That Feeling: Drawing Inspiration From Poetry to Write a Picture Book
Award-winning author Morgan Christie discusses the process of drawing inspiration from poetry to write a picture book.
Last year, when my father fell ill, I began reading at his bedside. The hospital was buzzy, nurses and doctors constantly in and out, asking him for the date and if he knew where he was. I remember the smells as much as I do the shards of white light coating his room; disinfectant, apple juice, and other things that didn’t smell as sweet.
I wanted to pull him out of all of it, even if it was just for a few minutes. To remind him that there was a world outside of the one he found himself in, tucked between those starch sheets and minced meals. So I read. I read everything I stuffed into my carry-on, which at the time, was a lot of poetry. Mind you, I don’t think my father had read an entire poem in his life, save mine, anyway.
Soon, I was reading through a friend’s collection, Settling St. Malo, and landed on the poem “Get Your Father from the Bar.” I read the piece to my father and noticed a soft change in his demeanor. His eyes became brighter, cheeks twitched as I read lines about a young boy’s memories of his father. That “he hid in imaginary caves/scenes where palms popped up” or that he’d “disappear in the smoke of his own stories.” My father whispered a lot then, but told me, it was like magic, listening to him talk about his dad. I thanked Randy, the poet, for his words and giving my father and I that moment, not too dissimilar from the moment he shared with his own.
I thought about my father’s reaction to the poem after that, couldn’t shake it really; watching him come alive amidst the tussled alliteration and burgeoning line breaks. That’s when it occurred to me—the poem was alive. Twisted up in palm trees and bar stools, underbrush and dense forests, the poem was full of images and sensations that he recognized, that he could feel. The poem touched him, saw and understood him, even though the memory belonged to someone else.
I’ve realized now, the only other time I’ve seen people react quite the way he did, was when I’d read to my students during story time. The classroom would fly still together, echoes of sneaker screeches pouring in from the hall, but it didn’t bother us. We were zoned in, encapsulated by the world, languages, and feelings living in those pages, the ones we found living in us. Did every book generate such a reaction with every student? Of course not, but it almost always did with a fair number.
Being a writer and reader of adult prose, I recognize the familiarity in a range of genres being able to encapsulate their audience. That’s what good writing does. But there’s something different about a poem; something stirring, quietly bludgeoning, and accessibly vulnerable. Perhaps intertwined in its brevity or restructuring of the line, grammar, or pace. Poems ask us to feel, relatively quickly. To taste the words and roll them around on our tongue, to press them between our fingers and close our eyes as we smell them turn from ink to aroma.
Poetry often requires us to unlearn the expected, to step out of the frameworks set by prose and other linear forms. It is in this understanding, this reality of poetry as form, that I believe I—we—are given the tools and ability to draw inspiration for our words in picture books.
Poetry opens up a realm of storytelling that is not as confined by structural nuances and predetermined arcs. Not that all prose does, but it is seen a bit less. There are often rules and syllabic counts to measure, but the poem’s undercurrent of condensed and fluid sensations create a heightened sense of feeling that engulf a reader in the minimal words donning the page.
When we write picture books our words have to be few (that 600 to 800 count still riffles through my mind) but the space often needed to pattern the way the story is being conveyed shrinks. Through the accompaniment of visual storytelling, readers are given cues throughout picture books that allow the movement of the narrative to progress through auditory and visual sensation. Working in tandem, these elements ground the story into comprehensible patterns that form structural continuity.
In truth, the gift of imagery and visual storytelling lift our words off the pages and into the sights of whoever shares in the book and its contents. But the feelings encompassed in the story, the unbridled focus the text has on evoking sensations and connective emotional tendons between itself and the readers, those stem from the writer.
The work that poetry often does in teaching the reader to unlearn their expectations, does not have to be done with picture books, as the visual elements, audience, and structure do this work for us. Where we can draw inspiration is in the emotion. The centralization of sensation and deeply evoked language and feeling that propel the story forward in its limited space.
We can draw from the tasted and aroma filled words, flickering in simplicity and depth. We can trust the images and their detail to support the emotional resonance of the story and experiences shared in a picture book. Mostly, what we can draw from poetry towards our picture books is all that comes after the unlearning: the sheer essence of story and language braided into small moments of deep and tangible meaning, ones powerful enough to quiet even the loudest of places.
My father has been out of the hospital for almost a year now, but I still find myself getting lost in that moment. In his eyes and attempted smile. In that poem, he found an aliveness that had been blanketed by circumstance. One so potent he read the poem again when he was strong enough to hold the book himself. It was an aliveness I strive to attain in all of my writing, but especially for the words in my picture books.
I hope we all remember, in some ways, how deeply we felt the world as children: as people new to the joys and sadness we’d inevitably encounter. If in those new experiences we could engage in moments like my father’s, like Randy’s, like my own, I have to believe that our understanding of the potential in reading and all it offers would grow immensely. I would hope that in those moments of widened eyes and almost smiles, of warmth, and of something curious that also feels like something we know, that the reader of that picture book feels compelled to pick up another. And another. All in search of that feeling, again.
Check out Morgan Christie's I, Too, Am Here here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
Morgan Christie is the author of four poetry chapbooks, a short story collection, and a collection of essays. She has won the Arc Poetry Poem of the Year Contest, the Prairie Fire Fiction Prize, the Digging Press Chapbook Series Prize, and the Howling Bird Press Nonfiction Book Award. I, Too, Am Here is her second picture book and she continues to work towards affecting change through reading and writing. Morgan is based out of Toronto.
