Bringing Joy with Steve Light

Steve Light, author illustrator of Gus & Sully All Week Long (Candlewick), joins Matthew to talk about distilling ideas to their most accessible and truest forms for our youngest readers.

Listen along:

About the book: Gus & Sully All Week Long by Steve Light. Published by Candlewick.

Join this amiable pair as they spend a week together in another sweet, funny story for little ones from award-winning creator Steve Light.

Friends Gus the rhino and Sully the mouse are excited to spend the week together having fun. While they may take a different approach to things – Gus’s tacos are a little too spicy for Sully, and Sully prefers building a book fort to reading – they enjoy each day. This gentle story reinforces the days of the week while also showing the joys of friendship and compromise.

More:

Visit Steve Light online at stevelightart.com 

Other helpful links:

• Steve Light at Boyds Mills

• Summer Camp for Writers and Illustrators: Session Two! - Get away for five days at our Summer Camp for fiction and nonfiction storytellers who are looking for inspiration, guidance, mentorship, community, fun, creativity, and…a place to dream!

• Steve Light Scholarship - Steve Light and Christine Cincotta have established a scholarship to support attendance at our Summer Camp in Illustration. 

• Steve light & Christine Cincotta Cabin (Whiskers Hollow) at Boyds Mills - Honoring Illustrators. Steve Light and Christine Cincotta are frequent visitors to our Retreat Center and Steve has been part of our faculty for illustration workshops.

Learn more about Boyds Mills and their upcoming programs by visiting www.boydsmills.org. 

Transcript:

NOTE: Transcript created by Descript. I've attempted to clean up any typos, grammatical errors, and formatting errors where possible.

1109 Steve Light

Steve:  It actually helps me. I'm not sitting at my desk, you know, sweating over trying to figure something out. I have to go teach and then I get to play with three year olds and I get to read them stories.

And I get to see how they respond to stories and, and the things that they're interested

Matthew: That is the voice of Steve Light, author illustrator of Have You Seen My Dragon, Swap!, Black Bird, Yellow Sun, A Spider Named Itsy and, most recently, Gus & Sully All Week Long (Candlewick), his third book in the board book series about two friends experiencing their days in different ways. 

Welcome back to the Children’s Book Podcast, where we celebrate the books and creators who help young readers feel seen, supported, and understood. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Boyds Mills, positively impacting kids by amplifying the voices of storytellers who inspire children to become their best selves.

I’m your host, Matthew Winner—teacher, librarian, writer, and a fan of kids.

A quick reminder before we begin: if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy ad-free listening and early access to episodes by subscribing to TCBP +Plus for just $0.99 a month. Just tap the banner in the app to learn more.

Steve Light is a long time friend of the show dating all the way back to the early days of the podcast, when the show was called Let’s Get Busy and when I first heard about Steve’s deep love of fountain pen nibs. Seriously, I could still listen to him talk for hours about custom-made nibs and the lines they create. Steve’s latest series explores foundational concepts through the lens of two friends: a rhinoceros and a mouse.

Here are a few things I learned in this conversation that I think you’ll enjoy: 

NUMBER ONE: Steve is all about the littles. He’s been a pre-school teacher for years and years, and spending time with our youngest learners influences the stories Steve tells and the art Steve makes. It’s also what helps keep him grounded in joy.

NUMBER TWO: Distilling ideas down to their most unhindered representations is really, really tough, and it’s what is called for when making books for pre-readers and beginning readers. If you’ve ever considered writing for this age, go to your local library, check out as many books by Steve Light as you can, and study, study, study them! This is a picture book maker who deeply understands his audience and to making concepts accessible for every reader.

And NUMBER THREE: Leading with kindness and empathy. This is something we all can be doing more, but I suspect there’s something to working with 3 and 4-year-olds that really helps keep you grounded and helps keep your heart in the right place. Steve’s got that in droves.

So, a little about Gus & Sully All Week Long (Candlewick) from the publisher:

“Join this amiable pair as they spend a week together in another sweet, funny story for little ones from award-winning creator Steve Light.

