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When the widely beloved children’s book icon Tomie dePaola died in 2020, he left behind a brief, unillustrated manuscript, itself (gently) concerned with the subject of death. Below, I talk with Barbara McClintock about how she and Laurent Linn, art director at Simon & Schuster, turned that manuscript into Where Are You, Brontë?

Roger Sutton: How did you get hooked into this project?

Barbara McClintock: One day when I was a guest speaker at the Highlights Foundation, Laurent Linn called me about half an hour before I was supposed to give my presentation. He asked me if I'd be interested in illustrating a story, the last complete manuscript written by Tomie dePaola. I was interested and intrigued from the get-go. But then Laurent talked about what the story was about — it was about Tomie’s beloved Airedale terrier and the arc of their life together from early puppyhood until Brontë left him one day. Both Laurent and I had just lost beloved cats, so we were primed for this subject matter and how Tomie moved through his grief over the death of his dog and discovered that Brontë was always there with him in his heart and in his memory. Laurent and I talked for quite a while, and we laughed a lot and we cried a lot. We realized that this was a good fit for me, this manuscript.

RS: Did Laurent say why he thought of you for this?

BM: Well, I think he's wanted to work with me for a long time and had a strong appreciation for the way that I depict animals. While I didn't really know Tomie, I guess there was a shared sensibility there, and Laurent thought that I could handle the sadness of the manuscript but also bring humor and a sense of joy to it.

RS: I thought the book accomplished this very interesting thing of having a very Barbara McClintock line but at the same time very Tomie dePaola colors. Was it something conscious that you did or did it just turn out that way?

BM: I really wanted to emulate Tomie's style and to honor his style in my drawings and in the way that I approached the artwork, so I started trying to copy some of his drawings — which was not so easy to do.

RS: It’s not as easy as you thought it would be.

BM: No, no. They're deceptive — they look simple, but they're not. And he has a spontaneity to his drawings and an elegance and a sense of fun and a vivacity that is wonderful. And I kept failing and failing and failing. I kept doing drawings and throwing them away and it just wasn't right. I wasn't getting it. And then suddenly it dawned on me as I was looking at his paintings that he approached the color first, in a way. I know that he did the line drawings first, but that color sensibility was so strongly there and part of who he was. So I started looking more at his paintings and trying to understand his color process, and that's when it all clicked, how I would go about emulating his work. And I'm stuck with my own style no matter how hard I try.

RS: Aren’t we all?

BM: It always shines through. But I had a lot of fun doing research, and I bought on eBay an old Steiff stuffed Airedale, and I saw in a photograph of his studio later that he had one just like it. And then I commissioned a little woolen Airedale to be made from a photograph of Brontë. I like to have fun as I'm exploring and playing around with how I'm going to illustrate something, and things like that are a good way to move forward. Tomie was so witty, and the humor carries through in everything he does. But there’s also so much pathos and spirituality in his work.

RS: Then you have this Last Supper–like illustration of Tomie’s great characters. That’s such a great picture.

BM: Well, you know, this book was a challenge. The entire manuscript fits on one sheet of paper. I really had to extend it. I almost had to create a wordless-book aspect to it to fill out and expand the story. So I started looking around at other books that I love and remember that would help me to create that bridge or that structure of more of a story being told in the pictures than what was necessarily shared in the text. Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman was something that influenced a lot of the smaller drawings in this book, the little vignettes. I thought it would be wonderful to honor Tomie’s characters in this book as well. So when Brontë gets his collar, it was another way of showing the developing relationship between Tomie and Brontë, but I also thought that it would be nice for the two of them to go out and have an adventure together. Tomie loved cooking and food, and it just seemed to make sense that “Why not go to this nice outdoor Italianate-looking dinner party and hang out with all of his wonderful characters?” (And in that illustration are also Laurent and my editor Celia Lee, there at the end of the table on the right-hand side of the page.) Of course I had to have Strega Nona, Oliver Button, and Big Anthony, among others. Including these characters and some important people in Tomie’s life, such as his beloved elementary school teacher, just seemed like a lot of fun and something I decided would be an interesting way to connect Tomie's work and Tomie and Brontë and keep everybody in there together. Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman was also about loss, it was about a budding relationship between the little boy and the snowman who comes alive. And they're exploring the house and then going off and flying through the countryside, coming back, and then in the morning the little boy looks out the window and the snowman has melted. But it wasn't done in a maudlin way, and I didn't want to give a maudlin spin to Where Are You, Brontë? either.

