Adele Griffin's Blog - Posts Tagged "adele-griffin"
by Adele Griffin
May 5, 2010, 2:21 pm
Cute & Delicious
Eating Reading Preparing Animals
By Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown
"... if you love children's literature, you cannot kill animals just because they taste good on a bun. There's more than a bit of hypocrisy involved in urging children to empathize with pandas and polar bears and bunnies and ducks in books and at a distance and then feeding them hamburgers and sliced deli meats."
--The Horn Book Magazine, May-June 2010
As children's book authors and carnivorous hypocrites, our love of literature often leads us straight into the kitchen. Here, for your culinary edification, we have sifted through our recipe books, selected our favorite snuggly bedtime companions, and determined how best to eat them up.
Olivia by Ian Falconer, or "Lisa's Killer BLT." Olivia is young, tender and full of fun. We bet she'd make a yummy bacon, fired up with this season's best heirloom tomatoes and crisp romaine lettuce, on lightly toasted multi-grain bread. Save room for baby brother William!
Frog and Toad Are Friends, by Arnold Lobel. Frog and Toad are also best Together, à la Parisienne, lightly breaded, pan fried, and served with an onion cream sauce.
Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey. Calling all Bostonians! Here's how to eat locally: get ye down to the Commons and pick up a family of mallards. We recommend a glaze of orange zest, honey, coriander, and garlic. Roast until brown, and let rest 10 minutes before carving. It's just the right thing to do.
Click, Clack, Moo, by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin. Hmm, cows with electric blankets; presumably that amount of coddling also means they're grass fed. A perfect filet mignon calls for four minutes per each side, a garnish of black pepper, and a side of creamed spinach.
Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. A good rabbit stew starts with a young restless bunny. There might be more texture with the old bunny whispering hush, but our kitchen thinks she might be tough. The best rabbit stew includes bacon. Mmm, we smell a sequel.
May 5, 2010, 2:21 pm
Cute & Delicious
Eating Reading Preparing Animals
By Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown
"... if you love children's literature, you cannot kill animals just because they taste good on a bun. There's more than a bit of hypocrisy involved in urging children to empathize with pandas and polar bears and bunnies and ducks in books and at a distance and then feeding them hamburgers and sliced deli meats."
--The Horn Book Magazine, May-June 2010
As children's book authors and carnivorous hypocrites, our love of literature often leads us straight into the kitchen. Here, for your culinary edification, we have sifted through our recipe books, selected our favorite snuggly bedtime companions, and determined how best to eat them up.
Olivia by Ian Falconer, or "Lisa's Killer BLT." Olivia is young, tender and full of fun. We bet she'd make a yummy bacon, fired up with this season's best heirloom tomatoes and crisp romaine lettuce, on lightly toasted multi-grain bread. Save room for baby brother William!
Frog and Toad Are Friends, by Arnold Lobel. Frog and Toad are also best Together, à la Parisienne, lightly breaded, pan fried, and served with an onion cream sauce.
Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey. Calling all Bostonians! Here's how to eat locally: get ye down to the Commons and pick up a family of mallards. We recommend a glaze of orange zest, honey, coriander, and garlic. Roast until brown, and let rest 10 minutes before carving. It's just the right thing to do.
Click, Clack, Moo, by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin. Hmm, cows with electric blankets; presumably that amount of coddling also means they're grass fed. A perfect filet mignon calls for four minutes per each side, a garnish of black pepper, and a side of creamed spinach.
Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. A good rabbit stew starts with a young restless bunny. There might be more texture with the old bunny whispering hush, but our kitchen thinks she might be tough. The best rabbit stew includes bacon. Mmm, we smell a sequel.
The new novel Picture the Dead is a collaborative effort by Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown. The story, set in the aftermath of the Civil War, has regret, remorse, reconciliation, and romance as one young woman struggles to come to terms with those she's lost, and those who were left behind. This exclusive interview with the authors reveals how they came up with the story, and includes a ghostly encounter or two.
Little Willow: How did you two meet?
Lisa Brown: We went on a blind date set up by our agent. She is a very, very, wise woman. She said: "You will love each other, you should work together on something... Now, go!"
Adele Griffin: Then we went down this bizarre, wonderful ride called The Book of Humiliations, our retelling of the Salem Witch Trials, only set in a New England High School in present day. With extensive graphics and visual clues. Ambitious, unpublished, beloved.
Little Willow: For what it's worth, I would snatch that book up right away, as I'm fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials! Now, for Picture the Dead, which came first, the text or the illustrations? Adele, did you complete the manuscript and then have Lisa create the illustrations, or was it truly collaborative, page by page, step-by-step?
Lisa Brown: Neither, really. First came these incredible 19th century photographs that we found on the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Online archive. The nameless people in those old photos just reached out and grabbed us, like they were begging for their stories to be told. And then I became morbidly obsessed with the Andersonville prison camp, and then we were both salivating over this exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York about spirit photography, and then postmortem photos and mourning art; our various fascinations just grew and grew.
Adele Griffin: Yes, and also we'd re-inspire each other throughout. A musty, 19th century of some anonymous corpse. A necklace made of human hair. Remembering that part in Jane Eyre when the first Mrs. Rochester is dragging around at midnight, her fingernails scratching the corridor walls. We have a talent for spooking each other.
Little Willow: Who wrote the letters? I assume Lisa hand-lettered them, but did you write the text, Adele?
Adele Griffin: Nope, Lisa wrote the letters.
