PW Talks With Chris Raschka

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on April 26, 2007 Sign up now!

by Nathalie op de Beeck, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/26/2007

Bookshelf talked with Chris Raschka about his latest picture book, The Purple Balloon (Random House/Schwartz & Wade, May).

I was approached by an acquaintance who was involved with Children’s Hospice International. I had done a little drawing for a benefit, and he asked me to come by and meet Ann Armstrong-Dailey, the executive director of the hospice. I thought he just wanted to ask me my thoughts on publishing a children’s book, but the notion, the evolution of my creating it came about when I wrote to Anne Schwartz and Lee Wade [at Random House]. They wanted me to write the book.

Your work often addresses complex topics, especially matters of race, but did you have any interest in creating a picture book about death?

Arlene Sardine is about death, and it was controversial. I never showed it to anyone for years and years, and I hadn’t thought of a direct approach [to the deaths of people and especially children] before The Purple Balloon.

But I had experience working with children who faced early death. After college, I worked in a children’s home for physically handicapped kids. A number of them had degenerative diseases, so they knew their lives would be short. That’s something that has always been close to me. So I stopped what I was doing and made a dummy based on a child I knew who has since died. It was told in very short, moderately rhymed sentences—a bit of a poem, but it was very direct. I was trying to recapture his voice, which was open and honest to the point of setting people aback. It was in your face a little bit. At one point, he says, “Death sucks,” and then moves on to say, “But hockey rocks!”

I gave it to Anne and Lee, and they showed it to Ann [Armstrong-Dailey]. She responded well, which heartened me. But Anne and Lee were concerned about the language, and Ann was looking for something for quite young children, so I rethought it. Where I had it told from the point of view of the dying child, so that it ends in silence, I switched it around and tried to come more from a universal point of view.

There are so few picture books that deal well with death and grief. Did you find yourself making many revisions?

It was very, very, very hard. But the hardness of it ultimately became the solution. It starts by stating the obvious fact that it’s hard to talk about death—it’s hard to talk about with my own son, for instance. But my father had passed away very suddenly about three months before, and so I used that as the key to getting into it. In living with my mother, who went through this as we all did, I saw how many people need to be involved.

Sometimes children and their families withdraw and become isolated simply because people don’t know how to deal with it and are afraid of saying the wrong thing. People shy away. This book would be a way of being able to talk about death. I wanted to make it practical, a kind of handbook.

As an artist, how did you extrapolate from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s comment, described by Ann Armstrong-Dailey in the foreword, that sick children often visualize their death as a blue or purple balloon?

My solution was to take the image of the purple balloon and anthropomorphize it, to make the string indicate a body and movement, while keeping it pretty abstract. I wanted the main character to become the purple balloon, so I allowed a transition in the color [from a red balloon, when the main character is alive, to purple after death]. For a while I had the main character get paler and paler as he or she becomes ill and dies, but that became confusing, so we just let him be red all the way through, and as he dies he becomes purple.

I wanted it to have the feeling almost of a stage play too, not set in time. And since it was going to be done with balloons, I didn’t want to create some background balloon world [with evident beds or medical equipment for the ailing characters]. I wanted it to be almost like a puppet play, to let readers think about what was going on.

You create the round, multicolored balloon faces with potato prints, which you also use in Five for a Little One. What attracts you to this homemade-craft technique?

I like potato prints very much for their simplicity. At one point I did an experiment where I made a balloon print with a potato, then let the potato get old. Each day it got a little more wrinkly and crumpled, and I kept printing with it. I wanted to let the potato itself embody the experience of the main character. It was a nice kind of art project but it got too complicated.

I think prints create a nice light feeling too. A print literally can have a feeling of lightness, and the balloons are transparent because I used watercolor on the potatoes. Maybe printing also removes the creator a little away from it. When you paint, your signature is there in the brushstrokes, and with a print it’s one step slightly removed. It does feel like this book could have been made by almost anybody. I’m not sure if that depersonalizes it or makes it more universal.

Speaking of universality, the balloons’ faces look compassionate, yet do not suggest racial or social identities. Similarly, your words are generic and nondenominational, despite a mention of “clergy.” Was it tricky to write to everyone, whatever their backgrounds or beliefs?

That wasn’t easy, and there was a debate over whether “clergy” was a strictly Christian term. Ann said no, “clergy” was a term for a spiritual advisor, so we left it in.

There is the danger that when you try to make something universal, you destroy the meaning or you make it forgettable. When you begin listing “clergy, teachers, doctors,” rather than saying “our pastor,” “Uncle Bob” and so on, you can depersonalize it. That’s why it still has a little bit of a rough edge. The potato prints are a little lumpy, the pencil is a little scratchy, and the backgrounds are prints too. I made efforts to keep it from going too clean, too antiseptic.

Given its sobering subject matter, how will this book be promoted?

To Anne and Lee and Random House’s credit, everyone is enthusiastic. The economic aspect of it, of course, is difficult. I weighed in quite heavily on the sticker on the cover [which reads, “Sales of this book help critically ill children”]. Random House is giving money on this book, so they did want to indicate that somewhere. But the wording went through many variations. [An as-yet-unspecified portion of the proceeds from Balloon go to CHI, a nonprofit organization.]

This is the kind of book, in some ways, that no one would want to have to buy, because people are afraid of it. My mother has always felt—she’s from Austria—that Americans think death is too taboo. You can barely speak about sadness. Depression is of course taboo. And death—you aren’t supposed to talk about it. You’re certainly not supposed to prepare for it.

Ann Armstrong-Dailey has said that parents’ impulse is to say, “No, no, no, this won’t happen.” The child always gets there first and knows he or she is going to die, and the parents cannot go there. This has been a huge burden on the kids who are trying to move forward, and on the parents unable to help them go there. People live in this denial until, obviously, the very end. But I’ve always been a believer in the talking cure. Just the talking helps.

In addition to The Purple Balloon, you just finished touring with Jack Prelutsky for the poetry collection Good Sports. What other projects are on the drawing board?

Next for me are two books, coming out in the winter. One is by bell hooks, called Grump Groan Growl, a book about an angry child—or the angry thing inside an angry child. The other is by Nikki Giovanni, no title yet, and it’s a retelling of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” cast as a court proceeding where the Grasshopper feels he is owed a share of the harvest because he was providing a service by playing music. The Grasshopper hires Robin, Robin, Robin and Wren to represent him, and the Ant is represented by Moth, Moth, Slug and Butterfly. And Norton Juster has written a new manuscript with the same cast for The Hello, Goodbye Window—I’m working on that.