Minnesota seems to have it all, including a wide and talented array of children’s book authors and illustrators.
Mary Casanova, Jennifer Bell, Carey McKeon Pearson and Patti Nero Kivestu don’t appear to have a lot in common; Casanova is a veteran in the publishing world with 19 titles, Bell has recently broken into the children’s illustrating scene, and Pearson and Kivestu set out to tell a mostly-true story of hope and friendship.
But they do have one thing in common/ they are Minnesotan. And while that means something different to each, they all credit their surroundings for influencing their work.
Mary Casanova
a blonde, fair-skinned gymnast whose appearance is remarkably similar to that of Casanova’s fictional character, McKenna Brooks, also known as the 2012 American Girl Doll of the Year. She tells Casanova about her elbow fracture last fall and her subsequent fight to get back in the gym.
This is a storyline Casanova is familiar with. Just as McKenna conquers her difficulty with reading, she falls on a balance beam dismount and hears a crack. In the series’ second book, McKenna, Ready to Fly, McKenna uses the same skills that helped her to overcome her reading issues to come back from her broken leg and make the Level 4 competitive gymnastics team, learning some beneficial lessons about friendship along the way.
The McKenna series isn’t Casanova’s first project for American Girl; she also wrote Jess, the companion book for the 2006 Girl of the Year, about a girl who explores the jungles of Belize with her researcher-parents, and Chrissa and Chrissa Stands Strong, about a 10-year-old girl who moves from Iowa to Minnesota and faces bullying at school.
“It always starts with a phone call and somebody says ‘are you interested in writing this next project?’ and my answer is always yes. I’m really excited that first day because I’m going to be able to do a couple of books and it’s going to come with a doll and all sorts of [accompanying] products,” Casanova says.
The process of writing an American Girl “Doll of the Year” book is very different from her normal process. Instead of two years or more from the initial idea to the book being in readers’ hands, she had only six months to research and write both books for the McKenna series. Casanova says it’s “not a task for a novice” but enjoys the challenge of working under a tight deadline. “For one day I’m super excited, and the next day it sinks in that … I have to do it in a pretty short amount of time. I usually go into a little bit of a panic, like ‘Oh my gosh, why did I think I wanted to do this?’”
Not all of Casanova’s stories are written under a tight deadline. “I was in New York City visiting with editors and the night before my meeting I woke up at midnight with these words in my head/ ‘The day Dirk Yeller came to town the wind curled its lip, cattle quit lowing and tumbleweeds stopped tumbling along.’ I thought ‘I don’t usually get up to write things down in the middle of the night because I work really hard at sleeping.’ [But] I [decided] to get up and write that down, and I’m so glad I did. I went into the bathroom so I wouldn’t wake up my husband and wrote it down on toilet paper.”
The opening lines of The Day Dirk Yeller Came to Town seemed to come to her out of the blue, yet not a word has changed from her toilet paper-scribbling. “I thought ‘okay just go back to sleep; it will probably sound really silly in the morning.’ [But] in the morning I looked at the words and went ‘wow, I actually kind of like that, and I think I know the whole story.’” Most of Casanova’s stories come through research, which is why this experience was so unusual.
On the road
Casanova credits her relaxed, northern Minnesota lifestyle for influencing her writing, but there’s more to her days than just writing. Research for her books has taken her to faraway places such as Norway and Belize, and most recently, for researching the setting of the McKenna series, to Seattle.
“I go to that location and try to soak in everything that I can, because I know I’m going to need all of that information for story material.” Casanova even used her own misfortune of walking into a path of fire ants for Jess. “I have to go there and experience it so that you would believe it when you’re reading [the story].”
When a new book is released, most of her days are spent traveling the country (which Casanova says she never saw coming), speaking to young fans about the stories behind her books’ characters, and more importantly, the story behind her own writing.
Speaking to a group of young readers gathered at the Roseville Barnes & Noble, Casanova makes a confession/ “I didn’t like reading when I was younger.” A true Minnesota girl, Casanova says reading competed with her outdoor time. Her love of writing came during high school as a way of being heard in a camp-like home as one of 10 children.
McKenna’s story resonated with Casanova because she also struggled with reading in school before becoming a bookworm later in life. “I was a pretty good student in elementary school and it was baffling to me that I could go to the library, check out books, but not be able to finish every book that I checked out like some of my friends could.”
Today, Casanova writes for the reader she was. “I’m the kind of reader where the author has to work extra hard to keep my attention and keep my turning those pages. When I finish a book it’s because I loved it.”
