Home at Last by Vera B. Williams and Chris Raschka

Vera B. Williams and Chris Raschka Vera B. Williams wrote Home at Last and then put it aside for many years in order to focus on other work, family, and life. In the spring of 2015, she decided that the time was right and that this beautiful, honest, and personal story needed to be told. Uncertain that she would have the energy to complete the pictures, she invited her good friend Chris Raschka to collaborate with her on what would be her final book. Chris and Vera spent many hours drawing together and planning the design, layout, and pagination of the book. Vera had completed the black-and-white sketches, and seen and loved a sample color picture or two, before she died peacefully at her home in Narrowsburg, New York, on October 16, 2015.

In the summer, Vera called me and said, “Chris, I need help with my book.

Can you do it?” I said I could do it. “One more thing,” said Vera. “Can you draw action figures?”

Pretty soon I was sitting next to Vera at her kitchen table (which is a lot like my kitchen table), where we read her story and talked. Vera said, “It might be nice if Lester was looking sad right here.” I drew what that might look like on a little piece of paper and stuck it down. Vera said, “Here is where Wincka gets her big idea!” And I drew Wincka, the dog, very small and sketchy, and stuck it down where it might go. And so on.

Over the next few months we sat—sometimes together, sometimes apart—and drew. And we talked as we drew.

Vera said, “Daddy Rich is the sporty one. Daddy Albert is a little more nervous. He gets cranky. Lester is really me.” She said, “Let’s just put out next to us whatever colors we have and then grab them, and when a color runs out, just grab another one.” We sat together on her sun porch and drew until the sun sank down.

One morning when I arrived, Vera sat in the middle of a pile of fresh drawings. “I don’t sleep much anymore,” she said, with a great smile. “And I had an explosion of ideas! I’ve been thinking about the action figures.”

The first time we sat together, Vera said, “It’s exciting making a book. It’s what keeps you alive.” She smiled and winked without closing an eye.

Chris Raschka and Vera B. Williams working together, August 2015

Vera no longer sits next to me. Nevertheless, I hear her voice. This is the book Vera and I made together. Vera wrote it. Vera and I drew it. And I painted it.

—Chris Raschka

“Lucky Lady”: Vera B. Williams and Chris Raschka Collaborate on Her Last Book

by Lydie Raschka

Chris and I found Vera standing barefoot in her workaday kitchen

Photos on pages 12–16: Lydie Raschka.

in Narrowsburg, New York. Green beans and eggs were bubbling in various pans on the stove, and Vera held a ripe market tomato in one hand. She leaned on a cane; her white hair was cut in a bob. Chris

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told me later he was shocked by how tiny and frail she looked in her loosefitting sundress—this woman he’d always thought of as a powerhouse.

“How’s this going to work?” was his first thought about their collaboration.

Vera had launched one final book project knowing she would probably not see it to the end. She had made the decision to forgo ongoing treatment for cancer. Making a book, she told Chris, “is exciting, and excitement keeps you alive,” amending her words with “…not forever, of course.”

As the children’s book world knows, Vera B. Williams died on October 16,

2015, at home. She was eighty-eight but undaunted by cancer or age in the months leading up to her death.

She had been planning an art show as well as a book. In July, she’d telephoned Chris.

Chris asked how she was. “Good and not so good,” she said. “I’m making a book, but I have cancer. I need help.

Are you interested?”

Vera had championed Chris’s work early on, recommending him for the Ezra Jack Keats award in 1994 for Yo! Yes?. They’d met frequently over the years at PEN events, the organization dedicated to free expression through

Lydie Raschka is the wife of author/illustrator Chris Raschka. She writes for insideschools.org and blogs at habitsofanartist.com. Home at Last by Vera B. Williams, illustrated by Vera B. Williams and Chris Raschka, will be published

by Greenwillow Books in September 2016.

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the written word. Chris loved her frank talk, her humor, her politics, and her vibrant art. Yes, of course he was interested.

We booked a room for two nights near Vera’s house on the Delaware River and hitched a ride from Manhattan with Vera’s daughter Sarah, a psychologist who works in the city. On the way, Sarah tried to prepare Chris for how Vera had changed and asked, gently, if he would be willing to finish the book if her mother died in the middle of things.

Vera’s text for this final book, Home at Last (to be published by Greenwillow in September), had been inspired in part by a brief period in her childhood when she lived in an orphanage. The book would feature two dads, a boy named Lester, and a dog. They’d need a house, a room, a bed, a toy.

