Jon Klassen

Can you internalize this piece enough to continue it somewhere else? So can you create like fan fiction about this thing in your medium? What this looks like for me is like I'm working on a picture book right now that I didn't write and some really interesting things happened when I would read little bits of the text and then I would just start drawing and I got this big sheet of paper out and I was just drawing kind of whatever came to mind in this world and I started telling different stories than were in the text.

And I think in picture books there's a lot of conversation about like John Klassen talks a lot about how the picture book is all about you know you're telling one story in the text you're telling a similar story or a connected story in the illustration but if it's really good they're kind of giving you both you can't have the whole story without both pieces and so there's an authorship to the illustration there's an authorship to acting with your choices and your character background and all that so if you've got a script could you write a little short film in the same world because that active recall is going to going to make it so that you're really bringing yourself to the table you're forcing yourself to understand the story in a deeper way where you've internalized it then you're really going to come from a place of authenticity and a place of authorship and I think that that's something that I would continue to do every time I do this from now on is that really try to create try to soak in a little bit of the story and then let that flow into things that are not even there because that's getting some of my perspective and point of view in it I do the same thing when I do editorial I do try to let it flow and have my own kind of take that's complementary to the text.

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Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett, illustrated by John Klassen.

On a cold afternoon, in a cold little town, where everywhere you looked was either the white of snow or the black of soot from chimneys, Annabelle found a box filled with yarn of every color.

So she went home and knit herself a sweater.

Another deal.

He's, he's quite like, so Mac Barnett, I was reading a making of the book, like a conversation between John Klassen and Carson Ellis and Mac Barnett.

And he's like, he makes this insane deal because he says that, okay, if you guess my name, I'll give you three nights to guess my name.

And if you guess my name, you can keep the baby.

Sam and Dave Dig a Hole is a very, very good...

It's, I forget who wrote it, but it's got illustrations by Jon Klassen who did This Is Not My Hat, and one of the ones won a Caldecott Medal with like a fish steals a hat.

Yeah, the fish.

Or I Stole This Hat or s-