Friends Gus the rhino and Sully the mouse are excited to spend the week together having fun. While they may take a different approach to things – Gus’s tacos are a little too spicy for Sully, and Sully prefers building a book fort to reading – they enjoy each day. This gentle story reinforces the days of the week while also showing the joys of friendship and compromise.”

All set to bring on the joy, the kindness, and the empathy? Then let’s jump in!

Please welcome Steve Light to the Children’s Book Podcast.

Steve: Alright. Hi I'm Steve Light and I'm an author illustrator of many books. My newest one is Gus and Sully all week long. And I love to draw and that's how my whole career in storytelling and illustrating and writing children's books began.[00:06:00] 

Matthew: You and I first met Steve, or we first connected over, have you seen My Dragon? And I want to tell you I said it then I believe I said it then. That book felt like a forever book to me. It has continued to be at the center of every library I've worked in for now. I've worked in libraries for since you and I've talked, we talked 12 years ago.

I've worked in libraries longer than that. Yeah. Wow. That's so nice to hear something like that. It's you, your work. I. Cannot help but connect your work to our youngest readers and to connect it to play. And we're gonna talk about that today. But before I go too much deeper, I'd love to engage with you right where I'm meeting you today and ask you, Steve, what's giving you hope today?

Steve: What's giving me hope is that one of my books will bring some kind of joy to a child. Because that's, I feel in hard times it's the only thing you can do is to put good out into the world. And I hopefully [00:07:00] I'm doing that with my books and my storytelling and my teaching of children. 

Matthew: Yeah, so Gus and Sully is about to have their third.

Book in this series so far? Yeah. Do you mind sharing a book, talk of the series to Sure. Any kids or librarians, readers who have not encountered them yet? 

Steve: Absolutely. So this started as so I teach three-year-olds and every day we have meeting in the classroom. We sit on the rug and we always do the weather and we sing the weather song.

What's the weather? What's the weather? What's the weather like today? We have a little weather chart. It only has four things on it. Snowy, sunny. Cloudy and rainy, simple. But the little arrow turns and, and I was just like, oh, you know what, we don't have like a book to, there's not like a easy book to talk about weather.

Even maybe like a book that kids could find the page of what the weather was and hold it up as a weather thing if you don't have a weather chart or, so [00:08:00] I actually started doing these like beautiful watercolors, which I'm still proud of. But it was like too romantic and too artsy for what I really wanted it to be used for.

So then very inspired by Cartoon Modern artwork. There's a short animation. Gerald mc boy, if you've ever seen it, Gerald boy. Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of art inspired the art. And I was like, I just need these two characters. Yeah. And we'll do the weather. And so the first one was about weather and the different kinds of weather, what's today like sunny, rainy.

And then the nice thing is I was like, not everybody loves when it's sunny. Some people it's too hot and so they don't always agree on things. So it's a nice little, you can get into a little empathy of you might be really happy that it's sunny, but your friend might be sweaty and hot and not like it, and, but you might like to lay out in the sun, kind of thing.

And it's a, and it's a good little play off the two characters. So Gus is a rhino. And Sully is a mouse. So Gus is more of an early riser and doesn't enjoy the sun, but Sully [00:09:00] likes to lay out in the sun. And so we did get we did the weather and luckily Candlewick was like, oh, we'd love to do some other books with them.

So we did get Ready for school, which is again, great to have with three year olds. We always are practicing putting on our jackets, hanging up our coats. Getting our lunchboxes, all of that thing. All of that. They wake up and they brush their teeth and everything. And it's really fun.

And luckily I got to, weather was. Was really fun. But in Get Ready for school Sully, Gus packs his lunch, his backpack notebook check. Lunchbox check, and Sully wants to pack like a bowling ball, a sponge and a TV remote. I've actually gotten laughs from three year olds from that, which, oh, not ev, not the whole class, but a few kids.

And when they do laugh, they really think it's funny. I've actually, as a teacher, had the TV remote come to school and the parents call and we're like, can you please make sure he's you send it home because we can't watch TV without it. That's amazing. [00:10:00] That's where that came from. So that's get ready for, so that's the second one.

