I attended the Vancouver Children Literature Roundtable annual Illustrator’s breakfast featuring Shaun Tan. I must say that I attend these events with a lot of humility being relatively new to the children literature world. The passion and enthusiasm of the attendees are inspiring. With his years of dedicated work Dr. Ron Jobe has facilitated a powerful legacy as evidenced by the attendance at the roundtable. We have to be thankful to leaders like him and his colleagues on the board of the roundtable.

However, I was surprised when less than ten people stood up, when authors and illustrators were asked to identify themselves. I don’t know if this low turn-out of book creators was due to competing events in Surrey and Granville Island or if some are too shy to identify themselves as book creators because they have not been published yet. In my opinion, book creators should not hesitate to identify themselves as such even if they are not published yet. Claiming the role goes a long way in assuming the responsibility of creating books. Being in the process of creating should define an author not what has been done in the past. Hopefully, the easy publishing offered by Sharing-Books.com site will help many more book creators identify themselves as such.

The event was also the occasion to introduce the six books shortlisted for the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada 2008 Information Book Award. This award honours books created with an educational purpose. This will be a difficult choice as all entries were of very high calibre in my opinion. These excellent books highlighted for me how children literature influences the values of the next generation. The topics chosen reflect the concerns of today’s adults and have the purpose of communicating these concerns to our children. I could not help but think of how many important topics remain unaddressed in children literature because of the constraint of paper publishing. There are many topics that may never be addressed unless you make publishing easy and do it in such a way that it can reach an audience spread over vast areas. Some audiences would never be big enough to aggregate locally in a “market” deserving a book, but once we use the web these audiences can be found and communicated to in an effective way.

The keynote speaker, illustrator Shaun Tan, gave a most interesting talk explaining his progress from early childhood drawings to the wonderful images he shared with the audience. I found his images and his talk absolutely fascinating. However, I am not sure I see his award winning books as children books. To me (and I am not an expert) they are more illustrated poetry where adults can spend hours exploring the rich details and symbolism of his images. I do not know if they would keep a child’s attention in the same way. Shaun himself admitted that he gets the most compliments about The Arrival from older immigrants who describe the book as depicting exactly what they felt when they arrived in their new country.

Perhaps such a high level of art intimidates new creators and prevents them from identifying themselves as authors or illustrators. We often hear comments like, “I am not good enough to be published” or “my book is not good enough to be published”. We address this with the “versioning” ability of our publishing engine. Start, publish your book. Share it with the world and connect with your audience. As feedback comes or as you feel inspired it is easy to update a book with new images or text on sharing-books.com. What is important is that you create and share your message.

Labels: event, news, vancouver