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In a brief palindromic text where the words are the same going forward and backward, a young boy confronts the loss of his mother by facing down all manner of dangers on a journey into — and back from — a fantastical world. The grief is in Daniel Nayeri’s words, the world is in Matt Rockefeller’s pictures; together, they (and readers, and the motherless boy) are Drawn Onward by the healing power of story.

Roger Sutton: Let’s talk about this extremely peculiar book. I'm thinking what Daniel’s manuscript would look like to an illustrator. Like, what do I do with this?

Photo credits: Daniel Nayeri: Amy Reams; Matt Rockefeller: Julie Sandfort

Matt Rockefeller: When he first sent it to me back in 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, I just immediately fell in love with it. At the time, it was conceived as a wordless picture book. Daniel came up with names for each of the areas the boy travels to that evoked a whole world to me. I think you called the underwater area the “sunless sea.” Do you remember the other ones, Daniel?

Daniel Nayeri: For all you Coleridge fans out there, that's a reference to Kubla Khan’s “down to a sunless sea.” The ruined castle is a metaphor for the young boy’s grief. And the dark forest is the place in every fairy tale where the adventure begins.

RS: Right, but none of this is in the text, Daniel. So what did you send to Matt?

DN: As you know, Roger, editors are always telling new picture book writers not to write illustration notes because it does step on the illustrator's toes a bit if you tell them what to draw. And the unfortunate thing about this manuscript was that because it was initially wordless, it was 100% illustration notes. The entire thing began with an apology and then proceeded to tell the illustrator everything that needed to be shown. I was inspired by wordless books like Zoom by Istvan Banyai and obviously David Wiesner’s Flotsam and Barbara Lehman’s The Red Book. What is a writer to do who doesn't know how to draw if he wants to do a wordless picture book?

MR: So many wordless picture books have the same author and illustrator.

DN: Right. I had to steal Matt's talent. I needed this man to lend me his very prodigious skills. While the concept was going to come from me, very clearly it was going to be a visually dominant book. So I went to Matt well before going to an editor and said, “Is this something you want to partner on?”

RS: When it was still wordless.

DN: Well, you're seeing the fifteenth manuscript. There was text on every page by the second or third draft. But Matt had already put his stamp on it. So that very first manuscript, the wordless one, was just a way to make an overture to Matt.

MR: And I would say that your notes weren’t extremely detailed. Not: this kind of tree, that kind of mushroom. Daniel was invoking a feeling for each of the places on the boy’s journey. That was partly what drew me to it, because there was space for me to imagine it in my head, to create the world. It's the best-case scenario, starting a book where you have freedom to play around with iconic images.

RS: And when did the text become a palindrome?

MR: That first draft with text was already a word-level palindrome. And the idea was that because of the palindrome, we wanted it to be visually palindromic.

DN: I remember wrestling with the idea that on every page the sentence that is written could be a letter-level palindrome. I mean, there have been some great letter-level palindromic picture books.

RS: I love Jon Agee’s books, do you know those?

DN: I love his books too. Otto was what I was thinking about. But you have to be Jon Agee to make some of those sentences make sense. That is, you're not going to create a coherent world where a salami hog randomly shows up unless you want it to be that kind of comedic, daffy kind of world. So the letter-level palindromes quickly went by the wayside. With word-level palindromes you can start to wrest back a little bit more control.

RS: To me, it almost reads like a magic spell.

DN: Very much.

RS: Matt, your art began with pencil and was then colored on the computer? How does that work?

MR: I love the texture and the unpredictability of graphite. I've been working with it since I graduated from college. I make individual drawings on paper. I have a very large stack of these drawings. I scan those, and then some of them have multiple layers and I compile them and color them digitally.

RS: Let’s talk about the layers of the book, because it seems to me there are many. What did you, Matt, discover as you worked on this book? And Daniel, what did you discover about your initial book once you saw Matt’s pictures?

MR: As you work on something like this, you go on the journey many, many, many times, and you’re trying — especially in the initial phase when you are laying out the thumbnails — to make sure that the story makes sense to start with. I found that each time I went on the journey I found ways to connect the things in the boy’s life related to his grief to his actual journey. A big part of what I was trying to do was blur the line between what’s fantasy and what’s real. Because I know there are a lot of books where a kid goes into their imagination and has an adventure and that’s how they deal with something in their real life. But I wanted to blur that because the boy exists in a fantasy world to start with, so there’s the potential that he did actually go on this adventure. When he goes into his backyard, if you look closely you’ll see that there's a spider next to one of the ingredients he's gathering, and then as he goes on his journey, you’ll see he encounters other spiders that are maybe a little scarier. So it's kind of like the fabric of his world slowly started to weave into the fabric of the fantasy world he’s entering.

