Seriously funny: Children's author/illustrator Mo Willems
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The black felt marker makes quick, scratchy sounds.
First comes a dot.
Then a circle.
Then a bigger circle ...
A few more lines, a touch of pale blue, and Mo Willems is done.
He's drawn a pigeon. A gawky, goofy-looking pigeon.
But that Pigeon - which he's dashed off countless times for his fans - is the title character in a series of wildly popular children's books, and a big part of the reason why Willems is routinely referred to these days as the reigning "rock star" of kiddie lit.
WILLEMS, WHO LIVES in Northampton, is the author and illustrator of more than three dozen books, almost all for the 8-and-under set. His first was "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!," published in 2003.
The Pigeon wants nothing more than to get his hands on the wheel of the big bus when the driver steps away, even though the driver has specifically said ... well, you know.
Willems manages to squeeze pretty much the entire range of human emotion - the Pigeon is by turns plaintive, pitiful, despondent, defiant, conniving, cheeky - into a five-minute read that's very, very funny. "I have dreams, you know!" he protests at one point.
Willems has done six sequels to "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" and launched other series, too - Elephant and Piggie, Knuffle Bunny, Cat the Cat. They're exuberantly drawn, and simultaneously silly and a little bit serious.
One person who's known him since the pre-Pigeon days says Willems' books are "like a Beatles song. Very simple ideas, just done perfectly."
In seven years Willems has garnered the kinds of recognition that most children's authors and illustrators chase their entire careers. He won a prestigious Caldecott Honor for "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!," and has since received two more, along with a bunch of other big-time awards. There seems to be a permanent place reserved in his name at the top of The New York Times' children's best-seller list whenever he comes out with a new book, which is often.
Children are crazy about Willems, giggling uproariously at his stories, and sending him sacks of fan mail.
Teachers, librarians and parents are crazy about him too. On blogs, Willems gets shout-outs that suggest he's got an enormous posse of breathless groupies out there.
"You must find & read Mo Willems NOW!!!"
"Hi Mr. Mo Willems! I HEART YOU!!! I want to meet you and be friends with you! Not in that crazy stalker way, but in that, 'Hey, yeah, I know Mo. He is TOTALLY cool.' "
"My friends, you have not lived until you see a hundred or so middle-aged female librarians swooning over Mr. Willems' dapper good looks, his off-the-cuff remarks, and his instant rapport with any crowd."
"Had the pigeon tattooed on my ankle this summer."
EARLIER THIS YEAR, Willems was a headliner at "Meltdown," a children's fair sponsored by radio station 93.9 The River. He was the last to take the stage at JFK Middle School in Florence, and anyone wandering in at that moment, clueless about Caldecott Honors and Geisel Awards, might have thought Willems was a professional performer who just does this writing and drawing stuff on the side.
He tossed one-liners at the audience, and "read" three of his books, exclamation points practically flying through the air. He jumped up and down, scrunched up his fists, made his eyes bug out and his voice squeak and screech: "Blarggie! Blarggie!"
Earlier, he'd introduced himself by saying, "My name is Mo Willems and I am an author/illustrator." (He'd actually introduced himself differently on the first go-round, in a rapid-fire monotone - "My name is Mo Willems and I am a corporate attorney specializing in tax affairs," which drew laughs from grown-ups because of what he'd said, and laughs from kids because of the way he'd said it.)
Do you like to make up stories? he asked the children at one point. Do you like to draw? "Then you," he told them, "are author/illustrators, just like me."
WILLEMS, WHO IS 42, grew up in New Orleans, the only child of Dutch-born parents. His father worked in hotel management until Willems was in third grade. That's when his mother finished law school and joined a firm, and his father became a potter.
As a boy, Willems loved cartoons, particularly the Peanuts strips. He once wrote a letter to Charles Schulz: "Dear Mr. Schulz: Can I have your job when you're dead?"
He got no response from the cartoonist. "My father never sent it," he says of the letter. The experience, he observes dryly, was "very Charlie-Brownish."
In grade school he was the kid who was always drawing. "And the art teacher and the librarian threw away my drawings." They weren't a hit with "the second-grade bullies" either, he adds.
"I was weird," Willems says of his childhood. "Very, very weird in a town that liked eccentrics but didn't like weirdoes."
