Books written and illustrated by Gillian Johnson. Books illustrated by Gillian Johnson.
Gillian Johnson
Profile by Dave Jenkinson.
The last of six children, Gillian was born February 26, 1963, in Winnipeg, MB, where she spent all her growing up years. Gillian sees being the last born in a large family as having had certain advantages. “I think you’re put in a corner and left to your own devices, and that kind of benign neglect is probably really good. You’re spoiled, but, at the same time, you’re also left on your own a lot. I think your parents are tired They’re not going to have the battles that they used to have with the other children because they’ve learned which wars are worth fighting.”
Determining what she wanted to be when she grew up was a challenge for Gillian. “That was something that I spent a lot of time trying to decide. I wanted to do lots of different things, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I did want to go to Art School, but I grew up in quite a practical family in some ways. My father was very keen that I had a ‘proper’ job. I could do art on the side. So, I didn’t study fine arts but shifted my focus toward medicine. However, at the same time, I always wanted to write and draw.”
Through public school, Gillian deliberately avoided learning how to type. “I had the thing of ‘Don’t learn how to type because then you’ll end up having to be somebody’s secretary.’ There was actually a lot of ‘girl power’ in my home because I had four sisters and a mother whose attitude was, ‘Get out in the world and do something interesting.’ She knew what it was like to be home with six kids. In first year at the University of Manitoba, and with the goal of going into medicine, I took chemistry, physics and biology, but I discovered that I could do much better in my English courses with a lot less work while having a lot more fun doing it.”
Athletics were an important part of Gillian’s growing up years, and she competed nationally in speed skating. “I started when I was six and got dragged to the River Heights Community Club by my older sister who had registered for speed skating. I signed up and got very, very involved. For about a dozen years, it was my main competitive sport, but during the summers and at school I did lots of other sports. Speed skating was the main focus though, and I spent most of my evenings growing up either at the River Heights CC or at the Sargent Park speed skating oval. I made the national speed skating training team, and we trained in Germany. That’s when I basically discovered that I didn’t have what it took - the will to push it to the next level. The focus was on going to the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, and suddenly I felt like I had missed out on a lot of education, fun, friends, boys. I came back from Europe, quit speed skating and threw myself into my university studies.”
“After that first year of university where I did all the science courses, I knew that medicine wasn’t where I wanted to go, and I took a year off. I got a great job with the Red Cross, got all my swimming qualifications up to standard, and did water and boating safety and then got great jobs around the city teaching swimming. Between my university years, Indian Affairs had lots of programs, and so I was up in Cranberry Portage where, with other U. of M. students, I was a summer counselor working with Indian students. On the basis of that experience, I fell in love with the North, and the next summer I went up to Churchill with a northern medical unit. I was the person who was available to do anything, and, as a result, I got to do some really interesting things, such as accompanying Inuit babies, who had been hospitalized in Churchill for chest infections, on their flights back to their homes in Franklin Inlet. I actually got so interested in the polar bears in Churchill that I had applied for a polar bear alert team job, but I didn’t get it, and so I had to go back and finish my B.A. instead.”
“A lot of what I was doing in university was just catching up for what I thought were deficits in my education because I had been speed skating and skipping out of school for my entire high school years. When I got to university, it was kind of a revelation, and I had to really hustle and work. I actually suddenly got very thirsty to keep going and just felt that there were lots of holes in my knowledge. My poor father was horrified thinking he would be about 90 by the time I graduated. I was the last of the six children, and he had been helping finance us at university since about 1959, and we’re now in the mid-1980's.”
Along with her athletics, Gillian had also maintained her interest in art. “In high school, I took classes at the Winnipeg Art Gallery where the teacher had live models, and I spent a lot of time going to life drawing classes there. I usually managed to find an evening course somewhere, and I tried to keep that going, especially life drawing. While at the University of Manitoba, I did some editorial cartooning for the student newspaper, The Manitoban. I always quite liked cartoons, caricatures and satire, and I did a lot of very unflattering pictures of my family which my mother used to quickly put away. My professors were also my ‘subjects,’ but I never showed them the finished results.”
