Trina Schart Hyman

From the January/February 2005 Horn Book Magazine

Trina

couple of summers ago, Trina Schart Hyman was walking with her dog on the dirt road by her house when a bear came out of the shrubbery.

She told it sternly to back off, and it did.

She told cancer the same thing, and so great was my faith in Trina’s powers that I really thought it would work, even when it wasn’t working.

Three weeks before she died, just before the presidential election, I told her that someone we both knew — a highly respected author — was a Bush supporter. “I always hated him anyway,” she replied, in her tiny distinctive handwriting. And I could hear her laughing.

“I haven’t lost my sense of humor,” she wrote me, along with the news that the drugs had failed. “Except at 3:00 a.m.”

Many years ago, in the 1980s, my mother had a stroke and spent five months in an unlucid state. She laughed and cried and talked to people from the past and viewed my brother and me as strangers who visited too often and took her away from more important things. One day she was weeping about a friend named Dorothy whose baby had died, an event we remembered from fifty years before. My brother, a doctor, trying to figure out where Mother’s mind had gone, asked her if she was actually “seeing” Dorothy, or “remembering” her.
Mother looked at him as if he were an idiot. Then she said dismissively, “In the Dreamworld, it doesn’t matter.”

My mother recovered, retrieved her old self, and went on to live for ten more years. But I was haunted by the Dreamworld she had mentioned.

I called Trina — a close friend — and asked her to collaborate with me on a book about the Dreamworld. She was intrigued as well. But it never came to be, probably because we talked too much, speculated too much, and eventually laughed too much about the concept.

Would there be animals there? Trina, as everyone knows, had animals. A duck named Dave. A poodle named Jerry. A cat named Bad Baby. (Those just for starters; I haven’t listed the sheep or the donkey. Or Woody, the new puppy named for Woodys Allen and Guthrie.)

Okay, we decided, there would be animals.

Friends? Yes, of course, friends, along with family.

Editors? That’s when we started laughing. It was a pretty appealing Dreamworld populated with animals and friends but as soon as we added Editors, then the question of Reviewers arose, and next came Ex-husbands and Real Estate Developers and finally it was Republicans, and then the whole grandiose concept dissolved and we gave it up, chortling still.

Her irreverence was memorable but so was her reverence, and everyone who knew her will remember her passion for and appreciation of writing, music, art, food, gardens, and good gossip. And her ongoing amazement at the natural world. She called me once to describe how the shadow of a hawk had crossed her pond and a mother duck, sensing it, corralled her babies with astonishing vigilance and hustled them back to the barn.

Trina had the shadow hanging over her even then. She fought it out in the open with her fists clenched but it had been circling for a long time and finally it swooped down, a lightning strike at the end.

Even now, so soon after she has journeyed there, I am imagining her in the magical place we once laughed about. With family, of course, and friends. And with animals: I’m picturing Jerry and Dandy, the dogs who went first, greeting her with tails a-wag. I’m picturing even Republicans welcoming her with outstretched arms. In the Dreamworld, of course, none of that matters.

—Lois Lowry

From the July/August 1985 Horn Book Magazine

Trina Schart Hyman

By Katrin Hyman

hen I was six years old, I wanted my mother to be like Laurie Bacon’s mother. Laurie Bacon was my best friend, and her mother wore pretty dresses, baked cookies, belonged to the PTA, went to church, and volunteered her time to the first-grade class. My mother wore blue jeans and spent twelve hours a day, seven days a week, behind the drawing board. Trina is a person who works. She doesn’t belong to the PTA or the League of Women Voters. She doesn’t go to church. She doesn’t play tennis; she isn’t a serious gardener; she can’t fix a car or knit a sweater. She hardly ever goes to the movies.

When I went to the first grade in 1969, I was the only kid in the entire school who was being raised by a single, working mother. And my mother really worked. When she sent me off to school in the morning, she was working; when I came home, she was working; and long after I went to bed at night, she was still at her drawing board. So when I think of Trina, I picture her hunched over her drawing board, a cigarette in one hand and a brush in the other. This image remains an important point of stability for me: It is the foundation on which I was able to grow to adulthood and on which I now build a life of my own.

My mother raised me with the idea that it’s not very important what religion people follow or how much money they make or what country they come from. She taught me to value human beings for their humanness, their ability to feel strongly, to work hard, and to care for each other. Her illustrations celebrate these essential qualities that bind us together as a species.

I like Trina’s work, in the same way that a lot of people like their mother’s cooking. It’s so familiar. How could I not like it? It seems to me that Trina’s pictures accurately reflect the way she sees the world and the way she has encouraged me to see it. Her drawings show a sense of humor and an attention to detail that is characteristic of the attitude we try to maintain in our household. More important, she likes to draw real people, people who laugh and cry easily, people who have bad habits and good smiles.

