A Birthday Cake Is No Ordinary Cake by Debra Frasier - Interview

You’re invited you to a birthday celebration of gigantic proportion! A party of this magnitude calls for a cake, of course—a spectacular cake, a cake made with very special ingredients. Debra Frasier’s newest picture book, A Birthday Cake Is No Ordinary Cake, is a celebration of birthdays, cake, and the natural world. Debra shares her secrets for out-of-this-world birthday celebrations and updates us on her recent canoeing adventures.

Q: Your newest illustrated children’s story, A Birthday Cake Is No Ordinary Cake, is no ordinary book. You have transformed a simple idea—the birthday cake—into a complex scientific wonder. Where did you find the inspiration for this thought-provoking, confectionary story?
A: In the spring of my daughter’s first year, birds built a little nest in the rafters under our second-story deck. Calla peered daily through the cracks in the eggs, and her glimpses of the hatchlings brought her to her first word: bird. We hosted her first birthday party in my studio and pinned paper birds to the walls—each carrying away one of her tiny first-year dresses in its beak! Sometime that day, before the guests arrived, I wrote this line: She has circled the sun and now she is one. Now remember, I live in Minnesota, where seasons are very defined, and very anticipated—or dreaded—and the counting of circles might be more pronounced than, say, in my native Florida. But that scribbled line sat in my files for another fifteen years before I pulled it out, ready to stretch it into a story.

Q: Your daughter Calla—the primary inspiration for much of your work, including the picture book classic On the Day You Were Born—has reached her eighteenth birthday. How did you make her birthday special year after year?
A: I love birthday parties. Over the years, we’ve staged some wild celebrations for Calla: the Rain Forest Birthday with blue morpho butterflies on the cake; the Treasure Pony Birthday with a treasure box hidden on Tower Hill; the Puppet Birthday with puppet shows in every part of the house, including the bathtub; and the Hollywood Birthday, for which the girls dressed like stars and drove through the city in a limo while on a scavenger hunt. There was one year that all the kids were interested in disasters, so I made up eight 9-1-1 emergencies. Half of the party guests reenacted the accidents while the other half came to rescue with bandages—it was ridiculously funny; you really had to be there.

Q: Near the end of A Birthday Cake Is No Ordinary Cake you include three recipes: one for the Spinning World Birthday Cake, one for Creamy Vanilla Frosting, and one for Creamy Chocolate Frosting. Did you created these recipes for family celebrations?
A: I am not a baker, and the cake recipe is a combination of ones given to me from friends at the exercise club. The recipe was refined and tested, and then tested again repeatedly by the fabulous librarian and baker Julie Reimer. The icing recipes are her cherished treasures. You will find her thanked on the dedication page of the book. You can also find her terrific bibliography for wordplay books to accompany Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster on my website, www.debrafrasier.com.

Q: You work in collage, an art form that combines unrelated pieces and parts into aesthetically pleasing compositions. What is it about collage that interests you as an artist?
A: I work with cut-paper collage because I am truly a sculptor who likes to move things around in space. Doing that is very different from drawing and painting. I have found that many people don’t know that they, too, are actually very good at this technique. Find a book by Henri Matisse on paper cutouts; it will make you rush to pick up scissors. Try to cut some of your own—you’ll see what I mean.

Q: At one time in your career, you built wind sculptures made of steel cables and sailcloth. Did that experience in any way help you create the art for A Birthday Cake Is No Ordinary Cake?
A: The WindWorks taught me to pay very close attention to what was happening outside. By the time I installed the last wind sculpture—WindWalk, a large piece in the city of Pittsburgh—I truly understood that the wind gives us a kind of writing, and I was building surfaces for the wind to write upon. It made me wonder if our job was to stop to read the story in the leaves of trees or on the surfaces of ponds. Now that line of thinking—and the necessary meticulousness required in making anything that survives a dialogue with wind—was great training for the rigorous attention required when writing and illustrating a picture book.

I want to tell Big Stories, the ones that make us a part of the rushing wind, the falling rain, and the rising moon—all the great cycles present on our water-blessed, spinning planet. In that way, the wind was my most demanding and inspiring teacher.

Q: Do you ever get a chance to meet with other children’s book writers and illustrators to share thoughts, ideas, and successes?
A: I am lucky to live in Minnesota, a place as enormously rich in children’s writers and illustrators as in lakes. We all participate in events in our state and often have a chance to see one another’s new projects. I’m good friends with Lauren Stringer, a local illustrator whose art has appeared in many wondrous books. In fact, the first book she both wrote and illustrated, Winter Is the Warmest Season, will soon be published. I was lucky to see the book’s progression from sketch to dummy to original single paintings pinned on the studio wall. When you see the book, you will see the breathtaking result of all those single pages bound into the remarkable rhythm of a picture book. Don’t take my word for it: Find this book and enter winter through Lauren’s eyes. In your mind, take the book apart and pin it up as single pages to see how different the panels look when unbound. The picture-book format allows you to accumulate words and pictures in layers, page by page, until some remarkable transformation occurs when the reader reaches the book’s final page. Because I live near an artist and author like her, I am able to see someone do what I do, and that helps me understand the process—and still I am amazed!

Q: Last year we spoke with you about your plan to canoe down fifty streams and rivers in celebration of your fiftieth birthday. At that time you had journeyed down nineteen of the fifty. Since then you have covered several more, including the great Colorado River. What have those recent adventures been like—and what’s ahead for you in the coming year?
A: We had a slow start this summer due to my daughter’s high school graduation and college search. The snow was long gone from the canoe when Luna was finally launched on the twenty-third river, the Rum, just north of Minneapolis. Wisconsin rivers are coming up next, followed by a river in Maine in the fall, and then a hike along the Pacific Ocean—that trek was inspired by a river in Washington State that we couldn’t paddle down! You can read about my experience with the Hoh River on the “River Journal” section of my website.

Rivers are running in my veins now, and I’m always looking for good recommendations—really, visit my website and leave me a note with your suggestions. This project has energized me, taught me great new skills, and led me to people and places that I would never have found any other way. If there is anything for someone to learn from my experience it is this: Don’t wait. Find what you love and begin it now—even if, like me, you know nothing. You will learn, and what you don’t yet know is this: Miracles happen along the way to make it possible!