“Even though my mother hid the unflattering family portraits, she was very encouraging of my drawing. It was always very nice to bring a drawing in and be told that it was ‘wonderful.’ My mother’s father was an artist, but he was a doctor as well and so he had a ‘proper’ job too. While my parents didn’t necessarily want me to go in the direction of art as a career, preferring that I choose to do something more ‘marketable,’ they were always very encouraging about my art interests and would say things like, ‘Oh, you haven’t been drawing for months. What’s the problem?’”
“Following my B.A., I went to McGill University in Montreal where I did their one-year teacher certification program. I then applied for teaching positions up north, but I got offered a job in Kanata, ON, at A.Y. Jackson Secondary School where I then taught for two years. I still felt restless and not quite ready to settle down, and so I went and did a Master’s degree in English, also at McGill.”
Gillian recalls that her interest in writing first found its form during her adolescence as angst-induced diaries. That she should select this literary form was a natural outgrowth of her early reading choices. “I read lots of book when I was little where everyone kept diaries, including all the L.M. Montgomery books like Emily of New Moon and Anne of Green Gables and other books such as Harriet the Spy. Anyone worth their salt kept a journal. My two friends and I should have had an L.M. Montgomery club because we were so into her. We used to haunt the Brock Corydon Public Library, waiting for someone to return the next Montgomery book we wanted. Montgomery was really prolific, but we couldn’t get enough and would have followed Anne right through to the grave if we could have.”
Gillian’s first venture into writing and illustrating for children occurred when she was in high school. “My oldest sister, who is 17 years older than I am, had a son, and I used to do little books for him when he was about three or four or five. I have always loved images and text together and how it all works, and, as a kid, I read a lot of comics.” However, creating these books for her nephew did not shout “career” to Gillian, although she acknowledges that writing and illustrating “was always something I wanted to do.”
She does, however, recall the incident which put the idea much more in the forefront of her mind. “It can be something very odd that suddenly triggers you. In my case, I took a trip with a friend to Portugal in about 1985. We stayed in a little place called Manta Rota which is on the Spanish border. I remember being told that in the apartment complex across from us there lived a man and a children’s book illustrator and writer from Switzerland. To this day, I wonder if it was Lisbeth Zwerger. But I remember thinking, ‘Yes, that’s really what I want to be doing.’ But it just takes a long time to get where you want to go sometimes, and I didn’t really know how to do it and how to get there.”
The opportunity to go in the writing/illustrating direction presented itself to Gillian while she was doing her M.A. at McGill and taking a children’s literature course from Ron Reichertz. “In place of a school project, I asked him if I could write a book. He was dubious, but he let me do it. I wrote and illustrated Saranohair, sent it in, and it got accepted by Annick. While I knew I was lucky, I was told, ‘No, you were just very lucky and that was a real fluke.’”
Looking back, Gillian acknowledges, “In some ways, Saranohair was not a very marketable book. It’s not really child friendly, and black and white is not very saleable. I had to learn how to do colour, and I had to learn how to paint and how to do some things, and so it was a long circuitous route. As well, Saranohair had a different shape, and it did not do what traditional books did at the time. As a child, I liked the drawings of Tenniel. I loved crosshatching, caricature and very extreme and odd books. Edward Gorey had always been a real favorite of mine as is Maurice Sendak who is kind of out there, but I couldn’t find that niche. I think that Annick took a chance on me with Saranohair, but it was a one-off. To be honest, my first love is still this kind of rather odd, not entirely traditional book, but maybe creating children’s books is all about reaching something that’s not too much a compromise between what you really want to do and being accessible and finding a medium that people want to read. Your own private vision can be quite introspective if you’re not aware of an audience.”