Lisa Brown: It was a reversal of our usual process, which was: Adele would go write and then hand a text document over to me, which I would edit - sometimes viciously - but the shape of the text was always hers to begin with. In this case, I wrote the letters and handed them over to her. And then she did the art! The handwriting in all of Will's letters to Jennie is Adele's.
Little Willow: It all looks very cool, and I like the fact that you switched roles for the letters. Lisa, do you sketch things out, or go directly to the computer? Both of you, which computer programs do you employ for writing and for illustration?
Lisa Brown: It really depends on the illustration. I often would work directly on the computer, tracing a photograph that I had imported into the program Adobe Illustrator. I typically use a wacom pen tablet instead of a mouse. But if I happened to be having a difficult time with a drawing, or if I was making a composite image from several different photographic sources, then I would print out the photos, trace over them by hand, refine the drawings with ye olde pencil and eraser and then scan them back in and digitally re-trace the drawings of the photos. Does that make sense? I have posted a little step by step, with images, on our blog, here.
Little Willow: Did the two of two ever disagree on how a character should look, or what should happen in the story? Did any plot point or character ever change?
Lisa Brown: People keep trying to get us to admit that we disagreed on things, but I really can't remember a time that we ever did. We are a strange duo, that way.
Adele Griffin: We are a peaceful duo. I think if we'd had to print out this book on a handheld press a la Bloomsbury, I'd still count it as a big win. Picture the Dead has always been a safe haven. I can unfailingly count on a note from Lisa to make me laugh or rev me up, and her creative process is very fluid and flexible. We were continuously veering in this or that direction throughout, moving the pieces. Never dull.
Lisa Brown: One character in particular who changed was Quincy, our hero. At first he was far more bookish and brainy, but he evolved to someone a bit rakish and snobby. Rather forbidding.
Little Willow: Do either of you work (or dabble) in photography?
Lisa Brown: I am the worst photographer known to man. I can't really figure out why. My 6 year old son is better than I am. In fact, he often approaches accidental experimental photography genius. Sigh.
Adele Griffin: He is strangely, perplexingly good. It's unnerving.
Little Willow: I think that Accidental Experimental Photography Genius should be the name of your next book. Or a band. What does a photo capture that words (text, speech) cannot? What does a photo fail to grasp or include?
Lisa Brown: Like any work of art, photography captures just one facet of the thing: nothing can be grasped in its entirety, really, no matter how many ways you try to get at it. I guess that's why artists keep going...they're trying to capture the essence of a thing, over and over and over.
Little Willow: Favorite illustrators, photographers, or other visual/fine artists?
Adele Griffin: All you, Lisa.
Lisa Brown: Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Julia Margaret Cameron, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Henry Darger, Marcel Dzama, Quentin Blake... do I need to stop?
Little Willow: No - Perhaps we should have a separate interview just about art and artists! Have either of you ever had a ghostly encounter? Do you believe in ghosts?
Lisa Brown: My feeling is that so many people, people who I've known and trusted, have had all sorts of encounters or experiences that they just can't explain. Ghosts? I don't know. But I do believe that there is plenty that human beings do not understand in this world, even in the 21st century. And perhaps we never will.
Adele Griffin: Sometimes a strong imprint feels like a ghost. Recently, I dreamed about my grandmother, who died last year, and in the dream it was her wedding to my grandfather, only I was there, too, and I really felt as if I'd seen her, laughing and gorgeously young in January 1947, with red lipstick and a pale flower in her hair.
Little Willow: Oh, that's beautiful, Adele. Would either or both of you care to list your ten favorite books of all time?
Lisa Brown: You will notice that most of these are children's books. I am generally Peter Pan with my favorites of all time.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
The Girl with Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright
Eloise by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight
Sarah's Room by Doris Orgel, illustrated by Maurice Sendak
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
Adele Griffin:
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Spears
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (well, I just read this last week, it might be grim for a fave)
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (standing the test of time since entry to this list in '80)
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lisa Brown: Oh, oh, oh, I forgot A Little Princess! That used to make me cry uncontrollably. OK, I admit it, still does. And Adele and I realized last year that we were both working on our own versions of the Turn of the Screw. Best ghost story, ever.
Little Willow: How did you two meet?
Lisa Brown: We went on a blind date set up by our agent. She is a very, very, wise woman. She said: "You will love each other, you should work together on something... Now, go!"
Adele Griffin: Then we went down this bizarre, wonderful ride called The Book of Humiliations, our retelling of the Salem Witch Trials, only set in a New England High School in present day. With extensive graphics and visual clues. Ambitious, unpublished, beloved.
Little Willow: For what it's worth, I would snatch that book up right away, as I'm fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials! Now, for Picture the Dead, which came first, the text or the illustrations? Adele, did you complete the manuscript and then have Lisa create the illustrations, or was it truly collaborative, page by page, step-by-step?
Lisa Brown: Neither, really. First came these incredible 19th century photographs that we found on the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Online archive. The nameless people in those old photos just reached out and grabbed us, like they were begging for their stories to be told. And then I became morbidly obsessed with the Andersonville prison camp, and then we were both salivating over this exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York about spirit photography, and then postmortem photos and mourning art; our various fascinations just grew and grew.
Adele Griffin: Yes, and also we'd re-inspire each other throughout. A musty, 19th century of some anonymous corpse. A necklace made of human hair. Remembering that part in Jane Eyre when the first Mrs. Rochester is dragging around at midnight, her fingernails scratching the corridor walls. We have a talent for spooking each other.
