Mo Willems is a three-time Caldecott Honor recipient and the inaugural Education Artist-in-Residence at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His debut book, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, was inducted into the Picture Book Hall of Fame. Willems began his career as a writer and animator on Sesame Street. Dan Santat is the author-illustrator of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, for which he won the Caldecott Medal. His graphic novel memoir, A First Time for Everything, received the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Santat also began his career in animation, and he is the creator of the Disney Channel series The Replacements. We asked Willems and Santat to discuss their new picture book, Lefty: A Story That Is Not All Right—a celebration of individuality—and the joys of collaboration.
Mo Willems: Hey, Dan!
Dan Santat: Hey, how are you?
Willems: Congratulations on Lefty.
Santat: Thank you for having me on board for this lovely project. It’s our third time working together.
Willems: It’s always fun working with you. But this is the first time where we each had different hands in something, and you literally got your left hand in the book!
Santat: I have to say, that was probably my favorite part of making the art. I’ve always wanted to do something different with photography. When I work, I generally take a design approach where form follows function. You set that up nicely for me. And working with my hands is always fun, building the stage and set.
Willems: The fun comes through in the images, for sure. I like how sort-of presentational and sort-of sketch comedy it became.
Santat: Yes.
Willems: I remember about 20 years ago, I curated an exhibition with some artist pals—Kadir Nelson, Betsy Lewin, and Brian Selznick—and we took a picture of all the tools that they used, including their hands.
It was fun to see how the hands bent depending on what they were holding. So, as I am going through this book, I’m enjoying seeing your hands at this stage in your life, documented forever in a book.
Santat: Yeah!
Willems: And your son’s hands!
Santat: You have first-hand experience working with puppets, but this is the closest I’ll ever get to doing something of that sort and I absolutely love the process. I remember having to get clothing for these guys and I realized, “Oh, I just have to get this sleeve of a shirt.” There I am at a department store trying to find colorful sleeves. I bought five or six different shirts and then cut off the sleeves immediately after getting them home. I realized then that I had a very clear image in my head. I wanted Lefty to have an “L” on the chest and Righty to have an “R” on the chest. I also knew that my sewing skills were not going to be up to par.
Willems: Right.
Santat: Then it was just a matter of fabric glue and making glasses. I wanted to really emote with the hands. I didn’t realize how a hand gesture can evoke emotion just by the position of the fingers.
Willems: The art does feel very puppet-y and it looks like it was captured live. When I illustrate, I always want my audience to feel like the ink on the page is wet, like I left the room just before you turned the page. This book has a similar degree of spontaneity to it, like you’re getting a puppet show performed for you.
Santat: There was a low-budgetness that I wanted to achieve, especially with the cardboard stage. I could have made something really fancy, but I wanted it to feel like, maybe you’re walking by a busker and you’re like, “Hey, check out this show.”
Willems: I think the style of Lefty fulfills this idea that you want your books not just to be read but to be played. Kids are going to read this book and then they might perform—with sleeves—their own stories with their hands. There’s a whole set of presentational elements implied here that are separate from the story itself.
Santat: We should discuss the origin of the book, because I am left-handed, and you are not. I think that was how this partnership came about.
Willems: I had done a little research about the word “sinister.” I was interested in how silly it is to create such a derogatory word for someone over something that’s so irrelevant. [People] can be terrible. But, ultimately, there’s optimism there, too. In this case, we seem to have figured it out.
The accommodation is not that difficult. You just make slightly different scissors, stop worrying about it, and move on, you know?
Santat: Right.
Willems: For me, it was important that I make this book with someone who is left-handed so that they would bring their experience to it—and so that the left hand was telling the story. If you just look at the endpapers, one of my favorite images is the Lefty hand with the huge smear on the side of it. That’s something you recognize immediately. But only a lefty would’ve—
Santat: Only a lefty could feel that pain.
Willems: Right, exactly.
Santat: And I remember that wasn’t in the manuscript, but I said it had to be [added] in there somewhere.
Willems: And that’s the joy of it. I can have some understanding of the issue on a metaphorical level, but for the details, you have to work with the people who are living the experience.
