I’m on the road with author/illustrator/philanthropist/magic-maker Dallas Clayton, and I keep mulling over this question: Has there ever been a kids book tour more fun than this? Maybe some Shel Silverstein tour, maybe. Really, this has to be in the top 3 2 craziest kids book tours of all time.
From L.A. to Phoenix and Tuscon and now El Paso, we’ve been sharing moments of sheer jubilation with the most extraordinary elementary school kids. Dallas is kind of a whiz at his job: rolling into a room full of kids and stoking them out with just his imagination. Our friend Micky Adams has true knack for compelling everyone to dance with the power of his bubbly folk tunes, as I jog around the room, documenting the madness from all angles.
Best of all, we’ve been getting into the randomest side adventures along the way: night frisbee in a truck stop parking lot, karaoke at a friendly bear bar, and the Arizona goth club we stumbled upon and somehow managed to demolish the dance floor with our wicked shadow-dancing. With 10 more days on the tour, I couldn’t be more excited to see what happens next. I shall return to Future Shipwreck in full force this April, and until then, peruse the pages of the Future Shipwreck Tumblr for your fix of rad art!
I’m proud to be a part of Dallas Clayton‘s life. His ideas are awe-inspiring and revolutionary, but he has a real knack for wording them in a way that everyone can understand. And then he illustrates them with a subtle sense of humor and grace that seems seriously scarce in children’s books these days. I’m proud to have been a part of the journey his sophomore book, An Awesome Book of Thanks, has taken two pages of text to a painstakingly detailed series of drawings, to an endless series of TIFFs and PDFs, to an actual book that you can touch and smell and put in a child’s hand and see their face light up.
Dallas Clayton has a new website that houses his poems for grown-ups. It’s filled with incredible illustrations, photos from his wild adventures on the road (touring elementary schools with An Awesome Book), videos and some of his best writing from the past and the present. It is rad and I can say that with confidence, as I helped him design it. Add it to your bookmarks ASAP, and if you’re on Tumblr, follow him! Take a look at some particularly excellent Dallas Clayton drawings and writings, after the jump.
Being an all-around rad dude primarily, and a master of children’s literature on the side, it’s only natural that An Awesome Book author Dallas Clayton finds himself frequently pulled into fantastic situations. Like how on his last book tour, he ended up reading to both pre-schoolers on a sheep ranch in Bodega and college students at a crusty punk house in Eugene.
Or how he was recently invited to paint a mural on the walls of Silver Lake children’s boutique Tomboy. I accompanied him on a midnight mural-painting mission and shot a little video (with my beloved new GH1) about the opportunities that keep popping up as a result of being Dallas Clayton.
Dallas Clayton is a bottomless well of good vibes. I had the pleasure of tagging along to a handful of local readings to shoot the video below, and while each reading is totally different, they all seemed to lead to ubridled fun and infinite smiles at the end of the day.
Dallas will be giving away copies of An Awesome Book, spurring impromptu arm wrestling matches and encouraging wild, untamed dreaming all across the west coast late next month on a brand new Awesome World tour, and I’ll be documenting the trip. So if you know of any schools or libraries or youth groups or Chuck E. Cheese’s we should stop at between San Francisco and Seattle, and maybe even in Montana, Utah and Nevada, let us know!
The opening of Thirty Days NY was insane! Hordes of people showed up, eager to indulge in the rad art, stellar selection of books, great music and free vodka. Good vibes all around.
Artist, wordsmith, and my We Love You So co-blogger Dallas Clayton is responsible for the existence of an incredibly rad children’s book. It’s called An Awesome Book, and in the year following its release, it’s taken off like rocket-powered unicorn. The tidal wave of love that has engulfed Dallas’ electrifying book is rather awe-inspiring considering the fact that the book’s not available in stores yet– not even Amazon! The process of promoting and distributing An Awesome Book has been an entirely grassroots, D.I.Y. affair, leading Dallas on a wild adventure across the country for a wonderfully non-traditional book tour.
The following interview with Dallas was conducted via email way back in January, before we started working together, but I figured the launch of Dallas’ new charitable foundation was as good a time as any to post it. With a focus on promoting literacy, the Awesome World Foundation will donate one book for every copy of An Awesome World sold. Check out the video below for a glimpse of Dallas’ tubular book tour and the philosophy behind all this awesomeness, and then read on for our interview!
Aside from having a child of your own, what inspires you to write for children? Do you find it more rewarding than when you write for adults?
As near as I can tell I get more out of sharing writing than I do out of actually putting the pen to the page. That said if I had to choose one age bracket of the many to “share” with exclusively it would be young children. Reason? They appreciate fun things more than anyone else, have the best reactions to the most simple concepts and won’t get bummed out when I misspell words. I feel rewarded by sharing with anyone, young or old, but like I said if I had to choose, kids for sure. Hands down.
Is it ever a strain to keep your thoughts confined to a few paragraphs, or does your minimalist style come naturally?
I used to write a lot of words. Mostly adjectives. But the more times a wrote, the less adjectives I seemed to need to say what I was thinking. Nowadays I find it hard writing more than a few sentences. The future? All single letter thoughts? Maybe that’s what happened to E.E. Cummings.
What do you enjoy more: the process of writing, or sharing what you’ve written?
