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The author-illustrator of more than a dozen picture books for young children, Maria van Lieshout discovered a hitherto hidden piece of her family’s history that serves as the source of her first graphic novel, Song of a Blackbird.

Roger Sutton: This is such a change for you. What part of it got to you first: the story, that you wanted to write a graphic novel, that you saw a blackbird, what was it? What was the first thing?

Maria van Lieshout: The first thing was that my grandmother died in 2011, so quite some time ago. During their lifetimes, my grandparents did not like to speak about the war because there was just too much trauma there. Their house had been bombed. A lot of their friends lost their lives. They lost all their belongings. They lost too much to name. So whenever we would ask them about the war, they would basically say, “Let's not talk about it. Let's just talk about happy things. This is behind us. This is not what we’re living today, and we just want to move on.” When my grandmother died, about a decade after my grandfather, we believed that all the stories were gone, until when we were cleaning out my grandmother's apartment, we stumbled upon several documents that described in detail what had happened during those years. Those documents were written in the 1980s by both my grandparents. One detailed the whole situation that happened around the bombing of their house — a literal minute-by-minute recording of what that was like. The second document was about my grandfather's time in the Resistance with his close friend Frits and what the two men experienced together. It ended with Frits being assassinated by the Nazis. I did not know these stories. I knew their house had been bombed, I kind of knew my grandfather was involved in the Resistance, but all of a sudden having all this information sent me on a huge scavenger hunt.

RS: What prompted them to write about this in the 1980s?

MvL: I cannot ask them, but I believe that they believed those stories should not be lost. I ended up meeting up with my grandfather's friend Frits's son — Frits was the one who was executed. His son, who has now also passed, was in his eighties when I was in the Netherlands, and he told me that during that time in the 1980s my grandfather invited him over and told him everything that he knew about his father. I think it was a way for them to put the story somewhere so that then they could walk away from it and not have to relive it over and over again. That's just my conclusion.

RS: When you started tracking down people and events and dates, was this to any purpose or just obsession?

MvL: A little bit of both. It was quite early on that I discovered the story of the National Bank heist, where the Dutch Resistance stole millions of guilders by forging counterfeit treasury notes. Frits had been involved with the bank heist. As soon as I learned about that story, I started unraveling it. I remember telling my agent Steven Malk about it and saying, “This has got to be a book.” (Since then, there's been a movie in the Netherlands about the bank heist, so the story is better known now.) I had no idea what this would look like because my experience had been in picture books; I could not fathom how it was going to go from this idea to something that was a book. But I resolved, Let me just see where the research takes me. Let me not try to figure this thing out right away. And where it took me was to the unbelievable discovery that unsung artists and women were a big part of this story. Many of those artists and women had, up to that point, remained anonymous. So when I decided that I would love to write this story from the perspective of a young female artist, it all clicked. I realized that if this was going to be a book about the power of art to fight hate, then it needed to be an illustrated book. When I started playing with the idea that it could be a graphic novel, all of a sudden everything started falling into place.

RS: What had been your experience with graphic novels up to that point?

MvL: None. I had met Mark Siegel (creative and editorial director of First Second Books) right when he started his imprint. I remember listening to him along with our critique group and being very inspired by him but also very intimidated by the whole notion of doing a graphic novel because of the work that would be involved. It was like, That would be cool. I don’t think it will ever happen. But once I started thinking about the possibility of a graphic novel for this story, at that point I was so far in, I was so sucked in to this story and so involved in it, that while I felt it was going to be a huge undertaking, it didn’t seem so daunting. I was just so emotionally involved at that point. I thought, I’m crazy, but I’m just going to do it.

RS: And how did you happen upon the other parts? I mean, you have the historical material which you fictionalize, but you also have another frame of the blackbird telling the story, as well as a contemporary 2011 story going with it. Where did that all come from?

MvL: To start with the blackbird — once I had decided that the book was going to be about the power of art to fight hate, I thought it would be really interesting to write the story from the perspective of inspiration. And I thought back to a story that my mother used to tell us when we were really young. There weren’t many stories about the war that we had heard, but there was one particular story that stayed with me, and that was a story of the blackbird. This was a story of when my mother was a five-year-old girl. It was after their house was bombed and during the Dutch Hunger Winter, which was very grim. Everything was rationed. Everyone was hungry. Everything was cold. And my mother heard a blackbird sing in their Amsterdam backyard, and she asked her mother, my grandmother, “Does the blackbird realize it is wartime?” My grandmother thought about it for a little bit and replied, “Yes, I believe the blackbird knows it is wartime, and it sings so beautifully because of it.” So for them, in that moment, the blackbird was a symbol of hope. I thought how cool it would be to narrate the book from the perspective of inspiration and use the blackbird as the embodiment of that inspiration.

