Ashley Wolff is a prolific children’s book creator, as the author and/or illustrator of more than 65 picture books since her debut, A Year of Birds, was published in 1984. Some of her popular works include her Baby Bear series, Baby Beluga by Raffi, and the Miss Bindergarten series by Joseph Slate. Her latest picture book, Wildfire!, is a sweeping examination of human first responders and animals reacting to a mountain wildfire. PW spoke with Wolff about California wildfires, her personal connections to the story, climate change, and more.
The art in Wildfire! is so cinematic and distinctive. Can you talk about your illustration process for this book? How did you establish the ideal balance between human and animal reactions?
Well, I’ll just get a little technical to begin with. The art is done in acrylic gouache, which is something that is relatively new for me. I had been doing a lot of painting in it for my own pleasure, but hadn’t yet done a book that was quite so painterly using that medium. It felt like it needed a more muscular style, with no lines holding in the shape s, and then of course, fire was really challenging to paint, and I knew I didn’t want to get very detailed. So I just really used big brushes and dashed it in.
And then people are not always my favorite things to paint—I much prefer to paint animals and nature, so I took pretty much the same approach of trying to be direct and bold and not fuss around very much.
You know, I have used so many styles in my career that probably nobody can tell that this book was done by the same illustrator as that book. I’m kind of restless; I get bored easily. I’ve done linoleum block prints, straight-up watercolors, watercolor with pen and ink, watercolor with colored pencil, watercolor with line, acrylic, collage—but I would say this is the first book that was painted just like this. I use tons of reference photos; I’m very reference-oriented, especially when it comes to animals, and all the firefighter gear, and the equipment—and oh, painting airplanes, not my favorite thing to do at all! Those I really had to psych myself up to do.
I raised two sons, one of whom became a firefighter, and all they wanted to read about when they were young was natural disasters. We had earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes—everything that you can imagine. And it was pretty straight-up nonfiction. And, of course, they liked trains and things with wheels, and wings, and propellers. And that wasn’t my wheelhouse at all. So this is like the first book I’ve done that I think, “Oh, they would’ve probably liked this as children. It combines two of their favorite things.”
Can you talk a bit about the inspiration behind this story?
It was a really bizarre situation where my son announced that he was going to become a wildland firefighter. He was living in Idaho—still is—and that was in May of 2013. In June of 2013, 19 firefighters were killed in Arizona in the Yarnell Hill Fire, where they were basically overwhelmed by a fire that changed directions really quickly, and everybody in the crew died except for one guy who had been sent to a different location to be a lookout. And I can only imagine his recovery process as the only survivor.
But, you know, my son Brennan was part of a 20-man crew—that’s the magic number—and he was doing exactly what those men were doing. And in this case, it was all men, although in my research, I’ve found that there are plenty of women firefighters; not just in the hand crews, but also hotshots and smokejumpers, so I wanted to make sure women were definitely represented in the book. So, I became extremely heart-in-throat whenever I would hear that he was being sent out to a fire, and one of my ways to cope with it was just to start doing a lot of research and questioning other firefighters; Facebook was quite a good resource, because you could just search firefighter groups. So I did that. I got the idea to write about it, and I started doing research online with firefighters; I made up a little questionnaire that I could send to people. The firefighters were remarkably generous, and they wrote back, and they answered all my questions, and they corrected me when I was wrong, so I had a very solid manuscript. And I’ve always been interested in animals, so I was really interested in comparing the human activity with the ways animals cope.
I lived in San Francisco for 34 years—even though I live in Vermont now, I was a Californian for a long time. When I lived there, as late as 2014, smoke in autumn wasn’t such a big deal; I don’t remember it ever really impacting us. And so when I wrote the book, which was quite a few years ago, I couldn’t sell it—I sent it around to lots and lots of publishers, including Beach Lane (who eventually bought it), and no one was interested. And then what happened, I believe, is that climate change caught up with the book, in just six years. I rewrote it again in 2018, tweaking it only a little bit, nothing major, and it sold [to Andrea Welch at Beach Lane, with art director Karyn Lee], because all of a sudden, wildfires were a huge deal, and were really impacting people’s everyday lives.
