At that time when I started there was nobody. There wasn’t even a book to teach me how to do it.
Today there are books for adults and for kids about how to make pop-ups, but at that time there was nothing. I guess being from the Midwest it’s sort of this really can-do kind of attitude. If you can’t find someone to show you how to do it or find a book, you have to figure it out yourself. It was really just a matter of sort of figuring out myself.
It’s funny that you mention a mentor or a group of people because I think that oftentimes people who are not involved in children’s books envision this big support group that we all have, or we all talk to each other and get together and hang out and drink and eat guacamole and chips and everything. To my knowledge that doesn’t really happen. Or maybe it does happen, I’m just not invited, like I’m the odd man out or something.
But we really don’t do that. It’s, surprisingly in some ways, very much a solitary kind of a field. Maybe that makes it more like an art field than anything else because we’re still working in our own little world and our own little environments. Not to say that I don’t have support, but a creative world is usually a very solitary, sometimes a little bit lonely kind of field.