It had been a couple of years since Chris had seen Vera. And it had been more than a decade since I myself had, but her books were a constant presence in my elementary-school classroom.

If you taught children from working14 The Horn Book Magazine May/June 2016

class families, or kids who lived without fathers, you wanted A Chair for My Mother and Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart. If you hoped to inspire children to illustrate their own work with exuberant colors, you reached for Vera’s books.

In the kitchen, Vera grinned, and immediately the heartier woman we’d always known took the place of this seemingly fragile person. She hugged us each in turn.

“Well,” she said. “Look around. Go see the river.”

We walked out back past a tiny summer porch with two wicker chairs and a day bed covered in an orangepeach throw, which reminded me of the Creamsicles I loved as a kid. Crossing a deep lawn, we followed a tall-grasslined path that led to a pebbly shore.

Chris crouched at the water’s edge in search of snails, and I trailed my fingers in the river, finding it warm enough for swimming. Strolling back across the yard underneath a penetratingly blue sky adorned with gaudy popcorn clouds, I stopped and looked around. It was a heavenly place to die.

Vera’s first book, Hooray for Me!, was a collaboration with Remy Charlip and Lilian Moore, and she did a poetry book, Long Walks and Intimate Talks, with Grace Paley. Vera and her daughter Jennifer Williams created a picture book, Stringbean’s Trip to the Shining Sea, together. Chris has worked on books with many people, including Vladimir Radunsky, Nikki Giovanni, and Norton Juster. And with his jazz books, he had, in a sense, collaborated with the deceased: he listened to Charlie Parker’s music for years before he wrote Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, and immersed himself in all things Sun Ra before making a book about him (The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra).

But this collaboration would be different. Sarah told Chris that her mother worked slowly “in the best of circumstances,” yet Chris and Vera appeared

unconcerned about logistics or time, only eager to get started. After eating a tasty salade niçoise at the picnic table, Sarah and I washed the lunch dishes and put our swimsuits on. Meanwhile, in the dining room, with its pale katydid-green walls, Vera parked her cane and adjusted her specs. She plunked a stack of rough sketches on her Formica table. Chris looked over her shoulder as she sifted through them one by one. He pointed to a pencil drawing of a dad holding a boy securely in his arms. Vera picked it up and nodded. Chris said something like, “Love the lines here.” The drawing was pure emotion. Pure Vera. And a place to start. Emotion through line is what Chris and Vera had in common.

They moved outside to the sun and sat at the picnic table as Sarah and I left to visit the town’s swimming hole. “I

CHRIS HAS OFTEN argued that

everything about a children’s book is collaboration, from dummy to layout to print. The pairing of author and illustrator—typically a blind-date match arranged by the editor—is only one aspect of the teamwork required: the editor shapes the text; the designer brings cohesion to pictures and words; and the child brings her own experience to the finished product.

Above (and on previous spread), Vera shows Chris some of her ideas for Home at Last.

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One morning, Chris arrived to find Vera sitting surrounded by a pile of fresh drawings. “I don’t sleep much anymore,” she said, with one of her great smiles. “And I had an explosion of ideas! I’ve been thinking about action figures.”

CHRIS AND I were walking in

Central Park when Sarah called with the news of Vera’s death. He pressed the phone tightly to his ear in order to hear Sarah better. Feeling close to Sarah after our long afternoon swim, I stood near him as if to transmit comfort through the line. Our weekend together had been compressed time that encapsulated who Vera was—frank, hardworking, and brave.

After that day, Chris worked alone, but he soon learned he would never be entirely alone with the project. In late October, he returned from a day at his studio and said with a smile-frown of exasperation, “Vera had words with me today.” He felt the pressure of the deadline and was losing sleep over try-

Getting re-acquainted at the picnic table in Vera’s backyard on the Delaware River.

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grid on a large piece of paper, which became the book’s first dummy.

“A lot of the work got done while I was napping,” Vera said with shining eyes when Sarah and I returned and joined them for cherry pie. Chris felt that those first two hours were crucial.

The book took shape in the words and ideas they shared at the picnic table.

