Carson Ellis is the author and illustrator of the bestselling picture books Home and Du Iz Tak?. She joins to talk about her life living on a farm in Oregon and her remarkable career illustrating numerous award-winning books for children.
Debbie Millman:
Part of the point of keeping a journal is so you’ll have a record of everything that’s happening to you and that you don’t forget. In many ways, it is evidence of living. But what if, years later, you forget you even wrote that journal? That is what happened to Carson Ellis. A few years ago she found eight typed pages documenting the week she moved to Portland as a young artist with no money and few prospects.
Carson Ellis says she’s now a little embarrassed by some of what she refers to as the twee phrases and intellectual name-dropping of her younger self, but maybe because she’s now the successful author and illustrator of best-selling books like Home and Du Iz Tak? she did not run from that younger self. Instead, she took that journal as is, and illustrated it. Her brand new book, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary evokes the alternative art and music scene in Portland at the turn of the century and the heart of a young woman living through it all. Carson Ellis, welcome to Design Matters.
Carson Ellis:
Thank you, Debbie. Thanks so much for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Carson, I understand that you would love to be a fly on the wall during Medieval Europe. Why is that?
Carson Ellis:
Wow. Gosh, I don’t have an answer for that question. I often say I think I would maybe rather be a fly on the wall in Medieval Europe than a woman living in Medieval Europe. I think I would love-
Debbie Millman:
Fair enough.
Carson Ellis:
… to see just day-to-day life during that period because I love the art and the fashion, and the architecture and just the simplicity of a Medieval life is really appealing to me. But it’s not appealing to me in a practical way. I don’t think I would want to be living then. I’d rather be a fly on the wall observing.
Debbie Millman:
The funny thing about being a fly on a wall, flies are just generally not very popular insects. I’d rather be a butterfly-
Carson Ellis:
That’s true.
Debbie Millman:
… on a wall or even a ladybug, which I know some people love and some people don’t, but they’re so much prettier.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, that’s true. I might amend it because flies are like my least favorite animal. A butterfly animal, maybe a praying mantis.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, definitely. Carson, you were born in Vancouver to parents you have described as hippies who were living in a van with a wood stove. They were also then in an apartment that they were evicted from. Where did you all go during this very sort of time of upheaval as you were a baby?
Carson Ellis:
Well, first of all, my parents don’t totally agree with this description of them as hippies, but on paper they feel like they were hippies to me. They did have this wonderful-sounding tricked-out hippie bakery van that they lived in. I can’t remember if they were evicted, but they didn’t have a place to live when I was born. They were staying at a friend’s house. They were in Vancouver, BC. My maternal grandmother lived in New York and came out to Canada and convinced them to move back to New York with her. So they did. My Canadian dad and my New Yorker mom moved to Brooklyn where my dad went to work for my grandpa, his father-in-law at a printing company.
Debbie Millman:
And then you moved to Mount Kisco up in Westchester, and I believe you lived in a rented carriage house of a former country home of a Vanderbilt until you were about seven. What was that like?
Carson Ellis:
Gosh, Debbie, you did so much good research. It’s so cool. It was amazing. Yeah, so what it was was sort of like the country estate of a wealthy New York family. It was a Vanderbilt and a Hammond, and their kid, or one of their kids was actually John Hammond, the famous music producer. And I think that was probably their country home or something. But by the time we lived there in the ’70s, the big estate house had gone to ruin. It was sort of decrepit and there was an old caretaker who looked after it. We lived in the carriage house, so it was sort of like a big loft on the second floor where we lived and the downstairs would’ve been, I guess where there would’ve been carriages and maybe horses. And it was on a dirt road. There was a pony that lived across the street that I was quite attached to.
There was just acres and acres of wood and pasture and I was allowed to roam. And so I led a wild childhood or wild as in very outdoors childhood, and I did a lot of drawing and a lot of exploring in the woods and stuff.
Debbie Millman:
I understand that you started drawing comics very young with cats and leg warmers, singing and dancing to Pat Benatar.
Carson Ellis:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And stories about a girl who got a horse for her 10th birthday. I’m wondering if that was inspired by the horse next door.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, it was just aspirational. It was inspired by my desperate desire to have a pony when I was a little girl. The horse across the street was a wild horse. I mean, it was domesticated, but I don’t think anyone had ridden it. So me and my friend who lived across the street were always trying to climb on its back and it would race across the field. Although I was a wild horse, but I always was like a horse kid who was desperately wanting to have a horse as a kid, and so I wrote stories about it and drew comics about it and stuff.
Debbie Millman:
It seems that by the time you were in elementary school, you were already drawing your own stories and also writing them, so you were drawing and writing. You’re doing basically what you do now in elementary school.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah. I think that’s true. I don’t know how often I was actually finishing anything. I have sketchbooks with lots of starts and not lots of finishes, like the first couple pages of a story. A story that maybe would have chapter one lettered in very elaborate typography. I would’ve spent more time lettering the words chapter one than actually writing chapter one, that kind of thing.
Debbie Millman:
Do you still have these journals and these books that you were making from back then?
Carson Ellis:
I do. I still have a lot of my childhood sketchbooks. My mom saved them.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you were a loner as a kid and preferred to hang out in the woods hunting for bugs and salamanders, catching crayfish in the stream behind your house and climbing trees, and I was wondering, were you shy or just introverted?
Carson Ellis:
I think I was both, and sensitive, but I think I really appreciated time by myself as a kid in a way that looking back, I feel like maybe was a bit misunderstood. I think I was often alone by choice, just it was comfortable and I really liked my own company. But I also think I was shy. I remember not being that comfortable befriending other kids or spending time with especially big groups of kids when I was little.
Debbie Millman:
When you were in high school, you took a weekly art class for teenagers interested in creating a portfolio for college applications. What kind of art were you making in that class and what did you think of what you were making?
Carson Ellis:
I didn’t like that class very much. It was taught by this woman who I think my grandmother knew. She was an abstract expressionist and she was probably my grandma’s age, so she was probably in her seventies back then. She taught a class for kids that wanted to beef up their college applications with extracurricular kind of activities, so she would have you create a portfolio and then she would reach out to her various connections at universities around the country and try to help you get into one.
