From age four until he entered school—for the first time—in third grade, Chad Otis lived on a school bus with his parents and older brother as his father made a living as an itinerant oil portraitist. Unhoused and often food-insecure—the family sometimes subsisted on “pizza” made from ketchup and white bread—the experience engendered both pain and creative resiliency, and eventually became the inspiration of his latest picture book, The Bright Side. Otis took time out from a vacation in Idaho, where he also makes his home, to speak with PW about transforming his autobiographical material for young audiences.
This is the third book you’ve written and illustrated. How did you decide you were ready to tell the story of your growing up?
I didn’t tell it for a long time. It wasn’t something I wanted to share. But as I got older, it got easier to tell people about it and I put it on my website.
I didn’t think of it as a story that would make for a good picture book. I had just illustrated A Little Ferry Tale and Cold Turkey and I was putting myself out there for illustration work through my agent, Robin Rue at Writers House. I wasn’t getting anything, and then I heard for the third time from an editor, “If he ever does anything with that story on his website, we’re interested.”
My dad was an art teacher—both my parents had teaching degrees—and when he lost-slash-left his job, they decided to live in a school bus. We’d set up art shows in shopping malls, he’d take commission for oil portraits, and then we’d move on to the next town. We did that from the Midwest to the California, just kind of zig-zagging, and parking in church and Kmart parking lots until we got shooed away. When my sister was born, my mom said, “Let’s get the kids in school and get off the bus.”
It was a mix of nomadic life and houselessness and definitely food insecurity. There’s a big contingent now of people who call themselves “Schoolies”—they’ll convert a school bus, run away on vacation, and take pictures of themselves for Instagram. This was not that.
I pitched the book as a dummy with the sketches and manuscript done and got quite a bit of response right away. Lauri Hornik at Rocky Pond Books became my editor. She had some ideas about what to change, but she was pretty happy with it from the start.
Do you feel that the personal nature of the story had an impact on your illustration approach or style?
Because it was his [the boy’s] perspective, there’s a kind of naïf approach. I made things a little simpler and rougher, chunkier. I’m wrapping up my next book right now and it’s very much like that in style, too—it feels right for me. I’m not too far into my career, so I’m finding my voice as an illustrator and a writer—it’s still jelling.
There are some frank and vivid moments in the book—the cold nights on the school bus, the boy’s difficulties in adjusting to the structure of school and connecting to other kids. How did you calibrate the level of emotional intensity and decide what to tell and not tell?
The social isolation for me was the hardest thing—I spent my whole life overcoming it. I was always the outsider, always playing catch-up, not knowing what kids were talking about.
But as for telling the story and calibrating it, I always want to have some kind of humor in my work and keep it engaging and accessible. I wanted to show that these things can be tough, but in the end, resourcefulness comes out of adversity, and resourcefulness can lead to accomplishment and accomplishment can lead to confidence in its own way. If kids pick up on that, it would be great.
The idea of “looking on the bright side” first comes from the boy’s parents, as a form of “chin-up” advice as he struggles with life on the bus. But for the boy, it means asserting agency and control over his circumstances. Can you talk about how you handled that transformation?
It’s authentic to me, so that made it easier. The whole story is an amalgamation of my lifetime experience: things started out tough, I rolled up my sleeves and made something out of this, and the more I tried to make things happen, the more good things happened to me. I feel lucky that I was kind of born with this ingrained ability to look on the bright side.
What do your parents think about the book?
My dad’s been gone for 32 years—he was a brightly burning candle, as they say. But my mom is still here, and she loves it. We’ve all got some mixed feelings about the whole thing. She recognized that it was a tough time for a bunch of reasons, and she feels bad that we didn’t go to school for a long time and get that socialization.
There aren’t many picture books that put these socioeconomic challenges like food and housing insecurity front and center. Were you concerned about finding an audience for this book?
There’s more child homelessness than ever now, and more social consciousness around these issues, so it felt like the right time to do it. Especially if I could make it relatable for kids.
I do hope that kids who are in a situation like this, who face some adversity, see this story and start to feel like things could be okay. Penguin Random House is going to donate a bunch of books through Books for Kids to libraries and homeless shelters, because the book costs around $20—and kids who live a nomadic lifestyle may not get to the library very much.
I’m also hoping that parents and kids who aren’t in this kind of situation can have conversations about it. They might notice that there are kids who come to school in the same clothes every day, or come in the middle of the year, or need to be in a free breakfast or lunch program, and empathize more—and maybe even take them into their social circles.
What’s next for you?
I have a two-book deal with Lauri Hornik. [The second] has a little more humor in it: it’s about a kid who’s very, very neat—the neatest kid ever—and his parents bring home a rescue dog that makes a big mess and he has to deal with it. As much I try not to go into messaging, it’s about how some kids are seekers of stimuli, and some are avoiders. There’s another little slice of me in the story of the neatnik.
The Bright Side by Chad Otis. Rocky Pond, $18.99 Feb. 21 ISBN 978-0-593-53062-7