Little Willow: Who wrote the letters? I assume Lisa hand-lettered them, but did you write the text, Adele?
Adele Griffin: Nope, Lisa wrote the letters.
Lisa Brown: It was a reversal of our usual process, which was: Adele would go write and then hand a text document over to me, which I would edit - sometimes viciously - but the shape of the text was always hers to begin with. In this case, I wrote the letters and handed them over to her. And then she did the art! The handwriting in all of Will's letters to Jennie is Adele's.
Little Willow: It all looks very cool, and I like the fact that you switched roles for the letters. Lisa, do you sketch things out, or go directly to the computer? Both of you, which computer programs do you employ for writing and for illustration?
Lisa Brown: It really depends on the illustration. I often would work directly on the computer, tracing a photograph that I had imported into the program Adobe Illustrator. I typically use a wacom pen tablet instead of a mouse. But if I happened to be having a difficult time with a drawing, or if I was making a composite image from several different photographic sources, then I would print out the photos, trace over them by hand, refine the drawings with ye olde pencil and eraser and then scan them back in and digitally re-trace the drawings of the photos. Does that make sense? I have posted a little step by step, with images, on our blog, here.
Little Willow: Did the two of two ever disagree on how a character should look, or what should happen in the story? Did any plot point or character ever change?
Lisa Brown: People keep trying to get us to admit that we disagreed on things, but I really can't remember a time that we ever did. We are a strange duo, that way.
Adele Griffin: We are a peaceful duo. I think if we'd had to print out this book on a handheld press a la Bloomsbury, I'd still count it as a big win. Picture the Dead has always been a safe haven. I can unfailingly count on a note from Lisa to make me laugh or rev me up, and her creative process is very fluid and flexible. We were continuously veering in this or that direction throughout, moving the pieces. Never dull.
Lisa Brown: One character in particular who changed was Quincy, our hero. At first he was far more bookish and brainy, but he evolved to someone a bit rakish and snobby. Rather forbidding.
Little Willow: Do either of you work (or dabble) in photography?
Lisa Brown: I am the worst photographer known to man. I can't really figure out why. My 6 year old son is better than I am. In fact, he often approaches accidental experimental photography genius. Sigh.
Adele Griffin: He is strangely, perplexingly good. It's unnerving.
Little Willow: I think that Accidental Experimental Photography Genius should be the name of your next book. Or a band. What does a photo capture that words (text, speech) cannot? What does a photo fail to grasp or include?
Lisa Brown: Like any work of art, photography captures just one facet of the thing: nothing can be grasped in its entirety, really, no matter how many ways you try to get at it. I guess that's why artists keep going...they're trying to capture the essence of a thing, over and over and over.
Little Willow: Favorite illustrators, photographers, or other visual/fine artists?
Adele Griffin: All you, Lisa.
Lisa Brown: Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Julia Margaret Cameron, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Henry Darger, Marcel Dzama, Quentin Blake... do I need to stop?
Little Willow: No - Perhaps we should have a separate interview just about art and artists! Have either of you ever had a ghostly encounter? Do you believe in ghosts?
Lisa Brown: My feeling is that so many people, people who I've known and trusted, have had all sorts of encounters or experiences that they just can't explain. Ghosts? I don't know. But I do believe that there is plenty that human beings do not understand in this world, even in the 21st century. And perhaps we never will.
Adele Griffin: Sometimes a strong imprint feels like a ghost. Recently, I dreamed about my grandmother, who died last year, and in the dream it was her wedding to my grandfather, only I was there, too, and I really felt as if I'd seen her, laughing and gorgeously young in January 1947, with red lipstick and a pale flower in her hair.
Little Willow: Oh, that's beautiful, Adele. Would either or both of you care to list your ten favorite books of all time?
Lisa Brown: You will notice that most of these are children's books. I am generally Peter Pan with my favorites of all time.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
The Girl with Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright
Eloise by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight
Sarah's Room by Doris Orgel, illustrated by Maurice Sendak
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
Adele Griffin:
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Spears
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (well, I just read this last week, it might be grim for a fave)
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (standing the test of time since entry to this list in '80)
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lisa Brown: Oh, oh, oh, I forgot A Little Princess! That used to make me cry uncontrollably. OK, I admit it, still does. And Adele and I realized last year that we were both working on our own versions of the Turn of the Screw. Best ghost story, ever.
Hello, Everyone--
So my Vampire Island series has been repackaged and is coming out mid-month, and in honor of that, I'm doing a giveaway via my website.
Just let me know what you'd name your Island, and why. You can write me at http://www.adelegriffin.net
I'll put all entries into a draw, and the winner gets all three books in the series. Vampire Island, The Knaveheart's Curse, and V Is for Vampire.
It all ends on 07/07/10, at the stroke of midnight.
Looking forward to your imaginative answers!
Thanks for tuning in.
x Adele
So my Vampire Island series has been repackaged and is coming out mid-month, and in honor of that, I'm doing a giveaway via my website.
Just let me know what you'd name your Island, and why. You can write me at http://www.adelegriffin.net
I'll put all entries into a draw, and the winner gets all three books in the series. Vampire Island, The Knaveheart's Curse, and V Is for Vampire.
It all ends on 07/07/10, at the stroke of midnight.
Looking forward to your imaginative answers!
Thanks for tuning in.
x Adele
Aurora is pleased to have Lisa Brown and Adele Griffin, co-authors of Picture the Dead. Even though there something amazing about the first published work for each of them, Lisa and Adele admit that Picture the Dead is a big deal for them. They had collaborated on another project, The Book of Humiliations--a graphic novel of teen persecution and redemption that borrowed from the Salem Witch Trials.