With 19 published children’s books and nearly a dozen more in the pipeline, Casanova is still terrified and delighted by writing. “I have to tell myself to take a risk, jump in, and do the work. It’s kind of a magical, mysterious process.”
Jennifer Bell
Jennifer Bell is grateful she took the plunge. Two years ago, she left her job as a holiday giftware product designer to pursue her dream of being a children’s book illustrator.
“I left my job and I wasn’t sure. It’s scary to jump into working on your own and not having a consistent income. Right after I left my job I started illustrating my first book, and that sealed the deal for me that I had made the right decision.”
While Bell’s environment—she’s only a short walk away from Lake Harriet in Minneapolis—is on the opposite side of the spectrum from Mary Casanova’s back woods, she’s nevertheless influenced by her Minnesota surroundings. “I take a lot of walks. It’s a nice excuse to put some daytime clothes on and get some fresh air.” She jokes that Minnesota winters force her to be more productive. “The cold keeps me inside more.” Elements of Minnesota are also evident in her illustrations; most of her portfolio to date is of “cute animal characters.”
Despite her initial nerves, Bell is enjoying every minute of her work. She reaches into her canvas bag and eagerly pulls out the proofs of her latest project, When a Dad says “I Love You” by Douglass Wood, due to be released next spring. Bell says nothing is as exciting as “getting to hold the book with the glitter all over the cover.”
Her excitement is justified. Before she began illustrating children’s books such as the popular Stella Batts series—and discovered firsthand the long hours that go into research and preliminary sketches—Bell did freelance work as a greeting card designer. “I used to do a lot of greeting card work and those are just short and fast, and pretty immediate.” Bell says.
She credits her previous career as a product designer for her rise to success in the competitive children’s book market. “That job helped me shape my style and taught me what was marketable,” Bell says. The experience appears to have paid off, too. “There’s usually one illustration that they can pinpoint, for whatever reason, that they just want the whole book to have that feel, so that’s usually where it all starts for me.”
Bell sketches each illustration by hand, then scans in the sketches and uses Photoshop to color each one digitally. She enjoys the flexibility that her hybrid traditional/digital method affords. “It makes it much easier to change colors without having to scrap the whole illustration.”
Although Bell usually works independently in her Minneapolis home, she gets plenty of advice from her 11-year-old son. “He has a lot of interesting suggestions, especially when I’m working on books with actual children. He has a lot of good insight on what characters should be wearing.” But even though Bell finds every day of her work exciting, it’s still not “cool” enough for her tween. “He’s not so interested in what I’m working on these days. I think I’d have to be a helicopter pilot for him to think what I did was cool.”
Bell doesn’t write her own stories—not yet at least. “I think I could also be working on my own stories, but I haven’t had the time to even think about taking that on.”
Carey McKeon Pearson & Patti Nero Kivestu
When Carey McKeon Pearson visited her daughter, Colleen, at Texas Christian University, she was expecting a show dog to come bounding out the door from the description Colleen had given her.
Instead, she was greeted by a rescued one-year-old Boston Terrier who Pearson described as “homely.”
Rags, now seven (that’s her estimated age—Colleen would prefer to stop the clock at age three forever), perches on the couch, peering at the door every few minutes, knowing this is the time of day when Colleen will come through the door and release her from “doggy daycare” at Pearson’s home.
“She’s so athletic,” Pearson recalls her daughter telling her over the phone but it took her getting to know Rags to realize that all the traits Colleen had attributed to this unassuming dog—athletic, intelligent, and loyal, to name a few—were because of her inner beauty, not her superior heritage.
Pearson and her long-time friend Patti Nero Kivestu realized they had a great story on their hands and one that kids who feel lost and alone—just like Rags did in the west Texas desert—can relate to. Rags to Riches/ A Dog’s Tale of Hope and Friendship is a true story, with a little “creative conjecture” about the Rags’ adventures as a stray. They would sit down together most afternoons, with a cup of coffee for Kivestu and hot chocolate for Pearson, and build on their own friendship while writing about the same.
The pair had a strong vision for what their completed book would look like, and clung to that vision throughout the editing and publishing process, even having a debate with their editor over the word “caterwauling.”
They wanted to create a children’s book like the classics they read to their own children. “We wanted a classic look, like Make Way for Ducklings. So many of the kids’ books today look almost gimmicky,” Kivestu says. Pearson added that the feel of the language was as important to them as the story they were writing.
It’s fitting that they wrote a story about finding a best friend, because Pearson and Kivestu have the same in one another. •
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Claire Walling is currently a student at Hamline University, studying communications.
