“When you’re younger, you’re more inclined to think you’ve seen a miracle.  When you get older, you think you’ve been fooled.  I like to not have to decide.” - CVA

There aren’t many people in this world who could roust me from out of bed on a dreary Saturday morning and onto the T for an hourlong lecture downtown.  Chris Van Allsburg, the mastermind behind Jumanji, The Polar Express and The Widow’s Broom (now a ballet as well, apparently), is one of the few who can and did.

A Tribute to Van Allsburg, part of Saturday’s epic Boston Book Festival, was one of the few events in the program that was colored-coded orange for “kids.”  As I hunkered down in the auditorium waiting for the liter of coffee I’d chugged to start buzzing around in my head, I was relieved to see a range of ages present and encouraged by the victory garden of fidgeting children sprouting in the front row–new young readers still enthralled by the stories that mid-twenties fogies like me grew up on.  (Then again, from all the moon-eyed parents fidgeting around, too, I could take a stab at who REALLY wanted to be there).

I’m not sure what I originally envisioned, but when Van Allsburg strode out onto the stage, something just clicked.  There he was in his smart little suit (corduroy pants and a seasonally appropriate pumpkin-colored vest to match his orange, brown and tan checkered socks) and neatly coiffed white beard. It worked.

Van Allsburg fell into writing books for kids in the fluid, seemingly accidental way that a lot of successful writers (annoyingly) seem to have in common.

He had a knack for lying (at first he wanted to become a lawyer) and a love of building things (”I would imagine myself on the ship as I made it”). The key was one “gullible” college admissions officer at University of Michigan who admitted him into the school of design and architecture even though Van Allsburg hadn’t taken any art classes in high school.

The admissions officer asked what Van Allsburg thought of Norman Rockwell.  Van Allsburg lied. Sizing up the “Midwestern man in a crew cut and bow tie” before him, he replied contrary to his own snobbery: that, though it might be popular to bash Rockwell’s paintings for some, Rockwell was capable of creating a “single image that fills us with feeling.”

Van Allsburg finished with a sly grin: “I didn’t know it then, but what I was saying was actually true.”

Van Allsburg chose black and white as a medium for many of his most beloved books because “you have to sell an idea” to people if they’re going to become enraptured by it: instead of becoming cartoonish, the rhino running through the kitchen in Jumanji had to look, well, real. 

Disappointingly, the interviewer, children’s author Brian Lies, fell a bit flat with his questions (starting off with “So–was writing this book FUN?”). And Lies missed a great follow-up opportunity when Van Allsburg disparaged kids’ reliance on movies because they leave “no open spaces” for the imagination.

How about following that up with, “So how do you feel about the horrendous movies that have been made from your own books”? 

I mean, after all, The Polar Express was turned from a charming, subtle fable about childhood faith into, well, a CGI musical with at least 90 minutes too many of Tom Hanks’ squawking.  And Jumanji-the-movie fell within a cornucopic list of occasions in which Robin Williams’ agent must have wanted to self-disembowel.

Actually, I did throw the question of movie adaptation to Van Allsburg after the book-signing crowd had died down and moved on to Ken Burns. 

Van Allsburg was packing up to get the heck out and gave me a sort of tense smile. Then he issued the most politically correct answer possible–there was the lawyer side–that he felt fine with the way those movies turned out, though they weren’t the “great” Wizard-of-Oz-like films he had hoped for. 

Moving on to the next panel, I considered my favorite book by Van Allsburg, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The premise is that there is a great artist whose folder of drawings ends up in Van Allsburg’s possession, each sketch with a single “teaser” caption below. According to Van Allsburg’s brilliant twist, Burdick disappeared and the stories were never filled in. He leaves it to the reader to fill in for herself.

Sometimes, meeting an author makes you wish you had left a little room for the imagination, too.

Tags:   Alexis · Boston Book Festival · Chris Van AllsburgNo Comments