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When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” And yet, both as a species and as individuals in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic culture, we are living under the tyranny of more — a civilizational cult we call progress. We have forgotten who we would be, and what our world would look like, if instead we lived under the benediction of enough.
How we got here, and what we might do about it, is what photographer, writer, illustrator, and wilderness guide Miriam Körner explores in Fox and Bear (public library) — a love letter to nature disguised as a modern fable of ecological grief and hope, partway between The Iron Giant and The Forest, yet entirely and consummately original, painstakingly illustrated in cut-out dioramas from reused and recycled cardboard, narrated with poetic tenderness and a passion for possibility.
Every day, Fox and Bear went into the forest to gather what there was to gather and to catch what there was to catch.
Day after day, the two friends forage and hunt together, watch the sun set and listen to the birds sing.
Life was good, thought Bear.
Picking berries and mushrooms,
hunting ants and mice,
catching rabbits and birds
kept them busy day after day.
But eventually, these joyful activities turn into tasks and the two friends get seduced by the trap of efficiency — that deadening impulse to optimize and operationalize doing at the expense of being.
As Bear and Fox begin gathering more and more seeds, catching more and more birds, laboring to water the seedlings and feed the birds, they suddenly find themselves with no time to watch the sunset or listen to birdsong.
This is how the allure of automation creeps in — Fox sets about inventing mechanical means of accomplishing the daily tasks, in the hope of liberating more time for leisure: an egg collector, a bird feeder, a water sprinkler, a berry picker.
Instead, the opposite happens as the forest begins to look like an industrial palace evocative of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s cautionary observation that “we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely.”
All this enterprise ends up consuming the time for leisure, subsuming the space for joy, affirming Hermann Hesse’s century-old admonition that “the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”
Every day now, Fox and Bear cut down more trees to burn in the steam engines, so the egg collector could collect eggs and the water sprinkler would water the plants. At night, they filled the bird feeder and fixed the berry picker and built more cages until it was almost sunrise.
As Fox keeps dreaming up bigger and bigger engines, faster and faster machines, Bear finds himself “so tired he had no imagination left.”
Suddenly, he wakes up from the trance of busyness and remembers how lovely it was to simply wander the forest “and gather what there is to gather and catch what there is to catch.”
And, just like that, the two friends abandon the compulsions of progress and return to the elemental joy of simply being alive — creatures among creatures, on a world already perfectly tuned for every creaturely need. We have a finite store of sunsets in a life, after all.
Couple Fox and Bear with the Dalai Lama’s illustrated ethical and ecological philosophy for the next generation, then revisit the forgotten conservation pioneer William Vogt’s roadmap to civilizational survival and Denise Levertov’s stirring poem about our relationship to the natural world.
Illustrations courtesy of Miriam Körner
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In the past forty years, South Asian writers writing in English have made a significant showing at the Booker Prizes, the literary awards for the best book published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie (who has been nominated seven times, and whose novel Midnight’s Children won in 1981, introducing South Asian literature in English to the world with a bang), Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga—and even in 2022, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka won for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
But the big news was sixty-five-year-old Indian writer Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand—translated by Daisy Rockwell—bringing home the Booker International Prize, the first time a book translated from Hindi had won in the prize’s nearly twenty-year history. Shree’s experimental and playful novel tells the story of Ma—an eighty-year-old bedridden woman who gets a new lease on life and goes on a journey back across a border that she thought she would never cross again. The English translation was originally published by Tilted Axis Press in the UK, and is now available from HarperCollins in the United States.
“Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and in other South Asian languages,” Shree said in her acceptance speech. “World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages, the vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction.”
I spoke to Shree on Zoom one late night in California / mid-day in Delhi in between a flurry of events and appearances that have flooded her calendar since the prize was announced in October of 2022. The author of four other novels, Shree’s melodic voice and serene and vibrant demeanor made me wish I could teleport to her city and hear her speak in one of the many storied literary spaces there.
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The Rumpus: Why do you write in Hindi?
Geetanjali Shree: The question itself says so much! That a person should be asked why she writes in her mother tongue, when it should be an absolutely natural thing. What else should I be writing in except in my mother tongue? It’s the first and most natural choice for a writer to be writing in her mother tongue. I think the question to be asked, normally, should be why you’re not writing in the mother tongue. But this says so much about our history, about our colonial past, about the place of English amongst the educated in [India], that it becomes almost unnatural that anyone who is educated to be writing not in English, but in another Indian language.
