Anne Landsman
Anne Landsman is the author of the novels, The Rowing Lesson and The Devil's Chimney. The Rowing Lesson was awarded South Africa's 2009 M-Net Literary Award for English fiction and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize.
The Devil’s Chimney was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway, QPB’s New Voices, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and as well as the M-Net Book Prize. Anne has published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Poets and Writers, The American Poetry Review, Bomb and The Believer and has essays in three anthologies, Touch, The Honeymoon’s Over and An Uncertain Inheritance. She has taught fiction and screenwriting at the University of Wyoming and The New School for Social Research respectively and is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Rowing Lesson, Soho Press, 2007. "Imprints" in Touch, Zebra Press, 2009. "The Baby", in An Uncertain Inheritance, HarperCollins, 2007. "White Knight", in The Honeymoon's Over, Warner Books, 2007. The Devil's Chimney, Soho Press, 1997. Trade paperback, Penguin, 1998.
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Friday, May 8, 2009 9:27AM
The Third Bird
The Scholastic Auditorium was packed for the event “Leaps and Bounds, Fits and Starts: The Evolution of a Children’s Book Writer” featuring panelists Neil Gaiman, Mariken Jongman, Shaun Tan, with Andrea Davis Pinkney as the participating moderator. Unlike the children’s book event I had added the day before with its older audience, the audience was young (mostly twenty-somethings) and restive, ready to be entertained. Every self-deprecating remark or wry joke by one of the panelists was greeted with gales of laughter, lots of clapping. The buzz in the room was palpable. The confluence of illustration and text in the graphic novels and cartoons of Gaiman and Tan added an extra kick, the engine behind the buzz. As publishers (and writers) bemoan the state of the literary novel, the literary graphic novel is clearly on the ascendance.
The questions seemed to be deliberately pitched to a youthful crowd. “What school did you attend?” prompted some great answers. Tan spoke about the idyllic yet boring community he grew up in Australia, and how he was good at handwriting and drawing. He was both the shortest kid in his class and the only Asian. His mom used to say, “You’re not short, you’re concentrated.” Jongman spoke about her shyness at school, and how she wanted to be friends with everyone. Gaiman’s school reports would say things like, “Neil lives in a world of his own.”
The inevitable, “What were the books that influenced you?” drew forth Where the Wild Things Are (Shaun Tan) and Pippi Longstocking (Mariken Jongman). Tan spoke about seeing the forest grow in the room. “It’s the tipping point, the moment we realize we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
One of my favorite responses to the question “Who are your readers?” and “Who comes to your readings?” was Neil Gaiman’s quick answer - “Bipeds.” For a moment, I daydreamed and imagined an audience of the fantastical creatures in Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (“Some have two feet/and some have four./Some have six feet/and some have more./Where do they come from? I can’t say./But I bet they have come/a long, long way”) filling up the Scholastic Auditorium.
The three authors found three very different paths to writing children’s books – Jongman started out as an actress and singer, Tan began his career illustrating science fiction short stories for adults and Gaiman was the only one who had always wanted to be a children’s book writer.
When Pinkney asked “What do you dream at night?”, Gaiman answered, “I used to have great nightmares. Then I started writing Sandman, and kept a pad next to my bed to write them down. The dreams eventually stopped.”
“What about the muse? Do you get an idea all of a sudden?” Pinkney asked Jongman. “I was doing an assignment for a course I was taking,” she responded. “I wrote a small piece of text, and then knew the whole story suddenly…It was about a boy called Rits with his journal and a video camera.”
Pinkney: “Rits is in diary format.”
Jongman: “I knew it was going to be a diary. I wrote diaries myself from when I was eleven.”
“What about the ‘you’ in your books?” Pinkney wanted to know. Tan spoke about how he was the main character in his (wordless) graphic novel, The Arrival and how the wife was his wife. “I used myself as the main character as I was compliant and cheap.” Gaiman said, “You use bits of yourself as yogurt starter.” And, on the subject of creating character in general, Jongman had this to say, “You can’t write about a person you hate.”
To chill out, Gaiman keeps bees and has won a blue ribbon at the local county fair for his honey. Tan paints everyday things on large canvases, “nothing surreal or weird.”
“Talk about process. Do you have a process you follow?” Pinkney asked. Gaiman answered, “Depends on what I’m writing… If I’m doing a novel, I try to write every day. If I do less than two thousand words, I’m very, very grumpy.”
After the event, I bought Tan’s The Arrival and stood in a long line to have him sign it for my kids. Meeting him was like meeting the main character in the book I was holding. There was nothing hurried about the way he stamped the inside of the book with one of his beautiful images and carefully wrote the children’s names inside the stamp. I noticed that he had a pencil case with a parakeet on it and asked him if he kept birds. He told me that he has two budgies (parakeets in the U.S.) and a small golden parrot. I don’t remember the name of the breed he mentioned but later it occurred to me that this third bird might be one of the origami-like, winged creatures in The Arrival.
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