In terms of your question about fictionalizing the story, during the research it became obvious to me that this was a pretty complex story because there were hundreds of people involved. With the National Bank heist — there were hundreds of people involved in the Resistance. The saving of the Jewish children from the Dutch Theater — there were many, many hundreds of people involved. In order to write it as a biography I would have to stay very close to the truth, and I wanted the book to be accessible, especially to a younger group of people, especially to teens. I knew that for it to be more accessible, I had to simplify it. Which meant that I had to fictionalize it so that I could combine characters and simplify the story line a little bit. And that is also why I decided to set one story line in 2011. I really wanted there to be a bridge to the present. But I also realized from my own experience, and from the experience of my parents, too, that war is a very traumatic thing that pulses throughout various generations. So I really wanted to show the characters of Soli and Hannah, who are just small children in the 1943 story line, also as older people in the contemporary story line. This kind of dual story line technique enabled me to do that.

RS: I wonder what it's like to grow up in a place where something like that happened. My father fought in World War II, so we had a few stories, but it was far away. It was far away in time but also far away geographically. What was it like for you growing up in a place where these events actually happened, within living memory?

MvL: Well, the interesting thing is when I grew up, I didn't think about it because it was normal. But once I started looking at it through the lens of a storyteller, through the lens of having lived in the U.S., I started looking at it differently. In a way I think as a writer or storyteller it's a gift when you have a little bit of distance because it allows you a little bit of objectivity. So once I came back to the place I grew up in and I came back with this new lens and this desire to learn and to explore and to uncover all the stories, all of a sudden it gave me a certain objectivity and perspective that I never had before. I remember in 2011, after I found the documents and I first started researching, I was in Amsterdam and I was in the location of the Dutch Theater, which is this little theater from which 46,000 Jewish people were deported. Since then it’s been remodeled as a part of the National Holocaust Museum, which opened just last year, in 2024. And now it’s become kind of a destination for people who visit Amsterdam. But at the time it wasn’t. And I remember I was there with my father; it was a Saturday afternoon. I just kind of wandered in and looked around and asked myself, “Why is nobody here? Why am I the only one here? This is such a significant place in our history.” And that just confirmed to me that I needed to write about this because these stories need to be told. I really felt strongly about that, and I'm so glad that now it has become a bit of a destination and that it’s more set up now for people to learn its history. Because just like the Anne Frank House has always been a remarkable place to learn about our history, so is the Dutch Theater. I really hope it will be as frequently visited as the Anne Frank House because it is equally significant in our history.

RS: Yeah, I had not known of it until I read your book. I've been to the Anne Frank House, but I had never heard about the Dutch Theater.

MvL: Yep, yep. And can you imagine, before the war this was an actual theater where people performed, so it was actually a place where the performing arts were celebrated. So the symbolism of that, right? The symbolism of the Nazis requisitioning that theater and turning it from this sort of temple of art and laughter and community into a deportation center. To me that is an absolutely chilling thing that they did, and I felt that I had to make that a central part of my book. Especially because my book deals with what the artists in Amsterdam did to fight back.

RS: I don’t really know how someone puts a graphic novel together. Did you write everything out and then...?

MvL: I actually don't think I did it in the way that most graphic novelists work. And I also am not sure that I did it in the most efficient way, but I did it in a way that works best for my brain. I would plot out the actual historical events and dates and people on a spreadsheet and would match them up with plot points to make sure I wasn't losing track of anything and to make sure that I wasn't writing things that could not have happened because it didn't match up. Then of course we had the two story lines, too, so that had to work out. I had this big spreadsheet, and I used the Scrivener app as kind of a research base because I had so much research and in so many different places. I had books I had read and I had web pages and I had old documents and I had letters. So Scrivener was a really good place for me to organize my research in folders and by dates. And then once I had an inkling of what my plot was going to be and which historical figures I was going to be focusing on, then I could design my characters. So I started drawing what my characters would look like, and basically designing the characters based on historical information and what I felt they should have looked like. And then I started putting it together. But it wasn’t a sequential thing. I had a large portion of the back matter finished before I had the story finished. To me that was always the starting point — the actual people who were so heroic, and the actual events. Even though my story was fictionalized, I wanted it to be very close to the actual historical events, so that was my starting point.