Santat: Even the subtle details, like in the opening endpaper. The image is something only a left-hander can really understand—the arm reaching around and over the text. Every time I see an old photo of myself writing or drawing, it really does look like my arm is broken. I look and I go, “How did I do that for so many years?”
Willems: Right. And, again, all those details in the art show fun ways to be super specific in a highly metaphoric story.
Santat: I want to tip my hat to you because the concept of doing a book about stereotypes was a nut that I was trying to crack for years. Going for the topic of left-handed people, I kind of curse you because I should have seen it, obviously, but you hit the nail right on the head. It does address the absurdity of people having these views.
Willems: I think that silliness, for me, was a breakthrough as well. It was a way to talk about how people treat other people’s differences. We’ve spoken about how we have a commonality in that we are both kids of immigrants, we’re both only children, and there was this first-generation expectation that came with it. And then your food was weird compared to other people’s. So, it was easy to be othered. I remember even as a kid thinking, “Being teased for this is just silly.”
Santat: Yeah, right.
Willems: And then to put it on a stage—that is interesting. I see comments on social media and from older people who are like, “Yes, this really was a thing growing up”—like the ruler being slapped on the hand and whatnot—which shows that anti-lefty-ness hasn’t totally been solved, just that it’s not as bad as it was.
Santat: I was at the tail end of that era. You can talk to somebody like Dav Pilkey who naturally was left-handed and then was forced to be right-handed. But there were repercussions from trying to force someone who was naturally left-handed to be right-handed. It created neurological issues by trying to rewire the brain to do something that wasn’t natural.
Willems: While constantly being told of your “otherness” —
Santat: That you’re “wrong.”
I don’t know what it was like before me, but when I was growing up, being left-handed wasn’t something where I was being shunned. It was more like I was a unicorn. People were like, “What do you mean you do things with your left hand?” I have a funny story, because most of my life I grew up using right-handed scissors, and I just got used to it. Then, there was a day when I found out about this left-handed store in San Francisco, and I said, “I’m going to buy some left-handed scissors so nobody else can use them but me.” I remember I spent like $50 on these left-handed scissors. Here's the thing about left-handed scissors: the blades are inverted.
Willems: Okay.
Santat: So, when I was trying to cut along the line, I was cutting a millimeter or two off the line. I would say, “Why is this happening?” My hands were so used to holding right-handed scissors, I was holding these left-handed scissors like a two-year-old. They were constantly slipping off my fingers. I might as well have lit $50 on fire. But I said, “No. I am going to learn how to use these scissors.” And here I am, with these scissors—
Willems: Are those the actual ones that you got?
Santat: These are the scissors! And I use them now.
Willems: How long have you had those scissors?
Santat: About 15 years, and I can tell you that I now comfortably cut like a five-year-old.
Willems: But think about it, who knew scissors were such a big deal?
Santat: There are other things, too. I remember my mom having to train me because when we would go to a formal event, I would want to shake hands with my left hand and she would say, “No! You have to shake hands with the right hand.”
Willems: That’s fascinating.
Santat: I can’t say I’ve been oppressed for being left-handed. But my hand would smear so much pencil on my paper. In school, sometimes we would take a test and then have to pass the paper to another student to grade your test. Whoever got my paper, there was absolutely no mystery on whose it was. They’d say this has to be Dan Santat because it is an absolute mess.
So, I commend you for talking about something in a way that everyone can easily comprehend without any biases.
Willems: Well, thank you.
Santat: Because that’s always a tricky thing.
Willems: One of the things that was important—and that broke the story for me—was that it was a dialogue.
Santat: Yes.
Willems: I feel like in any situation, where one character is saying, “This is real,” and the other character is going, “What?!,” By having a conversation seems to be the solution to so many questions. Whenever I see people really being terrible to each other for silly reasons, I just want to say, “Is there a conversation happening?”
Santat: Right.
