As we come up on Halloween– here I am posting about Christmas. Well, look, yes, I know. I know Halloween is my traditional obsession, and also I know that I’m not exactly Christian, that here I am a few days before Yom Kippur, an Orthodox Jewish woman, writing about a book for a holiday I don’t precisely, as it were, celebrate– and yet. Given an opportunity to talk to Alex Willan, author of Elves Are the Worst! about early readers, giving characters a distinct voice, and carrying on the interest and personality of a series, as he does both for his Jasper and Ollie and for his The Worst! series… wouldn’t you? I knew you’d get me.

Elves Are the Worst! is a Gilbert the Goblin story, and while there’s an actual plot in the book, with Gilbert getting a chance to learn about working together, teamwork, and so on– just wait until you meet the kitty canes. The driving force, as usual in Alex Willan’s lovable books, is character: Gilbert is the at the heart of the story, and the shenanigans (and kitty canes) occur in relation to him. And without more ado, thank you so much to Alex for answering my questions– and I’ll let his voice take the lead here!

On a sheer writerly level, I love the voices of your characters. And I do mean “voices,” because I hear them in my head! I have noticed that, textually, you are very sparing. When we have text, it’s direct from a particular character, in voice: Jasper, Ollie, our Goblin friend. The elves, in Elves Are the Worst! are not so chatty. Is limiting the speakers a deliberate choice? And how do you go about developing that perfect vocal timbre on the page—do you speak the text yourself, as you write?

Thank you so much! I really like writing characters who speak from a very specific point of view. With Gilbert the Goblin, he is so opinionated that it made sense for him to do most, if not all, of the talking. My intention is for it to be pretty clear from the start of each book that what Gilbert is saying is incorrect (that unicorns, elves, etc. are not the worst) and I really wanted him to always come to that realization on his own, as opposed to being corrected by those around him.

There are times when I’m writing where it does help if I read the text aloud. And I also find it very useful to have someone read the text to me so that I can focus on how it sounds in a voice that isn’t my own (or the one I give Gilbert in my head). Since I also illustrate the text, I’m constantly making changes to both the words and illustrations as I work. That back and forth can be quite beneficial, but it can also mean fighting the urge to endlessly tweak everything.

A funny note on voices: I was surprised to hear from multiple people that when they read The Worst! books out loud, they give Gilbert a British accent!

Since the characters I mentioned are in series, The Worst! and Jasper and Ollie, you aren’t just developing a voice and character for a book; you have to maintain or develop that character across a series of books. As a reader, when I see a new book in a series I always seize up in temporary panic: “Will my beloved friend, whichever character, stop working for me in this book?” (Fortunately, you maintain these voices beautifully!) How on earth do you brilliant authors do that? I always imagine, from my vantage point, that the best of these creations were fully enfleshed in the authors’ minds, talking away: Frog and Toad, of course, and Sergio Ruzzier’s Fox and Chick… do you have little characters in your head all the time? (Am I insane?)

Absolutely! (Wait, not about you being insane!) I constantly have various characters chatting away inside my head. For me, most of my time “writing” doesn’t involve writing down anything at all. By the time I’m able to sit down and type out a manuscript, or even just a few lines of text, those characters have existed in my mind for a good long while. Especially when it’s a character from a series. It’s really kind of bizarre to put into words, but I have spent so much time with Gilbert, in my head, that it’s less about me deciding what Gilbert will say or do, and more about imagining him in any given situation and “seeing” how he reacts. I guess there was some point, when I first thought of these stories, where I created his character, but at this point I feel like he’s steering his own ship.

I unabashedly love Christmas books. But the debate about creating lovely books for Christmas which maintain quality as well as being commercially viable for a lucrative market is an old one. I quote from Ursula Nordstrom writing to Maurice Sendak, who declined to produce a Nutshell Library for Christmas or Chanukkah. He wrote to her: “Wouldn’t people be bored too easily with too many Nutshells—and wouldn’t Harpers come in for its share of cynical criticism?” She asked, “What people, Maurice? Surely children won’t be bored with a Christmas Nutshell in the toe of their stockings. Surely children won’t be offering any ‘cynical criticism.’ […] We wanted to do the first Nutshell because we thought children would love some perfect little books…” and she continues, brilliantly. It was fascinating to see how far back the “commerce vs quality” hemming and hawing went. How do you approach this?