RS: I would imagine that would help you organize your thoughts too. Because in the back matter, which is scrupulous, you show us what you had when you began the book. What you knew.

MvL: That is actually where I started the book. In the book, it's the thing that comes last, but in my process it was the thing that came first, and then I wrote the fictional story. And it really was my framework. It had to work within that, or it wouldn't work. You know, once you start researching, there’s so much, right? There are so many other things I could have included too. At one point, I really had to be very disciplined to say, “No, no, this is more than enough to work with and I cannot add anything else to it. This is it.” But yeah, there were additional amazing stories that I could have included that I had to force myself not to.

RS: And at what point did you share this with your agent and/or publisher?

MvL: Well, I was sharing it with my agent from the very start, from 2011. And he was the one that encouraged me. I told him that I really wanted to do this new thing, and even though he’d worked with me as a picture book artist, he was so encouraging. “Do it! Just do it!” He said, “I definitely think that you have something here, and let me know how I can help.” I have a critique group that I've been in for twenty-five years, and they were amazing in helping me along the way. They are multi-talented and avid readers, and they were really able to help me structure the story and stay focused. So that was a tremendous help. And then once I had decided that I wanted it to be kind of a graphic novel — although I was still a little bit in denial and thought maybe it can just be an illustrated story — when we reached out to Mark Siegel at First Second, I told him, “I have this thing, but maybe it's not going to be like the graphic novels you normally publish. Maybe it's more like a novel.”

RS: With lots of pictures.

MvL: And he said, “No, I'm seeing a graphic novel,” and I realized that he was right, and I also realized that First Second was absolutely the right house to help me get it there. They were tremendous. I mean, they literally pulled me through and helped me take it from a story with visuals to the graphic novel format. They helped me with everything: how you structure the speech balloons, and where they need to be positioned on the page, and zooming in, and zooming out, and thinking about the material cinematically. My editor Tess Banta is an amazing fact-checker who would watch Steven Spielberg's Holocaust project, to check whether all the facts in the back were correct, and she would use Google Translate to dive into the archives and check everything. So First Second were my partners, attached at the hip all along the way in all areas, whether it was research, whether it was visuals, whether it was characterization, whether it was illustration, whether it was design. They’ve been such an amazing partner throughout this. I literally could not have done this without them.

RS: What was the hardest part about making a graphic novel for the first time?

MvL: That’s a hard question. I feel like I really had to stretch myself because I had to do so many things, right? I had to be a detective when I was doing the research — and that's including reaching out to people that I've never met and asking them to open up to me about some of the most personal things in their lives. I was invited into people's homes and witnessed emotional things. So I had to be really present for that at the same time.

RS: Graphic novelist, therapist — whatever.

MvL: Therapist, detective. Then I had to be the story plotter, which is almost like an engineer. How do I build this story where it's going to include all the facts and give all the background but not collapse like a big house of cards? And then I had to design my characters, so I was like a designer figuring out, Okay so what does this character wear? What would they have worn in 1943 Amsterdam, given that they're a badass artist but they also are living within that era? So I had to be kind of a fashion designer and work on that whole characterization. And then I had to be a graphic novelist. And then of course I had to get in the head of my narrator and write from the voice that the blackbird would have, which was a very specific voice. I had to stay true to that, so I had to be the writer.

RS: Everything that you have published up to this point has been a picture book, right?

MvL: Yes.

RS: So you hadn’t even written a novel, much less a graphic novel.

MvL: No, no. I think it's good that I waited so long to do this because I honestly feel that I have such a great network, between my writers' group and the people that I worked with on the publisher side and those on my agent side. It stretched me so much. That's why my gratitude page in the back is so long, because there were so many people who were so incredibly giving of their time and information. And then I realized that making a book like this is not something you do alone, absolutely not.

RS: And what, from creating picture books, do you think served you the most in creating this graphic novel?

MvL: I thought about that. What served me the most is the interaction between text and image. Because being trained as a picture book artist, I knew that the two have to perform a dance together. You cannot write what's already in the picture, and vice versa. So that was always on my mind because I was working with a narrator, and then I was working with the dialogue, and then I was working with the image. So I always made sure that the three complemented each other but there was never any duplication. And in fact sometimes there would be tension between what the narrator said and what the dialogue said.

