I recently spoke with author Andrea Davis Pinkney about her award-winning children's books, including Ella Fitzgerald: The Tale of a Vocal Virtuosa, Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra, and The Red Pencil.
I also asked Pinkney about her artistic collaboration with her husband, Brian Pinkney, who illustrates many of her books. Here's what she had to say:
Most authors and illustrators never meet each other. They don’t go to Starbuck’s. They don’t hang out. The publisher keeps them separate. Usually, if an author wants to convey a message to an illustrator or the illustrator has a question for the author, the editor of the book will convey the information to one or the other.
I have a unique situation. I’m married to the guy who’s illustrating many of my books. We share a home. We share children. We share a box of cereal and a tube of toothpaste. The way that we work together is that Brian’s studio is not in our home [in New York City]. It is in a neighborhood that is far, far away from where we live. I don’t go to that studio. I don’t peek in the window. I don’t wonder what’s happening. I treat him as I would any illustrator and that keeps us happily working together.
I see the artwork when it’s done. He brings it home. It’s spread on the living room floor. I look at it, and then it goes to the publisher.
That said, we do work together in a different way. We do have a meeting once a week, on a Saturday. The meeting is for several hours, from 10:30 in the morning until maybe 2:30 in the afternoon. We go to a diner, which is a neutral place. It’s not our home, his studio, or an office. The waiter in the diner knows us. Brian has read my manuscripts throughout the week. I’ve looked at his sketches. We bring all that to the diner and talk about it during that time frame.
There are certain rules for the meeting. There is no cross talk. I can’t cut him off. He goes first, and then I speak. We do this back and forth for those several hours.
We must always speak positively, like I would with a colleague. And when the meeting is over, it’s done. We can’t be brushing our teeth that night, and say, “There’s one more thing I want to tell you about the book Ella Fitzgerald.” Because we have a family and are married, we have to keep a boundary on when we talk about work and when we don’t.
The reason that authors and illustrators do not collaborate in the traditional sense, is that an artist should feel free to do whatever he or she wants. Brian Pinkney does not need me telling him that I think Ella Fitzgerald’s dress should be yellow because he will think of something I will never think of. Make it purple, as it is on the cover. Make her look like a big balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with a big skirt that looks like a globe with buildings around it from all the places in the world that Ella Fitzgerald sang. That’s how we collaborate. We keep it very contained.
How do the Pinkneys remain so disciplined? Credit their son:
We broke the rule once and were talking about our work in the car on a road trip. On the return trip, our son was in the backseat, and he started doing an imitation of our discussion or debate. It was an indication that we really need to keep it at the diner.
To learn more about Andrea Davis Pinkney's life, click here.
