Today’s interview is with an author of picture books, which might just be a first on Reads Rainbow. Charlotte talked about her love for folklore, working on dream projects with artists who clearly share that love, and turned simple images into wondrous stories.
Don’t forget that you can follow Charlotte on twitter!
Have you always known you wanted to be a writer? How old were you when you wrote your first story?
I think I “did” stories before I knew writers were a thing. I dictated my first published story to my kindergarten teacher at the typewriter. I couldn’t even read yet. By second grade, I was filling those wide-lined pages with spelling atrocities and tales of bunnies in spaceships, blobular aliens, and magical rainbows. I remember my teacher writing on one of them, “That’s our storyteller!” That felt good. “Storyteller” felt like a Big Word. Yet I didn’t really think about that, being a writer – I just liked making things up. Today, I’m happiest when I focus on making what I love and care about. If I think about “being a writer” – feelings of failure immediately follow. The making is where the joy lives.
What are your favourite genres to read and write, and are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?
I’ve always loved fantastical stories, anything folklore-ish with a twist. Being a profound scaredy cat, my least favorite genre is horror. And yet. Some of my favorite stories and shows are creepy or horror light. And I keep writing picture books about monsters. Maybe I’m trying to face my demons?
When you close your eyes and imagine an apple, what do you see? An actual apple, a sketch of one, a blackness? Do you think that impacts your writing process?
First, the bright scent, the sweet-tart crunch, a dribble of juice. I run my fingers over the dusty, rough bumps near the stem, hold the weight of the lopsided reddish-green fruit. I love the apples in Italy. I suck in a big, dripping bite for me before the hens see and come running. Then I bite tiny bits for them as they lean, necks stretched, groaning for a taste of this simple pleasure we share.
The apple is everything. Everything is the apple. The sharing. Swallowing life, to live, for now. The apple is the new grass and the yellow pollen on a cool breeze. It is the red chickens and afternoon sun turning their combs to fire. The apple is the growl of the tractor across the street, the billows of dust, and Maya yipping beyond the shrubs, too, and my sudden longing to lean against my friend who’s across the sea, and sigh. (Or cry, and laugh until we cry, to just look into her eyes.) The apple is the exhale. Now.
And the apple is the memory of the wormy soil (made of death) that nourished the tree, and the clouds that watched, and the insects that drank and sang as the apple grew (like I grew and sang as my parents watched; and I dreamed and worried, sickened and healed while staying sick, and today, just now, grew hungry, as living things do, for an apple to eat). This apple is also the wondering (chewing) about what I will leave. Whether the words I just wrote make sense, are kind. Whether I make sense, am kind. But the apple is kind. The chickens are sure. Like the green scarf coving my hair, which is hard to wash with illness, is kind. The apple, in its kindness simply is. Now it is being eaten and shared and returned to the earth. (I spit seeds. The chickens squat.) The apple is and was and will be: Everything. Everything is this apple.
I don’t know anything about anything anymore. Wisdom, writing, This World. But I know I love this apple. It is not a perfect apple. There’s a soft spot. I’m eating around the puckered scars. But I love this apple. Sharing it with the hens. This moment. This is the taste of existing. If words are apples – dripping with everything, grown from death and time and many mistakes, fleeting yet full of seeds – then maybe words can be a kindness, too. A sweet-tart taste of life. The kindness of an imperfect moment, shared.
Which three authors would you say influenced your writing the most?
These aren’t the only ones, but they were the first ones to give me permission. They dared to be more. They wrote completely and only as themselves, and as a full members of their complex human communities. Their words run wild with longing and audacity. They dare us to be human. More human. As human as we can be, in an inhumane world that needs to be better. In a natural world that never forgot us, not once. And these writers are not afraid of love.
When you’re building your world, what do you focus on? How do you try to make it come to life?
I always enter through the senses and the heart. Nearly all my memories start with the quality of light, the scents, humidity, textures, and how that moment vibrated in my heart. My bones. What did it mean? How did it feel? When I was then? As to writing, everything in a story is made up. And everything in a story is repurposed from the life were awake enough to notice. Then you mix it all up. (And revise a thousand times.)
Love, Violet was inspired by a childhood of snowy play in Iowa and Minnesota. There is a memory of lying in a quiet wood, snow landing on my lashes, the whir in the pines, adoring the solitude of snow, the quiet and crunch of a world transformed, my puffs of breath. Love, Violet is also inspired by the first flush of queer love after I came out, and the thick flakes drifting through lamplight onto our woolen caps on a sloppy street in St. Paul. And she smiled in a way that KNOWS. A smile that says FOREVER, starting NOW.
What projects are you currently working on? Can you share any details yet?
I sadly must be mysterious about this as my current projects are either in development or on submission. But I will name things currently inspiring me: our adorable chickens, fairy tales, queer families, the beauty of small graces in a big, bewildering world, learning to live with disability, being together while apart.
Three images that capture the aesthetic of your book?
Lavender sunrise on footprints making a heart in the snowy woods.
Torn bit of a handmade, glittery valentine.
Two young faces shining with joy. Snow sparkling on eyelashes.
Three songs you would put in your book’s soundtrack?
All the best love songs! (But none of the creepy, stalker-y ones.) I wrote Love, Violet while listening to the soundtrack of Shakespeare in Love on a loop. For months. Years. Gets me every time.
What would be your dream project?
A fairy tale-inspired middle grade novel that’s hybrid prose/graphic novel. I may have begun such a thing. If I did, I did so just after we moved to Italy and I became chronically ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) in 2019. (ME is similar or the same as much of Long Covid. Please, try NEVER to get this.) Now, I’m rarely able to leave home or visit with loved ones. I need to lie or recline most of the day and spend long periods on brain rest. Brain work is much harder now and makes me sicker. So, I’m not actually sure I’ll be able to complete this project, which is currently tacked up all over my wall. This last year has been devoted sharing about Love, Violet and getting a few picture books drafted (I can’t do as many things at once now). Meanwhile, Italy is basically a breathing fairy tale, and it whispers to me. Certain injustices and fairy tales that require reframing tug at me. I wonder about my limits. I also hope.
Which of your characters would you most want to fight a zombie apocalypse with?
Scar from said secret dream project: 15th Century, living in what is now central Italy, agender, wryly funny, warrior, time-jumper, loyal friend. Seen with foxes. Ridiculous about chickens (what?).
You can collaborate on anything with anyone in the LGBT community: who would it be and why?
There are picture book projects I’d love Charlene Chua, the illustrator of Love, Violet, to do because her work is so darling and emotive. Also, she keeps daring me to write a funny chicken book, which I have now done. We’ll see what happens! (We live with a little flock of darling, opinionated hens, The Eggyatrixes, who are fond of laying their eggs in our neighbor’s bushes and goading us into giving them MORE dried larva.)
I would also LOVE to have that hybrid middle grade project illustrated by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, whose work on Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me (Mariko Tamaki) knocks me out. The panel design alone is fire. Or, by Trung Le Nguyen, also fairy tale-obsessed, drawer of the most elegant, evocative, queerly gorgeous lines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlotte Sullivan Wild is the author of the picture books Love, Violet, illustrated by Charlene Chua (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) and The Amazing Idea of You, illustrated by Mary Lundquist (Bloomsbury, 2019), and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She has previously worked as an educator, bookseller, volunteer radio host, and creator of children’s literature events. Originally from frosty Minnesota, she lives wherever her wife is stationed, most recently in San Antonio, Texas and now in Italy! She is represented by Minju Chang of BookStop Literary Agency.
Follow on Goodreads | Buy Love, Violet | Buy The Amazing Idea of You
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