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Between the Lines |
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Interview with Monika Bang-Campbell & Molly Bang |
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Little Rat Sets Sail
Monika Bang-Campbell Illustrated by Molly Bang
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Biography |
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Monika Bang-Campbell makes her picture book debut with Little Rat Sets Sail. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
Molly Bang has written and illustrated more than twenty books, including three Caldecott Honor winners: When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really
Angry . . .; Ten, Nine, Eight, and The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher. She lives close to the ocean in Massachusetts.
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Interview |
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Q: First things first: How and why did you decide to turn a rat into the main character in a children's book? Rats are not often viewed the same way as, say, cuddly little teddy bears.
Monika:I have always liked rats. You know, the rat got a bad wrap with that whole plague thing. I mean, really—can't we let it go?
Seriously, though, I just like rats. When I was little, I had a pet rat named Sophie that my aunt gave me—they are great pets and very fun to play with. Mind you, I have not yet come face to face with a big snaggle-toothed city rat on the streets of Boston, so my affinity for the creatures resides with the ones smaller than my cat. I also had a rat in college, but due to strict standards and guidelines, he had to remain with his brethren in the lab and I only had visitation rights.
When we started the illustrations for the book, we had a family of rats that were used as models....
Molly: We bought a large brown rat at the pet store that the owner assured us was quite young. This sale was fortunate for the rat, since she otherwise would have become snake food. She was very sweet and wriggly and fun, but she was hard to draw because she never stayed still. We called her Rat. I took some photos of her, drew her, and gradually began getting a sense of what a rat looks like. About a week later, she started racing around in circles, pushing all the shavings into a huge pile in the corner of the aquarium, and then taking them all apart and pushing them all into another corner. A day later when I picked her up, I found that there were babies being born, so I put her back onto her bed and covered her with a T-shirt rag. She had three babies—two spotted ones and a brown one—but only the brown one survived. We named her Baby Rat, and she and her mom began to chase each other all over the cage. We soon had to build a second story and put in toilet-paper rolls and a couple of toys.
I found I had to draw these rats quickly because Baby grew almost perceptibly every day, and she became more and more like her mother. Her snout got longer and a bit more curved, her tail got longer and hairy, and her ears and eyes got smaller in relation to her face. Although it always makes the pictures better when they are drawn or painted from life, there is one particularly endearing feature that I never would have known if we hadn't had the rats as pets. On the first page of chapter one, Little Rat is listening to her Mom and Dad, and she is holding her tail. I really like this stance. It is what rats really do—they hold their own tails and they hold the tails of their relatives and friends for affection, for reassurance, for something to hang on to and play with. Little Rat is holding hers in a mixture of trepidation and self-reassurance.
Q: And I think any rat would feel this way when faced with sailing lessons....
Monika: That's true. Little Rat's endearing personality is, in fact, based on her plain and blatant honesty of emotion and fear. She is okay with the fact that she is afraid.
Q: You have an extensive sailing background, Monika, could it be that you were also afraid of sailing lessons in the beginning?
Monika: I have been sailing since I was six years old. My dad had sailed for years, and, living along the water, sailing was a natural activity in which to get involved. I started out in the beginner's sailing class at the yacht club and eventually made my way onto the racing team about eight years later. I had and still have a healthy fear of the ocean, but I couldn't live far from it or not be on it.
In high school I began to sail on tall ships, and I discovered my love for going to sea. People often say to me, "Oh well, you probably don't ever get seasick." This is far from true. I get very seasick, but the allure of being two hundred miles offshore—out to sea on a tall ship—and seeing nothing but the ocean is worth every second spent at the leeward rail! You can't go wrong when your office has sails and your job is exactly where you want to be. I have had some harrowing experiences during my years sailing, but I prefer to focus on the amazing camaraderie and inexplicable kinship that is formed within a crew and by sailors in general.
Q: What about you, Molly? Your boats, sailing angles, and waves are very realistic. Did you go sailing with your daughter to inspire your illustrations?