So yes, I write in Hindi because it’s my mother tongue. And I think, like a lot of us middle class Indians, I’ve also grown up with an English medium education. But when it comes to something like the arts and literature, it’s somehow so close to your bones that almost automatically you go into your mother tongue rather than in the language you have learned formally in school. I must add, because too easily it becomes a story about English versus other languages, that there is no such prejudice in my head or heart about it. Those who find for whatever reasons that English is the language they’ve expressed themselves in—they’re most welcome to do it.
Rumpus: Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi) was such a pleasure to read! The playfulness of the language really comes across, and the humor—also the deep themes of women and families and mothers and children and borders. You write: “Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.” Do these themes come up in all your books, and what was the inspiration for this one?
Shree: I haven’t sat down and studied what all themes I have written about before, since I don’t think of my books that way; but yes, all the themes you name and a few more as well. It is very pluralistic and very polyphonic and variegated. But yes, women easily and family, these are themes that I am interested in, but the trigger each time would be different.
In terms of inspiration, what has more and more become my way and more and more something that I have understood is that you don’t have to go for anything dramatic and big. The daily and the mundane are imbued with the big and the momentous. Every small and completely inane looking thing is also strangely connected to much bigger things, and each thing can have so many reverberations and echoes. What’s important is to find those layers, you know, as you go along. In almost all of my other works, I let small curiosities take me along.
The great poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan, in one of his diaries, he’d written that you don’t have to go looking for the poem, you just have to put yourself in a place where the poem will come to you. I really feel at one with that. You are carrying all your stories in you, from your surroundings, from your imagination, from your reality, from your observation, from your history, from your tradition—you’re carrying them all with you all the time. They’re building up. You just want to find the place where the story, for that moment, is going to emerge and begin to take shape and you can go with it. I just tried to put myself in a kind of mode of retreat and empty myself out and let the layers and whispers and the murmurs from within me become more audible and visible. And then I go along with that.
In this case, I think what set me off was just an image of an old person, an elderly person, lying with her back turned to the family, which is a very, very ordinary image, which is there in every family or everywhere, you know, elderly people who look like they have nothing more to do with this world. That image somehow formed inside me. Maybe it was there, maybe I picked it up from somewhere. And it stayed with me. And then that image stirred up my curiosity. What is it that this back is doing? Is it turning away from the world and from life, or is it turning away from the immediate family behind her? I followed that curiosity and that character, and that character started to do various things, which began to amaze me and amuse me and then a whole novel was on the way to being created.
Rumpus: Your book is dedicated to the Indian writer Krishna Sobti, another Hindi writer. Can you tell us about your relationship with her, and about the Hindi literary community in Delhi. It feels like a real community, as opposed to the United States where it is very institutionalized in terms of MFA programs.
Shree: The literary community in Delhi, well, it’s a very informal community at one level—and there’s everything that goes on within a community—there’s intrigue and politics and pettiness and support. In terms of Krishna Sobti, I consider her my guru and a great writer. She’s someone who people refer to as a “difficult writer,” which I find very unnecessary. I mean, why shouldn’t writing be difficult? The more important thing is whether it is good; difficult and good. Krishna Sobti was not an easy writer. You couldn’t just pick her up and read her in one second. But she was a writer of tremendous variety, and strength, and she was a person of great strength and forthrightness, and a person who you could absolutely iconify. She died a few years ago at the ripe old age of ninety-four, and right to the end she was very alert and aware about everything that was going on, very disturbed with the politics that were shaping up—and very upfront about whatever she had to say.
She was always very senior to me, and when we met, I was very much a new writer, but she was always very encouraging, not just to me but to others also, and she took all of us very seriously. She remembered what we were doing, and she would question us when we met. So right from the start, whenever I had the time, I would go and see her, which was actually not that often, but we just developed this relationship of great respect and affection. She was very, very kind and generous. We would sit down with a small brandy in the evening, which she would almost never finish, and she would ask about my work, and we would have that little evening together. It was lovely.
Rumpus: Your mentorship and community with Sobti makes me think of the many lines in your book about storytelling, and all the references you make to other writers. “Here’s the thing: A story can fly, stop, go, turn, be whatever it wants to be. That’s why our wise author Intizar Hussain once remarked that a story is like a nomad.” Is this an important part of your storytelling?