RS: To continue your spider metaphor.

MR: Oh, exactly. I did that on purpose.

DN: For me, the text of this book had such an incredible evolution because of Matt. He brought out this idea of: What if we were able to show not just the boy dealing with his grief but also the depth of the stages of grief? When psychologists look at how grief is dealt with, especially around kids, there is this cyclical nature to it. To both the healing and the grieving parts. People laugh at funerals, and it's not because they're suddenly happy. It's because we experience grief cyclically and even when we’re moving toward some kind of healing, it isn't like, “Well, now I have gotten past this particular stage, I will never again feel this.” That's just not how we work. A lot of this was visually coming to bear as Matt was manifesting it. What if the boy doesn’t have the bandwidth to help other people like these fairies, who need help at the well? That's a notable aspect of what kids who have gone through trauma are like. They're not able to open themselves up even to just be. Matt was able to, in the gesture work and in the boy’s facial expressions, show all this so well that I was able to pare back the text once again. The arc of the text went from none to too much. And then once all the art started coming in, I was finally able to step out of the way again. That was a really nice revelation.

MR: I remember when you sent the draft that started with the line “She was gone.” I thought, Ooh, this is it. Before that what he was going through was less overt. The fact that he is grieving his lost mother became more spelled out. And the magic of the palindrome is that at the end she's still gone, but his feeling about it has changed.

RS: As I think Daniel was just saying, the palindrome structure also reinforces that idea that grief is not something that ends. You go through it again and again and again.

DN: Obviously we want to leave kids with a hopeful ending. You don't want to tell children the hardest truths of life in a picture book.

RS: Mother's dead, and she's never coming back.

MR: The end!

DN: But similarly bad is false optimism or false positivity. An unearned happy ending can be a pernicious thing too. And in this case, while the boy does get his happy ending, his connection with his dad and some measure of relief and all those things, the book’s not going lie to you and say, “Tomorrow will be the brightest, best day ever, and you're gonna just forget all about Mom.” It's not going to happen that way. I thought Matt delivered a really touching last image where it's the evening, it's time to sleep. He's gone to the wild places. He's come back. He's safe. But the world is still the world.

RS: What world is this? I do love that you think you're looking at a fairy-tale world, everything soft and rounded and beautiful, and then, wait a minute, you see a pink refrigerator in the kitchen.

DN: Tomie dePaola had the greatest kitchen ever in a children's book, and I think this kitchen rivals that. When I saw the stove Matt created, I thought, What would it take for me to manifest this into the real world? What French contractor do I need to speak with?

RS: Matt, what do you think went into making the world you created here? How did you decide what it was going to look like?

MR: Daniel and I and our editor and everyone on the team have a love of the Legend of Zelda series. That sense of magic and adventure definitely influenced me going into art to begin with and wanting to create worlds of my own. I was pulling a lot from that. (And there's little references to Zelda throughout the book for people who've played those games.) But I've worked on a lot of different fantasy stories. I worked on the Five Worlds graphic novel series, which was kind of like my boot camp for world-building. Design five worlds, not just one! My work has a love of nature tied into it. So that was the initial inspiration. And as a world grows, I like to find ways to take a thread from one thing in the book, pull it, and make all these connections. It creates the sense that the world is maybe bigger than it is on paper.

DN: I remember when I asked you, "Are there any vehicles in this world?" And you had already thought about it for like three days, and I realized I should not ask random tossed-off questions because you already had it in mind.

RS: If we think about your text in its final form here, there's no reason it needs to be in a fantasy world, right?

DN: Until you said that I had not actually checked. I'm going through the text in my head and thinking that you're right, absolutely. After living with these images for so long I think it would take me quite a while to think about what it would be like to change it to a realistic setting, but yes, you could absolutely choose to illustrate this as a young boy in a cul-de-sac somewhere.

MR: I feel like for any generation fantasy stories draw certain people in and act as a place to either escape or process what's going on in your real life. So I do think that the combination of the story being about grief and being set in a fantasy world does feel right to me.

