Kerry: This is probably more of a question for Emily, but I have to say I loved hearing her talk to the students about using thick and thin brushes, toothbrushes, sponges etc - and showing them the early sketches, the smaller paintings, the sketchbook, and the way the Hundred Acre Wood inspired Ernestine's own journey through the Smoky Mountains. Earlier in this month in Southern California, we set up mini-galleries on our school visits so the students could see her work, and they loved it. She told them she's been drawing since she was old enough to hold a pencil, and this was very inspiring to them. My process/medium - long walks, listening, story-catching, interviewing, staring at landscapes, meditation.
Kerry: I wrote journalism and then plays, and then I began to write an autobiographical novel, OFFSIDES, about growing up a coach's daughter. After it was published, I wrote an American Girl book on catching stories and poems called WRITING SMARTS. I then wrote the Smoky Mountain Trilogy - GENTLE'S HOLLER, LOUISIANA'S SONG, JESSIE'S MOUNTAIN, and those books led me to meet Ernestine Edwards Upchurch and to return to the mountains again and again. (Note: CLICK HERE to see Kerry Madden featured for her other books on dulemba.com.) Those books also led me to write UP CLOSE HARPER, which is how I came to live in Alabama and California. While interviewing storyteller, Kathryn Tucker Windham for the Harper Lee biography, I was inspired to write NOTHING FANCY ABOUT KATHRYN & CHARLIE, which my daughter, Lucy, illustrated. Then I decided to write the story of Ernestine delivering milk to her neighbors and after about 100 drafts, I began to find the threads.
Kerry: Ernestine said to me the first year I met her, "If you're going to write about our mountains your California family needs to learn to spare you! And I have a cabin you can use to write." So I took Norah to that cabin up on Johnson Gap in Maggie Valley and I wrote and I took pictures of Norah as a six-year-old in the mountains.
e: What do you think makes an illustration magical, what I call "Heart Art” - the sort that makes a reader want to come back to look again and again?Kerry: What a great question! Every page of Emily's gorgeous work contains "Heart Art." A little boy in Maggie Valley looked at Emily's painting of the Smoky Mountains right before Ernestine goes on her journey in the early morning, and he got so excited and said, "Hey! Those are our mountains. I know those mountains. They're our mountains!"
Kerry: I keep an active Facebook Page and Instagram page. My daughter, Lucy, created a new website for me and said, "Mom, you've to get out of 2005." I set up my tour with indie bookstores because I know they will hand-sell my book if it's right for them. I find self-promotion difficult, so I balance by trying to my promote and celebrate my author/illustrator friends too. I did make a trailer for Ernestine of kids making butter, and it was done with love from students and from Norah too.
Kerry: I struggle with my time and the many demands made on it. Some of my family members are facing serious illnesses, and I can sometimes allow worry eat up my energy. I also kind of have two lives - one in California and one in Alabama, so there is that juggle too. But when I just breathe and walk and do my own work first, no matter where I am, everything always falls into place.
Kerry: One editor said, "Ernestine is five and doing this job for her mother? I'm very nervous about that. Could she be older?" And I thought, but that's not the story. She really was five-years-old. And so I hope this story is one that celebrates kids exploring and finding their own journeys and discoveries without adults hovering (and I certainly did my fair share of hovering regarding my own kids).
Kerry: I would love to write a book about my dog, Olive,
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