A Conversation with James Warhola, Dirk Zimmer and Alice Provenson

Read the book reviews in our Spring 2003 Hudson Valley Bookshelf

AboutTown: James, this is the first book that you wrote as well as illustrated. What made you decide to write your own story?

James: I'd been illustrating other people's stories for fifteen years. I took a break, and I was forced to come up with my own project. This book was the outcome. At first it was going to be a story about working in my father's junkyard, but I kept coming back to visiting my uncle and the contrast between him and my dad. When I started delving back into my past, there were so many memories, I had to edit a lot of it out. It didn't require any exaggeration. When Andy was doing the soup cans, we didn't see it as absurd; we gave him a lot of respect.

AboutTown: Will some of what you edited out eventually be turned into other books?

James: Possibly, one of the things I trimmed down was the portrait of my grandmother in the book. She was a magical person, she was from Eastern Slovakia and she had an old-world folksiness. I think she was the largest influence on my uncle. So someday I might go back to doing something about her.

AboutTown: Now a question for Dirk. The witch in Curse in Reverse is a wonderful character. Can you tell us something about how you came to picture her the way you did?

Dirk: Well, she's an impossibility in terms of folktale traditions, because there are no witches in Ireland. In fact Tom Coppinger, who's Irish, did not set his story in Ireland, but I did. And the old lady had to be a crone, so I thought of her as a kind of tinker or a gypsy.

AboutTown: Alice, about the dog "Murphy." Was he based on a specific dog?

Alice: It's about a dog I owned some years ago... I live on an old farm, I have horses there and dogs and cats.

AboutTown: You've had a long career in children's books, can you see any changes in directions in recent years?

Alice: My career is so long that I've seen everything come and go and back again, like fashion. Now everything is over-rendered, so many kids coming out of design schools, and they're beginning to look alike. If you begin to think of Thurber and all the early guys, they seemed much more individual. But I've always been sort of minimalist. I'm much plainer, trying to make simple statements.

Dirk: The individual handwriting of artists has disappeared. That's why I want to teach in schools, so kids learn to use their paws more.

James: I see what Alice means. I like the idea of keeping things simple. I was a very academic painter when I came out of art school, and it's taken me a long time to break away from that. Sometimes I wonder if I needed the training that I got.