Willems: I knew this book wasn’t for me to illustrate, on many levels. You and I had worked together on two Elephant & Piggie Like Reading! books and had so much fun. For Lefty, as the “writer,” I was able to talk about the visual stuff with you, and as the “illustrator,” you were able to talk about words with me. We shared a common view that the most important thing is not us, it’s the book.
Santat: It’s always the book.
Willems: We had that ability to work together and to know that it was going to be such a joyful book. I really do believe that the pleasure you take in a project gets on the page.
Santat: Absolutely.
Willems: Somebody said about Lefty, “Boy, they were having fun making this.” Yes! Exactly! I remember after the first meeting, you signed off with, “Oh, this is going be fun!”
Santat: When you first summarized the book, I remember the ending really hit me and I said, “That’s it. That’s the thing I was trying to address.”
Willems: I’ve been thinking about this issue as I’m working on a grown-up book about writing. One of the things that I think happens is as book creators, we discover an idea. We get very excited. Then, we go and put the idea on the page, and it doesn’t always connect because we’re presenting the idea, not the discovery of the idea. So, more and more, I am trying to take the idea off the page so that the audience has to discover the idea on their own. They get to put things together.
Santat: It makes them feel smarter. I don’t think people realize how absolutely difficult that is. That’s the thing that makes an okay or good book into a great book.
Willems: Simple and easy are opposites.
Here’s the thing: if the book doesn’t surprise me, how could I expect it to surprise somebody else? I love the idea that this is a surprising book. I want everything that I make to do that in some way.
Santat: For me, it’s a little different. Because for me, this is an important book. I want everybody to get the message. And I don’t want it to be pigeon-holed in a place where people think, “Oh, this is just for A or B.”
Willems: I am used to being pigeon-holed, so...
Santat: Oh, gosh! I walked into that one, didn’t I?
I will say this: I will rely on readers and teachers and librarians all over the country to read this and they will spread the gospel. I think that’s where it is going to take flight. Everyone is going to see that it’s clear, it’s simple, it’s unbiased, and that it really, really hits a chord by the time you’re done.
Willems: That’s beautiful. I am so happy to have you in my life as a friend and happy to have you in my life as an artist. I love all the work that you do and the honesty you bring with it, without losing your sense of humor. It’s exciting to see this book be more than I hoped it would be.
Santat: The same goes for you. Every time I work with you on a project, I always learn a tremendous amount. But also, we always have a lot of fun, and with our amazing editor Tracey Keevan, there’s just something special. I know that 20 years from now, when we look back at our careers and we see this, we’ll see the legacy we built, your body of work, of my body of work, and the things we did together. I can look at it proudly as something that hopefully made a difference. You have to keep reinventing yourself, you have to keep making new material, and you have to make sure that it is just as strong and just as impactful as the stuff you did early on and that you’re not running out of ideas. You can still do something that surprises you.
Willems: That’s what I want it to be! There are the other things about it, like, I want to try new scissors.
Santat: So, here’s a question for you. Do you think you would have been capable of writing a book like this say, 15 years ago?
Willems: I don’t think that 15 years ago I would have been open enough to leave space to let it become what it became.
From the beginning of my career, I was offered to illustrate books [by other authors] and I’ve never done it. I don’t draw other people’s words. Then the first time I was in a situation where I had someone else drawing my words, it was a learning curve for me.
Santat: Oh sure, I can imagine.
Willems: It was a different sort of thing. But now it’s relational. It’s like, “Do you want to take something that you think is important and have your buddy Dan illustrate it?”
Santat: Right, right.
Willems: That’s an amazing experience. I’m now more willing to let go of what I think it should be. Much like how we both have kids, who we are letting go to be who they are, right? I’m more open in that way in my life.
Santat: I give you credit because I don’t think I’m there yet, to say, “I wrote this thing. I’d like someone else to illustrate it.” I think in my mind, it’s like, “No! It has to be like this!”
I appreciate that you entrusted me with that.
Willems: Absolutely. Dan, always a pleasure.
Lefty by Mo Willems, illus. by Dan Santat. Union Square Kids, $18.99 Dec. 3 ISBN 978-1-4549-5148-3