"It was a really, cool, creepy book that we put aside to create our even cooler and creepier Picture the Dead. But the genesis of this idea—our heroine, some of the antagonists, a bit of the mood, came from this other project. So in a way, it’s been eight years in the making."
Adele told me that she loves how a young person's life can get so totally wrapped up in a book--to the point where nothing else matters. It's the reason she likes to write books for kids and teens.
"Pure book escape—that’s how I remember summer vacations, when I wasn’t scooping ice-cream and babysitting," she said. "So now I make up stories with the hope that they might fuel the escapism of someone else’s summer."
Lisa told me that, as a kid, she loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond "absolutely to death."
"To this day," she said, "I am completely and utterly obsessed with the Salem Witch Trials. I even took a course in college called “Witchcraft in Medieval Europe” just to feed my obsession. I aced it. And my crazy love for historical fiction persists. Just sped through Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry the Eighth and The Children’s Book by AS Byatt, about Victorian and Edwardian England up until WWI. Beautiful stuff."
While they were working on Picture the Dead, Adele and Lisa told me that they continuously referenced and plundered their memories for what it was like to be a teenager-- to be sixteen and in love, to be angry and yet powerless, to be frightened and alone. Then they had to make the leap to things they couldn't have known about-- living through the Civil War, the haunted house, 1865.
Those types of things took a lot of research and Lisa admitted, "Research for Picture the Dead was an endless point of fascination and digression for me. The Library of Congress was a wonderful resource. In fact, the book is completely over-researched, which was why we needed to design the website. To present all those tidbits we couldn't fit into the book."
"What person has helped you the most in your career?" I asked.
Adele answered, "Our first and only agent, Charlotte Sheedy. She is just an excellent, first-rate mentor, a champion and advocate for great stories."
"Here, here," Lisa responded.
Both of them feel that with the internet, it's easier than ever to keep a finger of the pulse of today's kids and what they want in terms of reading material.
"Kids give us so much access to their critiques, their picks and preferences on their blogs, through their reviews and ning networks. We have more dossiers on youth than ever before."
It's a two-edged sword, however, because it also plays into one of the largest challenges the youth of today face.
"Generation Facebook makes it hard for kids to make their youthful mistakes and move on. Any text or jpg becomes a constant reminder. Your diary is up there for everyone in perpetuity."
Finally, I asked Lisa and Adele, "What's the most embarrassing thing your mother ever did to you?"
Adele answered, "She always made me sing at family get-togethers. With my reedy voice, it was like I was deliberately cursing the gathering. Such a bad call, Mom."
"I wish I could have seen that," Lisa said.
"It was a really, cool, creepy book that we put aside to create our even cooler and creepier Picture the Dead. But the genesis of this idea—our heroine, some of the antagonists, a bit of the mood, came from this other project. So in a way, it’s been eight years in the making."
Adele told me that she loves how a young person's life can get so totally wrapped up in a book--to the point where nothing else matters. It's the reason she likes to write books for kids and teens.
"Pure book escape—that’s how I remember summer vacations, when I wasn’t scooping ice-cream and babysitting," she said. "So now I make up stories with the hope that they might fuel the escapism of someone else’s summer."
Lisa told me that, as a kid, she loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond "absolutely to death."
"To this day," she said, "I am completely and utterly obsessed with the Salem Witch Trials. I even took a course in college called “Witchcraft in Medieval Europe” just to feed my obsession. I aced it. And my crazy love for historical fiction persists. Just sped through Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell and King Henry the Eighth and The Children’s Book by AS Byatt, about Victorian and Edwardian England up until WWI. Beautiful stuff."
While they were working on Picture the Dead, Adele and Lisa told me that they continuously referenced and plundered their memories for what it was like to be a teenager-- to be sixteen and in love, to be angry and yet powerless, to be frightened and alone. Then they had to make the leap to things they couldn't have known about-- living through the Civil War, the haunted house, 1865.
Those types of things took a lot of research and Lisa admitted, "Research for Picture the Dead was an endless point of fascination and digression for me. The Library of Congress was a wonderful resource. In fact, the book is completely over-researched, which was why we needed to design the website. To present all those tidbits we couldn't fit into the book."
"What person has helped you the most in your career?" I asked.
Adele answered, "Our first and only agent, Charlotte Sheedy. She is just an excellent, first-rate mentor, a champion and advocate for great stories."
"Here, here," Lisa responded.
Both of them feel that with the internet, it's easier than ever to keep a finger of the pulse of today's kids and what they want in terms of reading material.
"Kids give us so much access to their critiques, their picks and preferences on their blogs, through their reviews and ning networks. We have more dossiers on youth than ever before."
It's a two-edged sword, however, because it also plays into one of the largest challenges the youth of today face.
"Generation Facebook makes it hard for kids to make their youthful mistakes and move on. Any text or jpg becomes a constant reminder. Your diary is up there for everyone in perpetuity."
Finally, I asked Lisa and Adele, "What's the most embarrassing thing your mother ever did to you?"
Adele answered, "She always made me sing at family get-togethers. With my reedy voice, it was like I was deliberately cursing the gathering. Such a bad call, Mom."
"I wish I could have seen that," Lisa said.