RS: Or what you read and what you see.

MvL: Exactly. I think that having done so many picture books really helped me think about that and make sure that that part was well thought through.

RS: Will you do it again?

MvL: God, no. There was a while there when I thought this graphic novel was either going to kill me or I was going to kill it. And it hasn't killed me yet. I'm sure I will do something again because I love the process, but it just took so much out of me that I don't want to think. I'm not letting myself have ideas right now. If I have an idea, I write it down and put it away. Because this was really a huge undertaking. I'll do something again, but not right now.

RS: No promises. But you're going to translate Song of a Blackbird into Dutch?

MvL: I have. The funny thing is, I wrote the book with First Second. I turned the whole thing in, then I moved back to the Netherlands for a while. I worked with a Dutch publisher to translate it into Dutch, then I adjusted all the art to fit the Dutch language, because Dutch is longer, so I had to adjust all the speech bubbles and adjust the art so it would look good. I turned it in to my Dutch publisher. It was published maybe three weeks later because the dynamics of publishing are so different from here. So in the Netherlands it came out in April 2024, and here it comes out today, the day you and I are speaking! Even though I finished the U.S. edition way before I finished the Dutch edition, because of market dynamics it was published there first, which was really funny and mind-warping.

RS: And have you published other books in Dutch? Your picture books?

MvL: I translated one, Hopper and Wilson, into Dutch years ago. But this was very different, obviously. It was actually great that I was able to work both with First Second and with Nijgh & Van Ditmar simultaneously because there were a lot of things that my Dutch publisher contributed that I could then go back and change in the U.S. version. There were some factual things, there were some sensitivity things, various things along the way that I hadn’t thought of before. I would call my U.S. editor and say, “Hold on, I need to change this thing because of working on the Dutch edition with Dutch people who have a different perspective on the whole process.”

RS: It's like the opposite from what you were saying earlier about going away to get some distance. But then now you're creating a book for two different cultures, two different places, and you can assume American readers know some things but not other things and I would imagine with Dutch readers you have to go through it all over again.

MvL: Yeah, it's like a different book. I told both editors I don't like talking about it as a translation because I wrote the best possible book for the American reader and then I wrote the best possible book for the Dutch reader. It's not a literal translation. Some things are very close, but there are some things that are left out in the Dutch book, some things that are added in the Dutch book, some things that are described in a different way. So they're really two different books, in a way.

RS: But they’re both your story.

MvL: They're both my story. And the books look a lot alike because I told my Dutch publisher from the get-go, “In order for me to stay sane, we have to stick to the exact same dimensions. I'm not making it bigger.” Because, for instance, it was also sold to Germany, and they're making it slightly bigger, which fine, great, go for it! But because I was doing the Dutch version myself, I needed to work with the same dimensions. Even though the text is going to be different and the art will be slightly different because of that, everything else has to stay the same or it will be too confusing.

RS: I can see those five pivotal pictures from the book hanging on the wall behind you.

MvL: Those are the five prints that play a central role in the stories. Early on, I selected five buildings that play a pivotal part in the plot, and I turned them into prints. And those are the prints that are the bridge between the story line in the past and the story line in the present because those are the ones Annick uses to uncover the past and to learn about what happened to her grandmother. It’s a really interesting story: when I was doing research, I came across the son of the illustrator who had actually worked on the bills that were forged in the bank heist. The illustrator was a Jewish man who was in the Resistance. His son, who is now in his eighties, has a print shop in Amsterdam, and through my research I ran into him and we became friends. He was wonderful, because not only did he help me fact-check the book but he had the original press, the exact same press that the forgeries had been printed on during the war, and he taught me how to use it. We ran those five prints from the press together.

RS: Oh, on the actual press! That’s just wild. How cool.

MvL: I know. That was one of those really special things where, you know, life imitates art imitates life.

RS: I think one of the brilliant things about this book is that there are so many different ways a reader can find themselves into it. Like if they're interested in Nazis, or in art, or if they're interested in war — there are so many different readers that could find their way here.

MvL: That is certainly my hope — and obviously it's my hope that readers will be as inspired by my characters as I was when I first learned about these people. Because I worked so long on it, I really had a chance to think about what matters to me, and I was able to layer that into the book. And if readers get that from it, that’s wonderful.

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