Shree: It is a line of thought which has probably been growing in me, perhaps something that I’ve been thinking more and more about. Perhaps it also comes from the fact that I am born into a literature which is in its modern form. Hindi literature very much belongs to the period just before [Indian] independence, and then concerns what went on after independence. And I think it was a period when social realism had a huge meaning and purpose for everyone who was writing because it was a new society, and everyone wanted to steer it towards a better future. So, this express purpose became the overriding concern for all the writers. Now that makes complete sense and I’m not deriding them at all, but I think it did become the sort of tacit rule and guideline that when you were writing, that you had to write about society for the betterment of society, and you had to do it in a way which is very easily communicable. You had to follow a certain sort of way which can be comprehended, the proper sort of story that a reader can immediately connect with.
I think somewhere I—when I say ‘I,’ I am not only talking about myself but a whole community of writers and artists—began to push back against social realism. Society comes into your work in so many different ways—it doesn’t have to be a verifiable, empirical, descriptive way. I think that spurred a lot of us on, and freed a lot of us. It’s like that Ramanujan quote again. I would say that we don’t have to go looking for the society, because almost whatever we do, society will come to it. So, just let yourself free in the field of literature and creativity. And, if you’re letting yourself free, then also realize that stories will not just go straight. Stories will go this way and that! There’ll be non sequiturs! There’ll be all kinds of breaks and incompleteness, and it’s okay to celebrate all that and see what happens.
Rumpus: Along with the meta-fictional elements in the book, there is also so much playfulness with the POV and characters and the way the story is being told. Do you feel like there is a lot of experimentation happening amongst modern Indian writers and artists today?
Shree: I don’t know if writers are thinking about that word “experimentation,” but it is happening in the course of searching out ways of saying what we are trying to say. Is there a lot of that kind of writing happening? Yes, the literature is very, very vibrant and many different things are happening. But I’ll also say that it’s not as if this is happening for the first time. I mean, if you go back to ancient literature, perhaps anywhere, and certainly in [India], you see it—look at our epics, take the Mahabharata. And what you’re calling experimentation I mean, come on, it’s full of every way of storytelling. It’s doing everything! It’s almost like there’s nothing new for you to do. In a way, I’m only copying. We carry on from things which have already been done, and we keep renewing them with our zeal and reinventing them and we keep trying to do something new. And sometimes, we manage with the same ingredients. And sometimes perhaps, we discover that we thought we were doing it for the first time, but it’s been done thousands of times before.
Rumpus: You speak so highly of your translators, not only mentioning your English translator Daisy Rockwell in your Booker acceptance speech, but also mentioning your French translator Annie Montaut. Tell me about what your relationship is like with your translators, and what the process of translating Tomb of Sand was like.
Shree: I’m so lucky to have these two translators for this book of mine. With both, actually, I’ve had a very, very rich relationship. I knew Annie, but I only met Daisy in person a few days before the Booker Awards Ceremony. It started with Daisy sending me a sample of the translation. When I saw those few pages, I felt that here’s somebody who really got the sense of things and is clearly enjoying the way I’m using language a bit crookedly—here’s somebody who seems to be in tune with it immediately.
After that, Daisy was sending me long questionnaires about lots of things that she needed clarified, which included messages where she said: “You know, it’s not really needed for the translation, but I need for myself, to have the context in my head when I’m translating.” So it was very fascinating, but quite excruciating sometimes for me because my work is not research based. I had to go back to my work and start sort of researching where I got certain metaphors from, what was the story behind my use of language, because when I am writing it’s just coming out. So, it became a conscious exercise of going back and researching and sometimes just guessing at what made me come to certain points in certain words and so on.
What’s important between the translator and the author is to share a rapport about the way of looking at things, you know, and feeling intensely about those things. So, I think the fact that Daisy felt as much love for language or playing with language made for a very strong foundation, and I think the outcome has been wonderful.
Rumpus: There has been a great deal of attention paid to the fact that Tomb of Sand was the first Indian language book to win the Booker International Prize. Why do you think Indian literature is not being recognized and translated as much as other languages and recognized on a world stage?
Shree: We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language. I think it’s unfortunate that English should become the pool where all literature is to be viewed. There should be more translations across languages; in fact, even across Indian languages. Why should Indians from different parts of the country have to read each other only in English? There’s a lot of things which are skewed in this whole translation story. In fact, in recent years, the quality of translations has really, really improved, so that’s a very hopeful sign. In fact, most of [the literature] that’s going out of South Asia is only literature written in English by South Asians.
Also, I don’t think there’s such a lot of translation being done of Indian languages. So, I think it’s a matter of accessibility—that it’s not been worked on and created. I think the world is really opening up, but it’s also made people quite insular. I hope something like the Booker win might do that. I was told that at the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishers were really interested in tapping translated works from Indian languages, rather than just going for the English. So, I think that’s a change one can immediately see, but it would only mean something if it becomes a sustained act.