He says he was unpopular, and confused. "I wasn't a happy kid." He adds that he's gotten progressively happier as he's grown older.
"Childhood is so difficult," he says. "There's no context. Furniture is not made to your size. You have to ask to go to the bathroom. You're powerless."
His books, Willems says, reflect that. "Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale," one of his best-known stories, is about a toddler named Trixie (just like Willems' daughter) whose favorite toy disappears during a trip to the Laundromat with her father. Adults can be heartless, offering cold comfort like "You'll forget about it later." But to a child, Willems says, it's a tragedy. "Bunny is lost. That's your best friend."
THERE'S AN OLD saying: Tragedy plus time equals comedy.
Willems' friend Tom Warburton spins that this way: "Tragedy plus Mo equals comedy."
Warburton, who worked with Willems on various animation projects and has known him for years (the dedication of "Pigs Make Me Sneeze!" reads "To Mr. Warburton, who makes me itch"), says Willems has a gift for making all-is-lost situations not just bearable, but downright laughable.
Sometimes that's accomplished with all-capital letters and characters who do lots of dramatic flapping around. "In every one of his books, someone is yelling," Warburton says. "Yelling is funny."
But Willems, he continues, is a master of ideas and wordplay, too. In "Knuffle Bunny," for instance, when the fact that her bunny is missing sinks in, Trixie flops inconsolably, and her father has to drag her home. Willems got that across with a spare drawing and a well-chosen adjective: "He just finds these moments that everyone knows - 'Trixie went boneless' - and finds a way to illustrate them," Warburton says.
One of Willems' latest books, "I Am Going!," features Elephant and Piggie, whom one reviewer called "the Vladimir and Estragon of children's literature," after the Samuel Beckett characters. After a spell talking about how perfectly pleasant the previous day had been, Piggie announces to Gerald, "Well, I am going."
Going? Now? Gerald is beyond bereft: "What about me? Who will I skip with?" He grows increasingly desperate with each page. Finally, alternately screaming and sobbing, he asks: "Why? Why? Why? Why?" - 36 anguished "Whys?" in all.
In the end, it turns out there's just been a misunderstanding. But along the way the story has reached a fever pitch of near-existential despair, despite the fact that its target audience is preschoolers.
Oh, and it's laugh-out-loud funny, too.
WILLEMS SAYS HE had a modest goal growing up: "I wanted to draw and do funny things."
In high school he got a gig writing a weekly comic strip called "Sur-Realty" in a local real estate magazine. He also did a comic strip for a school publication, and says he once got in "serious trouble" for using the word "fart" in the strip: He had to make a formal apology to the headmaster. "It took a long time for that to blow over," Willems says with a straight face.
From high school he went to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Afterward he quickly landed at an animation studio, adapting children's books for HBO. Almost as quickly, he was laid off.
He picked up odd jobs here and there - taking photographs for a book about psychiatric disorders, and doing artwork for bubble gum cards; working at a gallery; performing sketch comedy. "They were lean years," he says. When he chipped his tooth and had no money to get it fixed, he staged a benefit comedy concert called ToothAid.
Sketch comedy, it turned out, would lead to the proverbial big break. Some people from "Sesame Street" heard about him, and after an eight-month tryout he was hired. He spent nine years as a writer and animator for the show. Then he got laid off, as part of a major staff cutback.
While Willems by now had made a name for himself - his work had been honored with six Emmys - the timing was tough. It was two months after 9/11. The Cartoon Network had recently canceled "Sheep in the Big City," a show he'd created while he was at "Sesame Street." He and his wife, Cher, had just bought an apartment and expenses loomed.
But in the same week that all that dismal news converged, Willems got a call: "I think I've sold Pigeon."
Pigeon, of course, was "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" He'd written it years earlier as a lark, he says - "something funny" to amuse friends - and an agent he'd connected with had been shopping it around. Hyperion Books for Children bought "Pigeon," and has gone on to publish nearly all of Willems' subsequent books.
" 'SESAME STREET' WAS incredibly important for me," Willems says. "It was a little graduate school in a way.
"I learned how to write for children. I learned I wanted to write for children."
He also learned what he wanted to write. The characters in the show's sketches were typically successful at whatever venture they tried, and when Willems would propose bits that suggested other outcomes he'd be vetoed. "Most of us are incredibly deficient," he says. "We seem so afraid of failure that I think we lie to the kids." His books are filled with characters who are constantly thwarted, yet manage to get along. The Pigeon, after all, does not get to drive the bus. And his world does not end.