And I was a bit resentful of the experience because everybody made the same portfolio. It was like we’re all going to copy this [inaudible 00:08:45] collage and then we’re all going to make a woodcut print from a photo in a magazine. None of it was my thing, and it sort of felt like it was steering me away from my art practice, which was actually a thing when I was a teenager.
I had kept a sketchbook and I was drawing all the time. So I felt misunderstood in this class. And there was one other kid, it was all girls in the class, and there was one other kid who I felt like I felt kindred to because she also was just someone who loved to draw and I remember feeling like the other kids. No offense to them if they’re out there, but that they were just doing this thing along with their French club and their chess club and their lacrosse to get into a good school, and I didn’t appreciate it, I don’t think.
Debbie Millman:
As you were going through high school, I read in another interview that you did that you described yourself at that time as an unhappy stoner with abysmal grades and slim prospects for graduating. And the art class was actually the low point of your always very low week. Carson, why were you so bummed out at that time and how did you make sense of the world and your art?
Carson Ellis:
Oh man, Debbie, that is such a deep question. Why was I bummed out? I was just an unhappy teenager. I think I grew up in Westchester County, New York, and I feel like it was a pretty conservative environment. I went to a really big public school, kind of like a sports-centric public school, where the focus was really good grades and moving on to an Ivy League college after graduation and none of that really made sense to me. It didn’t seem like who I was. I don’t know. I think I was just a sensitive kid who didn’t quite feel like she fit in.
I think I had been teased a lot in middle school and while that wasn’t really something that was happening to me as a teenager, I think I still had a lot of baggage like childhood baggage that didn’t really go away until I left high school and moved far away from the town I grew up in.
Debbie Millman:
I really think that anybody that doesn’t get teased in middle school or junior high school peaks at that point in their life, and that’s the best it ever gets. I think everybody else that gets teased goes on to bigger and better things.
Carson Ellis:
Well, that’s wonderful to hear.
Debbie Millman:
At least that’s how I want to make sense of the world.
Carson Ellis:
I’d like to make sense of it that way too. I do. Those were definitely my middle school years. It’s true for so many people, but they were definitely the sort of nadir of my existence and it was sort of all uphill from there.
Debbie Millman:
Same.
Carson Ellis:
But high school was rough too. I think I was just unhappy. I was just kind of like a depressed, hormonal teenager. And I think art at the time, I loved making art. I drew all the time. It was this super important central thing in my life, but I don’t think it was necessarily something that was connecting me to the people around me. Certainly not in the way that it does now that I’m an adult.
Debbie Millman:
Was it difficult for you to get into a college that you wanted to go to?
Carson Ellis:
Well, I had very bad grades, but I didn’t…
Debbie Millman:
How bad? Like D’s and F’s or B’s and C’s?
Carson Ellis:
Some D’s and F’s. I had to graduate from high school. I had to go to summer school for chemistry and also gym because I missed so much school that I didn’t pass gym. I hated gym so much.
Debbie Millman:
Did you have to wear a uniform?
Carson Ellis:
I didn’t have to wear a uniform.
Debbie Millman:
We had to wear these blue and white stripes, horizontal stripe uniforms. It was just hell.
Carson Ellis:
That actually sounds kind of cute, but I just wore my gross sweaty gym clothes and I hated it. I really didn’t care in high school. I was just kind of didn’t care about much, and so it didn’t occur to me to try to pass gym, and it didn’t occur to me that it would be a big deal if I didn’t graduate from my school. I was just in that place as a teenager. And then I did graduate. My grades weren’t good.
I did get into one really good college and that was Bennington College in Vermont, but it was super expensive. I think at the time it was one of the most expensive private colleges in the country, and I didn’t get into a couple places I applied, but I did get into the University of Montana, which was the only place I really wanted to go to anyway.
Debbie Millman:
It feels having lived in your life for the last couple of weeks as I was preparing for the interview; it seems that there’s a lot of serendipity to you ending up at the University of Montana. You said this at the time, “I chose UM because I had seen beautiful photos of Montana in magazines and felt powerfully drawn there.” Also, it was a relatively cheap school that I could get into with my abysmal GPA and perfect lack of extracurricular activities. I had nothing to recommend me, but a portfolio of goofy high school art and an earnest college essay framed around the promise of starting anew. But despite being bad on paper, the University of Montana accepted me.”
Carson, you go on to say that you were mysteriously powerfully drawn to Missoula and that you felt happier there in a way you don’t think you ever did in New York. What do you think that was about? What was this pull that was bringing you there?
Carson Ellis:
I think it’s a constellation of things. I think for the biggest part of it probably was just being able to start somewhere new where I didn’t know anyone and where nobody knew me. It’s so hard to start fresh in life, and I think just going somewhere so far away to the Rocky Mountains, I could just be the person that I felt like I truly was. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain in a way that doesn’t sound kind of silly or hokey, but I think being able to start fresh and also Montana is so beautiful.
I moved there and that landscape and just being in that wide open place coming from the suburbs of New York where every town abuts another town. I didn’t even realize there were places in America where you could drive for a half hour and not even drive through a town. It seemed like amazing to me just how much space there was and how much natural beauty there was and how big that sky truly is. So it just felt good on all fronts to me there.
Debbie Millman:
At this point in your life, you knew you loved illustration and that was what you wanted to do, but there was no illustration program at the University of Montana. What did you end up majoring in and what do you think you might do professionally at that time?
Carson Ellis:
I do think when I went to the University of Montana that I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to be an illustrator when I was in high school, but I don’t think I was thinking in practical terms, so I knew there was no illustration program there. I studied fine art and I got a painting degree, and I guess I thought that would be the same thing. So I graduated with a painting degree and had no idea how to be an illustrator. I had no plan, but I also didn’t really know what… I didn’t know anything about illustrations.
