Wallace Edwards’ award-winning children’s books usually start with an idea. For Woodrow at Sea, the idea was simple.
"A cat in a boat," he laughs. "Of course, pretty soon that changed to an elephant in a boat."
"Because I like elephants. And with those ears and a trunk, an elephant has more of a physical reaction you can read on the page."
Since Woodrow at Sea is a book without words, reading the physical shenanigans of an elephant in a boat becomes crucially important.
Wordless picture books are a new frontier for Wallace Edwards, who has published a dozen books in 15 years, winning most of Canada’s top children’s book prizes for his beautifully illustrated stories.
Books without words put more pressure on the artist, but they open the door to children who are not yet able to read. Very young children can "read" these books independently, without relying on adults, often discovering their own story within the pictures that is more imaginative than anything a writer could conjure. Not only are wordless books a workout for the imagination, they help develop vocabulary and language skills as the child learns to label objects in the illustrations and articulate the story they see. They kickstart in pre-readers a lifelong love of books, but older kids — and adults, too — enjoy them because the depth and complexity of the paintings stimulates thinking and imagination in a way that a fully told verbal story may not.
Wallace resists theorizing. "If you are comfortable with an elephant in a boat and can suspend your disbelief, well, this book is for you."
Woodrow at Sea started out as a book with minimal text until his publisher at Pajama Press suggested eliminating words altogether.
"I did it as an experiment, and saw that she was right. It works."
Wallace started, as he always does, with sketches. He develops the beginning and the end, then he draws a circle to connect the two and maps out the points along the circle where the action happens. Then he divides that into the 26 pages of the book. For Woodrow at Sea, there was one more stage: each page was then divided into panels.
"This book is more like a graphic novel — a graphic novel for preschoolers," he says. "Another experiment for me."
Wallace describes the narrative arc of this latest book as the Odyssey, much distilled. "It’s a very simple version of the hero’s tale, where my elephant protagonist sets off on an adventure, meets a fellow traveller, and finds himself in a situation where each one saves the other."
Only the elephant has a name, which appears in the title, the only text in the book. Sometimes Wallace relies on his passel of nieces and nephews for the names of his characters, but not this time. He was working on the book, listening to an Ideas program on CBC about Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States.
"I liked the pun of Woodrow for an elephant that’s in a wooden boat, rowing."
The mouse, alas, has no name, although one suspects he will eventually have as many names as the children who read the story. Wallace’s original idea was that the mouse would be king of an island that Woodrow bumps up against.
"That’s how I work. My stories don’t spring fully formed as from the head of Zerus. I tend to start with a fairly complex story, then drop out elements until the story is down to its very basics. An elephant in a boat. A mouse. A dilemma."
On the Canada Council website, Wallace is described as "curious and witty, sophisticated and highly original in approach" and his children’s books as "visually pleasing as well as mentally stimulating." That’s it, in a nutshell.
Wallace graduated from the Ontario College of Art and moved to Yarker, where he produced his first book, Alphabeasts. It took him a while to find a publisher, but eventually KidsCan took him on.
"The first printing sold out in a month, the second in two months, the third in three months. It was my first book, so I didn’t know these things worked, I thought maybe that was normal. I remember my agent saying, ‘Don’t get used to this!’"
Alphabeasts won the 2002 GG and the 2003 Children’s Choices Award from the International Reading Association. It was profiled in 1,550 American newspapers as part of an Associated Press "Back to School Round-up."
The accolades kept coming. His second book, Monkey Business, released in 2003, won the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award, the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator’s Award for best children’s picture book in Canada, and the Great Book Award from the Canadian Toy Testing Council. The nominations and awards kept coming as he released Mixed Beasts (2005), The Extinct Files (2006), The Painted Circus (2007), The Cat’s Pajamas (2010) and on through What is Peace? released last year in time for Remembrance Day. In just eight months, What is Peace? is already in its third printing.
Over the course of his career, Wallace has worked with Canada’s largest and smallest children’s book publishers — KidsCan, Scholastic, Orca and Pajama Press, which released Woodrow at Sea this month.
"Pajama Press does a lot of books for younger readers and they are very good at it," Wallace says. Woodrow at Sea is a small book for small hands, just 8-by-8 inches square. "It is beautifully designed and has a soft, padded cover — I love the feel of it."
But Wallace is not sitting around basking in the satisfactions of his new book.
"I always have other ideas on the go, several projects half done. Children’s books are short, so people tend to think they don’t take long, but, really, a lot of them take years of piddling around. Some of those ideas will happen, some won’t."
His next book, due out in the fall of 2018 from Scholastic, has no title as yet, but the drawings are well on their way. This one has words: it’s the story of an alien from outer space who crashes to Earth and is helped by a little rhinoceros.
"I’ve taken a liking to chunky little animals in shorts," he laughs.
Merilyn Simonds has a complete collection of Wallace Edwards books for her own enjoyment and is busy buying more Wallace titles for the children on her holiday gift list.
The Kingston Whig-Standard 2017 ©