More from Stephen:
I think that it would be really fun and interesting to write a book, especially a children’s book. The problem is, what do you write it about? There are already so many books out in the world. But if I ever came up with a really good idea and knew where I wanted to go with it, I would do it. All the illustrations could be linoleum cuts. It would be a blast.
This came out of a conversation we recently had about the Have to Write a Book Challenge. You may have noticed that I like to pose little mental challenges for myself: work from home or work in an office, live in the city or live in the country, choose one color for the rest of my life, etc. One that I've been ruminating on lately (who knows where I thought it up) goes like this:
Imagine you wake up one morning to find that you have sleep-signed a contract with a publisher. You have no way to get out of the contract, which requires you to write a book within one year. What do you write about?
I think my book would be non-fiction. I really don't know how people write novels. They seem so complex, like juggling a hundred things at once, trying to make the whole thing engrossing, original, easy to follow and relatable, and remembering to tie up your loose ends. Mine might be more of a coffee table book, which may not sound very high-brow, but it's the kind of thing I'd like working on: large format, with lots of images. Maybe it would be an art book. Like Stephen, I envision something along the lines of a collection of linoleum prints. Like this.
I went to visit my parents over the weekend, and ended up going through a lot of stuff from college that's been collecting dust up in my room. I came across some old prints I'd made in my senior year, a couple of ancient letterpress blocks I found in Bouckville (the Antiques Capital of Central New York), some linoleum stamps of shopping carts and aprons and brooms I carved for a series on domesticity. It made me miss college and all the time I used to devote to things like that. I'm going to try to make more time for those things.