RS: Or to make it a death book. You know, it’s not bibliotherapeutic at all.

BM: Oh, that's good. I was hoping it wouldn't be. I did multiple sketches and dummies as I was trying to figure out the pacing and how things would work. As I was doing these little dummy books I realized that you get to a point in the manuscript and you just want to cry: “The day you left me, I knew I would miss you. And I did. Every day, every night.” I still start crying whenever I read that. And I thought, I can't just have all of these weeping children, and adults, too, we had to do something about this. I thought, Well, how would Tomie — I tried to channel Tomie a lot — how would Tomie work his way out of this? What would his way forward in grief be? I thought, Well, he was a creator, so he could actually embody that creative aspect of moving forward in grief and finding a way to keep Brontë near to him. So at the risk of getting all spiritual and stuff — it’s really just a reaffirmation of life and love. That we find a way forward in love to respect and keep those beloved animals and people close after they’ve gone, after they’ve left us. So to show Tomie just having that “aha” moment when he is on the hill where he and Brontë loved to walk, but now Brontë is gone and he’s sad. He’s on the previous page with all of these little situations going on. He’s drawing a broken heart, he’s sleeping in his bed where Brontë slept with him for twelve and a half years, and there are toys under the bed.

RS: Toys everywhere, yep.

BM: And then he gets up in the morning. There's that awful gut-wrenching moment when you wake up in the morning after your beloved pet is gone and there's such an emptiness. He has his breakfast and coffee and then he gets dressed and he goes out, up to this hill. The hill that he and Brontë spent so much time on. And it's raining and then it begins to clear and that's when he has his “aha” moment that Brontë is still there with him. And then we have the rainbow bridge — I think it also reflected the fact that Tomie was gay, that's also a symbol for that that I wanted to carry through. And then you have a little slight image of Brontë in the shape of a cloud. He's there. He’s just come back in another way and the love hasn't gone away, the love hasn't diminished at all. It's still very much there. So that's when Tomie is inspired and he's got a sense of purpose now and he's walking down the hill toward the studio, he hangs up his coat, and he sits down and starts drawing a picture of Brontë. And he takes down a tin Mexican frame and puts the picture of Brontë in it.

RS: Is that an actual Tomie artifact, or is it you?

BM: That frame? I don’t know that he had anything exactly like this, but he did have a lot of Mexican folk art from Oaxaca and other areas of Mexico. I think he had enough things that were similar to this, and there are birds, which were a very favorite emblem or symbol of Tomie’s. And then this is just a vibrant almost explosion of love coming out from the top of this heart-shaped frame. And he loved hearts too. So I thought it would be an interesting combination of elements that meant something to him and would maybe reflect him and his nature. I actually never visited his house, so I just looked at photographs of his studio and his home and some of his collections of things. So I had my own interpretation of what the house was like, and maybe that allowed me to have a little more creative freedom as well.

RS: How do you stop yourself from feeling strait-jacketed? I mean, I don't know if there were any demands from Tomie’s estate about how you would do this book, but just having this enormous presence from American children's literature kind of looking over your shoulder — it's his words — wasn't that intimidating?

BM: Yes, it was. It was very intimidating. Luckily, Bob Hechtel (Tomie’s longtime assistant) was wonderful. He was of course very much involved in approving who was going to illustrate the book. Fortunately, he knew that Tomie was aware of and liked my work. Bob knew that. So I think that I had his blessing to move forward and illustrate the book. And everybody was pretty hands off. Bob really wanted me to find my own interpretation of the book. Laurent definitely did. In fact, Tomie had started sketches for the manuscript just before he died, and Laurent didn't want me to see them. I would have been just paralyzed seeing those, so it was good not to. And then at one point I thought, I just have to relax. I think Tomie would want me to relax with this, he would want me to have fun. So I tried that, but it took a bit of courage to move ahead with that and to realize that it was such an honor to be given that role of interpreting his book and who he was. I've loved his work for a long time, so I hoped that I wouldn't block the creative motion of doing the book. Sometimes I think an artist can stand in their own way when they're trying to interpret a manuscript. I wanted to break that wall and get beyond that and just enjoy, have fun, just have joy doing the drawings and not think of this giant of children's books breathing down my neck. Just to be playful, to try to do something simple and let down my guard.