I didn’t know the difference between book illustration and editorial illustration and all the different areas that you could potentially be working in as an illustrator. And I definitely did not know how to put together a portfolio or who the art director was, or I just didn’t know anything when I graduated. So it was harder than I thought it would be to be an illustrator without having studied in a school, I think.
Debbie Millman:
I had absolutely no idea that there was even something called an illustrator when I was in college and thought that printers did everything that had to do with design. And look how my life turned out. It’s so funny how we don’t even know about these things. And now especially, there’s no way that when I was a little girl, I could have said, “Gee, when I grow up, I want to be a podcaster.”
Carson Ellis:
I know. I think in some ways it’s a boon to be so blissfully ignorant. At least looking back, I feel that way.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, no, I agree. Now, is it true that when you were in college, your college roommate was Colin Meloy?
Carson Ellis:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You had co-ed roommates in college?
Carson Ellis:
No, he wasn’t my roommate in the dorms. He was my roommate in a big party house with a bunch of people.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Carson Ellis:
So I lived in the dorms for the first year at the University of Montana, and then I lived wherever. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment for a while with a boyfriend, and then I moved into this big house. I think there were four or five people that lived there, and a couple people had moved out and Colin and I were moving in at the same time.
Debbie Millman:
Was it a memorable first meeting?
Carson Ellis:
I think so. I remember seeing him and thinking like, “Whoa, my new roommate is really cute.” And then he remembers seeing me moving in and how I had only a plastic bag full of clothes, like a garbage bag full of clothes and a skateboard, and one of those invisible man dolls. I don’t know if you can picture that. It’s a plastic model of a human with all of the internal organs on the inside. It’s like an educational tool, and I had one of those for some reason, and he was intriguing. So we both made some kind of weird but positive impression on each other.
Debbie Millman:
And would you say looking back on it now that there was a spark or was it just like, “Cool dude, cute.”
Carson Ellis:
I was like, “Cool dude, cute,” but I had a serious boyfriend and he had a string of girlfriends. He was dating a lot of people, and so we were very fast and close friends and remained fast and close friends for a lot of years. We have the same birthday and we would’ve moved into that house at the end of the summer in August or September, and our birthday is in the beginning of October. So by the time October rolled around, we were already good friends and had throwing a joint birthday party. The first of many.
Debbie Millman:
Colin is a musician. He ultimately went on to become the founder, guitarist, and singer for the band, The Decemberists. At the time, he was already making music and you started to collaborate with him to make a lot of art for his band at that time. What kinds of things were you making for him?
Carson Ellis:
Mostly posters, like flyers. Flyers I would make with Sharpie, and then we would Xerox at Kinko’s and hang up around town. I think I did make one CD cover design, but it was for a live CD. And I remember I pretty sure I drew it on a scrap of paper in a bar with ballpoint pen. So it was a pretty low-key affair.
Debbie Millman:
After college, you moved to Vermont and Minneapolis, and San Francisco, and you worked as a cocktail waitress and a bartender. Were you making art at the same time?
Carson Ellis:
I was, yeah. I was always making art. In fact, I was making a lot of art back then. I think by the time I had graduated from college, I had a pretty dedicated art practice, and because I had graduated with a painting degree, I was trying to be an illustrator, but I really didn’t know how to do it. So I was mostly being a painter and I was making these big oil paintings and trying to have shows and sell them.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of subject matter?
Carson Ellis:
Sort of fantastic subject matter, like ghostly people flying up into the sky. There’s one painting I made that was a giant dog as big as a mountain walking over a small village of houses. I don’t know, dreamy stuff, strange stuff.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to move to Portland?
Carson Ellis:
I was living in San Francisco, and it was so expensive there as it still is. It just gets more and more expensive, but this would’ve been like in 2000. I had friends there that I really loved, but maybe I hadn’t really found my creative community there, per se. I worked as a cocktail waitress and I lived in this very, very cold, unheated warehouse, this big metal airplane hanger warehouse. So many of my friends from Missoula from college had moved to Portland.
So I would go up and visit a lot, and Colin was there, and he was my favorite of all my friends there. I would go up there and it just seemed like everybody was living such a life. It was so much cheaper and they had heat. It was very, very welcoming. I just felt like I met people so much easier there. And people in San Francisco, I felt like I couldn’t really figure out where I fit in as an artist, and I didn’t really feel welcomed per se, but when I went to Portland, people were like, “I’m having an art show. Be in my art show, make a comic for my zine, make a flyer for my band,” and it felt so easy, so much easier. So I just moved there.
Debbie Millman:
By your late 20s, you began to get editorial work for some local weekly papers. What kinds of creative briefs were you getting from those papers and what kind of work, aside from the comics and the zines were you doing for the newspapers?
Carson Ellis:
I was doing editorial illustrations and I really was faking it till I make it kind of thing. I didn’t know how to use Photoshop or scanners. I remember my very first color illustration job was for the cover of the Willamette Week, which was a weekly in Portland. And I think I had pretended that I knew how to color something in digitally and I ended up having to ask the art director to talk me through it over the phone.
So there was a lot of sort of demoralizing moments in the beginning where people were very, very kind to me and helped me figure out how to do all this stuff. And I don’t know. I just did whatever editorial stuff came my way. At the time, I feel like a lot of the art I was doing had a Russian or Slavic influence to it. And so I know one of the first editorial jobs I got was an illustration of a Yugoslavian band or something. And so I think people were seeing my work and, I don’t know, just figuring out where it fit in, what would jive with this kind of stuff I was doing.
Debbie Millman:
When did you and Colin get serious and decide you were going to make a life together?
Carson Ellis:
Well, shortly after I moved to Portland in 2001. And at that point we were friends for three years or something and collaborating on various stuff, and we were very close friends by that time. And then I think we hooked up sometime that spring and then had a confusing on-and-off relationship for maybe a year. And then, ever since then, we’ve been together. So I think since 2002 or something, we’ve been a pretty steady couple. I don’t remember when we decided to have kids, but we did make a conscious decision to have our first kid, and he was born in 2006. So a few years later we were like, “Let’s have a family.” We didn’t waste much time. We dove right into it.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about how you met Steve Malk and how that has impacted your career.
