Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s book creators! Today’s guest: Amanda West Lewis. Take it away, Amanda!
I work in a number of different genres and media. My background is in theatre and in calligraphic book arts. I write books for young people in just about all genres –– craft books, nonfiction books, picture books, poetry, middle grade and YA fiction. For me, the challenge isn’t necessarily what to create, but what container is best for this idea?
Sometimes, we are lucky enough to find many different containers for an idea. By exploring ideas from many perspectives, I’ve found new things and come to a richer understanding of what I was trying to say.
Every process is different, of course, just as the ultimate audience for each piece will be different. With my new book, Looking at the Sky: How Dr. Janusz Korczak Fought for Children’s Rights, I explored the story as a theatre piece and calligraphed a quote from Dr. Korczak for a Christmas card long before I considered writing it as a book for young people.
I heard the story of Dr. Janusz Korczak from the landlord for my theatre school in 2005. Leon Gluzman had been a resident at Korczak’s orphanage in Warsaw and over eighty years later was still emotional when he talked about that time. I decided to work with a group of young people at the theatre school to workshop a play about Korczak. The students interviewed Leon and researched Korczak. They dove deeply into war-torn Poland and, inevitably, into the Holocaust. The two-year workshop process was a moving and personal experience for all of us.
We decided to take it to the next level and commissioned playwright Hannah Moscovitch to write a play that worked with child actors as well as adults to tell the story. I co-produced The Children’s Republic with the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa in 2009.
However, I didn’t feel that I was “done” with the story. The play, while suitable for young audiences, spoke from an adult perspective. I wanted to tell young people about Korczak’s ideas, to shine a light on his relationship to the children in his care, to show what it was like to live in the orphanage, and to see how that experience affected their lives.
But whose perspective should I write it from? Korczak’s or a child’s? What kind of “container” did it need? Nonfiction, fiction, or a combination? Did I want to try a biography for young people, or a picture book biography? What was it that I felt was missing from telling the story on stage?
I spent years trying different approaches, writing in different genres and from different perspectives. Eventually, I submitted a picture book biography to my editor Kathleen Keenan at Kids Can Press. It was Kathleen who said “There is much too much here for a picture book biography. Have you ever thought of writing it as a graphic novel?”
A graphic novel. Suddenly, I’d found the right container. I could clearly tell the story from the child’s perspective, incorporating details without words. It didn’t matter to me that I’d never written a graphic novel before. Finding out how to do something is never as difficult as figuring out what is the best way to do it. The how is mechanical. The concept, finding the container, is the exciting challenge.
Looking at the Sky: How Dr. Janusz Korczak Fought for Children’s Rights, written by Amanda West Lewis, illustrated by Abigail Rajunov, is published by Kids Can Press, June 2, 2026