Rumpus: How does it feel to be an artist in India, at this moment—or really in the world—with such a prevalence of right-wing and Nationalist leaders?
Shree: I’m really, really glad that you added in “the world.” I think that’s important because too often people talk about some places, like that’s where something is happening only. And there are other places where things are really, you know, hunky dory and you can do anything and get away with anything. That’s just not true. There are some trends in the world today, which are disturbing. There’s a tidal wave, you know. The world has opened up, but it’s also become more constricted. Vigilance has increased. Vigilance has become much easier than before, so everyone’s being watched. So, I’m glad you’re not making it India versus the world.
What’s happening in India… look, I mean, we respond to things at various levels. And let me tell you this: In some sense, the word has been endangered for a very long time, perhaps from the beginning. If the word is going to threaten the social order, it has to be stopped. Anything which is going to threaten the social and political order has to be stopped. And this has been going on perhaps forever. But I think writers cannot stop because writing for us is like breathing. We cannot stop. We have to carry on. By and large, I think that is what the situation is in India. So many people are writing and, indeed, I think there is a whole community which is carrying on saying what they want—even in this atmosphere of fear.
Felicia Chiao was working as an industrial designer at IDEO when A24 reached out and told her that Daniel Kwan, director of their highest-grossing film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, wanted to collaborate. The project was not a movie, but one of two picture books that Kwan had written (24 Minutes to Bedtime and I’ll Get to the Bottom of This), to be published by A24 as part of their expansion into children’s literature. Neither Kwan, Chiao, nor A24 had gone through the process of publishing a picture book from start to finish, which is perhaps why the final product is so strange and delightful.
Much in the way that Everything Everywhere All At Once layers dimensions in the multiverse, 24 Minutes to Bedtime layers dimensions of time. Each set of facing pages counts one minute closer to Winston’s eight o’clock bedtime. “Why can’t we stay up later?” he mourns, to which his dad answers, “Because . . . this is all the time you get.” With the help of a time machine, Winston fills every minute with chaos, as four different versions of him time-jump between pages, running from the inevitable. Chiao embedded mini storylines throughout the illustrations, and readers can choose to follow any of the Winstons, countless hidden easter eggs, or his frazzled parents. As Winston tries to slow the minutes, his parents wish they could fast forward. When he finally falls asleep in their arms though, they realize that truly, this is all the time they get.
Chiao has been drawing since she was a child, and thought of it not as a profession, but as a coping mechanism. Struggling to express her feelings, she drew in notebook after notebook through her school years and beyond. She began sharing her drawings on Instagram, but her account didn’t take off until the pandemic. When lockdowns began, she steadily gained an audience, and now has a following of over half a million. At the beginning of 2022, she left her job to become a full-time illustrator. On a phone call from Texas where she was visiting family for the holidays, she spoke with me about being part of this inexperienced yet brilliant team, working with Daniel Kwan, her own artistic process, and how her mental health has both shaped her work and transformed within it.
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The Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, one of the things I notice is the dreamy state it creates. There’s a sense of both mundanity and magic, a melancholy about the passage of time, but also humor and joy. Your art seems like a perfect fit for something that Daniel Kwan would write. How did this partnership come along?
Felicia Chiao: A24 had a list of people they were interested in working with, and Daniel had his own list. It seems I was on both, so they reached out to me. I knew A24 as the movie house, but I didn’t know anything about publishing or children’s books, and they didn’t really have a clear idea of how it was going to be done either, so it was new for all of us.
Rumpus: Traditionally, a children’s book author and illustrator might work separately, but it seems there was so much integration between the text and the images. Did you and Daniel work closely together on these things, or follow a more traditional model?
Chiao: I originally anticipated the more traditional model. I thought they were going to give me a storyboard and I was going to translate it into my style. But on one of the very first calls with everyone, they said, “We don’t know what we want the characters to look like or how we want anything done,” and they turned to me and asked, “Do you want to help us figure that out?” This wasn’t what I signed up for originally, but I’m glad it turned out that way because it gave me a lot more freedom.
Rumpus: As I was reading the book, I was thinking the family looked a bit like Daniel’s.
Chiao: I hadn’t actually seen a picture of his kid until later in the process, but, you know, every Asian child has that bowl cut. Originally, I’d drawn the dad as a bald man with a mustache, very stereotypical, and the mom with her hair up in a bun. They said, “Actually, we’re aiming for the A24 audience now—Millennials becoming parents—so the dad can be a little more hip.” I realized both dads on the video call were wearing beanies and had long hair, so I thought, “Well, I’ll take from life.”