Carson Ellis:
Oh, that is such a lucky stroke for me. So Steve Malk is my literary agent, and he’s incredible at what he does, and he’s also a wonderful dude. And this would’ve been, I guess probably around 2005. So at this point, I’d made a bunch of Decemberist record covers, and I had done a bunch of editorial work and I was starting to do more stuff like posters for other bands, but also the cover of a literary magazine, that kind of stuff. Just doing more illustration work generally. And I think I was just on his radar. And so he contacted me out of the blue.
My goal all along since I was a kid really was to illustrate kids’ books and perhaps to write them too. And so he contacted me to ask me if I wanted to do this work, and I did very much, but I was skeptical because I thought I maybe didn’t need an agent.
I didn’t know how the whole system worked. In fact, that’s kind of like a theme in my life is not quite understanding the system I’m trying to work within. So I was kind of working on a picture book pro bono with Colin for Editor. An editor had approached me and said, do you have any ideas for books for kids? And I said, “Well, yeah. My husband and I wanted to… Or my boyfriend and I wanted to collaborate on something.” So we pitched it to her and she said, “Oh, that’s great. Can you make a dummy?” And of course, I didn’t know what a dummy was, but I worked on this thing anyway. And eventually I was at a place where I sort of needed to check in with her and get some feedback, and I couldn’t really get her. She was very busy and I couldn’t get her to respond to me.
And I was like, “I’ve done all this work and I can’t get this editor to get back to me and give me any feedback.” And that’s about the moment Steve contacted me out of the blue and I was like, “Well, I don’t really need an agent because I’ve already got this illustration gig with this editor.” And he was like, “Well, I know that editor. Would you like to have a book deal, actually get some money for the work you’re doing?” And I was like, “Actually, I would.”
And so I was skeptical at first, but thank God I hired on with him because he has been so wonderful to work with. I don’t know. I don’t know where I’d be without him. But he did get me a book deal for this first book that Colin and I were working on together. And then it sort of fell through because the editor went on to another publisher. Kind of a long, boring story, but I’ve worked with him ever since.
Debbie Millman:
What was it about children’s books that appealed to you so deeply?
Carson Ellis:
I think I’ve always been drawn to illustration from the time I was little. I think probably whether we know it or not, we all are a little drawn to illustration because it’s our first introduction to visual art. Most of us as kids, we’re seeing our first art, we’re reading our first prose and poetry in the form of picture books. So that’s a big part of it. As a grown up now who’s been doing this work for 20 years, I think a big part of it for me is just how important that work seems to be.
Making books for tiny people who are going to interact with art and literature for the first time is like an honor and a privilege. I think as a kid, when I first… And it was really when I was a teenager, when I started thinking that that was what I would want to do with my life because I found the book, Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak, and it was such a weird, ambiguous, beautiful, dreamy book that it made me realize that a picture book could be anything and that it had this giant amorphous audience.
And that’s an incredible opportunity to make weird, incredible art because kids are really open-minded readers, way more open-minded than we are as adults. And this opportunity to combine text and imagery, both things, interest me and especially did as a teenager. I liked writing poetry and I liked drawing, and I was like, “Where do these things combine well? How do they work together in a meaningful way?” And it felt like picture books was the answer.
Debbie Millman:
I spent many years in my 20s and into my early 30s trying to rebuild my childhood and even into my middle school years library, because those books saved me, and I wanted them around me again. But, there are a couple of books that I don’t remember the names of. I just remember the color palette and the illustrations. In many ways, I feel like those are the ones that got away. I’m wistful for them, and I probably will be for the rest of my life. Here’s, I would say, not a month or so that goes by that I don’t wish that I knew what those books were titled so I could have them again.
Carson Ellis:
I think that’s so relatable. People always ask me what the picture books were that I loved when I was a kid. I don’t really remember most of them, but I remember them the way you do, almost like you remember a dream where you have this glimmering peripheral memory of something that’s more sensory than it is memory. Yet, I know those books were probably so formative, and they’re up in my brain, and forming everything that I do and everything that I make and all of my interests and obsessions as an artist, but I don’t know what the actual books are, which is wild.
Debbie Millman:
This book, actually, it’s really interesting. The book had a Carson Ellis-esque in my mind, in my memory that I’ve constructed about this very ethereal, very beautiful. It had blues, and it was about… At least there was a part of it that this little girl was going to sleep, and on her night table next to her was a couple of trinkets and a glass of water. Some people have been like, “Oh, is that Good Night, Moon?” I’m like, “No, it was not Good Night, Moon.”
Carson Ellis:
You’re like, “Duh.”
Debbie Millman:
That would be easy to find. I remember being so enthralled by this book that I actually want… I set up my night table to look exactly like hers, because I loved it so much. I just did the memory of that. I could reach out and touch it. That’s how powerful it is.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, books are really powerful for all of us, but I think especially for kids, they just live in them in a way that we don’t really remember how to do as adults, which is a really just… It’s such a profound relationship to have with art.
Debbie Millman:
Your early experiences illustrating children’s books were for other people. You illustrated Trenton Lee Stewart’s book, the Mysterious Benedict Society. I believe that was your first illustration commission for a book. You worked with Lemony Snicket, who is also known as Daniel Handler. Maybe I should have said that the other way around at a party, and he asked you to collaborate on a project. What was that experience like working with Daniel?
Carson Ellis:
That was an interesting one, because there was also a composer in the mix. That book is called The Composer is Dead. So, it came with a CD with an original score, and it’s… The format of it is a little bit like Peter and the Wolf, where you can read through the book and listen to the music that accompanies it. It’s a murder mystery set in an orchestra. I don’t think I talked to Daniel that much while I was working on it, nor Nathaniel Stookey who was the composer. I think we all did our separate jobs, which is typically the way things go with illustrating picture books.
