Five Minute Time Out: Sandra Boynton
The beloved children's author on hippos and Monkees.
by Gwynne Watkins
December 14, 2007
If you're familiar with Sandra Boynton's cartoons, you might expect her to resemble one of her characters — a boisterous hippo, perhaps, or a mischievous piglet. Instead, Boynton is a slender, elegant blonde, with a soft-spoken, acerbic wit. She's not round or cuddly, but she is immensely likeable — and she lights up when talking about her latest CD-and-book set, Blue Moo. An uncanny homage to the jukebox songs of her childhood, Blue Moo features Boynton's lyrics sung by the likes of B.B. King, Neil Sedaka, Sha Na Na, Brian Wilson and The Monkees' Davy Jones. Babble sat down to talk with Boynton about her writing process, her famous friends, and which books were inspired by her four children. — Gwynne Watkins
I want to talk about Hippos Go Berserk because it was my favorite book when I was a baby, and now our editor-in-chief has a one-year-old and it's his favorite too. It's the first book you wrote, right?
Yes, I wrote it when I was in drama school — I went to the Yale Drama School and it was a January project. They let us do any project we wanted to do. And I don't know how I persuaded them that it had something to do with theater! Actually I wrote my very first children's book when I was four, and the entire text was "Once there was a funny animal who had a party. All the animals came. They didn't like it, so they left. The end." So there's a theme running through! [Laughs.]
That book is also kind of fascinating in that preverbal children like it so much. Is that something you've noticed?
It is. I guess first of all, I don't think any children are preverbal. Do you know what I mean? You're so wired for language that the brain is designed to catch onto rhythm and percussion and consonants in language. So I think it's the chant of that book, the sort of sing-song-y chant that's part of it, too. I think it's also pictures — finding stuff in pictures, is a lot of it.
When you had kids, did that change your perspective on writing?
Well yes and no. I think children's book writers tend to be absurdly in touch with their own childhood. So first and foremost, I think you're writing for yourself as a child and it's not a stretch. It's very easy to go there. The thing that was great about having kids around to try things out on is you're getting absolutely honest, instantaneous feedback on whether it's working, whether it's boring. They don't have to say anything.
And also, you're inspired. Blue Hat, Green Hat was written when my son Devin, who's now twenty-three, was three, and loved the word "oops." He was a little guy with a very low voice, so every time he heard the word "oops" he would just go into this belly laugh that would set everyone else laughing. And so that was the fastest book I ever wrote. I said, I need a book that keeps repeating
"I think children's book writers tend to be absurdly in touch with their own childhood." the word "oops" in it! Barnyard Dance was very much inspired by my daughter Darcy when she was two — she's my youngest, she's seventeen now — but from a young age, she would just respond to that square dance rhythm, the spoken rhythm even. And I thought, oh that makes sense then. And actually the very first board book I did was for my oldest daughter, who's twenty-eight now, for her first Christmas. And that was Moo, Baa, La La La. And I did it because she loved animal sounds, but most of the animal sound books seemed a little tedious to me.
I think of your drawings as characters; I don't know if you see them that way. For example, you've drawn many different kinds of hippos over the year, but if I see a hippo drawn by you then I know right away it's one of your hippos. Is that a style you've always had?
I think you would recognize a hippo as mine, but actually if you look at all the different hippos I've done, they're quite different, one from the other. And that's why I like not naming my characters; there's a lot more flexibility in how to approach the drawing of them. Different body forms are expressive in different contexts, so I would hate to be locked into "oh, I do these five characters, and this one's the crabby one, and this one's the sweet one" — it's just way too limiting. So I like the unnamed-characters approach. And the decision of whether they're clothed, therefore more human, or not, is fairly complex sometimes.
Do you think of your books as being set in the same world, or do you think of each one as being distinct?
No, they each have their own reality. I think in a sense I'm very prosaic; people think I must be in this fantasy world half the time, and to me when I'm working, I'm working. I guess I'm very left-brained in that way.
©2007 Gwynne Watkins and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Gwynne Watkins is Babble's Senior Editor. Her interviews and essays have appeared both online and in print; she is also a playwright who has been produced and workshopped throughout the New York area. She is currently writing the book and lyrics for a young adult musical commissioned by Making Books Sing. |
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