Out of boredom, Raye and her best friend Natalya create a phony Facebook profile for a college freshman named Elizabeth Lavenzck. Elizabeth becomes Raye’s way into the in-crowd when Raye is recruited to tutor the popular, beautiful Ella Parker in Mandarin. Ella plans to use Elizabeth’s profile to trap and humiliate hottie Julian Kilgarry, who two-timed her at a party. Raye is thrilled to be a part of Ella’s queen-bee group, but she’s faced with making a decision between Julian and her social standing when she falls for him, especially since Julian seems to reciprocate her feelings. After Ella makes Raye’s life hell, Natalya gives Raye the key to bringing Ella down, a key Raye isn’t sure she wants to use. Themes of cyberbullying and social manipulation are made all the more sinister. Ella’s complete lack of conscience combines with her beauty and charisma to make it easy for readers to understand how she came to be feared as well as popular. Griffin portrays Raye’s soul-searching convincingly; readers will identify with her acute consciousness of her outsider status, which makes her inner struggle both compelling and sympathetic. (Fiction. YA)
Photographing the Dead
by Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown
The importance of photographing the dead was a natural extension of the early days of photography, then considered a “black art” and regarded with equal parts suspicion and awe. The era of photography’s rising popularity also coincided with the American Civil War. Such comprehensive visual documentation brought home, as no other war before it, the brutality of its battlefields and casualties. In our novel, Picture the Dead, the heroine herself is confronted with a few such photographs. “I examine portrait images of young boys with guns high as their chest. Rows of the dying. Rows of hospital beds. The pictures have a dizzying effect on me.”
At the same time, the Victorian era saw not only death in war, but also through disease. Diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever were just some of the dread diagnosis that took life violently and unexpectedly. Oftentimes, the most at risk were babies and children, and funerals were part of daily life. Shocked by grief, families turned to photography as both a recourse and means to preserve a memory—especially when no photograph of the living child existed. A photographer was employed to take a postmortem photograph, also known as a “memento mori.” Memento mori is a Latin term that refers to any sort of artistic expression that reminds us of our mortality. It can be translated as “remember that you are mortal” or “remember that you must die.”
In a memento mori photograph, the lifeless corpse was either arranged as if in sleep, or, more incredibly, propped up to a seated or standing position, often in a group of living people, and with his or her eyes pried open as if in life. In yet another tactic, artists were called upon to paint eyeballs meticulously over closed lids, in order to create the illusion of an open eye. To our modern sensibility, such images hold an element of creepy, transgressive horror. When refracted through the prism of time, however, we can find kinship with our ancestors in realizing that there are no boundaries, emotional or temporal, in our all-too-human need to hold onto the memories of our loved ones.
These fascinating photographs, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible and always morbid, can be found collected here, at The Thanatos Archive. Warning: some of these photographs are extremely disturbing and not for the squeamish. But remember, they were taken out of a sense of duty and love towards the deceased.
Photographs of the Civil War dead on the battlefield can be seen at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.
by Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown
The importance of photographing the dead was a natural extension of the early days of photography, then considered a “black art” and regarded with equal parts suspicion and awe. The era of photography’s rising popularity also coincided with the American Civil War. Such comprehensive visual documentation brought home, as no other war before it, the brutality of its battlefields and casualties. In our novel, Picture the Dead, the heroine herself is confronted with a few such photographs. “I examine portrait images of young boys with guns high as their chest. Rows of the dying. Rows of hospital beds. The pictures have a dizzying effect on me.”
At the same time, the Victorian era saw not only death in war, but also through disease. Diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever were just some of the dread diagnosis that took life violently and unexpectedly. Oftentimes, the most at risk were babies and children, and funerals were part of daily life. Shocked by grief, families turned to photography as both a recourse and means to preserve a memory—especially when no photograph of the living child existed. A photographer was employed to take a postmortem photograph, also known as a “memento mori.” Memento mori is a Latin term that refers to any sort of artistic expression that reminds us of our mortality. It can be translated as “remember that you are mortal” or “remember that you must die.”
In a memento mori photograph, the lifeless corpse was either arranged as if in sleep, or, more incredibly, propped up to a seated or standing position, often in a group of living people, and with his or her eyes pried open as if in life. In yet another tactic, artists were called upon to paint eyeballs meticulously over closed lids, in order to create the illusion of an open eye. To our modern sensibility, such images hold an element of creepy, transgressive horror. When refracted through the prism of time, however, we can find kinship with our ancestors in realizing that there are no boundaries, emotional or temporal, in our all-too-human need to hold onto the memories of our loved ones.
These fascinating photographs, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible and always morbid, can be found collected here, at The Thanatos Archive. Warning: some of these photographs are extremely disturbing and not for the squeamish. But remember, they were taken out of a sense of duty and love towards the deceased.
Photographs of the Civil War dead on the battlefield can be seen at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.
ETC: Your book has some dark themes—Andersonville, specifically, and the Civil War, in general, showcase particularly brutal moments in American History. Was there anything that either of you thought was too grim for this book?
BROWN: I think that there is very little that would be too grim for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the gory and grotesque. But we had to be careful when presenting some of this to the general public, who might not share in Adele and my morbid obsessions. The battlefield casualties, the soldiers’ deathbed letters home, the suffering of the wounded and the on-the-field surgeries—we could have made this story very different, tonally. But it is primarily a ghost story, not a war story. Ghost stories tend to be more about a frisson of fear and less about blood and guts. And of course, there is the romance.
ETC: A gothic, illustrated ghost story is an unusual idea. Did you go into this story with one idea, and change any plans midstream?