Even though Saranohair received an Honorable Mention for the Graphics Prize at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, when Gillian sent Annick a second manuscript, they said, “No thanks.” As a result, Gillian says that she “then spent the next few years trying to figure out how to do it again. In the meantime, while I was doing the figuring out, I had to teach and do various things, and so I decided to go back to school ... yet again. I went to California and did a creative writing program in adult writing at the University of California in Irvine. They had two writing instructors, one of whom was Thomas Keneally who wrote Schindler’s List, and the other was Judith Grossman, an English writer. I went down and spent two years there. They were incredibly depressing years because the university was located in a master plan community in a very sterile part of southern California, but it was time to write and find out some things. The program led to another Masters degree, a Master’s of Fine Arts.” As a result of the degree, Gillian has attempted to write for an adult audience but says, “I’ve tried. I wrote a really a really bad book, called ‘Prague Summer,’ which is unpublished, and I wrote a collection of short stories, also unpublished. I have published a couple of short stories, but they’re not satisfactory.”
“When I finished the MFA, I finally decided, ‘Enough education!’ This coincided with the death of my parents- an event that made me realize I did not have all the time in the world anymore. I moved to Toronto and gave myself one year to try to do what I wanted. If it didn’t work out, I would get a ‘proper job.’ Then I got an illustration contract with Tundra.”
Asked how she landed that initial contract with Tundra, Gillian replies, “Perhaps just by looking really, really desperate. And also by forcing myself to follow up on every contact and every possible opportunity. I came up with a design for a cover of Richard Scrimger’s The Nose from Jupiter. Tundra let me run with it and that turned into a longer term thing with Richard. I spent a lot of time on those covers. Since I have had children, I’ve had to give up a certain kind of finicky style and become a lot looser so I can work more quickly.”
The text of My Sister Gracie, Gillian’s first book for Tundra, was written as poetry. Says Gillian, “I like rhyme and the rhythms that rhyme offers. There’s a musicality, and it’s fun to read aloud, but, although I did a sequel to My Sister Gracie, I probably would not work in rhyme again. I think it’s very hard to do simple rhyme that doesn’t go doggerely. Also, poetry is hard to translate which is a consideration of the publishers.”
One published source asserts that My Sister Gracie “was inspired by a beagle-basset she [Gillian] adopted from the local pound.” Gillian clarifies that “Gracie belonged to my publisher, Kathy Lowinger. Gracie was old, and, when I met Kathy, she told me about this dog, and the book evolved from there. There was something I thought that was rather wonderful about, ‘What do you do if you’re a geriatric dog and you’re in a dog pound? You don’t have many options, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to be selected by children looking for a pet.’ That idea appealed to me.” In explaining why she decided to have the other dog be a poodle, Gillian says, “I thought a poodle would be the most horrified to receive a fat old dog. There was some appeal in a kind of camp, rather persnickety little dog that would have preferred one of his own ‘tribe,’ and I thought he was in need of expanding his soul a little bit. As to the poodle’s name, I thought ‘Fabio” was a great hairdresser kind of name.”
The origins of the plot for Gracie’s Baby Chub Chop, the sequel to My Sister Gracie, may reside in Gillian’s own two children and “just the havoc of when they start to walk. You’re desperate for them to start walking and when they do, then you’re like, ‘What was I thinking? Go back in your chair.’ Maybe the English are right. They keep them in strollers until they’re about five and don’t let them go anywhere.” For those who have enjoyed the canine odd couple and may be looking for more, Gillian confirmed that their adventures have concluded.
Thora, Gillian’s first novel, was initially published in Australia. “The Australians were the ones who saw the possibility for Thora working, and they were wonderful to work with. It was a very open process. My husband, Nicholas Shakespeare, is also a writer, and he has taught me a lot about being open to the editing process. He’s a very receptive writer and not a writer who says, ‘Go away. Let me finish it. Don’t you dare comment.’ He wants feedback. I think it’s made Thora a better book to work with a publisher like that. They had some really good ideas. I gave them drafts, and then they came back with lots of comments. Because we were on the same wave length, the process was much more ‘to and fro’ than I would have expected it to be. You don’t necessarily find a publisher that you feel that you can work with like that. They have commissioned two other books, and I’ve done Thora and the Green Sea Unicorn, the sequel to Thora, and I have the third one to do.”
