Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s book creators! Today’s guest: Jennifer Harris. Take it away, Jennifer!
I woke up with two lines in my head:
In the witching hour,
The sky turns orange.
Just those two lines—but I knew it was something good. The language flowed in a way I liked, and the orange sky forecast there would be drama. Within five minutes I’d expanded on these two lines (breaking them up with another) and completed the opening page of The Witching Hour.
Writing isn’t supposed to be like this, I know. There’s sweat! There’s toil! But sometimes there’s a line, and that line is a mood, and so you write the mood. And anyone who’s lived through that time after dusk with a fussy baby or toddler—known colloquially as the witching hour—fully understands the exhaustion and humour of turning yourself inside out to try and calm them. That’s definitely A MOOD.
In this story there’s a twist: the family are witches. It may have been the vibrant autumn orange I pictured in my head that made this seem like an organic choice. It certainly wasn’t a “eureka” moment (I hadn’t even had coffee yet). The witches would seem to have an advantage over the rest of us: they don’t just have bouncing and milk available to them to calm a cranky child—they have brooms and magic! Does magic help? OF COURSE NOT! Because as anyone who’s lived through this phase knows, nothing helps, or if it does, what worked yesterday probably won’t work tomorrow. So you just keep trying increasingly ridiculous things. Here, that contributes to the dramatic tension and the escalation of humour. Child readers will be entertained and amused by the magical tricks the witches try; parents will laugh, probably because it’s funny, but possibly also because it’s very relatable.
Aside from a cranky baby and increasingly exhausted parents, I had no idea how this would be illustrated. So imagine when I opened the initial colour sketches and saw my orange suffusing the page, balanced with purple and green. It’s unlike any other palette on my picture book shelf. Tundra editor Sam Swenson conjured the perfect illustrator, Adelina Lirius, who worked her own magic. These are not the warty hunched witches of Halloween décor; they’re soft forest witches who look like they were born from wood lilies and honeysuckle. And the baby’s face—it’s so hard not to laugh, because the expressions of doubt, distress, and dismay are all-too familiar. (Is this the time to say one of my children didn’t sleep through the night until age two? After a decade, we’ve almost recovered.) The cats are doing what cats do in the most delightful way, and the spiders and mice are fun to track through the pages.
To be honest, by the time I’d finished writing The Witching Hour, I wasn’t sure what I had. It felt like an oddball—a lyrical and slyly funny manuscript. But would editors see it as a picture book? Now, looking it brought to life with illustrations, it’s quite clear it’s a picture book, and I’m grateful Sam Swenson saw it that way from the beginning. It’s a Halloween book, a new baby book, a sibling book, and a funny look-at-that-cat book (which should be a category, if it isn’t). My hope is it finds a readership who appreciate it for itself, inviting it to birthday parties and baby showers and sleepovers, and making it feel welcome in the world.