So there's weather. Get ready for school. And then the third one, which is the one right now that's new the last few weeks is all week long, which is the days of the week, which is also something we do. So this is more what Gus and Sully do through the different days, so there is Taco Tuesday, which is actually very popular.

A lot of kids said they had a few kids that I've read too. Have said they've had Taco Tuesday and just a few other things throughout the week. So you can go through and learn the days of the week. And so it's just been fun to have these books. Kids pick them up all the time.

I go into the other classrooms and read them and it really resonates because like I said, most classrooms they do the weather, they talk about the days of the week, and they're always talking about putting on your shoes, zipping your coat, packing, all that stuff about getting ready. So it's been really fun. And I really love these characters. They're a little bit like me and my wife. Although not so I would be Guss 'cause I'm the big rhino.

And my wife is the little [00:11:00] mouse. Not that she's mousey, she's smaller than me. And, not all the things that Gus do, I do some of those.

Christine does. We switch them just to make it more interesting, and because so it's fun to do those. And that's Gu and Pelly and those are the three books, whether, how did 

Matthew: the characters 

Steve: get their, 

Matthew: oh, I'm sorry. I was just gonna ask, how, 

Steve: how 

Matthew: did they get their names? 

Steve: Gus is from Cinderella, the mouse.

Gus. Gus, 

Matthew: Gus, 

Steve: yeah. And he's has that shape, and then, I think it was originally Gus and Gully. But Gully just sounded weird, and so we changed it to Sully and it was just

Matthew: it worked. 

Steve: Came out. Yeah. Yeah, so this, yeah, they're really fun and I usually do a visual demonstration where the shape of Gus's head with his horn.

If you take that shape and you turn it sideways, that's actually the whole shape of Sully. 

Matthew: Oh, 

Steve: cool. So they, those two shapes, compliment each other. I show at Boys Mill at the illustration thing, I say, this is an idea I had to make these two characters relate to each other. It's that, and I draw the shape, and then I [00:12:00] trace the one and I turn it and I show that it's, and that everyone's always oh, you 

Matthew: know, that's neat.

And then you can't unsee it. I love talking to, especially our teachers at Boyd Mills about how teaching. Other writers and illustrators continues to influence their own practice, but rarely do I get a chance to talk to someone like you, Steve, who is actively in front of children every day. I would love to hear how that time with them influences your work beyond just, oh, here's a topic that we don't have a book that I feel like works, so I can help make that book.

But tell me how. Time spent with three year olds helps continue to inform the books you make. 

Steve: So yeah the first thing is that it actually helps me. I'm not sitting at my desk, sweating over trying to figure something out. I have to go teach and then I get to play with three year olds and I get to read them stories.

And I get to see how they [00:13:00] respond to stories and the things that they're interested in. A lot of times I'll read a story and I'll be like, oh, the way this story is structured, I could maybe use and structure my story similar, when I was really stuck on something, seeing the way they respond to certain books certain humor, certain which stories.

The thing that we've been working on this year is these are mostly stories that I just tell from my head, or I have story boxes that I use. Story boxes are little wooden figures that I carved that, I use as little, like almost puppets to tell the story. But they're mostly grims fairytales, so you know, it's the three pigs and it has a wolf and kids coming in this year.

More than I noticed other years. Usually there might be one kid that's really scared and the wolf is just like a hand puppet. When I'm doing these story boxes and I'll sometimes have one kid that's really scared of the wolf and I'll show, oh, it's a puppet. It's just fabric. And then they'll be okay.

But I had a bunch of kids this year, so we really had to work on, why do we tell these stories? There [00:14:00] there's bad things in the world and we can learn from these old stories how to overcome those things, and that's, things can be okay and, they might always be big bed wolves, but we can build a stronger house and take care of our, the other pigs by having them be safe inside and stuff. So that's been a really interesting thing to see. They really love them now, and they ask for them, and so then I wound up making little figures for them to act out the stories and seeing how they tell stories is really fascinating.