DN: Matt and I discussed for a hot minute whether the book could be set in our world, or a sort of Studio Ghibli version, slightly cartoonified version of our world. And this was where the vehicle conversation came in, "What if there's a car and a driveway and the garden is just like a garden in the back?" We really liked the idea that the story could have happened. If this young boy goes into the woods and has a completely imaginary adventure, that's lovely and that's in there as a possible reading, but, and just as likely, is the reading that he physically left the garden, went into all those fantastic places and came back. And that's, of course, possible only if he's already in a fantasy world. It's like a double fantasy, right? You're in a fantasy world in which he's having a fantasy.

RS: My head hurts, Daniel.

MR: I was drawn to the ambiguity of that. Because it's not this clean-cut reality, where you can just explain something. And in that ambiguity, there's a lot of magic and mystery.

DN: Yeah, so it's like a young Max who goes into the world of the Wild Things. That’s another book that is, of course, a giant inspiration.

RS: I also see a lot of Trina Schart Hyman in this. I think it was the borders that first made me think of Trina, but she excelled at creating these very homely — and I don't mean ugly, I mean cozy — fairy-tale worlds. One of the things that you're doing here is something Trina also did so well, which was to create fantasy worlds that felt so warm as the house does in here. And she also was big on the borders of pictures. But you know, that gentle but assured sense of line that you have here is I think one of the most beautiful things in this book for sure. But it never gets sleepy. I mean, there's so much dynamic action going on, and all your own. And you were all on your own, at least the way it looks in the finished book, you were all on your own in creating all that drama from this very simple palindrome.

MR: It's nice to hear your comments about the borders because that was something I went back and forth on, but for some reason it always just felt right. And I had to trust that instinct. I was like, Is this too much? Is there too much going on in this? It's already a very dense, visually dense experience. But in the end, I felt that the borders contribute to the feeling that the book is in its own world. If I had left them blank white, for some reason that suggested more about our time and maybe more of a minimal approach. So filling in the borders makes the book itself part of the world that we created.

RS: That fantasy within a fantasy — my head is gonna explode.

DN: Layers, layers of fantasy. This is a Christopher Nolan picture book! Matt absolutely developed the book’s visual language. At the outset the thought was that the whole book was just going to be double-page spreads. And it's one thing to frame out a spread; it's another thing to frame out panels for what is effectively an early graphic novel. That was another late-stage thing.

MR: When we went with HarperAlley and started working with Andrew [Arnold], we realized we could do something a little different, take this picture-book/graphic-novel hybrid approach. Which I think ended up working for the number of things that need to happen in each place, with the boy gathering ingredients and meeting these different creatures.

DN: But it definitely multiplied your framing challenges.

MR: It also helped reinforce the palindromic nature of the story, because I could mirror the panels so that every spread had its equivalent for the return journey. They're not perfect mirrors because different things happen on the way there and on the way back. But I did try to mirror the compositions and call back to different panels between them.

RS: I'll have to go do that now too.

MR: There’s a ton of tiny things in the borders that are different on the way back from the way there.

RS: One final question. How did you each leave space for a reader in this book? Because you don't want to suffocate someone. The problem I always had with J.K. Rowling was that she left no room for me. She told me not just what everything looked like but how to feel about what everything looked like. You have to leave room. And you have to do that in pictures as well as in text. I'm wondering how you guys addressed that challenge.

DN: I love formal poetry in general and I've been trying to do formal poems in picture books forever. When I was younger there would be lines of poetry that would almost subconsciously wash through my head. I would be just saying them. And they were really important to me. They almost were like mantras. The power of poetry is that one, it stays with you. And two, you can use it when you need it. One of the things I like about this project is that there are few enough words, and I'll only speak for the words, though I think it applies to the pictures as well. There are few enough words that a young person could keep some of those lines in their mind and come back to them. And especially for a kid who might not even be experiencing any kind of grief of any sort, I like to believe that they would take this and actually use it for themselves later. Almost as a mantra, almost as a refrain that returns. I think of it that way.

MR: I love that question because I also love when a book leaves space for you to imagine or wonder about something and doesn't spell everything out for you. And a lot of how I try to do that is in the textures and the spaces that I make. And having the shadows there.

RS: Right. “What exactly am I seeing here?” You really need to ultimately use your imagination to figure it out.

MR: It is such a detailed book. And visually the opposite of what Daniel is saying about poetry, where you have these very spare lines in the text, and then the art so full of textures and colors and images. But because the text is so abbreviated, people can look at the pictures and draw their own connections and conclusions. Some people might not even notice that the well in the backyard could be related to the well in the desert. But then I imagine there will be kids and parents who do discover that, and then that's an avenue for them to observe closer, take a closer look at each of the pages.

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