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| David Hyde Costello (photo: Jeanne Birdsall) |
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David Hyde Costello is a picture book author and illustrator. He lives in Amherst, Mass. He also designs and creates the puppets which feature in his online videos and films such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: A Shadow Puppet Film. I Can Help in the Neighborhood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is the second book in the I Can Help picture book series.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
I Can Help in the Neighborhood is a sequence of animals helping each other solve problems, creating a community by looking out for one another.
On your nightstand now:
I'm currently reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
I don't consider myself well-read, so sometimes I go for one of the big names just to try to fill in some of the giant gaps in my education. My college curriculum was weighted heavily toward visual and performing arts. So, while I've read and seen productions of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee, this is my first time reading anything by Virginia Woolf herself. (Nothing frightening so far.)
In the nonfiction department, I'm reading Chess: The History of a Game by Richard Eales.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Frog and Toad All Year by Arnold Lobel was one of them, and it still is. As a child, I think I responded to the warmth of the friendship between the two characters, and to the humor. As an adult, I never stop being impressed with the construction--it's made of such simple lines, there's nothing extraneous, but the overall effect is so generous. Maybe what I was responding to as a child and as an adult is Arnold Lobel's success in making something that feels personal. I remember reading an obituary for Stan Lee (another author who was important to me as a child) and it included a quote about Marvel Comics that went, "I wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn't aware of." First of all, that is a great description of exactly what it felt like to read Marvel Comics as a teenager in the 1980s, but also, I think that feeling is something like what Lobel achieves for his audience.
Are there authors who are particularly influential or inspiring to you in your own work?
Sometimes I think I'm really just trying over and over again to recreate 'Christmas Eve' from Frog and Toad All Year by Arnold Lobel. It has it all, and he does it in only 11 pages.
When I encountered the children's poetry of Langston Hughes in adulthood, I thought, yes, exactly; that's what I want to be able to do.
For example,
'Garment'
The clouds weave a shawl
Of downy plaid
For the sky to put on
When the weather's bad.
As for contemporary, living children's authors, Julie Fogliano and Hilary McKay are the ones whose writing I most admire.
David Small and Lisbeth Zwerger are the two illustrators I'm most overtly trying to emulate (which I think is true of a lot of illustrators).
One thing they all have in common--the poetry of Langston Hughes or the line quality of David Small--is that the technique doesn't dominate. The character of the artist comes through, but not the effort, not the ego.
Book you've faked reading:
I may be too naïve for this question. Why would I pretend to have read a book?
Book you're an evangelist for:
I give kids The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich whenever I get the chance because I love the story, and because I wish I'd encountered books like it when I was a kid.
Book that changed your life:
I can't think of a book to which I would apply that phrase, but of course there are some that made lasting impressions. Impro by Keith Johnstone was assigned in a college theater class, but I remember revisiting it after college in my mid-20s because it applies to creativity in general. I found it inspiring and mentally freeing in a way. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley is another book I particularly remember reading in my mid-20s. That one has stayed with me for a lot of reasons--my early- to mid-20s was when I had experienced just enough personal history to start to have a dawning comprehension of the connections across the broad sweep of human history. But something else I took away from that book at the time was the idea that, even in a short lifetime, we can have multiple chapters, different stages of ourselves.
Book you hid from your parents:
I can't even think of a book I would have needed to hide from my parents. My brother and I were afforded a wide latitude on this kind of thing when we were growing up. My brother was the reader, and I can't remember a single example of his ever feeling like he needed to read something on the sly.
Favorite line from a book:
One recent example that I keep returning to is from The Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown. I only know the Christian Robinson version, which I love. The line is, "And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird, and put fresh flowers on his grave." What a brilliantly simple way to acknowledge that we're not meant to mourn forever.
Five books you'll never part with:
My four Frog and Toad books, and an anthology called The Tall Book of Make-Believe by Jane Werner with illustrations by Garth Williams, which belonged to my mother when she was a child.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Funny you should ask. I've recently been thinking about the difference in people's preferences about repetition, whether it's reading the same book again, watching the same movie, eating the same meal two days in a row...
I have noticed that I have a large appetite for repetition. I don't know why that is, but I don't have a wish to encounter any book for the first time again. I'm very happy re-reading something a second or third time and finding different things to appreciate about it. I recently reread Emma by Jane Austen, and part of the pleasure of it came from knowing what was going to happen and seeing how Jane Austen was subtly setting up the ending.
Also, at 53, I have found it interesting to revisit books and movies and music from my childhood--to examine the craft, to reflect on the time when I was growing up and the cultural messages around me, and in some cases, to enjoy the parts that still deliver. And after all, there will always be new, great books to encounter.