The Storytellers Story

Mike Boldt brings little girls with tiger tails to life. And stubborn frogs, and dinosaurs, and numbers and letters. Mike is an award-winning Canadian author & illustrator who has written or illustrated (or both) over 15 award-winning children's books, including "A Tiger Tail", "Letters vs. Numbers," "Colors vs. Shapes", and "I Don't Want to Be A Frog!" Leafing through the pages of his books, readers young and old are drawn into the narrative: characterized letters compete with characterized numbers to grab the spotlight of the story; Little Jack Horner rocks out, live from the corner; or little Anya tries to figure out what to do when she wakes up on the first day of school, having grown a tiger tail overnight. You can meet some of his characters, and buy some of his books here.

Visiting his studio in early July, Mike gave me a glimpse into the process of bringing an imagined character to life on the pages of a storybook. It's a process that can take years from the first pencil sketches roughly drawn on a sketchpad, to the full-color children's book that you might find at the local library, or bookstore. Along the way, the story and the characters might change such that the end a little girl who began as a princess is reimagined as an "ordinary" girl next door; the names of the characters might change, and the villains might be recast -- so that the story you read to your children when you tuck them into bed is remarkably different from the narrative that was first imagined in the mind of the author.





Technology has no small hand in the craft of an illustrator. Where pen and ink may have been used once upon a time to capture the endless palette of colors on the page of a storybook, advanced hardware and software are now the tools of the trade. Changing the tint, adjusting the colors -- it's all done through sophisticated computer work. And it's done so well. Like any good illustrator, the genius of Mike's work is found in the attention to detail, the vividness of the colors, the way that the pictures beg you to look, just a little longer. Simply by looking at the illustrations on the page, you almost hear Frog bellowing his protest against being a frog; you smell the manure in Farmer Burrows' field; you empathize with little Anya when she doesn't want to go to school with a Tiger tail in tow. That's the joy of a well-illustrated Children's book.

Good art, and good stories invite us not just to see what's on the page, but to imagine what isn't on the page. Mike shared with me that he is often asked by children (and adults!) to fill in the gaps that his stories create. Referencing one of his earlier books, "The Gophers in Farmer Burrows' Fields", in which a family of gophers creates havoc for an unsuspecting farmer by rearranging his farming machinery , Mike is often asked how the gophers managed to pull off their hijinks. It's a fair question, in one sense; a rational mind wonders how small critters such as gophers can stack tractors, one on top of the other! It's a question Mike won't answer -- at least not directly. "How do you think they did it?" is his standard reply -- a reply that I suspect is tied to the very purpose of what it means to write and illustrate. Good stories spark our imagination. They make us wonder. They make us ask questions, and invent, and create in our own mind.

Sadly, it's an art form that we may be losing. Mike made the point that we are less and less invested in telling new stories, or in telling stories that demand us to use our imagination. We read stories, he says, that give us the answers, that fill in all the blanks. Movies -- another form of storytelling -- often reuse and recycle the same franchise rather than creating a set of characters and stories that are brand-new. Something is lost along the way.

We need stories. Stories -- whether the children's stories that we read before bed, or the novels that we read while lounging on the beach -- help us to make sense of the world around us. Stories spark our imagination about who are are, who we ought to be, and what our place in the world really is. Good stories invite us to envision what truth, morality, and beauty look like when lived out. One of the pieces of advice that Mike has picked up over the years is that good stories can't be preachy. They may have a moral message -- in fact, they often do -- but a preachy story is one that, for lack of imagination, must spell out the point for its readers. Good authors find ways not to do that; rather, through imagery, through illustrations, through conflict and resolution, they help us wrestle with what is virtuous, what is beautiful, what is truthful.
Some may be skeptical of the link between imagination and truth, or imagination and morality. After all, read the wrong way, that may sound as though we are suggesting that such things are for us to invent. That's not the case -- to imagine truth or morality doesn't necessarily mean that we are defining them on our own terms. We are instead saying that stories help us picture what these transcendent values might look like when they are played out. When Anya wakes up on the first day of school with a tiger tail, we the reader get to wonder about values such as diversity, acceptance, and what it means to be created as unique people. I noticed that one of the "critical" reviews (and there aren't many) on Amazon complained that although the book had  "...Great illustrations [it] leaves the reader to create a moral or conclusion." In other words, this reader was "disappointed" (their words) because the story wasn't preachy -- it left the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. And that is the point! The joy of reading a children's book (or any book, for that matter) is that the author shouldn't tell us at the end the conclusions we ought to draw; the joy of the story is that we get to put the pieces together. Mike was quick to point out that stories aren't directionless; they must have a direction, a point to it all. "It's a balancing act," he explained. "While not being preachy, [the story] still needs to have a strong direction and be worth remembering, or reading it will feel like you just read nothing at all." In other words, the power of story is found in its ability to imagine truth and beauty, lived out. The author wants to spark conversation with ourselves, with others, and as a broader culture, conversations that become formative to the reader.

The Christian story is chock-full of stories that do the same thing. When Nathan wanted to deliver a moral message to David, what did he do? He didn't cite the relevant portions of scripture to David. Neither did he tell a story that concluded with a spelled-out moral imperative. He told a story. A story that forced David to imagine what morality looked like when lived out. It was only when David had imagined what that morality looked like that the message came home to himself. That's the power of a good story. Or consider how much of Jesus' teaching began with, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like..." followed by a story - a story that invited the listener to imagine what life looks like under the reign of Jesus. In fact, it's no small thing that scripture itself is a narrative all on its own -- a narrative that invites us to see how things are, and how they ought to be, and how they might be so.

J.R.R. Tolkein, the well-loved British author of the mid-20th century wrote an essay entitled "On Fairy Stories." In it, he goes through great lengths to make the case that we need "Fairy Stories" (a genre he is careful to define). Perhaps most compelling in this essay is the way that he argues for the place of imaginative stories as an echo of the Christian story. He writes,

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel if any specially beautiful fairy story were found to be primarily true, its narrative to be history...The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind, but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite), high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men -- and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused."

Tolkein's point is that Fairy Tales (and, I would add, many other genres of good literature) are reflections of the greatest story. The joy and the beauty of a good children's book are found, in other words, in the way that through the palette of the color wheel, the words on the page, the characters that mirror ourselves, the conflict that holds the story in tension, the pathos of the characters, be they frogs, girls with tiger tails, or lifelike letters, number, colors, and shapes -- all these come together to help us imagine the true and greatest story.