While waiting for John Scieszka’s presentation to begin, I fell into conversation with a couple of other artists who were there to speak about their projects, including Mahendra Singh, who has been creating a graphics novel version of “The Hunting of the Snark” and blogging about it.

It turns out that not only did Mahendra work for Gary Groth and Fantagraphics books at the same time as I was writing a series of Ethics columns for them, but he had also done illustrations for Sovereign Media’s Realms of Fantasy, and I had edited Science Fiction Age for more than eight years for the same company. So we had plenty to talk about, at the same time proving that six degrees of separation are really too many.

Then the program began, with society president Andrew Seller introducing John Scieszka with a few words and then this Youtube video.



Scieszka then explained that one reason he was so in love with Lewis Carroll was because he had grown up in the ’60s immersed in Mad magazine, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Loony Tunes. He told us that he got his Masters degree in fiction, which is a valuable thing to have because it “allows you to paint apartments.” He said that he ended up writing for kids because what he liked to do were “short funny pieces which you can sell nowhere—but in children’s books they live on that thing.”

When he started sending out his strange ideas for kids’ books, such as The Stinky Cheese Man, he moved from getting form rejections or boilerplate signed rejections to receiving notes which said, “Please don’t send us anything ever again.”

One of his bizarre ideas (from which his publisher recoiled) was to publish a pop-up book with one spread deliberately broken, so that you’d “pull Tab A and it would break off in your hand and nothing would happen.”

He presented a slideshow of Mary Blair’s concept sketches for the Disney film Alice in Wonderland and explained the difficult process of turning them into a coherent children’s picture book.

Scieszka was recently in Washington where he was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature—and he had the medal to prove it! He read for the Bushes from his book Knuckleheads, and autographed a copy for them “To my two favorite knuckleheads.” He figures he was lucky to get safely out of town before they read the inscription.

Once I picked up an autographed copy of his new book, I unfortunately had to move on to the appointment that got me into Manhattan Saturday in the first place, but I did enjoy the small taste I had of the Lewis Carroll Society.

You can find my full flickr stream from the event here.