: a dragon falls in a hole, a fairy comes along and gets him out and they both live happily ever after. Not in the rainforest. In nearly every class we were moved by the extraordinary sense of community and generosity in the children’s stories and how the spectre of poverty loomed in their lives. The day this picture was taken, the class decided the main character was someone who didn’t have shoes, and therefore couldn’t go into a store to buy food. A magical trove of money appears.
“And the child gets shoes and can buy bread?” I ask the class.
“No,” they say, almost as one. I’ve missed the point. A boy yells out, as if the answer is obvious, which it is to all the children and teachers, “And everyone in the village gets shoes and bread!” Magic.
Jan and I marvel at other things that happened on that trip, too many to mention here. The tarantula the size of our hand. The cacao restaurant in the middle of the rainforest where our meal began with chocolate butter. The snorkelling. But always, the children. Eager to meet an author and illustrator, ready to read, wanting to learn, all the while teaching us more than we taught them.
Any Canadian children’s author can tell you that most of us won’t get rich on the sale of books alone. But when you factor in the incredible experiences–that’s where the magic comes in.
And it can be a slog, trying to succeed in the children’s literature industry. Jan and I do a lot of marketing and events to promote our books. While it’s one thing to dream up a crazy marketing scheme, it’s the illustrator who then has to execute the plan.
Here’s an example. One day, I stopped by the 10-foot R-O-M letters outside the Royal Ontario Museum and thought, “What would Gabby do with those?” I sent some photos to Jan. Later that day, Jan sent me a string of images with Gabby interacting with the photographed letters. That led to the idea that Gabby should celebrate the holidays. So, Jan put Gabby into Halloween costumes and then created social media cards for holidays like Valentine’s Day, New Year, Easter, Earth Day, St. Patrick’s Day, the winter holidays and even the first day of summer. We put Gabby in a comic strip. There are rug-hooked pillows and a felted brooch, T-shirts, stickers, and for our first book launch, gorgeous cake toppers sculpted by artist Suzanne Del Rizzo. There are Valentines that kids can download, a board game, colouring pages, fabric letters, bookmarks, book plates, a teacher’s guide … the list is long.
“Never once did you ever say no,” I say to Jan.
“You just do it,” explains Jan. “And you don’t mind doing it for nothing, because you love it so much.”
“You want to get it out there so the kids can see it. I want the kids to see it,” I agree.
“Yeah, the kids are important to me,” says Jan. “When they love something, it just melts my heart. It’s not about the bottom dollar, that’s the gravy. First and foremost, it’s about the kids.”
“The kids are my teachers,” I say. “The kids transport me, give me energy.”
We’re both in a bit of a haze, thinking about the past 10 years and how much our lives have changed thanks to our collaboration.
“I wish the three books didn’t fly by as fast as they did,” says Jan. “We were so new at it … it was, like, pump it out, and now, it’s done.”
Well, not so fast. I have a new character in my head and Jan has already agreed to bring it to life. A whole new chapter in our relationship, we hope. We know that going to publishers when you already have a writer and illustrator teamed up can be tough, so if worst comes to worst and no one snaps it up, we’re willing to try our hand at self-publishing. We’re not ruling anything out, because in the end it’s about creating books and getting them into the hands of kids.
With that, we seem to be at the end of our memories from the past decade.
“I don’t know where this article is going to go,” says Jan, “but the conversation has been great.”
Reluctantly, we each lean forward to hit end and our screens go blank.
But of course, it’s only about two days later that Jan and I are on the phone to each other again–talking about the new studio she’s purchased and about that new project. Once again, we’re looking for the magic.
Joyce Grant recently moved to Hamilton, where she is editing, mentoring and working on a non-fiction picture book about ‘fake news,’ to be published in 2022 by Kids Can Press. Jan Dolby moved into a new home-studio in Aurora in February 2019 and is working on writing her first picture book. Gabby was recently published in paperback and is available everywhere.
NOTE: The Rainforest of Reading program is the creation of Sonya White and Richard Clewes, who founded the non-profit OneWorld Schoolhouse Foundation to bring books to the Caribbean. Visit oneworldschoolhouse.org for more information, to make a donation or to volunteer.
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