I also the big thing this year is I finally got the Giant Richard Scary book. Do you know the giant one? I do know the 

Matthew: giant one, 

Steve: yeah. Yeah. So I finally got one from my classroom and they just love it. And finding all, there's so many things in his book and finding the pickle car in each one and 

Matthew: Yeah.

Steve: Is it Mr. Fumble crashes like almost on every page of that book, and then in one, Mr. Fixit vacuums the roof and can I just tell you. I would've read that and been like, oh, that's so weird. [00:15:00] But the kids just thought that was the funniest thing. And were just like, like you, you'd think they were like in a comedy club when I, when they realized, they were like, what's that?

And I read it and they just were dying from that. And every day they gotta open up and see that page and everything,

Matthew: oh, that's terrific. 

Steve: And also I'm inspired by the different kinds of art, the different things that we use, I try to do all kinds of things with them, from printmaking to watercolor painting, to even building things.

We build a lot with cardboard and duct tape and stuff. Just seeing how they respond to different stories has really helped me. I'll also read them some of my stories or tell them a story and sometimes even show them sketches in my sketchbook of the story and the characters to see what they think about or what they feel about those, this kind of story or that kind of story.

So it's a really invaluable thing to me. 

Matthew: I'm sure, Steve, I wonder in. Having created books for what, something like 15 or 20 years now, right? [00:16:00] 

Steve: 25. 

Matthew: 25. Congratulations. Yeah. 

Steve: Congratulations. 1999 officially, but the books didn't come out till 2000, 

Matthew: so didn't come out till 'em. 

Steve: Yeah, and I've done 32, 32 books.

Matthew: Incredible. I wonder what. If you are still running into the same challenges in finding and creating stories for those readers, or what also draws you back to creating for them I adore you for continuing to come back to our youngest readers. I think you have an exceptional talent for it, and I think you 

Steve: Oh, thank 

Matthew: you.

I think those people. Whom I love. I teach pre-K, I don't go as low as you do, but they're in my building and I think people that are called to work with our youngest readers are just special people. And so to not only work with them but to create for them, it's just something I admire about you.

Do you find 25 years into your career that it is still challenging to make new work for them [00:17:00] or that. That the joy of working with them keeps bringing you back. Why? I stick with them. 

Steve: I still have a lot of joy when I'm creating. 

Matthew: Awesome. 

Steve: And a lot of joy working with them. Even, it's, teaching is not the easiest job.

Matthew: No, it's not. 

Steve: But there, there is a lot of joy in that and just seeing them and talking to them and everything. And just, I feel really, I take it really seriously too because these are, I consider some of the first books that are gonna look at, that's, so that super important to me. How do we.

Simplifying something is actually much harder than making something very complex. So how do we simplify or distill down this idea into a way that can come across quickly, but still engage and still have other things that can bring them back, time and time again, but also relate to what they relate to, so I, I really feel [00:18:00] blessed to be able to do books for this, for the young age and take it very seriously and, but get a lot of joy from it, 'cause I do think it's really important. So that's 

Matthew: terrific. It does. I'm so glad to hear. What I hear in your voice is how you feel called compelled to create for them.

Yes. And as a fellow teacher. I know very well and respect what it means to distill something for our youngest learners, or really for all of our learners who have different and diverse needs who. Need you to say things in a different way, who need you to demonstrate perhaps in a different way. We don't teach one way.

You end up teaching the same thing several different ways because you wanna make sure everybody in that class gets it and has access to it. Exactly. Yeah. I understand that. And it's a hard and rewarding, but it is a hard job. Yeah. And so I'm glad that [00:19:00] you keep meeting new three year olds, but keep feeling compelled to make,

Steve: First, yeah. 

Matthew: I'm so grateful that, 'cause I think this is probably our fourth time talking or something.

But I'm so grateful that at this point now I'm able to. Work with the people at Boyd Mills. I'm able to keep doing what I'm doing, but also use this as a means of raising awareness for their wonderful programming and and just keep meeting their family and really for me to be an extension of what they've already done.

