In-depth Written Interview
with Allen Say
Allen Say, interviewed from his studio in Portland, Orgeon, on July 14, 2012.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You were born in 1937 in Yokohama, Japan. How do you reflect upon your earliest years?
ALLEN SAY: I was eight when WWII ended. Like the divorce of your parents, war scars you for life.
TEACHINGBOOKS: As a young boy you moved in with your grandmother, and then at age 12 moved into your own apartment. What would you like to share about that experience and early independence?
ALLEN SAY: I was a boy in his tree house in which no one told me when to eat or go to bed; I could wander around the biggest city in the world day or night. Japan was a very safe country. Speaking of Tokyo in Drawing From Memory, I say that I was free in a safe city. I've never felt that in any American city.
TEACHINGBOOKS: As a young teenager, you sought out an apprenticeship with one of Japan's premiere cartoonists—Noro Shinpei—and he ultimately became your mentor. What inspired you to ask for his guidance, and how do your reflect upon the initiative this took?
ALLEN SAY: I learned early that no one was going to help me to become an artist —the only thing I wanted to be. My father's unbending disapproval of my ambition told me I was on my own, that I had to take charge of my own life, and the divorce of my parents gave me a big opening. (Divorces were almost unheard of in Japan at that time.) It was like a chess game: I had to make the moves. I went looking for a master, or so I thought at the time. I've said this in several interviews and I'll say it here: When I grew up, I realized that the real reason for my search had been an attempt to replace my father with a man whom I could love and admire. I was very lucky.
TEACHINGBOOKS: At 16 you moved to America. What was that transition like? What is a frightful memory from that time? And what do you recall was particularly exciting?
ALLEN SAY: It was like seeing the CinemaScope for the first time, with no subtitles. I felt like a vegetarian suddenly turning into a heavy meat eater. It was scary to know that I could so easily become homeless in the land of freedom and opportunity. It was exciting to be asked by girls to go dancing, which had never happened to me in Japan. Sadly, I couldn't dance and never learned.
TEACHINGBOOKS: When you were young and lived at home, you read and drew a lot—so much so that your father discouraged it. When you meet people today who are discouraged to do something that they love, do you have any advice for them?
ALLEN SAY: It's like being in love with someone of whom your parents, relatives, and friends disapprove. Do it secretly.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You studied cartoons with Noro Shinpei, but up until your 2011 book Drawing from Memory, you hadn't illustrated any graphic panels or cartoon-like images in your books. Why not?
ALLEN SAY: I got sidetracked.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Your careers have included architecture, photography, and for the past few decades, writing and illustrating children's books. Does it surprise you that you have made your living and lived as an artist? Are there other things you can imagine having done or still doing?
ALLEN SAY: Architecture was a five-year program in college, and I took it to stay out the U.S. Army, but I got drafted anyway in my second year.
I'm amazed that I've been able to make a living as an artist—just what my parents said was impossible.
I wish I had the talent to be a caricaturist—what fun it would be to skewer politicians with my pen!
TEACHINGBOOKS: Your photography career began in the U.S. Army when you contributed to the Stars and Stripes newspaper. How might you suppose photojournalism has impacted your work as a book illustrator?
ALLEN SAY: Photography taught me something about lighting; drawing and painting taught me to see slowly. Photography, the most predatory of the arts, trained me to see fast, which is only skimming. Your success as a photographer largely depends on intuition and luck: you shoot first and see later. I did that for twenty years—a mercenary with a camera—then went back to slow-seeing.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Your second book, Two Ways of Seeing, was a collection of photographs that illustrate an anthology of poetry. You once described your photography as a sketching tool. What does that mean?
ALLEN SAY: Instead of carrying a sketchbook and pencil, I take a camera and sneak up on interesting strangers, snap their pictures on the sly, and put them in my books.
TEACHINGBOOKS: The lighting and framing qualities of your picture book illustrations have a photographic quality. How would you describe the relationship between your photography work and your approach to painting?
ALLEN SAY: As I said, I learned something about lighting and fast-seeing from photography. The rest I had learned from drawing and painting. Photography was a branch off the tree of my art training—not the other way around, as some people seem to think.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Your picture books reveal much about Japanese architecture and gardens. Can you describe an example or two of that?
ALLEN SAY: I try to be accurate in what I depict, so I do research, which means stealing images from whatever I can. Lately, the online research machine has become so handy that I rarely have to leave my house. But many of my drawings are composites—a farmhouse from a book, a bridge from a magazine, and so on. For the cover of Erika-san, I stole the image outright from a photo I found in a book of Japanese villages, roof tile for roof tile. It was a street scene straight out of my childhood.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Many of your books are autobiographical, or inspired by direct memories of your childhood and Japanese culture. Please share a few examples of that.
ALLEN SAY: The Bicycle Man was the first story based on my childhood memory. The two American soldiers were GIs (U.S. Army soldiers), not Marines, but I didn't like the looks of the Army uniforms (olive drab Eisenhower jackets), so I changed them. Otherwise, the event happened pretty much the way I tell it.
