A Chat With Dennis Lee - Page 3
© Paula E. Kirman
Dennis: I love the illustrations. Gillian also writes; she writes adult stuff as well as children's stuff. She was in Banff at the Writer's Workshop there about five years ago and a friend of mine, a poet Don Coles was instructing there and he thought a lot of her work and saw some of the children's stuff she was doing and had her sent it to me. Never having met, we corresponded and got to know each other a bit by mail for probably longer than five years. And then she published a couple of books in the last while: Sister No-Hair and My Sister Gracie. The range of stuff that she does visually is quite broad but it all has this kind of off the wall goofiness. When Key Porter decided they wanted to do The Cat and the Wizard as a self-contained book, the question was then who would be the illustrator. We actually cruised around a lot looking for the right person, and eventually we went to the Children's Book Centre in Toronto which is a kind of resource centre, and hauled about a gazillion books off the shelves. My preference was a Canadian illustrator but if the best person was someone from somewhere else we certainly would have approached them, but looking at Gillian's stuff everyone got really excited. She's from Winnipeg, so she's a Manitoba girl, but she married the British writer Nicolas Shakespeare and they were spending some of the time down in Tasmania and they had a new baby, so when we approached her we weren't sure she would be able to do it, but she fell in love with the poem and wanted to do it.
And so, a lot of the work was done by her down there; all the conferring was in your world of electronic stuff - things would come through whatever systems, I don't quite understand, but the art director would say, "We've got five more drawings from Gillian," that would have come across the phone lines by some system. It was all gorgeous stuff. I think especially with her cat; I really like what she did with the cat.
Paula: When you were writing the story, did you ever have any pictures in your mind?
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