GRIFFIN: We did. We killed off a character we loved, who wasn’t doing anything for the narrative. And while we knew there would be a strong visual component, the idea of framing the illustrations as a scrapbook was not on the table immediately. It just became intuitive, as we went along, that Jennie would be the one choosing and pasting and creating this book-within-the-book. And then Lisa began to create pieces of art, along with the portrait illustrations, that were more intimate to a young girl’s keepsakes, such as Jennie’s dance card and the dinner menu from the Harvard ball.
ETC: You toured this book in full Victorian costume. Why?
BROWN: I think that Adele has always wanted to sport a moustache. But beyond that, we really wanted people to jump on board with our passion for the story. If you’re in a corset (me) and moustache (Adele), people understand that you’re saying: “We are completely submerged in this story. Dive into the spirit of it, be part of it with us.” At ALA, our publisher had created an old-timey photo parlor so people could have their pictures taken with us. For our bookstore appearances and school visits, I show a powerpoint presentation of how the book came to be complete with antique photographs and old letters. Sometimes Adele sings a Civil War song. It’s a sight to behold.
I often bring my growing collection of hair art—this was a popular craft, back in Victorian times. Women would braid picture frames or brooches or even necklaces from human hair. It was a way of remembering your lost loved ones. It’s a bit creepy, but people love to see it. You can see some of the pieces for yourself on our website, www.picturethedead.com. There’s tons of additional information there, including letter transcripts, old photographs and magazines, blog posts about 19th century history: it’s all the things we researched but didn’t quite make it into the novel.
ETC: You hear any good ghost stories while promoting this book?
GRIFFIN: So many! And we give away a T-shirt to anyone who’ll tell us a good yarn. The best we heard was when we were up in Boston, about a ghost of an eight-year-old boy who’d lived in our storyteller’s home, who had died of some illness over a hundred years ago, and who had loved sweets. Every morning the door to the den—which used to be the pantry where the cakes and cookies were kept, was wide open—even when the family closed it, the night before. It was only when the family set a heavy chair against the door that it would stay closed all night.
So one night they set up a camera and filmed the door (without the chair). According to our storyteller, the video shows the door bursting open at about 3 AM, but nobody behind it. Nobody visible, that is. That story really gave us a fright! I am amazed that family continues to live in that house.
ETC: What started you on this ghost journey?
BROWN: Adele and my collaboration began when we were set up on a “blind date” by our shared literary agent. We fell in literary love based on our shared affinity for the creepy side of things: the Brönte sisters, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and The Turn of the Screw. We began to work together on a modern-day retooling of the Salem witch trials, set in a New England high school, which we called The Book of Humiliations. It now sits somewhat quietly in a drawer, waiting for a revisit. We were trying all sorts of experimental formats, which may not have been the best idea for a first project.
Undaunted, we turned to a more classic (in our minds, at least) illustrated novel. Around that time, there was an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City of spirit photographs from the mid 19th and early 20th centuries. We began to wonder: what if a photographer took a “ghost photo” that was obviously fraudulent, but something happened in the final print that was truly supernatural? And we went from there…
ETC: What would you most like to talk about and no one has ever asked?
BROWN: I’ve always wanted to talk about what makes, in my mind, the perfect, most chilling ghost story. They are hard to find, at least in fiction. The “real” ghost stories that people tell are usually far more frightening. Because what is often the scariest aspect of a ghost story is that it doesn’t really have a beginning, middle or end. It is far more open-ended, which makes it a difficult thing to write well. The best ones are unresolved. In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the reader is left with no resolution: just a queasy feeling of ambiguity. Once things are too resolved or explained, even if the explanation takes a supernatural form, some of the mystery and fear just dissipates. It’s a fine line that ghost stories must walk to be successful.
GRIFFIN: One question that hasn't been asked yet on our blog tour is if there's anything that personally appealed about living in the Victorian era. There is so much that would have been hard-- but when you read the old Godey's Ladies' Books about what women in that time could do-- sew their own clothes, bead their own purses, lacemaking, preparing remedies and tinctures, they could churn butter, prune a tree, fix a fence, stitch a penwiper, darn a sock, cast a hoop-skirt. There was so much information presupposed in the Godeys' recipes and dressmaking patterns-- I can hardly imagine having that kind of information in my own mind.
BROWN: I think that there is very little that would be too grim for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the gory and grotesque. But we had to be careful when presenting some of this to the general public, who might not share in Adele and my morbid obsessions. The battlefield casualties, the soldiers’ deathbed letters home, the suffering of the wounded and the on-the-field surgeries—we could have made this story very different, tonally. But it is primarily a ghost story, not a war story. Ghost stories tend to be more about a frisson of fear and less about blood and guts. And of course, there is the romance.
ETC: A gothic, illustrated ghost story is an unusual idea. Did you go into this story with one idea, and change any plans midstream?
GRIFFIN: We did. We killed off a character we loved, who wasn’t doing anything for the narrative. And while we knew there would be a strong visual component, the idea of framing the illustrations as a scrapbook was not on the table immediately. It just became intuitive, as we went along, that Jennie would be the one choosing and pasting and creating this book-within-the-book. And then Lisa began to create pieces of art, along with the portrait illustrations, that were more intimate to a young girl’s keepsakes, such as Jennie’s dance card and the dinner menu from the Harvard ball.
ETC: You toured this book in full Victorian costume. Why?
