They are also very elusive and tricky to draw, so it’s satisfying to get that right every once in a while.”Įxcluding the jacket and front matter, the book’s text only uses three types of punctuation marks: question marks, a set of hyphens and some apostrophes. “There’s something so mesmerizing about a circle.
Try these out loud: Octagon! Elephant! Oval! Wiggly! It’s good clay to smash around from the start. One of the greatest things about our language is how fantastic kid-facing words sound. With the book’s relatively limited vocabulary, I was cautious about too many true rhymes that might lead a reader to assume they are reading a rhyming book, only for it to.
I’m always writing for sound design, like the echo-y assonance of snails and squares or the consonance at the end of circle and purple. The text needed to be sticky: the kind whose rhythms stay in your head for a while, sounds really great out loud but is also doing some unusual things. What qualities were important to you to give the text of the book? Lots of juicy visual ideas were left on the cutting room floor, so I was able to pick up the scraps (so to speak) and create what might come next. I see what you did there! The editorial process on Circle Under Berry exploded with concepts that could have fit in that world, just not in a singular book. I hope Some of These Are Snails similarly captures logic and poetry in a playful way.Ĭan you talk about the beginnings of this book and how it began to take shape from there? When I was working on Circle Under Berry, I pitched it as “Hervé Tullet meets Ruth Krauss.” Occasionally, I tend toward overwriting or can get too abstracted to make sense, so I’m always looking to Krauss’ unfussy, authentic language for reminders of writing I respond so deeply to. Krauss’ influence on my life both as a reader and a writer has always felt clear and connected. Can you talk about her influence on these books? In fact, you even wrote a picture book about her called A Story Is to Share. You’ve mentioned that your favorite children’s author is Ruth Krauss, whose books include The Carrot Seed, A Hole Is to Dig and The Happy Day. At just over 200 words, the book may seem simple, but as Higgins reveals, it’s anything but.
In Some of These Are Snails, Higgins turns our attention to explorations of grouping, sorting and classification. This ingenious concept picture book with bold and vibrant artwork that expands on the approach Higgins took in her 2021 book, Circle Under Berry, which asked readers to consider shapes, colors and prepositions such as over, between and above. Carter Higgins has worked in school libraries, visual effects and motion graphics-and all that experience shows in Some of These Are Snails.
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