Working with Dan Santat on Drawn Together was a total dream. He had just come off winning the Caldecott Medal, which is the biggest award for children’s books in the U.S., for The Adventures of Beekle. He has such an amazing use of color and energy and humor, but he also has this incredible amount of heart in his stories.
I was like, ‘How do I come up with a story that kind of takes advantage of all that he brings to the table?’ And that’s how the idea for Drawn Together came about. When this opportunity presented itself my wife and I had just come back from the hospital after the birth of our second son, so I remember being up at 3 am in the morning rocking this baby to sleep and being like, ‘How do you write a story for someone who just wrote — or won the biggest award in children’s literature?’ But I think being in that new fatherhood mindset, thinking about family is kind of how this story came about.
But with a book like Drawn Together it is very much a story about the inability to connect with language. So, it’s a story that I wanted to be told mostly through the pictures. So my goal was to give Dan the sketch of a story that he could then take and come to the table with his own experiences. For example, in this story, in the manuscript the characters are Vietnamese just because that’s my experience, but I wrote in the note that like, ‘If you want to illustrate this from your perspective as a Thai American that would be wonderful.’
And he took that and like really brought a lot of personal experience and his own cultural background to the story, and I think that’s what really unlocks a lot of the story because even though I’m Vietnamese American and he’s Thai American, there is so much overlap in the kinds of experiences that we had that his story feels as true to me as my own. So, when we combine those two it really creates a book that I think rings true for people from all different backgrounds.
And that’s one of the things that I love about a story like this is that we dove very much into like a specific experience, but I think by doing that you touch upon something hopefully universal that people who don’t share that specific cultural experience can still resonate with the, the emotional truth that’s hopefully there. So, in Drawn Together the grandfather speaks Thai and we don’t put the translation on the, on the page right there. We actually put it earlier in the book in the little note upfront.
But we wanted to create a book and a reading experience where you as a reader don’t necessarily know what the grandfather is saying unless you speak Thai because that’s a space that these two characters are in. They’re not able to understand each other. So as a reader you’re experiencing something very similar to what the characters are experiencing and that kind of allows you to occupy a similar emotional space as the characters.
And I think talking through it with my editor and everything like we landed on, on that approach, and I think it works really well to kind of give you a taste of what it was like in this space.