Rumpus: What was the creative process of working with Daniel like?
Chiao: We would go through his stick figure storyboard online together and try to catch all the errors, because it’s a very complex book with connecting lines in different chronological orders. So there was a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth. For example, triple-checking that the pajamas matched up on the right page, and that what each version of the character was talking about made sense in the time jumps. I didn’t really understand this book until I had to draw every single page.
It was also an interesting process because I work traditionally. I don’t do anything digital really. For a book, especially with the repeating imagery of this one, we had to tailor it to fit my process. I was able to make a few drawings and scan them, then I would Photoshop in the different elements and characters and move around the speech bubbles that I hand-lettered.
It was a very strange process because of the way we all work—the A24 team versus Daniel, versus my abilities and the tools I had—to make this book come to life. We thought we would be done in June or March of this year and we finished maybe August or September. It all started in November last year, before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out.
Rumpus: The book reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once in the way it plays with time and dimension, and how there are so many threads to track. I imagine it was a challenge to illustrate.
Chiao: Yeah, I was having a really hard time in the beginning figuring out the book. Then when I went to the screening and saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of it clicked. Suddenly, it made a lot of sense. I got what he wanted, and what he was doing creatively. After that, it made the book a little easier.
Rumpus: I can see how that would happen. Artists are often preoccupied with getting at deeper truths around the same themes, and there were many that crossed over between this book and the film.
Chiao: Yeah, there was that vibe of nothing matters, do what you want, but everything actually matters so much. Wrestling with that idea was inspiring. A lot of times, I think artists are paralyzed by the fear of making something bad, so they procrastinate or don’t start a piece at all. When I first started concepting the house and the characters for the book, I spent so much time agonizing over small details. I drew several versions of Clarence, the stuffed rabbit, and nothing felt quite right. Eventually I just said “fuck it” and made what we called “long Clarence.” Did the shape really matter in terms of the story? No. But giving the stuffed toy an irregular shape added to the overall vibe of the story.
Do what you can or want and have fun with it; you’ll be surprised how much impact something you’ve made can have on other people when you’re not stressing about how to do it the “best” way. I’m so used to consultancy life where you just deliver what you think the client wants. And Daniel is such a big proponent of saying, “Well, what do you think? What do you want to do? What’s interesting to you? Let’s make it happen.” It was a really lovely reminder that I’m going to enjoy the work more if I do what I think is best. They hired me for my work, so I should be able to push my ideas a little bit stronger.
Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is “a 4-dimensional bedtime story,” and its nonlinear nature invites the reader to revisit it again and again, even more than the usual return to a children’s book, because you can read it differently each time. You did such a wonderful job of creating these layered reads and offering something new to discover with each one.
Chiao: Well, thanks. In my drawings that are interiors, I always love adding little details and objects all around the page. I think it gets people to look at your work a lot longer, especially in the time of social media where you stare at something for three seconds and keep scrolling. People tell me that they stop and zoom in, and they look for all the pieces. When you spend twenty to thirty hours on a drawing, you want people to look at it.
Growing up, I loved Richard Scarry. He had a book about vehicles and all I remember is looking for gold bugs on all the pages. I don’t remember the story. I don’t remember the rest of the book. I just remember every night I would go look for the bug even though I knew where it was already. So, I like the idea of a kid being able to enjoy little elements of the illustration and the art, even if they’re not reading per se.
Rumpus: Can you tell me more about your influences? For this book but also for your work in general?
Chiao: I didn’t use too much for this project besides the vague nostalgia of the books I grew up on. I knew this wasn’t about reading a book front to back like adults do. It’s more of a journey. I knew whatever Daniel was coming up with probably wasn’t going to be a standard children’s book, and I didn’t want to have that gut feeling where I’d be thinking, well, that’s not how it’s done. I also felt that if I looked at a stack of children’s books now, it would influence me too much in a way that isn’t authentic to my style, which is kind of how I handle life, too.
I don’t like looking at too many artists or illustrators because I don’t want to inadvertently copy what they’re doing. A lot of my work is inspired through film and music and the world around. If a song I like has a strong emotion in it, I try to go off that feeling. I want to portray that in my illustrations. My biggest inspiration, I think, is the artistic process itself. I like making things, so how I feel while I’m making it, that’s what translates into the drawing.
