Colin Meloy is best known as lead singer and songwriter for indie folk rock band the Decemberists. But he's making his debut as a children's book author with the middle-grade fantasy Wildwood, coming from HarperCollins's Balzer + Bray in August. The novel is illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis (The Mysterious Benedict Society). "It's an adventure story set in an alternate universe in contemporary Portland, Ore., where a 5,000-acre park has become an impassible wilderness that everyone has been taught to steer clear of," says Meloy. "But all that changes when a girl named Prue's little brother is kidnapped by a flock of crows and taken into the woods, and she has to go after him." Ellis has provided 85 illustrations—six of them in color—for the work, which she notes with a laugh, "is a very long book."
"It's been on the cooker for a long time," says Meloy. "We first started working on it 10 or 12 years ago, when we were living in a warehouse in Portland and had an idea for a long-form novel. We wanted to do an illustrated, classic storybook." Meloy says he wrote about 80 pages, and then the project got put aside as both he and Ellis worked on other things. "About five years ago, we decided to pick it up again and try to give it a little more structure," he adds.
Collaborating was not entirely new to the pair, notes Ellis, who has done all the art for the band over the years. "We both have overactive imaginations and are impulsively creative," she says. Meloy found that writing a book "felt like a nice change from some of the more laborious aspects of being in a band, like spending 10 or 12 hours a day in the studio, or being on the road." The experience was also a good bit different from songwriting. "Songwriting comes in such fits and starts that it often feels like you're wasting time," he says. "Writing in the longer form, it feels like you're actually doing a full day's work. There's a relief about having the structure of how much you need to write each day."
Meloy and Ellis will be signing ARCs of Wildwood today, 9:30–10:30 a.m., at Table 9; this is a ticketed signing. And as luck would have it, Colin won't be the only Meloy sibling in the autographing area. He's looking forward to meeting up with his sister, Maile Meloy, who will be on hand to sign her first children's novel, The Apothecary, due from Putnam.