Lane smith author illustrator contract
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Frequently Asked Questions
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I love word play. Lane Smith's book is getting a lot of love for its word play, but I'm tagging his book as Not Recommended. It is a 2016 book, published by Roaring Book Press/Macmillan.
Here's the cover of his new book, There Is a Tribe of Kids. The blue creature to the left is meant to be a young mountain goat, or, a kid (that is the term for a baby goat). We follow the child on the right as we read There Is a TRIBE of KIDS. That child is a kid, too, of course, which tells us that Smith is doing some word play in the book. See the two sticks coming out of the child's head? See the stance the child is in? That child is playing at being a goat kid.
Note that two words in the book title are in capital letters. They go together. That's a pattern that Smith uses throughout the book, and as a former elementary school teacher, it is kind of detail that I'd love to point out to kids.
BUT.
Smith's error is using the word TRIBE on the final pages of the book, to refer to children who are playing, adorned in various ways with leaves. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Let's go back to the opening pages.
On the title page the child is with three kids
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Q & A with Lane Smith
In the movies, it would be called a breakout role: Stickler, an eight-eyed, bat-eared woodland creature, appears in just one spread of Lane Smith’s 2022 book A Gift for Nana. But Smith knew Stickler had star power, and in his latest book, Stickler Loves the World, this creature—extraordinary in both his appearance and in his appreciation for the world around him—is front and center. PW spoke with Smith about how the character took hold of his imagination, the story behind the book’s dedication and look, and other musings on three decades of picture book creation.
Stickler made its debut in A Gift for Nana. How did it germinate—and did you know it could carry a book on its own?
In A Gift for Nana, the rabbit goes on his quest, and I wanted to show that the rabbit’s journey was getting stranger. So I had the rabbit go into dark, weird woods, and it seemed appropriate to create a character that matched the environment, one that was as weird as the woods. I came up with the idea of a woodland creature made of sticks.
I couldn’t get that character out of my mind. I continued to doodle it even after the book was published, and I made a decision to try to develop it in