Ever since Trina won the Caldecott, people have been calling up to congratulate her, and they always ask me, “Aren’t you proud of your mother?” Well, yes. I am proud of her, but certainly not because she won an award. I’m happy for her, and I think it’s nice that she’s finally receiving this recognition. But I’m proud of Trina for surviving. I’m proud of her for managing to get through the hungry years without compromising herself or her artistic vision. I’m proud of her for having the courage to depict the world the way it really is, for drawing black people who look like black people — not like white people with black skins — princesses who are really sexy, witches who are truly evil.

I’m now able to appreciate the fact that it’s just not possible to work twelve hours a day and be the kind of mother who bakes cookies and goes to PTA meetings at the same time. Trina’s not a “superwoman.” She’s an ordinary person who wanted to raise her family and own her home. She did it by taking any job she could get: textbooks, Little Golden Books, dozens of unmemorable children’s stories. She nearly went blind from doing color separations. I think she nearly went crazy from a lack of free time, fresh air, and sunshine and from the constant pressure to keep her bills paid and her family intact.

The important thing is that she didn’t get sick or become blind or go crazy. Instead, she worked hard and kept on growing as a person and as an artist. I remember my third-grade math textbook, which was illustrated by my mother. There are five cats that have to be matched up with the five balls of yarn. Each of the cats is different — they all have their own, distinct personalities. One of the cats is even winking, as if to say, “I know this is a stupid exercise, but you might as well go ahead and do it.” Trina has a lot of conviction. She does the best job she can, whether she is illustrating a math textbook or a Grimm tale, making a bed or helping a friend.

She still works hard, but her twelve-hour days have become eight-hour days unless she is really behind on a deadline. She no longer does color separations, and she can choose her own projects rather than indiscriminately accept any work that comes her way. These days she spends a disproportionate amount of time on the phone talking to editors who call her up just to chat and traveling around the country to give lectures or participate in seminars about children’s literature and book illustration. She is a little more fashion-conscious, although she still wears jeans ninety per cent of the time. But the structure of her life remains essentially unchanged.

Trina still lives in the large, falling-apart New Hampshire farmhouse she bought fifteen years ago. She shares the house with me and her best friend, Barbara Rogasky, who is an editor, photographer, and sometime-collaborator with Trina. There are also two dogs and four cats, and we have a herd of sheep we share with our neighbors across the road.

Barbara is the first person to wake up in the morning, usually by about five A.M. Trina and I have the unfortunate habit of waking up at about the same time, at eight o’clock, give or take a half an hour. There is often a little struggle about who is going to get the first shower. I usually win.

After she has her shower, Trina puts on her eye make-up (she feels naked without it), gets dressed, and takes the dogs for a two-mile walk. Then she makes herself breakfast, which is invariably a soft-boiled egg, a piece of toast, and seventeen vitamin pills. After she has eaten and done the dishes, she makes a cup of instant coffee and brings it to her drawing board. If the day is a good one, she will have started work by ten o’clock — about the time the phone starts ringing.

Throughout the day there is a constant flow of phone calls, visitors, and minor crises. The sheep get out of their field, start walking down the road, and have to be chased home again. A lady who owns a bookstore in Rhode Island stops by to show Trina a sister-in-law’s artwork. The UPS man comes. I call from town because my car has broken down again and I need a ride home. My grandmother calls with the daily weather forecast. The dog gets into a fight with a porcupine and has to have the quills picked out of his nose. Tom, the boy from across the road, comes over to sell us eggs and stays to watch Trina draw. I come downstairs to say “Hi” to Tom and sit for a while, watching Trina draw and describing in minute detail the movie I saw the night before last. Barbara comes downstairs to eat an orange, watch Trina work, and read the newspaper.

Sometimes we talk to each other over dinner, but more often we read. Every evening Trina reads the Valley News from front to back. When she is done, she goes back to work. Barbara and I disappear upstairs to read or work or watch television. The dogs and cats fall asleep in a circle around Trina’s drawing board. Trina continues to work until, as she puts it, “I can’t see any more.” She puts down her brush, puts out the dogs, turns off the lights, and goes upstairs to bed with a book.

This day is typical in the life of Trina Schart Hyman. It’s a little shorter than it used to be, but her routine hasn’t changed very much from when I was growing up. Trina is still chained to her drawing board, though by now the chains are forged as much by habit as by necessity. But “Trina at her drawing board” is hardly an isolated, sterile world. It’s the axis about which the life of this entire household revolves. It’s a world filled with interesting people, interesting ideas, and perpetual activity.

Somehow, in the midst of all the furor, a number of widely read, well-loved books have been created and sent out into the world. Yet it still surprises me when people say things like, “Your mother is amazing — how does she do it?” I don’t know how she does it. As far as I can see she just sits down every day and draws. Of course I know there’s more to it, but her technique as an illustrator isn’t very important to me. Neither is the final product. What I care about is that she’s still there, where I know I can find her, still sitting and drawing. If Trina weren’t at her drawing board, where would I bring my bruises to be kissed and made better? Who else wants me to describe the movie I saw the night before last?

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