Debbie Millman:
I was really surprised to read how little interaction you had in those early books with the authors that sometimes the authors would see your work, and they’d be like, “This is great,” and then that was it. So, there wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth collaboration the way you worked with, say, Colin on the Wildwood Chronicles.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, that’s true. I think now, for the most part, I think I’m mostly working with people I know pretty well at this point. Those are my favorite projects. Right now, I’m working on a book with Mac Barnett who is a very close friend of mine, so I’m able to go back and forth with him a lot, and it’s part of the fun. But typically, the way it works is authors and illustrators are… The author does their job, and they pass the book on to the editor, and the editor then works with the illustrator, and the two don’t really interact very much.
Debbie Millman:
You illustrated books for other people for a decade before you began working on writing and illustrating a book of your own. Your first book was titled Home. It came out in 2015. What inspired that book? It’s a beautiful, beautiful book. It’s absolutely gorgeous book.
Carson Ellis:
Thank you, Debbie. I had aspired to write my own book for a long time. Since I was a kid basically, I think I always wanted to do it. It just was hard to come up with an idea that I liked enough to move forward with. I think at that point, I was such a student and enthusiast of picture books that I was like, “I don’t want to make a one, and all my ideas feel mediocre,” and not even in a self-doubting way, just in the way that I was like, “I don’t think I’ve hit upon something yet that’s really worth my time.” Sometimes I would have ideas that would be half formed, and I would mention them to Steve, my agent, and he would be like, “Yeah, maybe. I think you need to flesh that out more.”
So, I had a lot of false starts, and then I realized that maybe I’m not naturally a narrative storyteller, and that that’s not the way I want to tell stories. So, Home was a book, so basically just a poem about homes, but I came at it more from an illustration angle. I thought like, “Well, if I don’t feel like I know how to write a book, but I do know how to illustrate a book, what do I want to illustrate? What do I love to draw, and what would I love to draw for 32 pages? What would keep me really excited and inspired throughout the whole book if I could draw anything?” I do really love drawing homes and environments, interior spaces.
I love books that feel interactive and dynamic, because a lot of the time, picture books are read over and over and over again. I think if you can ask questions, and have a different conversation each time, and imbue a story with your own imagination or the imagination of the kid reading, it becomes this changing dynamic experience, which is really a beautiful thing that picture books can do that a lot of other books can’t. So, those were my premises that I wanted to write a book that would be fun to illustrate, and I wanted to write a book that would ask questions of the readers, and ask them to tell the story of the book.
Debbie Millman:
Do you plant Easter eggs in the books so that people reading it over and over and over again could begin to see secondary things or tertiary things to help advance their imagination in some way?
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, I do. I especially did that with Home, because Home is a book about homes. It’s a book about mythological homes and homes around the world, and homes under the sea, and homes in outer space and all kinds of homes, but it’s also a book about being an artist, and the interests, and obsessions that we are constantly coming back to that make us the singular creative people that we are. A lot of the time, those interests develop in childhood. So, there are these long threads that run through our creative lives. So, it’s a book about all these places really, environments, obsessions, interests.
Then, at the end, you see the artist in her studio, and she’s surrounded by souvenirs from all these places that you’ve visited as a reader throughout the book. So, you can go back through the book, and find where all the little things in the artist studio at the end are. There’s also a bird, a morning dove that’s on every spread of the book that you can look for too, and then I’m in the book. So yeah, I do tend to chuck them full of Easter eggs or things to search for. I think as a person who maybe is not super comfortable with narrative storytelling, I think a lot about the picture books that I love that also seem to be written by people that love to draw, and for whom the storytelling or the narrative aspect of it is maybe secondary.
I think of people like Richard Scarry, and a book like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, and there is this vague story that runs through it. These pigs are on their way to the beach, but really, that’s not what that book is about. It’s about picking out all these tiny little details, and imagining the backstories of this hitchhiking fox or whatever, this chimpanzee driving a banana car. That’s the fun of that book. I think there are so many ways to make a book that’s engaging for kids, and one of them is just to fill it with details, so they can be pointing things out and wondering about them.
Debbie Millman:
Tell me about why you have a resistance to narrative storytelling. What is it about that that makes your bristle?
Carson Ellis:
It doesn’t make me bristle, and I love and have so much respect for it and wish I felt more comfortable with it and better at it, but I just don’t… For example, I think some parents are really good at sitting down with their kids before bed and telling them a story. My husband’s really good at it. He can just make up a story. He’s great at storytelling, and I just don’t. I’m freeze-faced with the challenge of making up a story, even if it could be about anything. You’re telling a story to a three-year-old with no expectations. The bar is very low, and I still feel frozen by it.
So, it’s not that I bristle. It’s not what I’m good at. I think I’m good at combining text and imagery in ways that feel novel and maybe explore the form a little bit, and find new ways to combine those things into the shape of a book without telling a narrative story. Someday I’m going to do it, but I just haven’t thought of a good one yet.
Debbie Millman:
Well, your next book, Du Iz Tak, came out in 2016, and the book is one of the most unusual picture books I have ever encountered. You wrote it using a language that you invented. Can you talk about how you did that and also how you approached the marketing folks at your publishing house to let you do this?
Carson Ellis:
That book, the germ of the idea for that book was very simple. I had just planted some seeds, and they were sprouting. I was excited that they were sprouting because I’m a gardener, and there’s always a thrill when those first initial leaves push up through the soil, and you’re like, “It worked. They’re growing.” So, I was lying in bed with my kid thinking about that, and I was thinking about a plant’s life cycle, but I was also thinking about the cycle of enthusiasm, how when the plant first grows, you’re so excited, and you’re paying so much attention. Each leaf that grows is exciting, and you notice it, but then the days get longer and warmer.
It grows faster and faster, and you stop paying attention to it, and then the next thing you know, it’s this big tangly plant. Then the next thing you know it’s wilting and falling over and returning to the soil. So, I was thinking a lot about that and how I would love to make a picture book it, but I was aware that the concept would be boring to most kids. I think kids also-
Debbie Millman:
Why? Why?