That is fascinating. I think that debate is something everyone in a creative field struggles with. I was fortunate in that every book in the Worst! series focuses on a different group of magical creatures, so having Gilbert turn his attention to elves seemed like a natural fit (Gilbert even mentions elves in the first book, Unicorns Are the Worst!). While it is certainly a holiday book, I wanted to keep the focus on the elves, and make sure that what Gilbert learns from them is universal (the importance of teamwork) as opposed to something more holiday focused.

I believe the industry tendency is to think of early readers and series as kind of a gateway for young readers, not yet confident enough to tackle a novel, into the world of reading independently. But a number of earlier-level-readers I see today, Fox + Chick by Ruzzier and your Jasper and Ollie among them, seem to poke cleverly at that not-so-clean divide between picture books for reading aloud (or, perhaps, together) and early readers. Is that something you think about as you write, or is that entirely a product of my readerly end of things? (Disclaimer: my daughter and I read Jasper and Ollie together as a read aloud. I liked doing the voices. I do hope I didn’t break rules there! She made me read the whole thing: the flap copy, author bio, everything.)

I am so thrilled to hear that you and your daughter read Jasper and Ollie together! I do appreciate that the lines between reading levels are getting increasingly blurred. I have always been a slow reader, myself, so there was definitely an internal shift for me growing up when reading stopped being something I enjoyed and became something I had to get through. I went from getting lost in the story to getting lost in the words. That’s part of why I loved comics and graphic novels growing up (and still do) so I’m also thrilled to see the growing appreciation for that genre as well.

I wish that I could say I was intentionally straddling that line when I write, but I think it’s more a case of having my own favorite books influence my work without me even realizing it! I’ve heard from several people that they see a clear influence of graphic novels in my books, which I am happy to hear, but wasn’t something I was consciously going for. I do love the rare occasions that I get to hear a young reader reading one of my books out loud – you really get to hear them take ownership of the story, pausing at the moments they like and brushing past the parts they don’t connect with. It is always a special moment for me.

Thank you again to Alex Willan for the chance to chat about his book, Elves Are the Worst!

Full disclosure: both books in this post were ones I got as review copies. Mind you, I’d already pre-ordered A Spider Named Itsy by Steve Light, and as for Two New Years by Richard Ho with art by Lynn Scurfield? When it was offered to me I couldn’t reply “yes, please!” fast enough. Some books you just get a feeling about.

If you know anything about Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish celebration of the new year and the anniversary of the creation of the world, you’re probably looking at this pair of books in bafflement: “New Year, that I understand… but spiders? Itsy? Is she meshuggeneh?” Well, I mean, yes I am crazy. But also I’ve got a very good point, so please pay attention.

Steve Light, first of all, is a genius. Let’s just get that said up front. Also, he’s one of the nicest people out there and towards the beginning of the pandemic he sent my daughter a picture of a wombat he drew along with a notebook for her to sketch in. The wombat is framed on her wall and the notebook is full of scribbled pictures, embedded in a mass of other scribbled notebooks.

I remember that now because that period of the pandemic was hard for everyone. We were uncertain, scared, and the book industry was hard hit. The big, robust, fun animals Steve Light was drawing at the time were as different as could be from his swift, lively, delicate yet strong ink drawings of little bugs in A Spider Named Itsy, a style familiar from his vivid and energetic art in Swap! and Road Trip!. At that point in the pandemic, we needed to play, to feel we could be strong and still have fun and climb up the waterspout again.

A Spider Named Itsy asks and answers questions with incredibly compact text and proportionately exuberant art: What prompted Itsy to make that climb? Was Itsy alone? What’s the end of the story?

The words are sparse, sticking as much as possible to brisk, active language: “Need a new home. But where? There! Must get going! Wind is blowing!” What need for articles and pronouns? None! (Added benefit: while the flap copy does provide he/his pronouns, no need to tell the kids that, and they can build characters as suits them. But I have no idea whether that was deliberate– it just feels natural to the sprightly nature of the text to keep it trim, forward moving, bustling onwards.) Itsy climbs up and up– along with other bugs escaping dangerous earthbound conditions. Once up, they’re all washed down. And, working together, held together by Itsy’s strong webbing, they finally make it up to create a new web home, and enjoy a meal together as friends.

The story is so much fun to read aloud. My Spriggan has asked me to read it several times, and every single time, a crowd of other children has drifted around us. The Spriggan is a few months shy of three years old, and the Changeling is ten. The other audience members have covered every age between. And every single time, without exception, someone starts singing the song at the end. I challenge you not to. More than once, also, the older kids started comparing finger motions: “I do it this way, because that way you get all eight legs, you see?” “But my way is more of a fun pattern on the way up!”