Because they seem so uncomplicated, Willems' books occasionally elicit a Hey, anyone could do that! reaction. "My goal is to have everything look like it took five minutes," he says.
But he says that a so-called Easy Reader like "Cat the Cat, Who Is That?" - he describes it as a book for the "sippy-cup set" - is in fact a "hard writer," calling for a vocabulary distilled to less than 50 words.
The same goes for the illustrations. Even a first-grader can draw the Pigeon, thanks to the directions at www.Pigeonpresents.com, and countless kids do, sending Willems spin-offs like Don't Let the Pigeon Kiss a Girl! and Don't Let the Pigeon Have a Cookie! But in fact Willems devotes an inordinate amount of time to teasing out the tiniest details. Should the dot representing an eye, say, be this size, or this size? Exactly where should that dot be placed? "I spend most of my time getting the eyeballs right," he says.
Last month he was working on another "Elephant and Piggie" book, and his rough sketches showed the kinds of decisions he labors over. One still bore the vestiges of various elephant ears. When one set of ears didn't seem quite right, he had erased them and drawn more, each angled slightly differently.
Willems' workspace, on the top floor of his house, is airy and uncluttered, with sleek furniture, cork floors and Calder-style mobiles dangling from the ceilings. Pigeon and Knuffle Bunny stuffed toys are stashed on shelves, still in their plastic wrapping. There's a cardboard bookstore display stand with the words "Hi, I'm Cat the Cat," and stacks of fresh books.
Willems draws at a large drafting table equipped with a light box. Nearby are neat rows of colored markers, and shelves where drawings can dry.
He keeps a flow chart for work in progress, using color-coded pencils to fill in graph-paper squares indicating the status of each page - rough sketch, finished sketch, colorized, scanned and so on. Every incarnation of a page is dated with one of those rotating-number rubber stamps that librarians used to use. Small black sketchbooks contain rough drawings. Willems dates these pages, too.
There's a conference room for the various meetings it takes to keep the Willems empire rolling along - not just books, but videos, merchandise, stage versions of his stories. This month "Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical" debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where it was a sell-out. (The role of Trixie was played by a friend from his "Sesame Street" days, Stephanie D'Abruzzo, who, it just so happens, gave Trixie Willems the stuffed animal that inspired "Knuffle Bunny.") A touring art exhibit titled "Knuffle Funny: The Art and Whimsy of Mo Willems" opens at an Orlando, Fla., museum tomorrow.
Willems keeps a running patter going on his various websites and blogs - GoMo, Pigeon Presents, Mo Willems Doodles!, and just plain mowillems.com, which he says is the hub leading to all the others. He's got a Twitter account called "The Pigeon Tweets."
Cher Willems, a potter, serves as the operation's CFO, and provides feedback on her husband's projects. He often dedicates his books to her: one reads, "To Cher - Nice Save." Sometimes the experiences of their daughter, now a third-grader, turn into story lines. The "Knuffle Bunny" books, in fact, are like mini autobiographies, with a girl named Trixie, a lanky, bespectacled, semi-bumbling father and a sensible mother who figures out how to set things right. The trio provided the voices for an animated "Knuffle Bunny" DVD, with Trixie doing an altogether convincing interpretation of the line "Trixie bawled."
Even the family dog, Nelson, has a role. He was the model for "City Dog, Country Frog," which will be published next month. For the first time, Willems wrote only the text; the illustrations were done by one of his idols in the children's book field, Jon J. Muth.
"They're this great puzzle that goes together," Tom Warburton says of the Willemses' dynamic. "A perfect little storybook family."
THE FAMILY HAD BEEN living in Brooklyn - in fact, photographs of their neighborhood provide the background for the two "Knuffle Bunny" books - but post-Pigeon began thinking about moving someplace "a little bit quieter," Mo Willems says.
They wanted a place that was walkable, had some culture, and was not too far from New York. They had friends in Northampton, and knew the area had a well-established community of children's authors and illustrators.
They looked for a house here for a couple of years, finally settling on an outsized Victorian tucked away on a side street near the downtown. Willems, in his blogs, sometimes refers to the house as Knuffle Manor.