Rumpus: I was sharing your work with a writer friend, and she remarked on how every image felt like being dropped into the middle of a story. When you create your own art, does it stem from a larger narrative playing out in your mind?
Chiao: I think I’m very lucky that there’s a storytelling aspect people can connect with, because that isn’t done on purpose. Images show up in my head. Then there’s a queue in my brain of what drawings I’m going to do next, and they stack up until I can get them out. A lot of times, it’s because I love the materials I use, which are alcohol-based markers and pens. I’m dabbling a bit with watercolor now. I know my tools well though. So I’ll think, “Oh, I wonder if I can make colors a certain way,” or “I want to draw this rounder shape,” and it’s just purely selfish. It’s the idea of, oh, I really want to draw a certain shape or certain lighting, or maybe sometimes when things are chaotic, I want to draw one point perspective interiors, because grids and perspective have rules.
Rumpus: It makes so much sense to me that during the pandemic, everyone found your work. The sentiments that I either read in your captions or find in your images signal that here is an artist who really has her finger on the pulse of what we’re all going through.
Chiao: It’s a little sad because I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
I think because I’ve had mental illnesses for a very long time; it’s not something I’m actively fighting against anymore. A lot of my work is about exploring what it’s like to live with it. There are still good days and then you’re having a bad day, and they’re both equally right. The little blob creature I draw that a lot of people seem to like is mostly anxiety. It’s a mix of things, but it used to be within the figure’s body impacting it. Now it hangs around in the house like a cat as a companion. People have interpreted it 100 different ways. I don’t actually know what’s right, because I’m not thinking too hard about what the drawing means. I do a drawing a week. So I’m glad people are finding meaning in it because sometimes I just want to draw a grid. I’ll put up a drawing that was done purely for technical reasons, and people will comment, “Oh my God, I feel this.” And I’m so curious: What are you feeling?
Rumpus: That’s part of what’s beautiful about your work. You leave space for the viewer to fill it with what they need. I noticed in 24 Minutes to Bedtime that there are multiple pages with illustrations and no words. In the beginning there’s an empty landscape, then the frame of the house being built, which I really only appreciated after I’d gotten to the last pages where you see the decay of the house. It was such a poignant way to show that this is all the time we have and it’s so fleeting. Was having these images without text part of the plan from the beginning?
Chiao: That was all Daniel [Kwan]. You just described exactly what he wanted people to feel. I’m so glad that came across because at first we knew we wanted the beginning scenes of the field and then the house showing up, but I did question the ending because I thought it looks like they’ve all died. We decided to stick with it though, because the story is talking about the passage of time. Even though the parents are so stressed and so tired, they recognize that this is all the time we get. Even if in the moment it doesn’t seem like the best thing ever, we have to appreciate this time.
I didn’t exactly have “this is all the time we get” in my mind before this project, but I had a similar thought in my work about “maybe this is all there is.” It’s the idea that so many of us are waiting for things to work out, for the next big experience or memory to define life by, but maybe life is really just about appreciating the day-to-day ups and downs that make up the majority of our lives. Stuff that seems simple now may carry a lot of nostalgia later, and I think the best we can do is to be grateful that we get to experience it all.
Daniel came at it from a film perspective of having opening shots and closing shots, and the text that comes in like credits. So it’s also been interesting working on a book with someone who normally does movies, because the vision is not what we’re used to seeing in books.
Rumpus: It feels full circle that you aren’t influenced necessarily by specific illustrators, but by film and by music. This partnership between the two of you seems like such a great fit for that reason as well.
Chiao: I still can’t believe it happened. I’m glad it’s done but I’m so appreciative of the opportunity because I don’t regularly freelance, which has been good and bad. It’s like a rubber band. It was stretched out when I was working for other people. Now I purely do only what I want to do. With freelance, I have to give up a little bit of control, but this was one of the first times genuinely working with another creative person that has expanded my idea of what good work is and how I want to work.
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Self-portrait by author
Your Pretty Much Pop A-Team Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss the original 1883 freaky children’s story by Carlo Collodi and consider the recent rush of film versions, from a new Disney/Robert Zemikis CGI take to Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion passion project to a heavily costumed Italian version by Matteo Garrone, which is the second to feature Oscar winner Roberto Benigni in a lead role. Benigni’s previous try was a 2002 version that is the most true to the beats of the original story and maybe because of this has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Why do people keep remaking this story, and how has the original moral of “be a good boy and obey” changed over the years?
Read the original story. Some articles going through the film versions include:
Follow us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.
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Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.
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