Which is the point, of course. Going up again, and maybe having fun on the way. In every life, we all know, we get washed down the waterspout. The pandemic has been a biggie– and though we like to pretend it’s done with, for many people the challenges persist. (I write feelingly: my brain fog is not over and done with though Lord knows I’d like it to be washed down the waterspout, over the hills, and far away!)

Steve Light, the creator of that fun wombat in the depths of a painful time, is just the person to show us, as we face a new year, how to get up, persist, and climb that waterspout again. He doesn’t do it gloomily. He doesn’t preach it. He sticks to the verbs and skips over any flabby text.

But if you want commentary, look at his art. Do you see those little bugs with all their worldly goods strapped to them? The first time I saw them on his Instagram account, before I held a finished book, they evoked a memory. In the runup to publication, he elucidated, and it clicked: the Dust Bowl. I wasn’t imagining things; it was pretty direct. If you’ve ever seen pictures of families during the Dust Bowl with all the goods they could pack strapped onto a Model T, looking for somewhere, some way, to survive, grimly picking themselves up and climbing again, those sturdy, busy bugs will look familiar.

And yet it’s neither patronizing nor depressing; the fact is, Steve Light is telling a truth in this book. It’s not easy to pick up and start again. It’s why, on Rosh Hashanah, we come together, we blow the shofar, and we reflect and think and pray. We celebrate, and we are also looking forward to the very serious work on Yom Kippur, when we repent and think and plan changes. This is not in any sense a religious book, but to me it evoked a spirit of the honest, hard work, the introspection without navel-gazing: you have to think, yes, but you must also pick up and do the work. Kids are really, really good at that. Read this with a kid, and you’ll find yourself laughing, singing, playing, and also ready for a new year and new work.

Two New Years by Richard Ho and Lynn Scurfield is an entirely different, and, to me, entirely new kind of book. The closest I can think of, in narrative style, is the Canadian classic Le Chandail de hockey by Roch Carrier and Sheldon Cohen. The text is much, much shorter and simpler, but, like Roch Carrier, Richard Ho isn’t pretending to be a kid as he describes his dual world, the Jewish and the Chinese: “My family celebrates two New Years,” he tells us, and he’s not talking down to us, adult to kid, and also not using a fake child’s voice. The text is simple, direct, and plainspoken. The art, too, is unpatronizing and evocative of the richness of two traditions. Perhaps my favourite spread is one of the adult Jewish woman (representing the mother of this family) in her headscarf and wearing a magen David necklace on the left page, holding hands with her husband, wearing a kippah, on the right page. Behind her is a papercut in the style of Jewish artistic tradition, while behind her husband (who looks a great deal like Richard Ho!) is a Chinese style papercut. (You and your kids can have fun picking out the symbols in the art– I love the dragon, of course, and the sheep.)

What I particularly love is exactly that interleaving: like Roch Carrier, Richard Ho keeps it slow, simple, not pushing a “beginning, middle, end” narrative. (Please imagine a rant here about the enforced necessity of a story arc in every single book. I don’t feel like writing it right now, but thank any deity you please that Richard Ho ditched that for this book!) In an odd way, while A Spider Named Itsy is brisk and active while Two New Years is slow and gentle, they share a compactness. That compactness is a shedding of anything ancillary. Two New Years allows the reader to look at the illustrations and build the characters of the family members behind this lovely spread of rituals and tradition: Who’s making and enjoying these foods, the challah and the dumplings, all of the varieties of fish? Who are the bubbies and zaydies, the ma mahs and yeh yehs? We imagine, but aren’t told.

One particularly special moment for me was seeing the mother in a headscarf and the family at an Orthodox synagogue, just like mine, in a book shared with Chinese culture. I’m a proud Ashkenazi (that’s of Eastern European tradition) Orthodox Jewish woman, and the mother of a child whose earliest favourite author was Grace Lin. I love to see Judaism sharing a page with other traditions, and this is one of the few examples I’ve seen where it’s done with unpretentious simplicity, honesty, and beauty.

(I’m never one for much backmatter, but I have to admit I really liked it this time– the author’s note was particularly beautiful and the visual glossary is exactly the kind of thing my Changeling loves.)

So as we head into the new Jewish year, that will be the year 5784 in the Jewish calendar (but you have to wait until February 10, 2024 for the Lunar New Year, which will be the Year of the Dragon), think about trying out these two books!