"When people ask us why we're living here - who wouldn't?" he asks. "Take a look. It's paradise."
The house borders a stretch of lush open space, and has a view of the Holyoke Range. On one side is a court for a game called jeu de boules, which Willems and his wife like to play at lunchtime. On the other side is a tidy garden that he says will produce most of their vegetables come summer. In mid-spring the yard was in bloom with azaleas, daffodils and a deep-purple saucer magnolia. A small fountain burbled; birds chirped. Trees were leafing out. There's actually a white picket fence.
Inside, the house is bright, with clean-lined furniture. A renovation retained touches like wood marquetry floors and an imposing staircase that wends its way up three flights. Willems' wire sculptures, which he's been doing since his 20s, and Cher Willems' ceramics are displayed on shelves. There are also examples of his father's pottery, some of it decorated with Willems' designs.
The dining room walls are dark green, chalkboard paint that allows for an ever-changing gallery of doodles by Willems, his wife, his daughter and whatever guests happen to be on hand. Willems frequently posts them on the Mo Willems Doodles! blog. His birthday present from his wife and daughter this year was a roll of butcher paper that they use as a tablecloth: "So this year for my birthday dinner, Team Willems went on a dynamic dinner doodle!" he wrote on his blog.
Throughout the house there are dozens of framed cartoons and illustrations by artists he admires - Fiep Westendorp, Ronald Searle, Richard Thompson and others. Many of them bear personal inscriptions like "To the Mighty Mo Willems."
Over the fireplace is an original "Peanuts" strip, bought to mark the Willemses' first wedding anniversary - the paper anniversary. It shows Lucy, loudly protesting yet another crisis: "It's not fair! Cheaters! Cheaters! Cheaters!"
DESPITE HIS SUCCESSES, Willems still frets. "There is a moment when I think I'll never have a good idea, or come up with anything again.
"Look at my characters," he says. "All they do is lose things, yell and freak out. That doesn't come from nowhere."
Near his desk is a framed sketch of the Pigeon, looking especially mopey. Why that one, out of all the Pigeons he's drawn? "Because he's so miserable," Willems says. "It's a funny little drawing."
He says he's got ideas to take him through the next three years. "Then I'm taking a nap."
Right now he's busy with another "Knuffle Bunny" book. He started it in 2006 - Trixie ventures beyond her neighborhood in this one, so it required some travel to photograph the backgrounds - and began doing the final art early last year.
Willems used to think that "Knuffle Bunny" would stretch into a long series. Instead, "Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion" will be the final installment in what he refers to as his "big trilogy" ("We find out that Luke" - as in Skywalker - "is Knuffle Bunny's father," he jokes.) The book comes out this fall.
IT'S KIND OF FRUSTRATING, Willems says: One of the reasons he wanted to write children's books was so he could work at home and spend more time with Trixie. "Then my books became successful and I had to go on the road," he says. He is in high demand as a speaker, drawing crowds wherever he goes. A recent signing in California featured a petting zoo designed to entertain kids as they waited in line.
In the past few weeks Willems has been to Washington for the "Knuffle Bunny" musical premiere, to Vermont to speak at The Center for Cartoon Studies, to New York City to emcee the Children's Choice Book Awards Gala.
On June 5, he'll be reading from "City Dog, Country Frog" at the Broadside Bookshop in Northampton. Nancy Felton of the Broadside staff says the book is a change from the quirky material Willems is known for. "It's a lovely story about loss and seasons and friends," she says.
When he is in town and not working in his studio, Willems will walk his daughter to school, or go kayaking. He says he feels like he's barely scratched the surface of Northampton. At the book fair in Florence in March, he put in a plug for Cartoon-a-Palooza, a showing of his animated movies this Sunday to benefit Forbes Library. (See sidebar.) Buy tickets, buy the poster, he urged. "Every single penny will go to make Forbes extra-super-triple-awesome!"
Cartoon-a-Palooza, Willems says, is "part of just now getting into town and finding we can help."
When the Willemses lived in Brooklyn, Tom Warburton says, they talked frequently about moving. One day they might ponder New Zealand; another day, it would be another far-flung destination. "They always had their eyes set on someplace on the horizon," Warburton says.
"When they hit on Northampton that seemed like it was it for them," he adds. "They don't talk about moving anymore."
Margot Cleary can be reached at MCleary@gazettenet.com.
