Suzanne Chitwood: Frequently Asked Questions

Ten Frequently Asked Questions

Did you like to do art when you were a kid?

Yes. I liked drawing, painting, working in clay, sewing, making just about anything with my hands.
Did you like reading when you were a kid?

I had a difficult time learning to read. Eventually, but not until I was in high school, I found out that I had dyslexia. But when I was a kid, reading hard work for me. I mostly picked books with lots of pictures. Some times the pictures helped me figure out the words. My mom read to me, some of her favorite children's books. A Tree is Nice is one I remember and the Madeline books, and Winnie the Pooh. She read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler to me. It is still one of my favorites books I think partly because she read it to me and partly because I loved the idea of sleeping in a museum! When the librarian at school introduced me to the Beverly Cleary books, I devoured the whole series.
Did you always know you would be an artist and make children's books?

No. My grandmother liked art and she liked to paint. But there was no one on either side of my family that was an artist, not for their job. I did not know you could make art and write and illustrate books for a living.
When did you make your first book?

I think in high school. I did a series of little drawings on cardboard during a Christmas vacation of all the things we were doing, when we got together with our cousins, or went sledding. That kind of thing. I did not bind it together or even put words to the pictures but it was a story about our Christmas vacation. One of the first books I made was a little folded accordian book. I made the pictures with rubber stamps that I cut out of erasers. It was a picture book of me hiking up a mountain and going back down. Pretty simple!
Where did you get the idea for Wake Up Big Barn?

I grew up in the country, on the outskirts of a small. It was a rural community. There were a menagerie of animals around when I was growing up; cows, a horse or two on different occasions, we kept a donkey for a someone for a while, I always remember having a dog, usually two, rabbits and chickens though they were short lived. My dad brought home a dove once with a broken wing and it lived loose in our basement while it's wing healed. He found a stray puppy once , very sick on the side of the road and he brought it home. We kept it while we nursed it back to health. We had a sort of pet pig briefly, too. He stayed in a pen at our cousins who lived next door to us. But he dug he way out of the pen a couple of times and he went on to greener pastures. We were outside a lot; working in the garden and yard, hiking, camping. The nearest neighbor was about a half a mile away, on our dirt road. The next beyond them was reached via a path through the woods, across the creek. So outside was a big part of my life. We had a old barn, that my father built with his brother and by the time I came along, it had seen better days. So I guess that's where the idea for Wake Up Big Barn came from, all of that.
Why did you choose collage for the illustrations for your first two books?

I always loved Eric Carle's work. So when a friend asked me to illustrate a manuscript for a children's book, I thought of his illustrations. We had a big pile of old Patagonia mail order catalogues. The photographs in them were filled with beautiful colors and textures that I immediately saw would be great for collage. So the technique was born; tearing up magazines for collage, leaving in type, page numbers, and odd details whenever they worked for the illustration.
How did you get your first book published?

I did not know anything about the publishing business when I started this adventure. But after getting some interests from editors and art director about my first submission, I decided it might be worth it to press further. If i could make children's books, I could be working with two things I love most, art and books. So I gathered up some samples of my artwork, piled it in my portfolio and went to New York to knock on the doors of editors and art directors I had contacted who had expressed any interest in my work. I had gotten their names out of a how-to-publish style book at a bookstore. I was VERY naive. But looking back, maybe that was good because if I had known how hard it was to get a children's book published, I don't think I would have set out on that road. And certainly, I would not have gone at it with such confidence. Ignorance was bliss.

I knocked on doors, continued to get encouragement with art directors asking to see more of my work. Until finally, after years of persistence and creating piles of art work, Wake Up Big Barn came to life and was published.

I'm not sure that could happen exactly that way now. That certainly wasn't the typical route to publishing if there is a typical route. Publishing is a very complex business. And it is a business.
What is the hardest part of making a book?

HUUUMMM.
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