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Interview with Debra Frasier, The Incredible Water Show |
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Debra Frasier is the creator of The Incredible Water Show and the companion title, Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster, as well as Out of the Ocean and the bestselling classic On the Day You Were Born. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Vero Beach, Florida.
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Synopsis |
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| In The Incredible Water Show, the kids from Debra Frasier's Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster are back! This time they're putting on a neighborhood play starring the world's most astounding combination of atoms—H20! Filled to the brim with scientifically accurate facts about water and water conservation, here is one wet-and-wild celebration you won't want to miss. |
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Interview |
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Q: The Incredible Water Show is the perfect addition to a lesson plan about the water cycle. I can just imagine students in classrooms all over the country staging the performance detailed in the book. What motivated you to take an everyday substance such as water and transform it into a dazzling theatrical show?
A: I have been collecting information about water in a "Water Journal" for nearly ten years. Four years ago there were rumors that the Clean Water Act was to be seriously weakened. It seemed a good time to try to write something that would praise water! The kids from Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster were the perfect group to have fun with this wondrous material.
Q: To create your vibrant and colorful artwork, you use markers, crayons, paper cutouts—and lots of time. Can you describe your style and the illustration process, specifically the process of crafting The Incredible Water Show?
A: The Incredible Water Show is a companion book to Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster. Many of the design and illustration principles guiding this book were determined in the first one—and were determined in part by the fact that I created the illustrations far from a city and any lavish art-supply stores. My family and I had taken a year off from our lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and returned to the tiny seaside town where I grew up in Vero Beach, Florida. Without an array of papers to choose from, I decided to make the illustrations from the materials you could find in a fifth grader's desk…markers, lined notebook paper, and office-supply colored papers. I decided to turn the checked pattern of Miss A. to bubbles in the companion book, Water Show.
Q: This book teaches children many aspects about water: its atomic structure, the water cycle, and water conservation. And you make it fun! Do you have any ideas for parents and teachers to help make these important lessons interesting?
A: Delight! Add delight in the study of this miraculous gift. Although water is "everyday," as you say, it is also astounding. I didn't make up the miraculous part. We don't know how, or why, or exactly when these atoms came together. Earth is currently unique in water's creation—the recycling of water is amazing if we stop to consider it. Let's cultivate a love of this daily constant—in water glasses, in bathtubs, everywhere we find it. Praise it! Speak of it! In our children we are growing the one-day voters who will determine the future of water on our planet. Let's make sure they know just how essential this everyday matter is to not only their own life but to all life. (Parents or teachers who would like to stage this show in their own communities are encouraged to visit my Web site, www.DebraFrasier.com, where they can find ideas for sets and puppets, with patterns and puppets for both small and large productions.)
Q: In an ongoing celebration of your fiftieth birthday and your love of water, you plan to canoe down fifty streams and rivers. In fact, readers can recommend rivers and track your progress by consulting your "River Journal" on www.DebraFrasier.com. What's the latest on your incredible water adventure?
A: So far I have paddled seventeen rivers, the most recent being a gorgeous eight-mile stretch on the Au Sable River in Michigan. I was speaking to teachers at the Michigan Summer Literacy Conference and finished my duties just in time to rent a kayak for a late afternoon paddle down one of the Wild and Scenic Rivers of the USA (rivers preserved in their wild state due to their extraordinary beauty). This summer I also navigated a raft down the French Broad River in North Carolina with four teenagers, and I paddled a canoe down the dwindling Loxahatchee, a river right out of a Tarzan movie in Florida. This project has energized my life and turned my attention toward rivers wherever I travel.
Q: In your acknowledgments, you thank people for steering you back to the water whenever you've stayed on land too long. What is it about water and nature that you find so fascinating?
A: In the presence of water I feel the earth's great liquid being moving between us. Many writers have written of water's affinity to our body's blood, the lifeblood, on which we all depend so essentially. Witnessing this essential is part of it, but there is also the simple visceral beauty of being in the presence of water. I grew up next to the Atlantic Ocean—and as anyone who has stood beside a lake, a brook, a great river, or the wide expanse of the ocean knows—water somehow calms, cleanses, and restores, just by its presence. That's part of what I love…but this is too large a question. I'd like to try to answer it in another book.
Q: The first book that you both wrote and illustrated is the beloved On the Day You Were Born (Harcourt, 1991), winner of the Parents' Choice Gold Award. Until the book was published, you had focused on design work. What encouraged you to make the leap to becoming a writer as well as an illustrator?
A: I was first trained as an artist, and my mother was an artist, as is my daughter, so this is the first language in my family. But I also come from a long line of Southern storytellers. I went through a wrenching pregnancy that resulted in my one and only glorious daughter. When something difficult and transformative like that happens, and the outcome is miraculous, sometimes you want to try, try desperately however weakly—somehow you must tell the story. That's how I took up the pen. But I was given a very, very amazing story to tell.
Q: Throughout the year, you visit schools and talk about subjects including the writing and editing process, creating illustrations, the search for ideas, and others. It's easy to see how students and faculty might benefit from your presentations, but what do you take away from these interactions?
A: I often wish that someone like myself had visited my elementary school—I did not know such a path in the world existed. Part of my job is to wake up the next storytellers sitting in the audience of the schools I visit. We need stories more than ever, stories that remind of us of the larger story we are making all together. I am somewhat unusual in that I speak both the language of the visual and the written language. Often I talk about how I keep visual information side by side with writing, how one way of seeing influences the other. In every school someone will whip out his or her journal and start scribbling, eyes wide open. That's what I take away.
Q: We first saw the cast from The Incredible Water Show in your book Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster (Harcourt, 2000). Do you have any future plans for Sage, Forest, and the others?
A: Geography? Wouldn't you like to see what those kids could do with that subject? I would, so we've been talking it over.
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