![]() ![]() Truthfully, we never had a chair covered in velvet with roses all over it. And I doubt that she or any other real parent (certainly not I) was ever as patient as were the mother and the grandmother in the book. Although I have worked in restaurants, my mother worked most of her life in shops, offices, and hospitals. There was never a fire in our house as there is in my book. She was not tall and dark-haired but short and carrot-topped. It's not that my book is about her in a biographical way. She is no longer alive, having died at eighty-three after a very short illness but when she was alive, she was very much so. ![]() I had, in a way, made the whole book for her, so I'm sure you will agree if I accept the award for my mother, too. I dedicated A Chair for My Mother to her, but that was just the final naming. One strand I do feel certain about is my mother. Of course, there's no way to be certain of such origins, but it is exciting to look back over the years and see the strands braiding up their many ways. It occurs to me to note that the borders of A Chair for My Mother, though so different from the borders in The Poppy Seed Cakes, probably owe their dim beginnings to this book. If one could locate the card of that particular copy, I imagine it would show that the book spent as much time in my house as in the houses of all the other borrowers put together. At once I went and took out a book called The Poppy Seed Cakes (Doubleday). By this ceremony, which I experienced with religious solemnity, I was entered into the community of the library. After I read I was handed a pen dipped in ink, and I carefully wrote out my name in the penmanship I had learned in school. It was my turn to stand in front of the desk in the children's room upstairs at the Tremont Branch Library in the Bronx to read the statement of responsibility at the top of the pages in the big book, which was an outsized ledger with ruled pages. I shall go back to a day about fifty years ago. It has something to do with being welcomed and honored by a community I respect, owe much to, and love. But there are also deeply moving aspects of this occasion I want to tell you of, and I expect I'll have a somewhat harder time explaining just where these feelings are rooted than I have with the obvious joy and celebration of the experience. Being a Caldecott Honor winner this year and now the recipient of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award still seems like a fairy tale to me. When an old friend, Remy Charlip, generously gave me the chance to illustrate a book he and Lilian Moore had written - Hooray for Me! (Four Winds) - I was quite unaware that I was going to do a second book and a third and so forth. There were just too many other courses to be followed before I actually got around to it. I made a great big book as a birthday present for one of my children, who, after looking through it gravely, told me that it was very nice of me to have made it for her but that it was not the kind of present children like.īut I had not actually embarked on writing and illustrating as a profession. Then, when I was a student at Black Mountain College, I made several books by hand, even weaving the binding for one. I even told a reporter for the old New York Herald Tribune - who was interviewing me in connection with the very special free art school I went to throughout my childhood - that I would do children's books when I finished college. I had intended to do so when I was in grade school and in high school. It may be that I feel this way because I became a writer and an illustrator of children's books only in recent years. First, I would simply like to share with you the fact that I am exceptionally happy to be here. ![]()
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