The Boy In The Garden is based on an experience I had when I was five or six, so it had a gestation period of about sixty-five years—as long as Lao Tzu was said to have stayed in his mother's womb before coming out with white hair. My father was not as kind as he is depicted in the book, and I carried the hurt all these years. Writing the book has healed the wound.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Grandfather's Journey, winner of the 1994 Caldecott Medal, is an extremely personal book. Please share the backstory that inspired its creation.
ALLEN SAY: When working on a book, I almost always start with the art. Grandfather's Journey was an exception. The story came to me while I walked in a park in San Francisco, and I wrote it that afternoon. It's an experience I had only twice in my memory in which a complete story ran through my head like a speeded-up movie. It was a five-minute inspiration that took two years to illustrate.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You once said that you saw Grandfather's Journey as a family photo album, but that you didn't have the painting skill to create it as you wanted for many years. Please elaborate on what you meant by that.
ALLEN SAY: After I wrote the story in one afternoon—probably in a couple of hours, with accompanying sketches—I set it aside because I knew I wasn't up to it technically. That was in 1987, the year I decided to quit photography and work on picture books full-time. Three books later (The Lost Lake, El Chino, and Tree Of Cranes), in 1991, after four years of on-the-job-training, I felt ready to take on Grandfather.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Many of your books reveal a difference between cultures—such as Allison and Emma's Rug. Is there anything you would like to say about these books or this cultural theme?
ALLEN SAY: I didn't think about cultural themes in either one. When I was a small boy I fantasized that I had been adopted by the couple who pretended to be my parents, and that I had a real mother and father who were prevented from seeing me. Allison is probably a belated exploration of that fantasy.
Emma's Rug was supposed to be my response to that awful question: Where do you get your ideas? It didn't work.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Home of the Brave is particularly relevant in that it speaks to the traumatic experiences of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were forced into Japanese internment camps. Did creating this book provide any challenges that were different from creating your other books?
ALLEN SAY: I felt presumptuous in writing about an interment camp in the United States because my experience of it was secondhand. But as a boy I had lived in a more dangerous place: wartime Japan. I felt I could say something about the hostile world from a child's point of view. The inspiration for the story came from Dorothea Lange's photograph of the Mochida family, which I first saw at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. It shows the large family just before being bused to an interment camp. (Imagine the photographer, and maybe her assistant, some magazine people herding and lining up the unfortunate family for a photo shoot before letting them get on the bus to the desert prison.) The expressions on two of the little sisters, Miki and Hiroko, brought back all the fears and bewilderment I'd felt as a boy during the war. I kidnapped the girls and put them in my story. When the book was published, three generations of the Mochida family came to the book launching at the Museum in L.A. Their approval of the book was the highest praise I received.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Drawing from Memory, a 2012 Seibert Honor, is an homage to your Sensei, as is your 1979 novel, The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice, but this time is told in a scrapbook/graphical form. What would you like to share about the making of Drawing from Memory?
ALLEN SAY: A few years after I wrote The Ink-keeper's Apprentice, I thought of doing a graphic version of it but censored myself. That would've been self-plagiarism. It is normal and acceptable for artists to steal from other artists, but to steal from themselves means they've stopped growing. Then about four years ago, Andrea Davis Pinkney from Scholastic asked my agent if I might be interested in the project. Here was an official sanction, an imprimatur. I said yes.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You have described your childhood self as a "little kamishibai man"—a visual storyteller. And your book Kamishibai Man, beautifully shows the feelings of both the storyteller and his audience. Does it seem surprising that you have spent the past twenty years writing stories?
ALLEN SAY: It amazes me that I've been able to make a living by telling stories in my second language. Until I was fifty I was a visual artist of one kind or other. Today I'm called an author, which makes me feel like an imposter.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please describe your illustration process. It looks like you often paint, but in Drawing from Memory, for example, you used a variety of media.
ALLEN SAY: I would have to write to book to try to explain how I work, and it wouldn't make any sense to anyone. There's no set procedure. What I do and what comes out of my efforts have all to do with my moods—and intuition, I hope. I just start doodling. I used to be a purist (didn't use white paint with watercolors; no cropping of photos), but not anymore. Now I use anything I feel like using. Except pastels—I can't stand the dry chalky scraping.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you get asked most about your work?
ALLEN SAY: There are two common questions: "Where you get your ideas?" and "Are any of your stories true?"
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell students?
ALLEN SAY: Read my books.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell teachers and librarians when you speak with them?
ALLEN SAY: Read my books.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck creating a picture or writing the manuscript of a book?
ALLEN SAY: I used to go fishing, but now I go for a walk or get on the exercise bike and try to keep my blood pressure down. I also read in bed.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Is there something else about your work that you want to share?
ALLEN SAY: My next book, The Favorite Daughter, will be published June 2013. By then I hope to finish the book about my first three years in America.
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