Corinna Luyken: Hi, my name is Corinna Luyken and I'm the author and illustrator of My Heart, which is a picture book that really began as a poem that I wrote many, many years ago, and kept coming back to. And there was something in the poem that I was interested in trying to put pictures to it and to see what would happen. And then the other thing that happened, as I was thinking about this poem, is I had a friend whose mom had a collection of heart-shaped rocks and she lived on an island in Washington State in the Puget Sound. And she had them over her fireplace. And it inspired me to start my own heart rock collection. So my daughter and I, when we lived out by the ocean, we would go for walks and look for heart-shaped rocks. They're surprisingly easy to find. Once you start looking, you see them everywhere.

But there became a point where I started to wonder if I could find them in my day to day life, and not just when I went for long walks on the beach. So I started looking on city streets and in yards, and just looking around me, and realized that you could find them there as well. In fact, there's a gravel driveway on the way home from walking my daughter to school where I found four heart-shaped pieces of gravel in two days, just in this one driveway. So that is part of the inspiration behind the book, is just this collection of hearts and the realization that once you start looking, these heart shapes are everywhere all around us, in the same way that love, once you start looking for it is really all around us.

And then another thing about this book is the color palette. I get asked sometimes about, why all the gray? why just gray and yellow? And I live in the Pacific Northwest in Washington State where we have a lot of rain and it's really gray a lot of the time. So one of my favorite colors is yellow, and I love the color yellow, but I also love what the color gray does for yellow. And the way that gray and all the different shades of gray can make yellow even brighter and more luminous.

Because I was making a book about the heart and it's really a meditation on the heart, a celebration of the heart and all the feelings that the heart can feel. So I really was excited about this idea of not using the reds and pinks that we sometimes often see around Valentine's Day with the heart, but really approaching it with something that was more subdued and allowed the brilliance, the yellow, to be brilliant and to really shine.

I have a number of favorite pages in the book and I can't just choose one, but one page that I really love is just a couple of pages in and it's a mostly black page which has these two windows. And it says, "My heart can be closed or opened up wide." I love many things about this page, including the simplicity of it. But the thing I wanted to point out is the image on the right hand side has these blinds that are hanging down in there, a little bit crooked and broken, and these blinds were inspired by blinds that were in my studio when I was making the book. And in the same way that the heart-shaped rocks were all around me in nature and I started to find them, there's this way of finding beautiful things and bringing them into your storytelling. As an artist, as an illustrator, you look around you and you see things that you like and you put them in your books.

But what's interesting to me is the things, kind of like The Book of Mistakes. The things we don't like sometimes can also enter our books and inform them, and even become something beautiful. I have these blinds that I really hated in my studio, because they were always about to fall down. And it was the only window in the studio and it stared right at the neighbor's house. It was very, very close. They had a rusty truck and then a window. And so at night, I needed to close these blinds so that they couldn't see in. But during the day I had to open them because I wanted light. So every day I would open and close these blinds and I felt like they were going to fall down on my head at any moment.

One day they really did. They fell right down onto my drawing desk and the slats on the blinds got all caught and tangled up in my colored pencils. And what's crazy is that that happened on the day that I was working on this image, and I hadn't even drawn the face. I had just drawn the blinds. So it made me laugh really, really hard. It was a great funny moment, where I felt like the whole world was laughing with me and at me. Also, it ended up being that this thing that I really, really hated, these blinds, became one of my very favorite images in the book, which to me is just a really beautiful thing.