ShareThisBy KAREN MACPHERSON
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Years ago, when author/artist David Wiesner was in art school, a teacher urged him to be open to "mental flotsam" _ those random thoughts that float around your head and seem unconnected and unimportant.
Wiesner's teacher believed that "mental flotsam" was a vital part of the creative process, leading artists to produce work they never could if they followed a more conventional path.
Over the years Wiesner has paid attention to his "mental flotsam," which includes some wild and recurring images of fish, pigs and oversized vegetables floating over landscapes. Those images, in turn, have fueled his picture books, which include two Caldecott Medal-winning books _ "Tuesday" and "The Three Pigs" _ and two Caldecott Honor books _ "Free Fall" and "Sector 7."
Now the ever-innovative Wiesner has taken the idea one step further. In his latest picture book, appropriately titled "Flotsam" (Clarion, $17), Wiesner explores what happens when a boy finds some actual flotsam _ an old camera _ washed up on the beach.
Inside the camera is a role of film. And when the boy has it developed he discovers worlds within worlds involving both humans and sea creatures. When the wordless "Flotsam" ends, the boy's focus _ his lens on the world _ has been forever changed, just as the lens in the eye of the fish on the book's cover suggests it will.
As always, Wiesner's art mixes whimsy with masterfully created images. And, as he has done in previous books, Wiesner teasingly plays with the reader's sense of perspective and scale. Some of the two-page spreads, for example, show full-size fish and other denizens of the ocean; other spreads focus on the boy's actions and contain a number of smaller images. As a result, the reader's focus constantly shifts, creating a narrative that is both thought-provoking and entertaining.
The reader, mirroring the young narrator, is "making connections across time and space," Wiesner said in a recent speech to participants in the Association for Library Service to Children's 2006 Institute. One of the book's big questions _ who is taking most of the pictures _ isn't answered, Wiesner added.
"It's up to the reader to decide," he said.
Wiesner said he began working on "Flotsam" several years ago "when I began seeing an image _ literally _ of flotsam.
"I grew up in New Jersey ... and my family would 'go down to the shore,' as we called it, for a couple of weeks each summer," Wiesner said. He added that he still has a vivid image of a dead puffer fish he once found washed up on the shore. Looking at it, Wiesner remembers thinking it was both "eeewww" and " cool."
That puffer fish shows up alive and well in "Flotsam" as a fish-balloon airlifting some other fish out of the ocean. Other parts of "Flotsam" reflect other Wiesner fascinations, including UFOs (there's a hilarious illustration of ocean-dwelling aliens) and giant bugs.
Wiesner also has long been interested in pictures showing other pictures within them, which in turn show other pictures within them and so on. This becomes a major narrative device in "Flotsam" as the boy uses a magnifying glass and then a microscope to see photos within the photo he is holding in his hand. Through that one photo, he can travel back decades, to the time when the camera was new.
This device was a piece of Wiesner's own "mental flotsam," he said, "that clearly has been waiting for a place to go."
Meanwhile, the young narrator is similar to others in Wiesner's books _ "a curious kid, inquisitive," Wiesner said. "That seems to be the kind of kid I write about." (He actually looks a bit like the photo of a young Wiesner featured on the book's back flap.)
Wiesner, meanwhile, is amused by his obsession with drawing fish.
"I don't even own fish," he said. "It's not really logical. I just like drawing fish."
NOTE: "Flotsam" is aimed at ages 4 to 8, but older children and adults could really enjoy it as well.
(Karen MacPherson, a children's librarian at the Takoma Park, Md., Library, writes this column weekly for Scripps Howard News Service.)
