Three Takeaways from the Winter 2021 SCBWI Virtual Conference by Sara Kendall

First of all, thank you so much to Shutta Crum, the generous lady behind “Shutta’s Scholarship” which allowed me to attend the Winter 2021 SCBWI Conference.

This was my first time attending one of the big SCBWI conferences, as well as my first virtual one, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, given that my most recent experience with Zoom was accidentally leaving my microphone off on a virtual doctor’s visit. 

Overall, I was amazed at their coordination! There were only one or two instances of accidental muting, and of course the rogue dog or child, but the conference generally ran like a well-oiled Rube Goldberg machine. It amazed me that I was able to leech inspiration from great minds in the industry while guzzling cocoa and wearing sweatpants.

The segments were many, and there’s no way I can go into detail about all of them here, but here are my favorite takeaways from a weekend of crash course knowledge and summer-camp-style belonging.

Takeaway 1: “We’re all in this together."

With thousands of digital attendees from all 50 states and some 62 countries, the conference had no business feeling as cozy as it did, but on the first day, when Matt de la Peña read us his and illustrator Christian Robinson’s new book Milo Imagines the World, as one would to a class of grade schoolers, I felt like I could have been sitting cross-legged on colorful carpet and waiting for the page-turns alongside everyone else listening in. I almost cried; the book was beautiful, the illustrations simple and evocative, and the gentle act of being read to was surprisingly healing. 

I thought I got sick of this idea of “being in this together” at the beginning of the pandemic, when car insurance commercials and fast food places used it to death. But here I was hearing from people in my field who needed to dredge up artistry in the midst of a pandemic and who admitted to having difficulties similar to my own, and all of a sudden this saying popped back into my head and started to mean something less trite. 

Takeaway 2: So many different people need to work together to pull off a kid’s book!

This was a theme exemplified at the Simon & Schuster virtual office tour, a segment on the first day of the conference, where Laurent Linn, Art Director at Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers, acted as MC as we jumped from zoom window to zoom window to meet a representative from every department that makes a kids’ book come together. 

The art department, the publishing department, the managing editorial department and the production department are chock full of people dedicated to making your book a success. They bounce work back and forth between themselves, from nitty gritty details like balancing budgets, all the way to choosing paper and special finishes for the final book. To a publisher, every book is an investment, and every author or illustrator has a team behind them and working with them to make sure that investment makes bank. 

At the mock book cover/ book design production meeting, hosted by Yaffa Jaskoll, Executive Art Director at Scholastic, we saw another team of editors and designers who worked together like a friendly machine. We were shown the steps, from mood boards and finding an illustrator, to final sketches and branding, that lead to the advent of several dazzling covers that gave me heart eyes. 

We saw the options and the design roads that could have been taken, and most interestingly of all, why they weren’t taken. It took me back to when Christian Robinson showed us how he used little teensy sticky notes to rough out a book, and the piles of crumpled and ruined sticky notes he had to go through to get there. 

Takeway 3: A great deal of mess and effort is necessary to make something beautiful. 

A few more examples in this vein stuck with me from interviews at the Illustrator’s Intensive, which was an extra event that took place the Monday after the conference concluded: 

• Illustrator Jing Jing Tsong went through 12 rounds of sketches for most spreads in her upcoming book, and thought up and roughed out a whole B-plot that didn’t end up being used.

• Illustrator Archana Sreenivasan made a trip to rural India to do hands-on research, and to meet the peoples profiled for her book Desert Girl, Monsoon Boy by Tara Dairman.

Sometimes as illustrators it’s easy to look at our heroes and imagine their work having sprung fully formed and perfect from their skulls, but the Illustrator’s Intensive was useful in that it pulled back that curtain and showed us people working hard and trying things out and doing their job. Jing Jing Tsong said it best when she emphasized the need to explore and make mistakes in order to find your way to the idea that you wish you had thought up in the first place.

Portraits by Sara Kendall

At the end of the conference, I was still alone and in my sweatpants, and my hot cocoa was now just a delicious stain in my mug, but I felt connected to thousands of other attendees and inspired in a way I had not expected. I can’t wait to attend in person, but weirdly I feel like I already did.

Sara Kendall is a middle grade illustrator who loves drawing adventurous kids with the fun kind of teeth that haven't yet been wrangled into braces. She's looking to expand into middle grade book covers, to make a dent in her to-read pile, and to go to the movies again one day (or at least to eat Swedish Fish in the dark). You can find her work on instagram @sarakendall.art, and on twitter @skillustrative. Her email is art@sarakendall.net, and her website is sarakendall.net.

Coming up on The Mitten Blog this spring: 

Book Birthdays, a Writer Spotlight, Equity & Inclusion Corner, interviews with our SCBWI-MI illustration mentors, a new Featured Illustrator, and much more!

Have you registered for the SCBWI-MI (Virtual) Spring Conference?

Find everything you need to know here: 
https://michigan.scbwi.org/2020/05/01/spring-conference-2021/

Please join SCBWI for #StopAsianHate Virtual Action Day, Friday, March 26, 2001

Read the full statement at: https://www.scbwi.org/stopasianhate/

Members for Members Scholarship: Supporting Inclusivity in Children’s Literature

This scholarship awards a one-year SCBWI membership to a Michigan writer or illustrator.

Qualifications: Must be a Michigan resident actively working toward creating children’s books that resonate with diverse readers.

Award: Awardees will receive a year’s membership to SCBWI beginning April 1 if awardee is a new member. If the awardee is a current member, the membership will be extended for a year.

Deadline: Applications are accepted February 14 through March 14. Winner(s) will be announced on or about April 1 each year. ***Application deadline for the 2021 M4M Scholarship has been extended to April 1st. Winners will be announced by April 15th.

For more information and to apply go to: M4M Scholarship Application