Just before Christmas my editor at Walker Books, Denise Johnstone-Burt, emailed to inform me of the very sad news that the illustrator Vanessa Cabban had died. I discovered subsequently that she had been suffering from severe depression and took her own life by throwing herself in front of a train.
Although I worked on five books with Vanessa, including my two bestselling titles Dear Tooth Fairy and Dear Father Christmas, I never met her. I never had any contact with her at all - not in person or by phone or email. All of our collaboration was conducted through the aegis of our respective editor and designer at Walker Books. People who don't work in the publishing industry find this lack of personal relationship between author and illustrator strange, but it's just the normal way it's done in the picture book world (unless of course you are both the author and illustrator and then you can have as much personal relationship as you like!). I've done many picture books and have usually ended up meeting with the illustrator at some point - often at a party after publication - but with Vanessa the opportunity never arose. Once we nearly met when she was down in London and another time when I was in Berwick visiting a school during the Northern Children's Book Festival, the librarian who was accompanying me told me, as we were leaving, that Vanessa lived there. It seemed as if we were destined not to meet. And so it has turned out.
The last project we both worked on "together" was the paperback of Dear Mermaid. This was the third book in the range and was published in hardback in 2007. It wasn't as successful as the previous two titles and didn't co-edition as the others had - perhaps because the subject matter was less occasion-linked but also perhaps because the illustrations were not quite as enchanting. I think Vanessa struggled a little with the underwater scenes. Having said that, the book sold over 40,000 copies in the UK (thanks mainly to the Book People) so was hardly a flop. I agitated for several years for a paperback version but it's taken till now for it to happen. The new version has lost much of its novelty content, but I think it stands up well as a story about a girl and mermaid princess exchanging letters and I have no doubt that many young girls will (from the reaction I've already had) love it. I'm delighted that it's going to be available, but when I received the first copy last weekend I had mixed feelings. It was impossible not to think of Vanessa and her suffering and her tragic, very premature (she was only 42) death. I'd like to think that illustrating the books we collaborated on - albeit at a distance - provided her with some sort of relief, if only fleeting.
Dear Mermaid, I believe, will be published in May this year and I am dedicating it wholeheartedly to the memory of Vanessa, a wonderfully gifted artist (in a number of different fields apart from book illustration) and a person that I wish passionately that I had met. I wrote a poem for her at Christmas, which you can read below. I wish her peace.
Meeting Vanessa
I never met you, Vanessa
except in the worlds we envisaged
apart yet together in books:
Fairyland, Lapland, the Mer Kingdom
beneath the sea...
My words dressed exquisitely in your pictures,
you brought to life my visions on the page;
yet in all those years
we never met or spoke or wrote
or knew each other anywhere
but in those realms of story.
I'd wonder sometimes about you,
imagine you in your studio,
paintbrush, pencils, paints, paper,
a flower in a vase perhaps,
a cup of tea, a dog dozing at your feet,
something soothing on the radio,
lost in the scene you were painting,
the pain in your heart eased for a while
in the joy of creation;
not that I knew then of the trouble
you carried around inside like a tumour
that would finally crush and destroy you.
I wish now I had met you,
to tell you how much what you did meant,
to show you the letters and emails
of gratitude and appreciation from children and adults,
the delighted faces of young readers
whose lives you enriched;
to share with you that love,
but you were gone, too soon, too young,
blown away like thistledown,
leaving only the jewelled illustrations of the books
in which we met,
in which I knew you, Vanessa,
in that magical land where fairies, elves and mermaids
live and play and happiness flows
like water from a fountain,
and in which I wish you too may frolic
and find joy forever, Vanessa..
Bless you.
Although I worked on five books with Vanessa, including my two bestselling titles Dear Tooth Fairy and Dear Father Christmas, I never met her. I never had any contact with her at all - not in person or by phone or email. All of our collaboration was conducted through the aegis of our respective editor and designer at Walker Books. People who don't work in the publishing industry find this lack of personal relationship between author and illustrator strange, but it's just the normal way it's done in the picture book world (unless of course you are both the author and illustrator and then you can have as much personal relationship as you like!). I've done many picture books and have usually ended up meeting with the illustrator at some point - often at a party after publication - but with Vanessa the opportunity never arose. Once we nearly met when she was down in London and another time when I was in Berwick visiting a school during the Northern Children's Book Festival, the librarian who was accompanying me told me, as we were leaving, that Vanessa lived there. It seemed as if we were destined not to meet. And so it has turned out.
The last project we both worked on "together" was the paperback of Dear Mermaid. This was the third book in the range and was published in hardback in 2007. It wasn't as successful as the previous two titles and didn't co-edition as the others had - perhaps because the subject matter was less occasion-linked but also perhaps because the illustrations were not quite as enchanting. I think Vanessa struggled a little with the underwater scenes. Having said that, the book sold over 40,000 copies in the UK (thanks mainly to the Book People) so was hardly a flop. I agitated for several years for a paperback version but it's taken till now for it to happen. The new version has lost much of its novelty content, but I think it stands up well as a story about a girl and mermaid princess exchanging letters and I have no doubt that many young girls will (from the reaction I've already had) love it. I'm delighted that it's going to be available, but when I received the first copy last weekend I had mixed feelings. It was impossible not to think of Vanessa and her suffering and her tragic, very premature (she was only 42) death. I'd like to think that illustrating the books we collaborated on - albeit at a distance - provided her with some sort of relief, if only fleeting.
Dear Mermaid, I believe, will be published in May this year and I am dedicating it wholeheartedly to the memory of Vanessa, a wonderfully gifted artist (in a number of different fields apart from book illustration) and a person that I wish passionately that I had met. I wrote a poem for her at Christmas, which you can read below. I wish her peace.
Meeting Vanessa
I never met you, Vanessa
except in the worlds we envisaged
apart yet together in books:
Fairyland, Lapland, the Mer Kingdom
beneath the sea...
My words dressed exquisitely in your pictures,
you brought to life my visions on the page;
yet in all those years
we never met or spoke or wrote
or knew each other anywhere
but in those realms of story.
I'd wonder sometimes about you,
imagine you in your studio,
paintbrush, pencils, paints, paper,
a flower in a vase perhaps,
a cup of tea, a dog dozing at your feet,
something soothing on the radio,
lost in the scene you were painting,
the pain in your heart eased for a while
in the joy of creation;
not that I knew then of the trouble
you carried around inside like a tumour
that would finally crush and destroy you.
I wish now I had met you,
to tell you how much what you did meant,
to show you the letters and emails
of gratitude and appreciation from children and adults,
the delighted faces of young readers
whose lives you enriched;
to share with you that love,
but you were gone, too soon, too young,
blown away like thistledown,
leaving only the jewelled illustrations of the books
in which we met,
in which I knew you, Vanessa,
in that magical land where fairies, elves and mermaids
live and play and happiness flows
like water from a fountain,
and in which I wish you too may frolic
and find joy forever, Vanessa..
Bless you.
