Interview with Carter Higgins, author of Some of These Are Snails

Carter Higgins has labored in class libraries, visible results and movement graphics—and all that have exhibits in Some of These Are Snails. This ingenious idea image e book with daring and vibrant art work that expands on the strategy Higgins took in her 2021 e book, Circle Under Berry, which requested readers to contemplate shapes, colours and prepositions equivalent to over, between and above. In Some of These Are Snails, Higgins turns our consideration to explorations of grouping, sorting and classification. At simply over 200 phrases, the e book could appear easy, however as Higgins reveals, it’s something however.

You’ve talked about that your favourite kids’s author is Ruth Krauss, whose books embrace The Carrot Seed, A Hole Is to Dig and The Happy Day. In truth, you even wrote an image e book about her known as A Story Is to Share. Can you speak about her affect on these books?
Krauss’ affect on my life each as a reader and a author has at all times felt clear and related. When I used to be engaged on Circle Under Berry, I pitched it as “Hervé Tullet meets Ruth Krauss.” Occasionally, I have a tendency towards overwriting or can get too abstracted to make sense, so I’m at all times trying to Krauss’ unfussy, genuine language for reminders of writing I reply so deeply to. I hope Some of These Are Snails equally captures logic and poetry in a playful means.

Can you discuss concerning the beginnings of this e book and the way it started to take form from there?
I see what you probably did there! The editorial course of on Circle Under Berry exploded with ideas that would have slot in that world, simply not in a singular e book. Lots of juicy visible concepts had been left on the reducing room flooring, so I used to be capable of decide up the scraps (so to talk) and create what would possibly come subsequent.

What qualities had been essential to you to present the textual content of the e book?
The textual content wanted to be sticky: the sort whose rhythms keep in your head for some time, sounds actually nice out loud however can be performing some uncommon issues. I’m at all times writing for sound design, just like the echo-y assonance of snails and squares or the consonance on the finish of circle and purple. With the e book’s comparatively restricted vocabulary, I used to be cautious about too many true rhymes which may lead a reader to imagine they’re studying a rhyming e book, just for it to . . . not. It can’t really feel like a mistake. One of the best issues about our language is how incredible kid-facing phrases sound. Try these out loud: Octagon! Elephant! Oval! Wiggly! It’s good clay to smash round from the beginning. 

Excluding the jacket and entrance matter, the e book’s textual content solely makes use of three sorts of punctuation marks: query marks, a set of hyphens and a few apostrophes. How did you arrive at that alternative?
Poetry will get to play quick and free with grammatical conventions, and finally that’s what we’ve got right here. It’s primarily a tune, a rhythm, a cadence—not certain by the identical punctuation guidelines as prose. It’s attention-grabbing to notice that there are query marks however no different sentence-ending punctuation. Maybe that’s a metaphor for this e book asking questions of you however not providing exact options. 

The apostrophes solved a rhythm drawback, deploying a contraction to show two syllables into one. And it’s simply so pleasant to assume of the conversations that occur round a book-making desk: “Should it be ‘tweet tweet tweet’ or ‘tweet-tweet-tweet’?” I don’t bear in mind why we landed on the hyphens, however I like them.

Did you start these illustrations with sketches or doodles, or by working immediately with reduce paper? 
I did quite simple sketches in Procreate, a drawing app for the iPad. At that stage, it was primarily the essential shapes: an orange circle for a tiger, a blue sq. for an owl. Knowing how every image would change from unfold to unfold helped make sure the textual content is equally stunning and playful. 

Did you experiment with completely different papers or portray instruments (brushes, sponge brushes, fingers)? Are the colours we see single shades of paint or a number of shades blended collectively? 
I painted massive sheets of newsprint with acrylics utilizing a very talked-about course of for preschoolers: scrape portray. You squirt the paint immediately on the paper and use a scraper of some kind to tug the paint round. I often selected not more than two colours to make anyone piece of paper, however the one colour mixing was what occurred proper on the paper in consequence of the scraping. Most of the papers for this e book had been painted with plastic pizza advertisements a neighborhood restaurant mails out, the sort that snap out like your library card or grocery retailer rewards playing cards.

This is a query I feel many kids shall be enthusiastic about: Did you utilize stencils or outlines to chop the shapes, or did you wing it?
Yes, I’m an enormous fan of stencils! The backside of my pencil cup made the snails’ our bodies. A Post-it pad for the elephants. If I wanted to make one thing from scratch, like an octagon or oval, I used postcards. 

How did you assemble the completed illustrations digitally?
Once their design was discovered, I created the person items of artwork: all of the ladybugs directly, all of the yellow squares, all of the worms. After that, I scanned them and made the ultimate compositions in Photoshop. Everything was handmade and bodily exists, however the ultimate footage had been assembled digitally.

The e book has so many nice colour moments—pages or spreads the place it’s clear that you simply’re within the contrasting or complementing interaction of colours in addition to in shapes. Can you inform us about one of your favorites?
Thank you for noticing this! Being intentional with colour feels just like being intentional with the sound of the language. The first 4 spreads primarily characteristic inexperienced, orange, yellow and blue, so when purple and pink are each launched on the fifth unfold, it seems like such a deal with. You’ve bought a way of how the e book is working, so we out of the blue begin to expertise it in a different way.

What is one of your favourite shapes and why?
There’s one thing so mesmerizing a few circle. They are additionally very elusive and difficult to attract, so it’s satisfying to get that proper each occasionally. (But I’ll nonetheless fortunately use my pencil-cup stencil!)

You labored as a faculty librarian for 10 years. What insights did you achieve from that work that you simply had been capable of convey to this e book?
One of the perfect issues about being a librarian is continually rising up with your college students. You don’t move them alongside to the following grade stage in the identical means classroom lecturers have to. A kindergartener and that very same reader in fourth grade? Wildly completely different, very a lot the identical. For this e book, I needed to create a couple of completely different experiences relying on the reader’s age, whether or not you’re a toddler or an enormous child. 

If you could possibly turn into a fly on the wall throughout a library storytime during which somebody was sharing this e book with kids, what would you hope to see the storytime supplier doing? What would you hope to see the kids doing?
You know, I hope it’s somewhat noisy. I hope children are shouting out solutions and discovering new methods to see one thing, and that the storytime supplier is simply fortunately within the thick of it. 

Author picture of Carter Higgins courtesy of The Headshot Truck.