Carson Ellis:
I think a lot of kids really love planting things and watching them grow. I think that is a thing that interests kids, but I don’t know if the… It seemed like it needed another element to it to make it be a fun thing to read a book about. It’s very fun to plant some seeds and watch them grow, but does that excitement translate to a picture book on its own? So, I was thinking about when I was a kid and how much I loved these microcosmic worlds of creatures I would find if I flipped over a log. I think that was… Probably of all the activities I partook in as a kid, my very favorite activity was flipping over logs, and seeing what I could find underneath them.
So, I took that idea of the plant growing and dying, and I added this community of little creatures around it. I thought that that could just be a wordless picture book, but it felt kind of static. It felt like it needed something else to make it be more immersive and also funnier. I actually was working in my studio on this book or thinking about it anyway, and I had my kids with me. My husband was out of town, and I was trying to work and entertain a one-year-old and an eight-year-old. So, I put on this show called Pingu, which is like a claymation cartoon about a penguin.
He speaks an invented language, and he’s so funny, and everybody loves him. Despite this big seven-year age gap between my kids, they were both watching Pingu yammer on in his ridiculous gibberish language. They were on the floor laughing, and I thought, “That is what this world of bugs needs. It needs its own language.” So, that was the idea for the language. Then writing the manuscript for it was hard, because the only text in it is dialogue, and all the dialogue is in an invented language. So, I wrote it like a screenplay or something with a lot of artist notes, author notes like, “These two damsel flies enter, and one of them says to the other, “Du iz tak.” The other says, “Mana zoot.”
So, I wrote the whole book out that way, and I showed it to my editor at the time, Liz Bicknell, who is just a very trusting, wonderful editor or was. She retired. I didn’t give her a glossary or even tell her what the words meant or anything, even though they do have a translation. They do all mean something. She just didn’t totally understand it, but was like, “I trust you. Go forth.” I need to see what these characters will look like, and I need a little more information, but it seems like an okay idea.
Debbie Millman:
Did you write it first in English, and then translate it, or did you write it and then translate it?
Carson Ellis:
I didn’t ever translate it, weirdly. I just gave her a manuscript that was all gibberish dialogue, and the notes that describe the action on the page. They knock on the log, and the door in the log opens, and there’s a pill bug inside, and they say this. So, I didn’t ever tell her the translation. I don’t even think we talked about it, and that she realized necessarily that it was translatable until the book was done, until I had finished making it. I think that’s fine, because I felt really strongly. So, the book is…
The dialogue is all in an invented language, but I was really conscientious about creating a language, and using it contextually in a way that if you’re the kind of brain that really wants to translate it or decode it, decipher it that you could, but it felt really important that it also work as a book if you have no idea what they’re saying, if it’s just noise. I think that’s part of the reason why I didn’t give her a translation, because I wanted to make sure that it worked, whether or not you knew what they were saying.
Debbie Millman:
There are some sites where people have tried to write it in English, I discovered, as I was doing my research, which I loved, but you’ve said that Du iz tak means, “What is that?” Do you find that kids reading the book are easily able to comprehend the plot and what is happening even though they don’t know the language so to speak?
Carson Ellis:
Yes. I think it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on in the story just through the pictures. When I read the book aloud to kids, I don’t translate everything as I read it, but I’ll translate a few things here and there strategically so that when I get to the last page, when there’s a little cricket that wanders out into this field of little growing plants, and the cricket says, “Du iz tak,” and then I say to a group of kids which means, and they all know. They all yell out, “What is that?” Because I think by that time, you’ve heard it repeated in the context of people pointing at a thing and wondering about it so many times, and kids are just so intuitive when it comes to language. I think kids understand that book in general a lot better than adults do.
Debbie Millman:
Can you share a couple of lines from the book with us?
Carson Ellis:
Oh, sure. So, there is a page where these three beetles wander out. They’re meant to be children. Though I’m never sure if it’s clear. There’s this green shape in the middle, and it does appear to be a plant that’s unfurling. One of them says, “Du iz tak.” Another one says, “Ma ebadow unk plonk.” Then the third one says, “Du kimma plonk.” The second one says, “Ma nazoot.” Do you want the translation?
Debbie Millman:
Yes, please. How’d you know what I was thinking?
Carson Ellis:
So, du iz tak means, “What is that?” She’s pointing at the plant. The second one says, “Ma ebadow unk plonk,” which means, “I think it’s a plant.” Then the third one says, “Du kimma plonk,” which means, “What kind of plant?” Then the second one says, “Ma nazoot,” which means, “I don’t know,” which is another phrase that gets repeated a few times.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I love about all three of your children’s books is perspective, the perspective that you bring to the book, the perspective that a reader can bring to the book. There’s so much nuance that overlaps that they could be read in so many different ways at any number of different times, and that felt very much apparent in your most current book, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary, but this is the first adult book that you’ve both written and illustrated. The book relays the story of one week of your life. In 2001, the monumental week, you first moved to Portland, Oregon.
That week, you decided to keep a journal documenting every single thing you did each day, everything you ate, every book you read, every time you checked your email. Why that week at that time, and why so much detail?
Carson Ellis:
I don’t remember why that week, and I didn’t remember anything about this journal when I found it. I just found it in a box of ephemera a few years ago. I couldn’t remember why it even existed. I hadn’t seen it in 20 years or something. I was like, “Why would I have kept not only this journal for one week, but a journal that was so meticulous, such a detailed, meticulous chronicle of everything I did?” But then I spoke to my friend about it who is in the book a lot, my really old friend Emily. I asked her if she remembered anything about it, and she was like, “I do. You kept that journal, because you were worried that you were losing your memory. It was some kind of memory exercise, because you always were feeling like you were too forgetful, and you were somehow trying to boost your memory by writing down everything that you did.”
So, I think every morning when I woke up, I wrote down every single thing that I could remember from the day before. It was the week I moved to Portland, and I think… I don’t know if there’s significance to that. I’m not sure if that was intentional. I’m not sure if it was something that was helping me get my bearings in a new city. My sense is that at the time, I was 25 years old, and I had just a million half formed art ideas in my head, and this was just one of them, a bunch of just ways of being creative that I was exploring and trying to find some purpose for in my creative practice.
