Five Creatures

Three humans and two cats

Five creatures live in our house.
Three humans, and two cats.
Three short, and two tall.
Four grownups, and one child (that's me!).

In this book of lighthearted comparisons, simple text and warm pictures work together to depict various scenes in a happy household where each member is distinct but also has something inn common with one or more of the others. The fun comes from sorting out the similarities and the differences.

Five Creatures is a 2001 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award Honor Book for Picture Books.

I grew up in the Boston area in the 1970s. My mother was a preschool teacher and my father a playwright. I remember visiting my mother's classroom and reading to the children there; even more vividly, I remember sitting in the back row of theater after theater, watching rehearsals--seeing stories come to life. My mother read me countless picture books, but at my father's house there wasn't much of that nature. He read me what was at hand: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes stories. He also made up stories for me and recounted the plots of Shakespeare's plays.

I was a raw child. In fact, I am a raw adult. This is a hard quality to live with sometimes, but it is a useful quality if you want to be a writer. It is easy to hurt my feelings, and I am unable to watch the news or read about painful subjects without weeping. I was often called oversensitive when I was young, but I've learned to appreciate this quality in myself, and to use it in my writing.

Growing up, I spent large parts of my life in imaginary worlds: Neverland, Oz, and Narnia, in particular. I read in the bath, at meals, in the car, you name it. Around the age of eight, I began working on my own writing. My early enterprises began with a seminal picture book featuring a heroic orange sleeping bag, followed by novel-length imitations of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken and Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.

I have never kept journals or notebooks for my own sake. I am a writer who writes always with the idea of an audience in mind--and at nine I was determined to share my Pippi story with the world. I got my father to type it up in a book format and photocopy it fifty times. Then he took me to an artist friend's studio, where we silkscreened fifty copies of a drawing I'd made for the cover. I gave it to everyone I knew. That was my first book.

I have always been interested in picture books as a form, which stems (I suppose) from my background in theater. I am fascinated by the intersection of words and images-- the way the meanings of words can be altered by changing their presentation. An actor varies her intonation or an illustrator changes a line--and the story is new. In college, I studied illustrated books from an academic standpoint. I went to Vassar, where children's book writer Nancy Willard was on the faculty. She introduced me to illustrator Barry Moser, and the interview he gave me was the centerpiece of my senior thesis. While I was there, I spent three years as a student assistant in Vassar's lab pre-school, and after graduation found work as an assistant teacher in a Montessori school, teaching six- to nine-year-olds. That year, I began to write a novel with my father--through the mail. I was in Chicago and he was in New York. We thought it would be a fun way to keep in touch. I wrote a chapter--then he wrote a chapter. We rewrote each other's chapters. And rewrote them again. It took a long time, but eventually that story was published as The Secret Life of Billie's Uncle Myron.

Now I write full time (except when parenting) in a tiny little office in Brooklyn, accompanied by two plump and ancient cats. The walls are raspberry-colored and lined with pictures by the artists I've worked with.

Emily Jenkins writes books for both adults and children. She has a doctorate in English literature from Columbia and reviews children's books for The New York Times. At New York University, she teaches a course in writing for children.

I was born on April 1, 1950, in the small town of Konin in Poland. Sometimes I feel very young, sometimes somewhat old. I am neither tall nor short. I don't wear suits and ties. I have many pairs of glasses, and I am never sure which pair to wear, so often I don't wear any at all. I like riding a bike, and I like the smell of fresh grass and flowers. I like music, and I like silence where I can hear my thoughts and let my imagination run free. I draw all the time, and have for as long as I can remember. I always have a lot of ideas, but never enough time to work on all of them.

I grew up in my grandparents' big house on the bank of the Warta River in Konin. I liked to ride my bike to the outskirts of the town, to the meadows. I liked playing with other children, but I also liked to be alone in my first attic "studio" to draw, paint, read books, write stories, or just sit quietly with my eyes closed, imagining faraway places and adventures. I carved the wooden toys
I played with. I planted my first flower garden there.

When I was fourteen, I moved to the capital of Poland--Warsaw--where I completed my high-school education and later attended the Academy of Fine Arts. I still loved riding my bike, the smell of fresh grass and flowers, and sitting in silence and letting my imagination run free. I still read books, wrote stories, and drew all the time.

For many years after that, I lived in a house deep in a forest in the Mazury region in Poland. I rode my bike, planted flowers in my garden, and carved wooden sculptures, and toys for my little son to play with. I had plenty of time to do what I loved. Later I traveled widely and lived in many different places--London, Florence, Stockholm, and Amsterdam among them. I stayed in some places for only a few days, and in others for a few years. Then one day I came to New York. It felt like home, so I decided to stay . . .

I started illustrating books for children during my last year in college. Since then I have illustrated more than forty books, some of them my own stories. Children all over the world have enjoyed them, so I continue to work on new ones.

Tomek Bogacki obtained a fine arts degree from the Academy of Art in Warsaw, Poland. While active as a painter, he became involved in a variety of other artistic pursuits. His growing interest in graphic design resulted in numerous posters, book jackets, and record album covers. Through his work with Polish television, Tomek gained recognition for his animated film projects, having produced over fifty. He has also designed stage sets for theater and television in Warsaw and London, participated in developing an educational illustration program for elementary schools in Poland, and had his work shown in a multitude of prestigious illustration exhibitions.

His interest in children's book illustration goes back to 1973, when his first book was commissioned by KAW Publishers in Warsaw. His distinctive style has won him international acclaim, and his books continue to be published throughout Europe and in China and Japan. Tomek now lives in New York City.