INCLUDING THAT first visit, when they mapped out the book, Chris made three visits to Narrowsburg. During the second, they put in many hours over two days on Vera’s porch, sitting sideby-side in the wicker chairs: she with a rolling desktop over her lap, her feet propped up on a pillow, surrounded by a mess of colored pencils. Vera said, “Let’s just put out next to us whatever colors we have and then grab them, and when a color runs out, just grab another one.”

Illustrations on pages 17–18 by Chris Raschka.

had no idea how we would proceed,” Chris said later. He pulled out the sticky notes he carries because they are quick, easy to move around, and disposable. Afterwards, he told me, “I reached for the Post-its cautiously. I didn’t want to impose, but she seemed to like the idea. It gave us a focus. She would outline her vision in words and I’d start scribbling until she was satisfied with how the Post-it drawing fit the vision in her head.”

Vera said, for example, “It might be nice if Lester was looking sad right here,” and Chris drew what that might look like, very small and sketchy.

Vera said, “Daddy Rich is the sporty one. Daddy Albert is a little more nervous. He gets cranky. Lester is really me.” And so on.

After two hours of this collaborative work, Vera took a nap, and Chris organized the yellow Post-it squares into a

ing to inhabit her vision yet still retain his own best voice.

“I’m worried I’m falling between the chairs,” he said. Joking, I asked if he meant the wicker chairs on Vera’s porch. No, he meant “falling between two stools,” an idiom that means failing to be one thing or another.

Some days he reported that Vera’s voice was light and jokey: “Why are you putting that there?” Other days she was too present, too near, and the work went haltingly. He felt the weight of the expectations of Vera’s fans and family and longtime publisher, Greenwillow Books.

After a long day in late November immersed in painting, Chris stepped outside his studio and was overwhelmed by the colors he saw all around—orange peach, yellow ochre, and olive green—and hoped it was a sign of progress, and of Vera’s approval.

The result, of course, was never the most important aspect of this collaboration. Lucky Chris! To be invited to work with Vera B. Williams on her

As rendered by Chris, the two wicker chairs on Vera’s porch.

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final book, to spend six precious days talking and drawing with her, and eating cherry pie.

F

IVE DAYS BEFORE Vera died, Chris drove up from the city with Greenwillow’s publisher and Vera’s editor, Virginia Duncan, and Greenwillow’s associate art director, Sylvie Le Floc’h. They took with them a copy of Vera’s drawings, with text set by Sylvie, and a few samples of Chris’s paintings based on those drawings. They spent the day at Vera’s house tweaking the text, layout, and design with the help of scissors, tape, and a small copier Sylvie bought at Staples. Chris felt relieved that his first renderings of her drawings in paint

pleased Vera. Now in a wheelchair, she was weaker, yet still “very much wanting to be a part of it,” he said. They talked about fabric and clothing colors and the beautiful bedspread. Vera was insistent on keeping the elephant in one of the scenes—she thought kids would like it, and it would make them laugh. Virginia thought it was extraneous and wanted to cut it. They negotiated; Vera won.

Over a Mediterranean feast of crusty bread, smoked salmon, and champagne prepared by daughter Jennifer, along with son, Merce, Vera surveyed the people around the table.

“I’m a lucky lady to have all these people around me,” she said. “It’s good to have people working together.” n

Editor Virginia Duncan on the creation of Home at Last: It wasn’t really clear in the beginning how the collaboration would unfold, since Vera didn’t know how much work she’d be able—or want—to do. Chris was incredibly generous with this fluid arrangement.

What ended up happening is that Chris and Vera sketched and talked and sketched and talked. Ultimately, Vera sent us enough pencil sketches for a dummy. One sketch (in the bundle we saw) was drawn by Chris (the action figures). But the genesis of the book is how it is described here. Chris did some color studies, as did Vera.

Over the following weeks we worked on revised sketches, text revisions, and pagination, back and forth over email and mail; Chris came into the office a bunch.

All Vera’s sketches at this point, but Chris always very involved. Then Chris did more color studies based on Vera’s sketches.

When Sylvie, Chris, and I went up to see her (the third visit) we finalized the dummy

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Chris’s timeline of visits and deadlines for Home at Last, starting with “Vera calls.”

(text, placement, pagination, sizes, images).

Vera reviewed everything (and fought to keep things I wanted to cut, both text and image) and blessed Chris’s art samples and color choices. Sylvie did one more layout, and Chris created the art based on Vera’s sketches in that final dummy.

Reprinted with permission from the May/June 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, www.hbook.com. All rights reserved.