So that’s a kind of convoluted answer to how I got interested in fire and how it impacted my life personally. I really struggled to look for some positives to fire, and then I started researching Forest Service policy, which is not discussed at all in the story, but I do touch upon it in the author’s note. You know, Smokey the Bear told us to put out every single fire, and that has led to total fire suppression, which has made the forests full of underbrush and ready to burn very, very hot. And then with the whole everybody-finding-cities-too-expensive-to-live-in, they’re moving out to the edges of any urban area, where it’s easier to buy a piece of land and build a little house, and that’s the urban-wildland interface, as it’s called, and then the area that firefighters have to cover just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The Caldor Fire, up near south Lake Tahoe, is a perfect example of that. They had to keep rescuing structures until the fire got so close to south Lake Tahoe that they had to pull out every stop and throw money and resources at it. Even though I’m not a Californian anymore, it still feels pretty personal.
I’m 65, and I’m going to have to deal with that for the rest of my life, but I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be, say, 30, and having to grapple with this, and not know what we can do. Recycling and even driving a Prius isn’t going to solve the problem. We’re going to have do something a lot more drastic.
As you say, the book is unfortunately quite timely. What do you hope young readers will get out of this narrative?
Well, obviously I want them to be impressed by the danger of fire. I want them to be impressed also with the heroic sacrifice that the firefighters put in, because it’s very dangerous work—and really low paid; I mean, you’d be shocked how little they make. And then I want them to care about the animals. But I don’t necessarily want them to come away with the same idea that all fire is bad fire—I think, depending on their age, for the little ones, I want them to think, “Oh wow, this is a really exciting and tense book.” It has a relatively happy ending; the forest burns down, but it comes back to life in a number of years. I don’t say how long it takes; I’m thinking the last spread is four to five years later, but it could take up to 80 years for a habitat to rejuvenate. So I guess, depending on their age, to take different lessons from it, but to be drawn to the subject matter. [I want readers] just to see fire as a real thing, and not be too frightened about it.
I don’t know that authors always know why we do a book or what we want our audience to get out of it. It’s just something we have to share with the world. And this one felt like that, for me. Even the experience of not being able to sell it for six years, [I felt like,] this still needs to get out there. I’m going to try again. And I’m glad I succeeded.
What was your son’s reaction to the story?
Well, he was involved with the whole thing from the beginning. I was questioning him all the time. You know, “What’s it like?” He would send me photos, usually by text message, of him and his buddies—most of which I couldn’t possibly share, because there was always somebody giving the middle finger in the background. [Laughs.] That seemed to be the theme of their summers: jump in and ruin somebody else’s photo. But there are a few that are, you know, clean, mostly guys marching away across a burned landscape. There was one wonderful one of him holding his chainsaw. He was a sawyer, and their job is to basically use a chainsaw and clear ahead of the rest of the crew, or take down trees that are still smoldering, or you know, whatever you can do with a chainsaw. And to this day, he’s still expert with it. He’s now one of those suburban landowners with a big backyard, and that’s how he uses it, but he learned as a firefighter. So his reaction was, Yeah, cool, Mom. He totally takes having an author mom for granted. Anyway, he’s happy now. It’s dedicated to him. I wanted to get a picture of him in there, but that didn’t quite work out; he’s wearing a mask in his photo—which is another interesting thing about the book. It’s coming out during Covid, when everyone’s wearing masks. You sometimes wonder as an illustrator nowadays, do you put masks on people or not? Because how long are we going to be wearing them in the world? In Wildfire!, everyone has like a bandana or a covering over their mouth, because that’s how they breathe.
Can you tell us about your next project?
It’s pretty nascent. I’ll tell you one thing—it’s about another member of my family. A totally different kind of book, not disaster-based at all, but one I’ve also had in mind for 15 years; and it’ll be for children who love animals and would like to grow up to be veterinarians. But I can’t say any more than that, because it’s just a baby—we don’t want to rock the crib. [Laughs.]
Wildfire! by Ashley Wolff. Beach Lane, $17.99 Nov. ISBN 978-1-5344-8773-4