Helping authors go from. Thinking up ideas to crafting stories to, to going further. Now I get to be part of that after all that. We promote our books. We talk about our books. That's 

Steve: awesome. 

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. 

Steve: Yeah. Boyd Mill is an incredible thing that they're doing there. If I accidentally call it highlights, 'cause [00:01:00] it used to be called highlights Foundation.

It's okay, you understand? But boy, it's now Boyd Mill and it's, but it's still the same great place. Just a different name. 

Matthew: Yeah. 

Steve: And I've been so lucky to like. Be able to go. It started with. Picture book bootcamp with Denise Fleming and Pat Cummings. 

Matthew: No 

Steve: way. And I remember going up there, it's such a funny story because, they have these little cabins and they also have a lodge, and then they have what they call the barn.

But that's the big place where we do art demos. I'll go and lecture about my career and in illustration and illustrating. Children's books and then I'll give a demo of certain different styles that I work in and stuff. And then they get to go, the students get to go and work, and I also mentor.

Some students in that, I meet them, they bring a dummy to the workshop, so they've already started a story and I get to meet with them as a group and then one-on-one to talk about the picture book dummy that they're working on. So it's really great. But the first time I was there. It was, it got, it was night, it was dark.

And so they drove me [00:02:00] up and it's in the country, and I'm a city boy, so they dropped me off at the lodge and I was, but it's this big lodge with many rooms, but I was the only one there. And so three o'clock in the morning I woke up and I was like, it was pitch black, so I couldn't even see the barn or anything.

I didn't, I had no layout of what the whole place was and how wonderful it was. And I was just like, oh my God. They just dropped me off here I was so nervous and but it was such a great experience once we got going, and once and that since then, it's been called different things, but now it's the illustration.

Last year was illustration inspiration. I think maybe it's called something different, but basically it's the same thing. It's the students bring a dummy book that they wanna work on, that they've written and started to illustrate with sketches, I get to see that before they show up.

So I have notes for them when, right when they show up the first night. Then there's a bunch of different illustrators that give a little lecture about their work and their journey through, illustration and picture books. Then they, each illustrator usually does a demo about how they work, with, [00:03:00] watercolors or pen and ink or whatever they use, and then the students get to go and try that or work on their work.

And then, like I said. We meet as a group. I have like about five students that we meet and we talk about their projects, and then we meet one-on-one to talk about their dummies, their picture books and their work. It's just such a great experience and if no one knows about, if you don't know about Boyds Mill, they have a chef and it's farm to table, and they feed you three times a day and you get your own little cabin that you get to sit, work in.

And they have this beautiful barn that we all meet in and. Present, lecture and present and do the demos and stuff. And it's just, it's an incredible place and I feel really blessed. My wife has gone with me a bunch of times now. She also paints she's given a little demo about how she carries her watercolors and paints on location.

And so we were able to set up the Steve Light Scholarship Fund so that a student each year can go. Through that, and then we've also been blessed to have our own little cabin there. So when [00:04:00] we go up, we stay there, but when we're not there, other people stay in that cabin. And that has all the artwork, the original artwork to my book Road trip of Whiskers Hollow Adventure, which I went up there to work on 'cause it's set in a forest and trees and stuff.

So I would go up there and work. I had some personal retreats that I did just on my own and then, other times with Christine too. And then doing the illustration intensive. So when. George asked me to, if he could hang the artwork in the cottage. I was of course ecstatic. So if you get to go there and you get to stay in cabin 13, it's the Steve Light, Christine Kota cabin with all the road trip artwork and some of Christine's paintings too that she did.

We were working on the book, Christine collaborates a little bit with me on the colors and just, she's a kindergarten teacher, my wife Christine, i'm always reading my stories out loud to her because to me it's about reading a story out loud to a group of kids. 'cause I do that two or three times a day. 'cause I'm also teach three-year-olds. So yeah, so she's part a big part of my life and career and work 

Matthew: Hey Steve. I still have my [00:05:00] Whiskers Hollow. 

Steve: Oh, awesome. 

Matthew: I do, I still have it. 

