San Francisco resident Lisa Brown is an illustrator, author, and cartoonist who teaches picture book writing and illustration at the California College of the Arts. Her work spans numerous genres, including parody and wry humor for adults; The Phantom Twin, a YA graphic novel; and a roster of picture books encompassing solo work and books she illustrated written by others, among them her husband Daniel Handler. Brown’s most recent picture book is The Moving Book, which she wrote and illustrated in the same vein as The Airport Book (2016) and The Hospital Book (2023). Her new work follows the multiracial family from these earlier books through multiple moves over the years, from apartments in a variety of buildings to houses of different styles—eventually one with a garden out back and a bedroom for Grandpa. PW spoke with Brown about her ongoing, multifaceted creative journey.
The Airport Book, The Hospital Book, and The Moving Book all deal with events that potentially trigger anxiety in children. What inspired you to focus on those experiences?
I like to find these in-between spaces to address situations that are in a sense universal—experiences that are not scary as well as those that can be traumatic for kids going through them for the first time. For The Airport Book, I thought about how my own kid, who is now 21, was obsessed with airports as a child, like a lot of kids. When I was writing, I tried to look at things that happen at an airport—so many people arriving from and going to different places in the world. So much in that book is about observation, both in general and from a kid’s point of view.
The Moving Book was a particularly personal one for me—I moved five times before I was seven—so I know well that moving can be scary.
In your solo projects, do words or images come first? And does both writing and illustrating a book present a very different challenge than illustrating the words of other authors?
It’s actually very similar. With my own projects, when I paginate the book, I start to separate the text into pieces, with particular attention to [providing] incentive for the reader to turn the page. And then when I begin to draw, I revise the text, editing out what the pictures are handling all by themselves. I am conscious of creating a relationship between word and image. In other writers’ books, of course, I can’t just edit the text! But most creators are open to collaboration. And of course, I occasionally illustrate my husband’s books, and he’s easy for me to boss around!
I have found that in the interplay of words and images in a picture book, kids read along with the “visual text” as the adults read aloud. They find things in the pictures that are different than the words in the text. So many things are happening in the illustrations that are not directly addressed in words, and kids see different things each time they read a book.
In my solo projects, words come first—with the caveat that the words are often preceded by one initial visual idea. For example, in the book Goldfish Ghost, a collaboration with Lemony Snicket I started drawing a fish floating on its back over a goldfish bowl, and the story followed from there.
What do you make of comparisons between your work and that of Richard Scarry?
I’ve never set out to write a Richard Scarry-like book and I don’t consider my books to be analogous to his—but he has loomed large in my appreciation of picture books. I am drawn to Scarry’s method of using lists of people and objects to tell a story from a child’s point of view—of creating a kind of treasure hunt based on what kids might see in the world, as well as what they might not see—the pickle car comes to mind—around them in various places.
And I am very interested in the kind of non-narrative observational work that Scarry did using animals to portray society. I am interested in doing something similar, portraying all different kinds of people in places where they might gather together—such as an airport or a hospital.
Given the genres and age levels that your work spans, where are you most at home as a book creator—and what are you working on currently?
I spend a lot of time thinking about picture books—especially since I teach about writing and illustrating them, so I suppose I’d say that is where I’m most comfortable. I’d like to do another book in the same series as The Airport Book, The Hospital Book, and The Moving Book. Like all picture book writers I’m chewing on many ideas at once and am hoping to move some of them from ideas to manuscript.
Right now, I am working on my second graphic novel, tentatively titled Ghost School, which is taking me a lot of time—I’m both drawing and writing it. Unlike The Phantom Twin, which falls somewhere between YA and middle grade, this one moves a little more firmly into middle-grade territory.
Looking ahead, besides more picture books, I’d like to do something that involves research, which I love, as a former history and literature major. I was obsessed with the research I did while writing The Phantom Twin, when I delved into the background of carnival sideshows during the early 1900s.
I have a very early concept of a book that involves my own family’s immigration story, perhaps for adults. But I never know who a book is for before I begin it—sometimes even as I am writing it! Where am I most at home? I guess I would say that I inhabit a lot of spaces, but at the heart of all of them is the relationship between word and image, and how folks of all ages can comfortably sit with both at the same time.
The Moving Book by Lisa Brown. Holiday House/Porter, $18.99 July 22 ISBN 978-0-8234-5718-2