Molly: For the watery parts of the book, I took pictures of prams and javelins, and I went out sailing a few times on a javelin. (I find that I'd much rather be in the water than on top of it. I really love to swim, and I can't quite understand why people want to sit around on boats.) I also walked around on the beach and up and down the steep, steep path where Monika had gone to sailing school and where Little Rat faces her first challenge.
Some difficulties arose because the prams of today are much spiffier and sleeker than the prams Monika sailed in, and the javelins have been replaced by much racier boats, too. So, I had to find other javelins to use for the basis of the drawings. Also, although most javelins don't have centerboards, I put one in Little Rat's boat. Centerboards are pulled up in a different way from how I show it, but the way I drew it gives a better idea of how it works, I think.
Q: Tell us about your writing, Monika. How did you decide to write Little Rat Sets Sail, your first children's book?
Monika: I like to tell stories and that is really what got me started on the whole writing thing. I would tell my stories to various people, and they would advise me to write them down. Eventually I started doing this. But, my patience for the writing process is in the developing stages, which is my euphemistic way of saying that I get very frustrated and stressed out when I have to transcribe the characters in my head onto a piece of paper. Let's just say a certain little rat is capable of exercises in frustration like you read about in the book!
Q: So, there are some similarities between you and Little Rat! Is any of the story based on specific childhood sailing experiences?
Monika: The character of Buzzy Bear is based on the man who first taught me how to sail when I was really little. He put up with all my fears and anxieties, and was supportive and loving all the time. This gentleman taught me much more than how to sail—he was a profound influence and beacon of light throughout my childhood. Little Rat is based on my experiences and feelings about a number of childhood activities in which I participated.
Q: How does it feel to see the finished work, Monika? And what's it like working as a team with your mother, Molly Bang?
Monika: As this is my first literary work (with the exception of about a zillion papers I wrote in grad school), I couldn't really say how I feel about it quite yet. It is exciting to have a book out there that opens the world of sailing to kids. And it is very special to me to be carrying on a tradition of writing and illustrating with my mother, as she did with her mother.
Q: Molly, you worked with your mother as well? Is it any different working with your daughter?
Molly: About twenty years ago I illustrated some folktales that my mom had translated from Bengali, and working together—discussing Bengal, and folktales, and Bengali folk art—was a great pleasure for both of us. It's been even more fun illustrating stories written by my daughter—especially since neither of us ever imagined doing a book together until the Little Rat series began to bubble up from Monika two summers ago. One of the great delights for me, being with Monika, is listening to her tell stories about growing up. She is very funny, and when she tells a story, no matter how prosaic or poignant or happy or fraught with difficulty, it always has an edge of humor. If there's a characteristic that seems to be particularly absent in my own makeup, it is humor. I was surprised to find when we worked on this book that it had crept into my pictures.
Q: With all of the research, rat care, and boating you had to do, Molly, it must have taken ages to finish these pictures. How long did it take to illustrate the book?
Molly: : I think the pictures took me about five months in all. The most difficult pictures were the cover, which I redid about four times, and the scene where Little Rat is standing alone at the end of the dock. This dock picture was the first picture I did for the book, and it would establish the style for the whole rest of it, so I needed to take my time to get it right.
I made many, many, many versions of it—some of which had people instead of animals for the other students, some on which I used pen and ink, and some of which had a completely different format. Once I was satisfied with this picture, the rest came fairly quickly. The last pictures were the ones of the rat family's house, with its portraits of boats, the couch and the red walls—the first picture, where Mom and Dad are talking to Little Rat, and the last pictures, in which Little Rat's mom is rubbing her feet and in which Little Rat is sleeping on her pillow. I felt very glad to be finished with the book, so I played with the frames of the pictures, which got more and more complicated and silly as I dragged out the last couple of days left working on it.
Q: Monika, how do you think the illustrations reflect the character of Little Rat?
Monika: I think the artwork really portrays the sweet and lovable qualities of Little Rat. I'm very pleased with this book, and I think children will enjoy it and also learn from it.
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Monika Bang-Campbell
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photo credit: |
Monika Bang-Campbell
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Molly Bang
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photo credit:
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Alan Stewart
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Little Rat Sets Sail
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