BROWN: I think that Adele has always wanted to sport a moustache. But beyond that, we really wanted people to jump on board with our passion for the story. If you’re in a corset (me) and moustache (Adele), people understand that you’re saying: “We are completely submerged in this story. Dive into the spirit of it, be part of it with us.” At ALA, our publisher had created an old-timey photo parlor so people could have their pictures taken with us. For our bookstore appearances and school visits, I show a powerpoint presentation of how the book came to be complete with antique photographs and old letters. Sometimes Adele sings a Civil War song. It’s a sight to behold.
I often bring my growing collection of hair art—this was a popular craft, back in Victorian times. Women would braid picture frames or brooches or even necklaces from human hair. It was a way of remembering your lost loved ones. It’s a bit creepy, but people love to see it. You can see some of the pieces for yourself on our website, www.picturethedead.com. There’s tons of additional information there, including letter transcripts, old photographs and magazines, blog posts about 19th century history: it’s all the things we researched but didn’t quite make it into the novel.
ETC: You hear any good ghost stories while promoting this book?
GRIFFIN: So many! And we give away a T-shirt to anyone who’ll tell us a good yarn. The best we heard was when we were up in Boston, about a ghost of an eight-year-old boy who’d lived in our storyteller’s home, who had died of some illness over a hundred years ago, and who had loved sweets. Every morning the door to the den—which used to be the pantry where the cakes and cookies were kept, was wide open—even when the family closed it, the night before. It was only when the family set a heavy chair against the door that it would stay closed all night.
So one night they set up a camera and filmed the door (without the chair). According to our storyteller, the video shows the door bursting open at about 3 AM, but nobody behind it. Nobody visible, that is. That story really gave us a fright! I am amazed that family continues to live in that house.
ETC: What started you on this ghost journey?
BROWN: Adele and my collaboration began when we were set up on a “blind date” by our shared literary agent. We fell in literary love based on our shared affinity for the creepy side of things: the Brönte sisters, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and The Turn of the Screw. We began to work together on a modern-day retooling of the Salem witch trials, set in a New England high school, which we called The Book of Humiliations. It now sits somewhat quietly in a drawer, waiting for a revisit. We were trying all sorts of experimental formats, which may not have been the best idea for a first project.
Undaunted, we turned to a more classic (in our minds, at least) illustrated novel. Around that time, there was an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City of spirit photographs from the mid 19th and early 20th centuries. We began to wonder: what if a photographer took a “ghost photo” that was obviously fraudulent, but something happened in the final print that was truly supernatural? And we went from there…
ETC: What would you most like to talk about and no one has ever asked?
BROWN: I’ve always wanted to talk about what makes, in my mind, the perfect, most chilling ghost story. They are hard to find, at least in fiction. The “real” ghost stories that people tell are usually far more frightening. Because what is often the scariest aspect of a ghost story is that it doesn’t really have a beginning, middle or end. It is far more open-ended, which makes it a difficult thing to write well. The best ones are unresolved. In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the reader is left with no resolution: just a queasy feeling of ambiguity. Once things are too resolved or explained, even if the explanation takes a supernatural form, some of the mystery and fear just dissipates. It’s a fine line that ghost stories must walk to be successful.
GRIFFIN: One question that hasn't been asked yet on our blog tour is if there's anything that personally appealed about living in the Victorian era. There is so much that would have been hard-- but when you read the old Godey's Ladies' Books about what women in that time could do-- sew their own clothes, bead their own purses, lacemaking, preparing remedies and tinctures, they could churn butter, prune a tree, fix a fence, stitch a penwiper, darn a sock, cast a hoop-skirt. There was so much information presupposed in the Godeys' recipes and dressmaking patterns-- I can hardly imagine having that kind of information in my own mind.
THERE WAS A CERTAIN joy here in March, when Lisa (visiting the East coast to work on all things Picture the Dead related) and I tore open the mail to find a bound bi-annual index of Godey’s Lady’s Book, July-December 1864. The book, an Ebay purchase, was even inscribed, “Anna Lloyd, from T.P.M. 1864,” giving it that extra measure of authenticity.
But the droll amusements of that next hour—reading about how to crochet a winter jacket or whip up a batch of ginger lozenges—are presumably incomparable to Anna Lloyd’s unabashed delight when this very index was delivered to her, hot off the press and costing $12.00 for the deep-pocketed T.P.M., who was well aware of Godey’s worth in the lives of women of a certain social standing.
Godey’s was published from 1830-1898, but its heyday belonged to the forty-year reign (1837-1877) of its editor, Sara Josepha Hale. Under her longtime stewardship, Godey’s usual format was as a monthly magazine that, among its sewing patterns, song sheets, and cooking “receipts” also sought to print substantive, thoughtful and relevant articles on every aspect of a woman’s life. Conservative to its core, however, Godey’s kept away from such hot-button topics such as the women’s rights movement, even though the forward-thinking Hale was simultaneously publishing many stories, poems, and essays by women writers. The magazine also refused to become part of any political or war-related discussion—a search through this particular index does not turn up so much as a pattern for a mourning dress, and surely, in 1864, these were in great demand.
But if it was a leaf penwiper you wanted, well, you could stop your search right here.
Materials: three pieces of black cloth; one piece of green; one piece of black silk, all but the size of our illustration; two yards of Alliance silk braid, scarlet and black; half a bunch of small gold beads; a handle.
