Xin Li’s picture book debut, I Lived Inside a Whale (Little, Brown, Feb.), came into being during the upheaval of the pandemic. “I thought about this girl wanting to run away from all the chaos and mess,” Li says. She remembered a story told by the poet Sarah Kay about the heart of a blue whale, so large that an adult can stand upright inside it. “What if I put the girl inside the whale?” Li thought. In Li’s story, the girl, Emma, tapes a drawing of a whale around a doorway and finds peace inside her make-believe refuge—until an unexpected guest intrudes.
Though she was trained as a designer, Li’s early career headed in a different direction. She grew up in a small town in southeast China, got a degree in graphic design in Beijing, left for an internship in Copenhagen, and spent the next 14 years working for software companies in several countries, including a year and a half in Uganda helping design solar-powered computer workstations.
In the early 2000s, Li discovered Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and the art of visual storytelling. Intrigued, she read all of Scott McCloud’s books about making comics. “I was very curious about the process,” she says. “I felt like I wasn’t talented enough to do that. But then at some point in my mid-30s I realized, if you want to do something you have to start doing it,” and she committed herself to feeling uncomfortable. “More experienced illustrators will say, ‘Well, if it’s very hard for you, maybe it’s not the right thing,’ which is discouraging. Now I need to grow! Maybe later I can make something beautiful.”
Around that time, as a new mother living in Oslo (she married a fellow designer she’d met while in Denmark), she took her infant daughter to the library. She had always been an eager library-goer but had never entered the children’s section: “I never had a reason to go there,” she says. She was startled to find titles by Shaun Tan, a favorite of hers, among the picture books. “I was like, Oh! You could do this for adults and you also could do things for children,” she says.
As Li grew more confident, she got an agent and began finding illustration work—a lot of it. “Basically, I didn’t have time to take all the work that was coming my way,” she says. She learned to regard her unconventional background as a strength. “I felt very much behind because I didn’t have an illustration degree. And I was in my late 30s starting a new career, with a toddler at home. There was pressure, both personally and financially. But then I realized that this other experience I had was an asset, not a hindrance. Whatever life experience you have, it ends up in your story.” Her design background gave her advantages, too: “all my knowledge of color theory, understanding of composition and visual priority, visual organization.”
Yet none of the manuscripts she was assigned felt quite right. She had been working with Giuseppe Castellano, founder of the online education resource the Illustration Department, and she confessed to him that she really wanted to write her own story. “You are writing a story,” Castellano told her. “You’re already writing a story with your images.”
Castellano passed some of Li’s work to Angharad Kowal Stannus, a former colleague who had become an agent. Earlier on, someone had suggested that Li try writing a STEM book “because a lot of houses are looking for that,” she says.
Kowal Stannus had different advice. “Don’t worry about what kind of story you’re writing,” she told Li. “You write the story that you want to write, and I’ll help you find the right house.”
Li began working on I Lived Inside a Whale. She had studied visual storytelling; now she had to learn how to write. “I don’t write well on the first draft,” she says. “Then I read [Anne Lamott’s] Bird by Bird, about the writing experience and the shitty first draft concept. I was so encouraged! Yes,
I can do this!”
After seven months, Li had a finished dummy. It went to auction; four houses were interested. Li was thrilled by the prospect of getting to work with Little, Brown editor Farrin Jacobs and art director Saho Fujii: “Farrin Jacobs edited [Vashti Harrison’s 2024 Caldecott winner] Big, and Saho Fujii was the art director for Grace Lin’s A Big Mooncake for Little Star,” she says.
“I think the team really helped me elevate the story,” Li says. “When I sent it in, it was more than 60 pages. I said to my agent, ‘Do you think I should keep editing it? I’ve heard that publishers don’t like picture books that are too long,’ and she said, ‘We should just send it in and be open for her to shorten the story.’ I was really stressed because I might not want to cut out things I feel are important. But they are very good at asking questions, and once they started giving me notes, I realized, ‘Oh, there’s no problem taking out a spread here. This makes more sense! So I was very lucky in the whole process. I feel like I had control of my own story.”
Feelings of self-doubt about her work persisted even as she finished the final art, according to Li. “But the struggle and the frustration were a big part of what made me feel intensely engaged,” she says. “Making art is a mysterious experience for me. Writing and illustrating stories was not smooth sailing, but right now I cannot imagine stopping.”
Antonia Saxon is a book reviewer and features writer for PW.
