Julie Shimada, children’s book buyer at Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colo., may have hit upon the secret ingredient that makes the Mountains & Plains Independent Association’s FallCon such a lively and productive gathering of indie booksellers, year after year: the Children’s Author and Illustrator Breakfast that traditionally marks the official start of the show. “A children’s breakfast is always the best way to kick off a show,” Shimada said. “It sets the tone: hope for the future, as well as memories of the wonderment and safety you felt when you read books as a child. Mountains & Plains does this every time and it works.”
This year’s breakfast served up a hearty menu of seven speakers: author W. Bruce Cameron (Zeus: Water Rescue, Tor/Starscape, out now); author Michael Datcher and illustrator Frank Morrison (Harlem at Four, Random House Studio, out now); author Carl Hiaasen (Wrecker, Knopf, out now); author-illustrator Kazu Kibuishi (Waverider: A Graphic Novel, Graphix, Feb. 2024); author-illustrator Violet Lemay (Alithia Ramirez Was an Artist, Michael Sampson Books, Oct.); and Andrea Wang (Summer at Squee, Kokila, Mar. 2024).
Most of the speakers focused on the real-life inspirations for their books. For Cameron, the inspiration for Zeus, the water rescue dog in his middle-grade novel, was his dog Tucker, whom he claimed once spoke English to him. Zeus: Water Rescue is the first volume in a new series, Dogs with a Purpose. Recalling the appreciation of booksellers in the region for his earlier novel, A Dog’s Purpose, Cameron noted, “my mission is the same as yours: we’re here to save the children of this world. They’ll put down their phones for a puppy.” He praised booksellers for their work with librarians, noting that when he goes to schools, “all the children are holding my book. It really takes the efforts of you, the booksellers, to get these books to kids.” If an adult puts a book into a child’s hands, Cameron insisted, “and they feel its wonder, you’ve got them forever.” He concluded by thanking booksellers once again, telling them that they are the ones “who make their [children’s] success possible—it’s not me, it’s you.”
Next, Datcher, who is best known for his adult nonfiction, including Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story, and Animating Black and Brown Liberation, introduced himself by declaring, “I really love people who love books.” Datcher recalled that when he was an undergraduate at the University of California-Berkeley, his life was transformed when he took a poetry class, as it made him want to pursue poetry as a career. Harlem at Four, a picture book written as poems and divided into two parts, is about a girl named Harlem, followed by a history of the New York City neighborhood. The book was, he explained, inspired by his young daughter, as well as by Philip A. Payton Jr. (1876–1917), nicknamed the Father of Harlem. Payton was a real estate entrepreneur in Harlem who rented his properties to newcomers during the Great Migration. “This is the story of a man with an incredible mission to help his people,” Datcher said. “I wrote this book as a gift to my daughter and presented it to her as a surprise.”
After being introduced by Datcher, Morrison explained how his own children often inspired his art, and that they were models for some of the illustrations in Harlem at Four. “I got a book about a dad and his daughter,” he said of the project. “I had to illustrate this book. I can celebrate dads and their kids.” Not only that, Morrison said, illustrating a book about Harlem gave him plenty of excuses to visit the neighborhood and have an “opportunity for all these adventures.”
The next speaker, Hiaasen, who lives in Florida and writes bestselling adult and children’s fiction, didn’t hesitate to inject politics into the conversation, speculating that everyone on that morning’s slate of speakers “is going to be on Governor DeSantis’s list” of books banned in the Sunshine State’s school districts. Hiaasen urged booksellers to “keep up the great work” of putting books in children’s hands. He noted that he has been “canceled” by school districts in Georgia, North Carolina, and in his home state due to content in his books that school districts in those states considered “disturbing” for children, such as mention of a 1921 lynching in one book and a “pro vax message” in another. “So that’s where we are,” he said.
Mentioning that he won a 2003 Newbery Honor for his first children’s book, Hoot, Hiaasen admitted that he’d written it for his own children, and remembers thinking that if they liked it, he “didn’t care if anyone else read it.” Concluding his remarks, Hiaasen said that “this is a really important fight” against book bans and author cancelations, and that booksellers and librarians should persist. “These waves come and go,” he said. “Just keep up the good work.”