This pen wiper represents a large leaf, veined with gold braid, edged with a fringe of gold beads, and finished off with a handle. If this is difficult to obtain in gilt or bronze complete, a handle may be made of wire, covered with gold beads twisted round, with the rosette of the beads for a button. The green cloth, of course, makes the top of the pen wiper; this should be braided all round the shape of our illustration, and then cut out. For the veinings the braid must be drawn through the cloth and back again, and fastened down on the wrong side. Nine little stars of gold beads are arranged round the leaf at regular intervals. The green cloth is lined with a piece of card-board, shaped, and covered with a piece of black silk. The three pieces of black cloth, which should be cut a trifle smaller than the green piece, should now be secured to the top, and the whole fastened by means of the handle, which is arranged with a little spring, to hold the leaves firmly together.
But the droll amusements of that next hour—reading about how to crochet a winter jacket or whip up a batch of ginger lozenges—are presumably incomparable to Anna Lloyd’s unabashed delight when this very index was delivered to her, hot off the press and costing $12.00 for the deep-pocketed T.P.M., who was well aware of Godey’s worth in the lives of women of a certain social standing.
Godey’s was published from 1830-1898, but its heyday belonged to the forty-year reign (1837-1877) of its editor, Sara Josepha Hale. Under her longtime stewardship, Godey’s usual format was as a monthly magazine that, among its sewing patterns, song sheets, and cooking “receipts” also sought to print substantive, thoughtful and relevant articles on every aspect of a woman’s life. Conservative to its core, however, Godey’s kept away from such hot-button topics such as the women’s rights movement, even though the forward-thinking Hale was simultaneously publishing many stories, poems, and essays by women writers. The magazine also refused to become part of any political or war-related discussion—a search through this particular index does not turn up so much as a pattern for a mourning dress, and surely, in 1864, these were in great demand.
But if it was a leaf penwiper you wanted, well, you could stop your search right here.
Materials: three pieces of black cloth; one piece of green; one piece of black silk, all but the size of our illustration; two yards of Alliance silk braid, scarlet and black; half a bunch of small gold beads; a handle.
This pen wiper represents a large leaf, veined with gold braid, edged with a fringe of gold beads, and finished off with a handle. If this is difficult to obtain in gilt or bronze complete, a handle may be made of wire, covered with gold beads twisted round, with the rosette of the beads for a button. The green cloth, of course, makes the top of the pen wiper; this should be braided all round the shape of our illustration, and then cut out. For the veinings the braid must be drawn through the cloth and back again, and fastened down on the wrong side. Nine little stars of gold beads are arranged round the leaf at regular intervals. The green cloth is lined with a piece of card-board, shaped, and covered with a piece of black silk. The three pieces of black cloth, which should be cut a trifle smaller than the green piece, should now be secured to the top, and the whole fastened by means of the handle, which is arranged with a little spring, to hold the leaves firmly together.
Hey, Everybody--
Yesterday I walked into the house and found a humungous package of Vampire Islands and Knaveheart's Curse sent complimentary, now that the VI series is licensed to Scholastic Book Club (hooray! hurrah!).
I'm always happy to have lotsa books, but I'm happier to give them away, so it's time to do another draw.
All you have to do is send me the title for the fourth Vampire Island. It can be anything-- especially since I have yet to write a fourth.
Then I'll do a draw, and send three winners the Scholastic editions of the series. You can hit my Goodreads, website, Facebook or twitter-- it doesn't matter to me.
All the magic ends when the clock strikes the last day of July.
x Adele
Yesterday I walked into the house and found a humungous package of Vampire Islands and Knaveheart's Curse sent complimentary, now that the VI series is licensed to Scholastic Book Club (hooray! hurrah!).
I'm always happy to have lotsa books, but I'm happier to give them away, so it's time to do another draw.
All you have to do is send me the title for the fourth Vampire Island. It can be anything-- especially since I have yet to write a fourth.
Then I'll do a draw, and send three winners the Scholastic editions of the series. You can hit my Goodreads, website, Facebook or twitter-- it doesn't matter to me.
All the magic ends when the clock strikes the last day of July.
x Adele
Jennie Lovell is one sad little spinster. Her parents are dead and the Civil War has taken both her brother Toby and her betrothed Will, leaving her at the mercy of her stuffy aunt and uncle’s reluctant charity. Now she has nothing to look forward to except a slow slide into servitude in her cold relatives’ dark house, which feels filled with ghosts. Then Will’s brother Quinn returns from the horrific Andersonville prison camp wounded in more ways than one. He has lost both an eye and the ability to feel anything but anger and contempt. Jennie tries to break through his sullen silence because she can sense he’s hiding a secret about her lost love, but Quinn refuses to speak. When the grieving family poses for a photograph at a spiritualist’s studio to try and commune with Will, Jennie is struck by a feeling so strong it could only be the ghost of her fiancée trying to beak through from the other side. With Will’s spirit as her guide, Jennie unearth clues like a broken locket, a lost letter and a ruined photograph that begin to tell the awful story of Will’s demise. There’s only one piece missing, and that’s Quinn himself. Can Jennie convince Quinn to tell her the truth of what actually happened to his brother? And does she really want to know if it means the memory of her beloved Will is tainted forever? Hugely under the radar author Adele Griffin (whose fab literary fiction I adore) skillfully bakes the brutal history of the Civil War, the creepy Spiritualism movement and America’s fascination with the new science of photography into a tasty gothic treat that is guaranteed to give you welcome chills in the middle of the August heat! Sumptuously illustrated by Lisa Brown, this eerie little ghost story just begs to be read up in your favorite tree or the top of your summer camp bunk.
