Calista Brill—picture book author and editorial director at First Second Books—makes her graphic novel debut with middle grade comic Creaky Acres, illustrated by Nilah Magruder. Star equestrian Nora is sad to leave behind her friends upon moving to the rural town of Greenville. There, she butts heads with the owner of Creaky Acres, the rundown barn where she houses her horse, Hay Fever. And as the only Black kid in her new class, she’s bombarded with microaggressions from her peers. Over time, though, Nora begins to see the bright side of her circumstances and works with new friends (and a silly animal crew) to make Creaky Acres feel more like home. Brill spoke with PW about the skills and community she’s gained during her career as a comics editor, and how that influenced the development of Creaky Acres.
What initially sparked the idea for Creaky Acres?
This book originally came out of a conversation that I had with my colleagues at First Second 10 to 15 years ago. We were talking about holes that we saw in the market; in particular, we couldn’t figure out why nobody was doing horse books, because we all grew up reading those, and we know that they’re perennial sellers. It was an offhand conversation, but the more I thought about it, the more it stuck with me. Normally, as an editor, I’m thinking about stories I wish other people would write. But for some reason, this one felt very personal. I was a huge horse girl as a child. I was one of those kids who was always drawing pictures of horses in the margins of her notebooks, I went to horse camp, I read every horse book. I was a Marguerite Henry super fan. I started to think I had a story to tell.
So this has been a long time in the making, but because of my experience watching graphic novels get made, I already knew it would be extremely labor-intensive, especially for whoever we signed up to do the illustrations.
What surprised or challenged you about approaching a graphic novel as a writer rather than an editor?
Everything about it was surprising and challenging to the point where it was genuinely sort of humiliating [laughs]. I started this project all cocky and confident thinking, “I know everything there is to know about writing a graphic novel because I’ve been guiding authors through the process of making books just like this for 10 years.” I thought I was in a perfect position to kill it right out the gate.
I am here to tell you I made every beginner mistake. Writing the script for Creaky Acres was the most embarrassing and humbling experience of my entire life. But it was also very useful for me as an editor. Writing for artists is very difficult, and just because I knew from the get-go that there were only so many words that I could fit on a page without causing the artist problems, it was still a very hard rule of thumb to adhere to. It felt counterintuitive. It goes against a writer’s instincts as a person who works with words.
Can you talk about your experience working with Nilah?
It bears noting that Nilah is also a huge horse girl. And Nilah can draw horses. Not only can she draw horses, but she draws them incredibly beautifully and with wonderful expressivity. I have never been so lucky as I was to persuade her to work on this project with me.
As a writer, having a vision for what the final book is going to look like, and knowing that you will have very little control over how that vision comes to fruition, is a real act of faith. It can be kind of scary. But then your collaborator begins their work, and you start to see all the spaces that you left open in your writing be filled with art that exceeds your wildest imagination. It’s one of the most intensely satisfying experiences I’ve had in my creative life.
What steps did you take to ensure that you respectfully and meaningfully reflected a Black child’s lived experiences through Nora?
I gave myself an ambitious task with this book. I wanted to tell a fun horse story about making friends and finding your place and learning to relax a little, but I was also interested in exploring questions of race and class at the same time, and I wanted to be thoughtful about it. My process was: I thought a lot. I wrote a lot. I showed it to people I trust, and they told me what they thought I had gotten wrong. And then I thought more, and I revised more, and I showed it again.
There are some elements here that I’m drawing from my own lived experience, particularly the themes of class and feeling like you don’t necessarily fit in, in terms of financial equity. The elements of race were harder. Nilah and I are both credited as writers on Creaky Acres, and it’s for good reason. I may have originated the idea, but Nilah brought a tremendous amount of insight to it; she was very thoughtful about letting me draw on her lived experience as I continued to develop the script. There were mistakes I made that she was very kind and very clear about fixing. The book is much different now than it would have been if I had a different collaborator, to the point where I don’t think this project would have seen the light of day without Nilah.
All my collaborators—my friends, especially Traci, Nilah, my editor, Namrata Tripathi, the rest of the team at Kokila—were so generous with their time and perspectives. They made me work hard to capture the race dynamics in this book as authentically and thoughtfully as we wanted to capture them. It was a community effort, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do it any other way.
Creaky Acres by Calista Brill, illus. by Nilah Magruder. Kokila, $24.99 May 6 ISBN 978-0-7352-3061-3; $14.99 paper ISBN 978-0-7352-3062-0