The next speaker, Kibuishi, introduced himself by explaining that after listening to the other presenters, he was going to talk about his grandfather, a Japanese American man born in New York City who was drafted during World War II. He ended up being an interpreter for the U.S. military.
Authors and illustrators, Kibuishi said, “find ourselves as stewards,” and he considers himself an interpreter for his readers just as his grandfather was for the military. “My job is—there’s some young reader in the middle of a fight—and I parachute myself into the situation,” he said. “I give them a place where they want to go. My job is to give people a little bit of relief.”
Explaining that he did not even know what a graphic novel was when he first started creating what became his debut graphic novel, Kibuishi said that he just “liked to draw.” He admitted that he just wants to create books that children would remember, “like The Lord of the Rings.”
Kibuishi said that Waverider is the ninth and final volume in the Amulet series, which debuted in 2008. Waverider, which he created during the pandemic, “is about forgiveness: forgiving families, forgiving neighbors,” Kibuishi said. “I’m tired of outrage. It’s the last book in the series, so I tried to make it suitably epic.”
Describing herself as a lifelong artist, Violet Lemay explained that she produces illustrated books both as a creative outlet and as a means of processing “bad things that are going on in my life and in the world.” She recalled a project she had initiated after a mass shooting in Switzerland when she lived there, called “Let’s Be Friends,” in which she reproduced the faces of the victims. Her intention, she said, was to emphasize that “despite our differences, we have a lot in common.”
Alithia Ramirez Was an Artist, she noted, was inspired by another tragedy: the mass shooting of 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Tex., in 2022. Lemay said that she reproduced the faces of the victims and posted her portraits on social media.
“I really struggled whether or not to do it,” she said, disclosing that she was concerned that she would be accused of exploiting the tragedy. But such worries proved groundless after the father of one of the victims, Alithia Ramirez, reached out to her to tell her that he supported the project. Lemay already had been drawn to Ramirez because the father had disclosed in an interview that the girl had been a talented artist who loved to draw.
After virtual exchanges with Ramirez’s parents, Lemay met with them to discuss Lemay’s proposal to write a picture book about Ramirez, and her mother sent Lemay photos of Ramirez’s artwork. Much of the art contained in this book was actually created by Ramirez, who is credited for her contributions, although Lemay is officially the author and illustrator. Lemay is donating all royalties received to a charity created by Ramirez’s parents, the Alithia Haven Ramirez Memorial Summer Seminar Scholarship fund. A website was also launched to promote the book, the memorial fund, and children creating art, called AliciasArtAngels.com. “Alithia’s mother wanted to encourage other young artists,” Lemay said.
The last speaker, Andrea Wang, introduced herself by noting, “I have the honor of making a lot of people cry in public spaces,” as many of her readers have informed her that her tales have reduced them to tears. Wang told MPIBA booksellers that she’d written Summer at Squee during the pandemic, “because there were no summer camps and I wanted to go to summer camp.”
Wang recalled her childhood in Ohio, where she was the only Asian American in her class and in her grade. It was only after moving to Boston when she was 13 that she met other children her age who looked like her. After she became a mother herself, she wanted her children to know of their heritage at a young age, so she sent them to a Chinese heritage camp in Massachusetts beginning at age six. Her children loved it, and so did she—in fact, she became a volunteer there.
“Camp was a safe space where they didn’t have to explain themselves,” she said, recalling that the demographics of the camp eventually changed and there were a lot more girls there who had been adopted from China. Wang wondered “what transracial adoptees felt at being at such a camp?” She wrote Camp Squee for middle grade readers “as an exploration of Chinese American identity, told from the point of view of transracial adoptees.” What if, Wang speculated, the very things that made Chinese American children feel connected to their heritage, to their community, made adoptees feel uncomfortable or unsafe?
Despite some intense scenes in Camp Squee, Wang concluded, ultimately it “is a fun summer camp story, but with added layers,” with characters who are “figuring out what it means to be Chinese American.”
Mountains & Plains shifted into high gear after the Children’s Author & Illustrator Breakfast, with a day of networking and rep presentations, the trade show in the exhibit hall, and a day of education. Read all of our coverage here.
Next year’s MPIBA FallCon will be held in Denver, October 6–9.
