Author’s ink flows at library
[attach]2046[/attach]Joan Yolleck has lived her life around books, first as an English Literature student at York University, then after graduation working at Britnell Books in Toronto, and finally working for years in the publishing industry.
Now she’s on the other side of the book, so to speak.
She has a day job, but Yolleck is an author by night.
The Forest Hill resident’s first book, Paris in the Spring with Picasso, has recently been published by Random House.
And in spite of the decidedly Parisienne content — Picasso, Gertrude Stein and a bevy of real life characters from the early 20th-century Paris arts scene — the entire book was conceived locally at the Forest Hill library.
An author’s note on the inside of the book references coming up with the idea in the library. Yolleck also took out and read over 100 books from the branch, which she often read there.
“It’s always been my library,” she says. Even today she still has vivid memories of doing a project there in grade 3.
You have to use books as research, she says, as they contain information that’s vetted through editors and publishers and fact-checkers – and that doesn’t always happen on the Internet.
“You have to go to the source.”
It’s not going to feel real, she adds, unless it’s accurate.
“There are worlds inside of books.”
While working on the book, Yolleck even test drove it on grade 1 and 2 students in her old school, Northern Prep.
It was amazing hearing their feedback, she says, and she ended up changing parts of the book based on the students’ response to it.
One girl she remembers kept repeating the same word from the book over and over again in different sing-song voices. That means a lot, she says, because in children’s picture books you have to choose your words so carefully.
“It’s hard to catch their attention,” she says. “This worked.”
Yolleck says she plans to go back to the school with her second book that’s in the works. It’s about an African American woman who gave a large contribution to the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
And she’s still using the library religiously.
She’s also planning to do outreach at local schools to see if they’ll use the book in art class and also get it in the library.
It was always important to keep the book for children as she says she wants kids to know about this time and these people.
When she came up with the idea seven years ago there wasn’t a lot of diversity in the children’s biography area, she says, but she had a good sense of the market and knew the biography would fly.
Originally, she wrote the book as a bio on Gertrude Stein, who was part of the Paris arts scene and great friends with Picasso.
Eventually the story morphed into being more about him and the cast of characters that surrounded him before his famous Blue
Period.
Getting the attention of Anne Schwartz from Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House, was a big deal, Yolleck says. And when she finally saw the drawings that award-winning illustrator Marjorie Priceman had rendered, she says she nearly flew she was so happy.
“I was over the moon.”
The book is in major bookstores like Indigo but also in independents like Type Books in Forest Hill Village.
Sadly, it’s not in the library system yet. The process can take six months to a year, she says.
It’s most fulfilling for her to hear that people have seen and read the book, Yolleck says.
“I’m totally fulfilled. The world is an amazing place.”