A nice little project ‘on the side’
How ‘Mendel’s Greenhouses’ grew — part #2
With the first chapter written down, an invisible barrier had been breached. A short story for a school reading method wasn’t exactly what I had had in mind, but this story about domes and greenhouses was going to exist, somehow, and I was writing it.
Between September 2016 and Januari 2017, I wrote it down, in little bites, just as it presented itself, without a plan or structure.
To be honest, I have never really had a problem with writing blind. You will find authors who will brood on a story for months until they have figured out all the characters and can write down the story structure to a fault. Next, they will chart a timeline and a script and go about writing it in full.
I am not that kind of a writer. My writing process bears strong resemblance to a walk through the fog: I can see but the next few feet in front of me. As I proceed, some new part of the path will show itself, and it’s my job to trust that it won’t just disappear or decide to throw itself over some cliff’s edge.
But it won’t. I am confident of that by now. I have been writing like this for three decades, and my stories always land safely, like cats. Often they will surprise me, for I no more know what is coming than a reader does, I will only find out as I’m writing. The creative process will take me for a ride, exactly like a good book by someone else will. I like that very much. It’s always new, and always exciting.
Trusting the flow of that process when you’re doing assignment work on a pretty tight deadline is something else entirely, to be sure. But this, once again, turned into a pleasant experience: my inner compass knew exactly where this story needed to go, leading me to an ending that both took me by surprise and deeply touched me.
All the books from this method series were to be illustrated. Writers were encouraged to propose illustrators whose work they considered to be a good match with the text. Did I perhaps have someone in mind?
In hindsight, some moments in your life turn out to be crossroads of the most improbable significance.
A few months earlier, with the wind chasing the clouds across a clear blue sky and the sun only breaking through at intervals in the square in front of the Brussels-North train station, I had an encounter with an illustrator I had met several years previously and whom I had continued to bump into in the funniest and most unlikely of ways.
We had common interests and we shared a number of experiences and doubts about getting work published. We shared a spark of recognition we couldn’t quite define and we had spent the last two years ‘sniffing each other out’.
There was no hint of anything resembling a Sapling at that point, but that Brussels afternoon was the moment Jurgen Walschot and I took a jump off the edge of a cliff together, as I have since come to call it. Without a plan or a safety net, but in full faith that we wouldn’t fall but fly.
Our collaboration was an adventurous journey, tantalizing and challenging, and the longer it went on, the more powerful it felt. It was especially uplifting to be creating something together. To share thoughts and ideas, exchange images, mail concepts back and forth. We became sounding boards, compagnons de route of word and image.
So when the Van In question needed an answer, half a year later, it was pretty obvious to me who was going to be doing the illustrating on De serres van Mendel. I also knew the subject was one Jurgen would like. And as a creative pair, we were up for a nice little project ‘on the side’, something to complete short-term and see published.
And so it came to pass.
(Or how do they say it so solemnly in all those Important Tales?)
I am a word person, not a purely visual thinker. But I do have a strong visual streak. Writing the short story, I had come to imagine an entire world in my head.
To give Jurgen some idea of what I saw in my mind’s eye, I gathered an extensive collection of images, from trees to trilobites, all of which had something to do with this domed world. ‘You’ve done half my work’, he joked.
It was nice to see how he went about using some of the material. I had seen him make complex images before, but what he presented to me now surpassed everything I knew. Immense domes, filled to the brim with living things. A world that went beyond what I had imagined, a green wilderness you could lose yourself in.
By Easter of 2017, our minitature story was completed. Everyone was pleased with it, and so were we. But it would be a long wait until September of 2019, when the Talent-series would in fact appear. At the same time, we were also left with the feeling that there was so much more potential to this story than we had been able to get out of it now.
Van In supported the idea that I took this story to a non-educational publishing house. If we wanted, we could really try to turn this little gem into a genuine children’s book.
In the mean time, Jurgen and I were fully launched into our Sapling project. We were so pleased with it that we had a limited series of posters printed of two of our favorites, in both Dutch and English. And we followed our gut feeling about one particular Sapling called STREAM, that had the ambition to grow into a book. The entire summer of 2017 we were very busy, cruising on what, in hindsight, came close to a creative high, with work meant almost exclusively for an adult audience.
But we did not forget our children’s book. And it kept tickling us, until it turned into an itch. Could Mendel live a second life?
That’s when an announcement appeared about a cottage in Sweden, waiting for a writer and an illustrator…
In September 2019, ‘De serres van Mendel’, a children’s novel (10+) in words and images, a joint project of writer Kirstin Vanlierde and illustrator Jurgen Walschot, will appear with Van Halewyck publishing house (Belgium). For the time running up to the publication, a blog will appear every month on how this book came to be.