Steve: Yeah. I 

Matthew: keep it on my deck. So those are, 

Steve: that happen too. I made a little 

Matthew: like box some 

Steve: of, yeah. Yeah. So 

Matthew: when I published this episode, I'll add links to all of those things, but I'm so glad to see the, like the framed box

And also if I can bring us to back to Boyd Mills that you keep feeling compelled to share with others how to do.

Illustration, how to think about audience, how to engage. You've got I believe you've been involved for a couple years now with this specific summer camp for illustrators. Yeah I'd love to hear more about that. 

Steve: The first story bootcamp that I mentioned the first time I went to Boyd's Mill was 2016.

I think we did a virtual one or two over. COVID blocked it out. And I'm, we might have missed one year, but yeah, since 2000. So 

Matthew: you've been working with then highlight, formerly highlights Foundation? Yes. For 10 years though. That's 

Steve: a long time. Yeah, so it's been fantastic. It's really just the highlight.

And it's nice because they usually email in December and to have that to look forward to in the summer, like sometimes gets me through [00:20:00] those dark winter days. I'm like, oh yeah we'll get there, we're gonna get there. And just trying to, so I had a great teacher when I was learning illustration.

He taught at Prat and Parsons and had his own school and his name was Dave Paqua and he. Taught you how to learn. He didn't teach you how to illustrate like him. He taught you how to discover how you wanna illustrate or how you want to draw, and really it was a foundation in drawing. Like drawing was the thing the thing that would bring everything else together.

And he always concentrated on your strengths in that your strengths would get so strong that your deficiencies would drop away. You would find ways to make your strengths work so well that the things you weren't good at wouldn't necessarily be a problem, and that was, that's a really interesting way to teach in an inspiring way to teach.

So I try to do that. I try to be inspiring and encouraging to the students that come to Boyd's Mill for illustration and writing [00:21:00] children's books. There's such a wide variety of. Drawing, illustration and storytelling that you can do. So it's really interesting to see what kind of stories they wanna tell and hopefully I have enough knowledge to share with them to inspire them and help them to follow their dreams and creating children's books, so it's been a really wonderful experience for me to give back that way.

Also,

Matthew: I would also say that I know you. To be an incredibly kind and selfless person. Thank you. You've Oh, thank always been that way to me specifically. And so to have those qualities in a teacher whether that's in your class of three year olds or your class of illustrators at whatever.

And storytellers at whatever stage of their storytelling education they're in that you really are a gift. Steve, I feel like Oh, thank you. I feel like given all our [00:22:00] time together. I regularly feel compelled to make sure you know it, to make sure you hear it from me, because you've had, thank you, just a profound impact.

Your kindness has had a profound impact on me. So I have to imagine too, those illustrators that you work with as well as the children, but those illustrators are boys. Meals that you work with aren't just leaving with the skills and the knowledge that you're sharing, but they're. Leaving with this is a way that you can show up for others in this space.

And I know, 'cause we've all had good teachers in our life that we remember those good teachers when we have the opportunity to teach. And so you're impacting in 

Steve: really 

Matthew: wonderful ways. Yeah. And 

Steve: kindness and empathy. I lead with kindness and empathy hopefully with everything I do in my life, and, I'm human too, and I can catch myself getting into these thoughts and I just.

Okay. And that goes for everyone. It's you don't know what that person went through before they showed up that moment. And they're, doing this thing that you're like, why are you doing this thing? You just have to take a breath and go, [00:23:00] I've been in that same position, we're all human and we all deserve kindness and a place in the world and to share our story, so we I work very hard every day too.

To do that in the world. 

Matthew: Yes. I wanna end our time together, as I always do by asking you that, Steve, I will see a library full of children tomorrow morning. Is there a message I can bring to them from you? 

Steve: I was thinking so hard on this. So I wrote it down 'cause I was like, I need to so I said your story matters.

Everyone's story matters. The old stories matter. We learn from them. And then there's also a quote that I love, which is similar. It says, people need stories more than bread stories teach us how to live and why. And I always remember that the importance of stories in everyone's story and everyone should get to tell their story.

Yeah. And hopefully th through art also.