Thora has its roots in a 1995 visit Gillian made to Iceland “where my ancestors are from, and there I was taken to a grave of a long dead relative named Thora who had a very kind of wonderful story. I came home with that story, thinking I was going to try and cast it in fiction for children. I did a couple of drafts, but it didn’t really take off. Nonetheless, I had this voice in my head, and, in one of my fiction workshops in California, I wrote it down. There was a nice reaction from the people in the workshop, but writing workshops don’t necessarily take you to the next level. As I wasn’t there to do children’s books, I put it aside. The voice is what stayed with me, and I felt that this was the story that I wanted to tell, and I made a decision that I wanted to do it. I was in a situation where my son was very tiny, and he was still very ‘manageable.’ I think I ‘knew’ that I wasn’t going to have a huge amount of time as he grew older and that I’d better do it now. There’s nothing like children to suddenly focus you. As well, I wanted to write longer text for older children because I think I feel more at home in that medium.”
Thora is an illustrated novel, and, in making her decision as to what to illustrate, Gillian says, “I think that sometimes it’s as random as you read a line and a picture comes and you do it. For me, this process is not a linear one. When I’m writing it, sometimes I will draw the character when I’m thinking about the book and I imagine the scenes. Initially, I was going through the chapters and trying to do one little drawing per chapter with a scene that stood out. From there, some of the illustrations were better than the others, and some of this was the publisher’s choice as well. A lot of the illustrations were eliminated, and some were added. They were quick drawings because they’re black and white with a wash. It was quite a fun process.”
“With the second book, Thora and the Green Sea Unicorn, I pretty much saved the illustrations to the end as a kind of reward for finishing the book. I really enjoyed the drawings in the second book because I knew who the characters were, and I had already done lots and lots of drawings of these characters for the first book. It was really heaven to do the drawings for Thora and the Green Sea Unicorn, and it only took me two or three weeks to get them all done.”
The contract for Thora committed Gillian to three books about the character. When she looked ahead to the other books, she “sort of knew how it all ended, and now I have an understanding of the inevitability of it. I know how the third one will evolve, but, with the second one, my question was, ‘What happens before it all evolves into the finale?’ Something had to happen, and, because Thora is a world traveler, I wanted to be able to use the places I had lived. Thora’s that kind of character who likes to have new experiences and likes to see new things. We were in England when I started Thora and the Green Sea Unicorn, and so that’s where the book stayed. The third one will be set in Australia.”
When Thora was published in the United States, the editors there required some changes. “The Australians and the English were extremely laid-back in a way that took me, as a Canadian, by surprise. ‘Isn’t this a problem? Are you sure?’ And they said, ‘It’s fine. Yes, absolutely.’ The novel could contain cigars, cigarettes, Thora’s living alone on a boat. All of that was acceptable because this is a fantasy. It’s a children’s book, and everyone knows that it’s not a depiction of a true situation. The Americans accepted the book on the condition that I couldn’t have Thora living on her own. I had to bring Hella, the mermaid, to kiss Thora goodnight every night. As well, Thora could not be left alone, and so when Mr. Walters was summoned to Argentina to his brother’s funeral, we had to make sure that Hella had a bit of a presence there also so that nobody would get scared that Thora was by herself and that somebody might hurt her.”
“The Americans also suggested getting rid of the cigar smoking of Mr. Walters, but that was too fundamental a change. They wanted me to vacuum out all of the Britishisms, but Mr. Walters was a British man, and so it was very unnatural in his speech for him to say, ‘Ok, guys. Let’s go.’ He said, ‘Ok chaps. Let’s go.’ That wording’s because he’s British, not because the narration insists on it. I think the Americans were ultimately accepting of that, but there were a lot of changes that they made in order to accommodate what they felt was an American audience. The gingerbread men being dressed as cricketers had to be changed to hockey players, and nappies had to be changed to diapers. Those kinds of terminology changes are all fine because I think that’s part of different countries’ vernacular.”
After the third Thora, Gillian plans to do another picture book. “Hodder, who published Thora in England, have approached me to do a picture book. They have this idea of following a character over time so that she becomes older. Hodder publishes Lauren Child’s books about the character, Clarice Bean, who started as a picture book, Clarice Bean That’s Me and now Child’s taken her into books for older children. Francesca Simon, who did the “Horrid Henry” books, also has followed Henry from the picture book audience into 5-7's. I think Hodder actually has quite a clear marketing idea about having a character that everyone falls in love with and then following that character into their next stage and keeping the readers hanging in there.”