Debbie Millman:
You said that the text doesn’t read so much like a journal that you feel that it reads more like a stoic catalog, and that you don’t reveal much emotionally. I have to say, Carson, I don’t agree at all. That to me doesn’t even feel like we’re talking about the same book.
Carson Ellis:
Sure thing.
Debbie Millman:
There’s so much emotion in it. What’s so interesting about it is that there’s a lot of emotion because the things that you don’t say that give a sense of there being deep emotionality in it.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah. I mean, I think my favorite books are books where we’re not hearing from a narrative voice what the characters are going through. We’re witnessing it, and we’re discerning it from context and dialogue and stuff. So, I guess in that way, this book is similar, where I don’t really ever say how I’m feeling, but because you see everything I’m doing, and are privy to so many of my conversations, you can see that I am broke. I’m probably in love with my best friend who I’m hanging out with all the time, but he’s dating all of my friends-
Debbie Millman:
Sleeping with in the same bed, but nothing is happening.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, we’re sleeping in the same bed, but we’re “just friends.” There’s so much longing and unfulfilled stuff in it that it is. I agree with you. I do think there’s a lot of feeling in it, but I think I really go out of my way to not actually express anything, which does seem counter to a diary, because I feel like other diaries I have kept, I’ve kept them because I was in some of moment of emotional tumult, and I wanted to be like, “Dear diary, I’m so unhappy because of this reason and this reason, and there’s none of that in this book.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s certainly very unselfconscious, but that’s also what I love about it. You know that this young woman is in love with this man, and he’s bringing her pizza every night, because she’s so broke. She doesn’t have money for dinner and… I don’t know. There’s so much unsaid beauty in it. What made you decide, once you found it again, that you wanted to make it into a book and make all of these, I think 20 or 30 illustrations, paintings for the book?
Carson Ellis:
I was moved when I read it. I read it and I thought it was very funny how boring it was. It’s just like I woke up, and I put on this song, and then I ate this bagel. Then I checked my email, and no one had written me, and then I took a shower. It’s like just page after page of that. I realize I’m not really selling it, but I think there is something to that. For one thing, it’s such a time capsule both of my life, which was so different then because I was broke, and I wasn’t a working artist, and I was also transient and in constant transition when I was 25 years old, but also because we were in the middle of this radical cultural shift into a digital age.
So, it was like my email was novel. The internet was novel, and I had no sense of how profound this shift was or the magnitude of it, or the fact that it was irreversible, and that we were all moving headlong into a era of digital everything that we would live in, whether we wanted to or not. So, there was something moving about that, and I do pine for a time before my iPhone and my social media. So, it was very, very sweet and moving to be taken back to that period and also to that period in my own life. Then also, I feel like because it is, I do think of it as a pretty stoic account of that week, and so it just felt like a thing that would serve from illustration.
I was like, “Oh, the other side of the story is all the emotional poignancy and resonance of that week,” and maybe that could be something that would be in the art if it’s not in the text, or maybe those two things would communicate with each other to tell a more interesting story or something. I guess as an illustrator, I think I’m always trying to find places where art helps text be more interesting or sophisticated, or tell a story that is a little deeper, because you’ve combined it with some visual element, and this occurred to me as a good candidate for that.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, what I find so remarkable is that the paintings are so vivid. They really do help expand the text in a lot of ways, and because it is so matter-of-fact, you never really tell your reader how they should feel. It almost feels very objective in a lot of ways. There’s nothing purpley about it. It’s all very clear, and then you see these beautiful paintings that seem to perfectly articulate the memory. So, I think there’s such a nice duality to that without sounding really eye-rollingly ridiculous. There’s such a nice play between the very ethereal, very beautiful memories as paintings or paintings as memories, and then this very matter-of-fact way of going about your life.
Carson Ellis:
Thanks, Debbie. I was hoping for that, and I was hoping that the two things would feel like these separate voices working together to tell a story like the voice of the 48-year-old painter, and the voice of the 25-year-old writer who are the same person, but not really. So much time has passed.
Debbie Millman:
Do you see this 25-year-old version of yourself as part of who you are as integrated into who you are? How do you feel about these two women when at 25, when at 48 that share the same soul?
Carson Ellis:
They feel like they’re the same person, but they also feel really, really different. It did feel certainly more like I’m collaborating with an author than it felt like I was writing and illustrating my own book.
Debbie Millman:
As you were re-reading what you had written so long ago, did certain memories that you had about that time get changed by what you had written? Did you remember things differently than you wrote them? Part of what I love about reading some of my very, very old journals is that this somehow feels evidence of an accurate memory.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, I know what you mean, because memories change so much over time through the retelling and through the remembering of them. They’re like a game of telephone happening in your head over decades. I guess so. Colin, my husband, who’s in this book so much, he feels like that week in our lives, there are so many things that happened that he remembered even before we found that journal and read it. He thinks it’s uncanny, because he was like, “That was our first December’s show, and I remember that trip to the racetrack, and we climbed on the building and made that movie.” We remembered all these things.
So, it happens to have been a week full of memories that we held onto regardless, and maybe it was because it was my first week there, so it was… Everything felt important and big, and there was a big transition happening in my life. I don’t know, but I’m not sure. There wasn’t anything that I came across in the journal that I was like, “Oh, that’s not how I remembered that.” It was all basically how I remembered it, maybe because I had written it down 20-something years before, and that had somehow cemented it in my head in a way that it wouldn’t normally have.
Debbie Millman:
That climactic scene on the top of the roof felt so cinematic. I understand that your friend Nathan… You asked your friend Nathan to find an old video, which included an image you were hoping to find for the book. How difficult was that?
Carson Ellis:
It was amazing that Nathan found it, because I think he’s had to dig through a bunch of old hard drives, and he dug it up for me. It’s a video that he took. At the very end of the book, we climb up on this building, and we’re climbing on some ladders, on some scaffolding, and just running around being naughty, trespassing people. So, it’s like weirdly meta. I talk about how we did this thing, and he filmed it, and then we go back to the warehouse, and we all watch it together, and how eerie and beautiful it is climbing on the roof. It’s in black and white, and just the sound of the highway in the background.