Damn, I fully just answered that one without even seeing it here first. I’m pretty good at this stuff…ha!
When did you start distributing pamphlets of your work, and how did that become one of your primary mediums for expression?
I started doing zines when I was 13. That was a time when making things by hand made more sense. Just something you did to let people around you know you were young and loud and ignorant as could be. I moved to California when I was 18 and realized there were so many shows every night here that I could make enough zines to sell to strangers to make a living, keep writing, and meet tons of people. So I did. And I guess still do, in many ways.
Aside from your book, do you ever use your writing and illustration for profit? How do you support yourself as an artist?
Is it considered profit if I just use the money to buy expensive cars and rare animals and jewels? If so, then Hell Yes I do!
Actually at this point I’ve done/been hired to do just about every aspect of writing one could do in one way or another. Editorial, fiction, screenwriting, poetry, bio, blog, copywriting… all kinds of crazy junk and to a degree the same goes with arts and illustration. I guess that’s a pretty good measure as to how I support myself as an artist as well – Make lots of stuff for lots of people.
How does the book party for the release of a children’s book end up being presented by Bjork and Matthew Barney, and sponsored by ArtForum, LACMA and Mercedes-Benz?
Dream big!
Much of your work has a sense of childlike wonderment about it. What was your own childhood like? Did you begin writing and drawing at an early age? Did you ever go through an angsty, world-hating phase as a teenager, or have you always seen the best in the world?
I’ve actually had a pretty charmed live and childhood in particular. Other than my parents divorcing at an early age and being totally weird, as all adults are, there’s no real hectic aspect of my youth to be noted. I started getting into music and radness really young and writing just took off from there. Mixed in somewhere between 11 and 17 there were likely a lot of youth/angst moments with really funny T shirts about telling the government how to improve its effectiveness but nothing that ever made me feel like I needed to set a McDonald’s on fire or anything. I was always too busy breaking into swimming pools and climbing on rooftops.
How has the Internet affected your work? From directly handing people pamphlets on the street to instant global availability, how has your process changed?
Well obviously it’s a million times quicker, easier, and less wasteful which are all things I really love. Also the reach is so substantial, and people’s abilities to share in other countries I’ve never even been to that’s pretty amazing. I got an email today from Turkey from someone telling me that had translated my book into Turkish to read to their niece. That’s insane! To be able to speak to people in that way is totally thrilling. Plus I like that internet culture is inherently based on sharing (for better and for worse) and how things spread around so quickly BUT as per the usual writer/artist response there’s always a reaction one has to touching something and being able to put it in someone’s hands. That reaction definitely keeps me making things tangible. At least until nanotechnology replaces us all with cyborgs. (3 more years?)
On of my favorite projects of yours is the “More Popular Than You” blog– do you ever feel anxiety over that kind of stuff? Do you hope to be as popular as Warwick Davis and Dollywood, or was the project more of a meditation on the absurdity of fame?
Man people love that blog. I put it on the back burner so long ago and just haven’t had a chance to get back to it. But I will this year for sure. I guess the answer is that’s the whole reason I made the blog in the first place, how absurd it is that people are trying to hard just to be popular rather than just to make good things. I mean, I don’t have too many friends who have done as many things, seen as many places, made as many products, or met as many people as Napalm Death. But are Napalm Death popular? Has my mom heard of them? Does it matter? Who knows, but Napalm Death is doing exactly what Napalm Death needs to be doing. And that makes me happy.
How does your illustration relate to your writing? Do you make drawings that aren’t related to what you write? Also, have you ever experimented with the comic book format?
I’ve never done comics. I might some day. Maybe 3D comics. My illustration is just something I do for fun that became a part of my writing. I’ve always considered myself a writer who draws more so than a drawer who writes, but a lot of times people will stoke out way harder on the drawings. Especially kids. I think my drawing has a lot of catching up to do before it really feels like I own it completely but I’m on a bit of a fast track with the success of An Awesome Book so now it’s really sink or swim I guess. Draw! Draw! Draw! Write! Write! Write! See what happens. Hopefully more awesomeness!
I’ve been leading a secret double life! For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing for Spike Jonze’s We Love You So, a brand new blog that launches today! The blog is designed to give a glimpse at some of the influences and behind the scenes forces at work in Spike’s upcoming epic masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are, as well as to share rad art and ephemera outside of the Wild Things orbit. I’ve been creating content alongside three of my all-time favorite bloggers: Dallas Clayton, Molly Young and Matt Rubin. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve put together, and there’s plenty of material to look at in the archives already– so go dig in!
…And the award for Best Children’s Book of 2008 goes to Dallas Clayton! Like the poetic contemplations that furnish his flabbergastingly beautiful blog, Clayton’s words in An Awesome Book access startling truths of the human heart, devastating the reader with their honesty while they lay down the framework for a hopeful new world. An Awesome Book is propaganda for a society that values imagination– a rallying cry championing the power of dreaming. It’s directed at children, but it’s perhaps even more applicable for adults who’ve forgotten what it means to dream big. Plus, it has rocket-powered unicorns and ice cream cones wearing sunglasses and rocket-powered unicorns!
Check out the whole book online, and then purchase a copy for the imagination-starved child (or adult) in your life. If enough people read An Awesome Book, it might become the anti-Mein Kampf. It’ll start a revolution of the raddest kind.