Although Gillian works in watercolours, she says “I’ve got a lot to learn. Watercolour is an difficult and elusive medium – but it’s also a witty and personal one. I’ve experimented with colour pencils, pastels, gouache and oil, but there’s something I’ll always love about a pen and ink and watercolour. I’d like to learn more about illustration and the computer. That said, Hodder Books in London made a very happy announcement to me, saying that drawing is back, and they’re really encouraging their illustrators to go back to drawing. They claim that we’ve had two decades of painterly kinds of execution of books where story has been less important and character is lost to colour and design. I was very excited by this. There’s a feeling of going back now to more conventional old-fashioned books with characters that you can relate to and more emphasis on story, plus more pencil, more pen and ink illustrations.”
In working on illustrating her own picture books, Gillian describes her process as being one of where, “Generally, I do the text first and then have fun with the pictures. Sometimes the illustration leads to the text being altered as it can be much easier to alter a word than to do a whole new drawing.”
As well as illustrating her own books, Gillian illustrates the texts of other authors. About doing the latter, Gillian says, “It’s harder than illustrating your own work because there’s this understanding that no matter what you do, you’re not going to necessarily capture what the author would like. What’s interesting is that a lot of authors aren’t very articulate about what they like until they see what they don’t like, and so you can do a lot of work and they can reject, reject, reject. I’ve found that publishers with a lot of experience, if they’re reading the personalities and the sensibilities of the author and the illustrator correctly, can manage it themselves and put the two into contact if they feel their sensibilities will mesh and they’ll get something better out of it and keep them apart if they don’t think that will happen.”
“It was interesting doing the illustrations for Tom Kenally’s Roos in Shoes. It was quite a challenge trying to draw kangaroos wearing shoes. There’s a nature park nearby where we live in Tasmania, and we went to it because you can get out of the car and feed the kangaroos and wallabies. I went with my digital camera and got lots and lots of pictures of their feet and then had to find shoes to put on them. Birkenstocks and Converse sneakers look the best.” Gillian adds, “Roos in Shoes probably won’t make it to North America because it’s quite an Australian tale. It’s kind of a lefty polemic for maybe older kids.”
As previously noted, Gillian’s having children has made a big difference in how she approaches writing and illustrating. “It’s completely changed absolutely everything in my entire life. I’ve been trying to reconstruct some new version of myself ever since, and I don’t know if I’m there yet. I tried having help, but it didn’t really work out because I wasn’t raised with help, and so I don’t know how to manage help. I’d rather just suffer in chaos. I work when the children are out of the house. I cannot really work when they’re in the house. They won’t let me. I’m too distracted. Now, when they’re out of the house, I really focus. I know it’s one of those cliche things to say, but you do wonder what you were doing before you had children. You must have had so much time, and what were you frittering it away doing? When I’ve got three hours, I have to sit down, and I have to work. It certainly made me more disciplined about my work.”
Even when the children are not home, Gillian still is not entirely alone because her husband, the other full-time author in the house, is also there. “There’s lots of wandering through the kitchen having tea and saying ‘Listen to this,’ or “How about that?’ Sometimes that’s great, and sometimes it’s, ‘I don’t think I can sit here and listen to a chapter. I’ve got to get back to my own work. Bye.’”
With her husband and their two children, Gillian typically splits the year between Wiltshire, England, and Swansea, a community on the east coast of Tasmania. “My husband, who is British, is completely phobic about the cold, an unfortunate feature given that I’m a Canadian. While on a trip to Australia, we fell in love with this Tasmanian beach property and bought it. We go back to Tasmania to ‘avoid the English winter’ as Nicholas would phrase it. Now that the children are getting older, we’re having to work around their school schedules and so we can just go back for three or four months. When they get older, we’ll probably have to make a decision about staying in one place for a while. I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing, living where I’m living, unless I had access to hundred dollar printers, a scanner and Mac computer.”
This article is based on an interview conducted in Winnipeg on October 4, 2005, and revised May, 2006.