Then he sent me the thing after I had read this scene over and over again, and I got to see it in real life what it actually looked like, and it was so strange. It was very, very moving. I definitely cried. Now when I read the book, I’ve done a reading, and I’m going to be doing a few more in October. I actually show that video while I’m reading that part of the book, and it just feels like so many different ways of experiencing it coming together. Oh, I don’t know how to describe it. It was a funny thing to watch that video, and very moving.
Debbie Millman:
Carson, before we finish the show, I’m wondering if you could read a little bit from One Week in January: New Paintings for An Old Diary.
Carson Ellis:
I would love to. I’m going to read the end.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good.
Carson Ellis:
Which is Friday. It’s one week, and so this is the last day. I’m going to start about halfway through the day. Colin called Emmy, and asked her if she wanted to come to the track with us. She did, so we picked her up and went to Portland Meadows to bet on horses. It was rainy, and we drove down to MLK instead of I5, and got lost. Colin was being a real brat. To everything that Emmy and I asked, he would say no. When I patted him on the shoulder, he said, “Don’t touch me.” I said, “You’re never coming to the track with me again, are you?” He said, “No.” I said, “That’s mean.” He said, “Good.” I said in my head, “I hate Colin Meloy.”
We got to the track in time for the third race, and I told Colin that I was so mad, and went to get a hot dog, a program and a beer. I placed my first bet $2 across on the number six, and went to the paddock to look at my horse. Then I saw Colin, and was still angry, so he half-heartedly apologized, and we made up. The only good bet either of us made was the same bet, three bucks across on a long shot, and we both won $24. Emmy made one bet on a horse named the Cisco Kid in the fifth race, and lost. I was wearing Emmy’s Grandma’s rings, my red dress and red high heels for luck. Our luck was never very good though, and we left after the sixth race.
We dropped Emmy at home, and came back to the warehouse where I fell asleep on Colin and Steve’s couch for about an hour. Nathan woke up at 10 to 10, and the three of us walked downtown to see Marjorie, Lucia, and Heidi in a dance performance at an art school. I kept slipping and falling all the way there because of my lucky shoes. When we got there, it had just ended, and we all felt dumb for missing it. I walked around and looked at the art, which was bad except for a painting of a rooster on a pane of glass. Heidi then drove Colin, Nathan, and me to a bar called Fifteen, where we got so drunk. Colin drank screwdrivers. Nathan drank beer, and I drank scotch.
I started talking to a boy named Donald, and Colin pretended to be my jealous boyfriend. Then I slipped and fell on a ramp going down to the bathroom because of drunkenness and, again, the lucky red shoes. I broke two glasses, one with scotch and the other with water. Two men rushed over to help me and brush me off. I was sad because my scotch was now on my dress, but one of the men offered to buy me another, so I didn’t care. Then Marjorie came and introduced me to a guy named Shantos in Elvis Sunglasses, who was some sort of promoter or something. We talked about me making some posters for him, and exchanged numbers.
The owner of the bar brought me another scotch, because I had fallen down and broken mine. I went back to talk to Donald, but he told me he was looking for his one true love, and tucked my hair behind my ear. So, I left and sat down with Lucia, Jebediah, Colin, Marjorie, Nathan, and some of Jebediah’s friends. Nathan was sad because the hot girl that he hadn’t worked up the courage to talk to had left. Colin and I started singing poke songs as loud as we could, and slamming our fists on the table. The bouncer came by and told us to shut up, but we didn’t. Another guy collecting glasses said to us snidely,
“Is that really necessary?” But still, we sang.
I vowed never to return. Then we got up to go home, and Nathan tried to solicit a ride from Marjorie who was in the midst of a conversation, and I said, “We ought to walk anyway, because we were so drunk.” A couple of blocks from home, we spotted some scaffolding on the roof of a building with 30-foot ladders tied to either side. Nathan somehow got on the fire escape, and busted the chain that was securing the lowest part of the ladder, and keeping it from touching the ground. It was one of those seesaw-type ladders. It was raining now, and I ran to get Nathan’s bag, and slipped and fell on my ass.
We climbed the fire escape to the roof, and Nathan got out his video camera. Colin and I each climbed a ladder on either side of the scaffolding. I was still wearing high heels, and climbed so carefully. When we got to the top, we were dozens of feet up with about 30 feet between us. After some time, Colin put a cigarette in his mouth, and yelled to me, “Do you have a light?” I yelled back, “Yes, come down and we’ll have a cigarette.” So, we climbed down and ran around on the roof, going up some more ladders, and looking into a creepy brick room. Nathan had filmed the whole thing, so we went home to watch it.
When we got back on the ground, we started running, and I yelled, “Wait, you guys,” and fell on my ass once more. I had left my red candle that I stole from the bar on the ground next to the building, but I couldn’t find it, and decided to come back for it the next day. We walked home in the rain, and went straight up to Nathan’s. First, we watched the rap video that we made in San Francisco for [inaudible 00:35:26], which was so funny. Then we watched the video of the roof, which was beautiful and eerie with only the noise of cars on the highway and some yelling in the background. We shared the last two cigarettes and the last two beers between the three of us.
Nathan rewound the tape, and we watched the whole thing again with outtakes from [inaudible 00:35:46], scenes of Colin and Nathan driving out to San Francisco, and some video shot at the Shanghai. Colin went to sleep, and Nathan and I talked about lost love. “Now, I’m sad,” I said. “Now, I’m really sad,” said Nathan. I kissed him good Night on the cheek, and went to bed.
Debbie Millman:
Carson Ellis, thank you for making so much work that matters. Thank you for this gorgeous, gorgeous book One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Carson Ellis:
Thank you so much for having me, Debbie. It’s been a pleasure and an honor.
Debbie Millman:
You can read more about everything Carson is up to on her website, carsonellis.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting this show, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Milllman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 3:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.