. Two new children’s picture books are out in 2022: Leo + Lea (with illustrations by Kenard Pak) and Elbert in the Air (with illustrations by Jerome Pumphrey). Her essays and short stories have appeared in many other venues including The New York Times. For over fifteen years, she’s taught creative writing at UC Berkeley Extension, Stanford Continuing Studies, Left Margin Lit and elsewhere around the Bay Area as well as working one-on-one as an independent editor. A graduate of Reed College and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, she lives in her hometown of Berkeley, California.
Recently I asked Wesolowska about what she was reading. Her reply:
As someone who writes in multiple genres, I read in multiple genres. Not surprisingly, the books I’ve recently read all seem related to elements of my new picture book,Visit Monica Wesolowska's website.including different ways of seeing and being, the solace of art, and the Fibonacci sequence, a popular math pattern often found in nature.
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky is my most exciting recent find, a novel that took me on a wild ride. It begins: “I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest…” Soon, the narrator gives birth to an owl-baby. How is this possible and what does it mean? The book does not give easy explanations. It’s a gorgeous metaphor for parenting a child who defies expectations, and Oshetsky extends the metaphor as far as it will go. I love that the mother in this novel allows her owl-baby to beherself. There is rage here, and lyric language, and love.
The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find her Way Home by Katherine May is a memoir I stumbled across as fortuitously as the author seems to have stumbled across her own topic. Until the day she heard an interview about autism on the radio, May never suspected she herself might be on the spectrum. She just thought she was overwhelmed with the noise of parenthood. Who wouldn’t be? So she told her husband she needed time to walk…a lot…and alone. I sank into those long, lush, rainy walks along the South West Coast Path of England with May while she tries to understand how to be comfortable with thefamily she loves as well as in her own skin.
Finding Fibonacci: The Quest to Rediscover the Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed the World by Keith Devlin is far outside my usual reading. It’s about math. But to write a picture book based on the Fibonacci sequence, I had to do research and found this book charming. An acclaimed Stanford mathematician, Devlin writes about searching through Pisa for biographical information about this influential medieval mathematician. After enjoying the book, I consulted Devlin about my own book. He pointed out that Indian mathematicians used the sequence long before Fibonacci did, and that Sanskrit poets used it long before that, which was a nice affirmation of my own project of writing a poetic picture book based on the pattern.
Bod’s Dream by Michael and Joanne Cole was a favorite picture book of mine as a child. Curious to know why, I went to find a copy. Thinking this book from 1969 must be obscure, I was delighted to find it had been re-issued in 2016. On the first page, Bod wakes from a lovely dream of strawberries and cream and sets out on his day still thinking about it. Curious to know what Bod is dreaming about, his friends and neighbors all follow him, falling right into a hole in the ground. And you won’t imagine what they find there! I guffawed aloud, and read it again. A strange, profoundly satisfying story about a little stick figure with a big head who follows his dreams.
The Page 99 Test: Holding Silvan.
--Marshal Zeringue
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