Meet-the-Author Recording with Sophie Blackall
Hello Lighthouse |
Sophie Blackall introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Hello Lighthouse.
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Sophie Blackall: Hello, this is Sophie Blackall and I'm the author and illustrator of Hello Lighthouse. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to create this book and then I'll share an excerpt with you. A third grader once told me lighthouses are like helpful castles in the sea, which is my favorite definition ever. But the thing I love most about lighthouses is that they're steeped in stories, stories of monstrous storms and daring rescues, and of course the stories of the courageous men and women who tended the light.
At a flea market several years ago I picked up an old print of a lighthouse with a cut away showing the interior round rooms and spiral staircase, the keeper's bedroom and kitchen, and the lantern room. Hello Lighthouse can be traced back to that very moment I picked up the print. It took six long years to turn the idea into a book.
In that time I studied the history of lighthouses and read keeper's logbooks and memoirs, I visited cliff lights and rock lights and island lights. I climbed their spiral stairs and gazed from lantern room windows. I even stayed in a lighthouse on a tiny island of the northern most tip of Newfoundland. In the days I was there I saw blood orange sunsets and galloping storms, brilliant blue skies and rolling fog, smooth silvered waves and a heaving black sea. But the lighthouse was always the same, tall, steadfast, constant, beaming its light out to sea as though it was saying, "Hello, hello. Don't worry. I'm still here. I will always be here."
And now I'll read an excerpt to you and tell you a little bit about how I made the illustrations.
The book begins like this: On the highest rock of a tiny island at the edge of the world stands a lighthouse. It is built to last forever, sending its light out to sea, guiding the ships on their way. From dusk to dawn the lighthouse beams, "Hello, hello, hello. Hello lighthouse."
I wrote the first draft of Hello Lighthouse on Quirpon Island and figured out the structure of the book, it would be tall and narrow, and the pages would alternate between exterior and interior. Everything outside is in motion, the sea, the weather, the passing of time. Inside too life rotates and expands within the lighthouse walls. But I knew I wanted the lighthouse to be constant, to literally be fixed in the same place on the left hand page of these alternating spreads.
It took me a while to realize the family story needed to be told in circles, circles which begin as small spots and grow to fill the page as the keeper's life expands with the arrival of his wife and the birth of their child. The lighthouse keeper's logs was so important in my research and I wrote the text to echo their tone, gently repetitive, containing quiet words to describe full lives. I enclosed the whole book within the log. The end papers form the pages of the keeper's journal, scattered with mementos from the sea.
The illustrations were made with Chinese ink and watercolor which is my favorite medium. I discovered the Chinese ink and watercolor combination by accident about 10 years ago and have been using it ever since. I paint all the tones in the ink and use washes of watercolor over the top. It has the effect of tinting an old black and white photo.
A child asked me how I was feeling when I made Hello Lighthouse and I told him that there were a lot of bad and sad and crummy things happening in the world when I made this book, and that when the world is full of such things, books often escape to a different kind of world, and if we can't find exactly the world we seek in a book, then we can make our own book and our own world. That's what I did with Hello Lighthouse.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Sophie Blackall was exclusively created in September 2018 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.