Story Always Comes First

With award-winning author and illustrator Rosemary Wells, “Story always comes first. Picture books must be strong enough to be read aloud five hundred times without boring the reader.” She suggests that song lyrics are the only other media that requires such repeated exposure to a text.

Perhaps this is why Wells is more than just an illustrator. Her characters have a life. She says, “Everybody’s life is very pedestrian. We all choose what shoes to wear, even celebrities.” She fears that ours is a culture that takes much and does little with it and feels she has become an unofficial advocate for educators who she says are “underpaid, under-recognized, and under-served” despite the fact they “are the most important people because they are in charge of our next generation.”

The career of a children’s writer allows authors like Wells to “open the world to a child at the age of five instead of nineteen. But writers couldn’t do our job without teachers and librarians,” Wells adds. “This career allows me to tell ridiculous stories and live my life as a professionally illogical thinker.”

Despite the lure of television and video games, Wells knows there will always be room for books because of “their energy and stories that feel real to the audience.”