RS: And I imagine it’s hard that the reason you’re illustrating this book is that Tomie didn’t live to do so, right? So Tomie’s death kind of overshadows the whole thing. But the book isn’t about Tomie’s death. And thank God you don’t have Tomie die in the book.

BM: Yes, yes, this is true.

RS: You kept it as the manuscript created by a living person which was about the death of his beloved pet, but not about his own death, which of course was on all our minds, and I imagine would have been on yours in creating the book.

BM: Yes, it definitely was on my mind as I was doing it. It was just so important to get it right. It was his last message to us, really, and I was just a vehicle to get that message out into the world, because there had to be drawings with it. And it had to be an interpretation of that manuscript. But I think that he becomes the dog, and we become Tomie in this story, and we find a way forward with our grief about losing him. He died so suddenly — I mean, he was not a twenty-year-old guy, so it wasn’t entirely a shock, but still. Just suddenly he wasn’t there. Just like Brontë. To quote the book: “The day that you left me, I knew I would miss you. And I did. Every day, every night.” I think that echoes what so many of us felt when he suddenly was gone.

RS: But you can't make a book out of that because if you do it's just kind of a Tomie souvenir, and it has to be a book for children, right? So you have to just do that manuscript the same way Tomie would have done that manuscript. Not in the same way but with the same process — you're not memorializing anybody but Brontë.

BM: Yes, and that's true. In fact, even thinking about that as I was drawing Tomie, I mean the guy looks a lot like Santa Claus. So every once in a while, I would just think, Oh.

RS: There’s Raymond Briggs coming back in. Father Christmas.

BM: I wanted my Tomie-character to be like the best grand-uncle that ever showed up in some kid's life. So it’s Tomie, but it also is just someone who every child can relate to, with a dog.

RS: Was Tomie always the protagonist from the beginning?

BM: I believe so.

RS: Because he was the “I.” I mean, you could have conceivably had a child narrator.

BM: Yes, I could have. I could have, that's true. But I think that the character was so much him. I'll read you the first part of this. “You flew to me on an airplane from Chicago. I put you on my lap for the drive home. The first night you slept in your crate, next to my bed. The next night you whimpered a little. So I let you sleep on my bed — for the next twelve and a half years.” Yeah, that's Tomie, that's who he was. And I mean Brontë was a puppy that he had sent to him from a breeder in Chicago. And he drove home with Bob driving the car, because Tomie didn’t drive. He held Brontë in his lap. So this story is very autobiographical. And Laurent was so close to Tomie that he also brought something to the process of how I envisioned the story, because he knew all these details — about Brontë, about Tomie and the relationship they had, about his interest in collecting art, about the source of inspiration of his work. We talked a lot about Tomie, so I think it was in my head that this protagonist would be Tomie and not someone else. But the idea of a child narrator is intriguing. Maybe I'll do some sketches of a little kid instead, like a little behind-the-scenes aftermath story for myself, just to see how it would work.

RS: How did your own feelings about pet death intersect with the creation of this book? You had just lost a cat, right?

BM: I had a beloved Siamese cat named Emma. And she died two weeks before the conversation I had with Laurent. So it was really fresh — in fact, I don't want to creep anybody out, but I still have her ashes in my studio and I need to bury them.

RS: I keep my sister’s on the back porch.

BM: I know there’s a spot in the backyard where Emma’s best friend, who was a much older cat, is buried, and I know she'd be happy being there. But I can't bring myself to part with her in that way yet — if ever. I think I wanted to find a way to get through my grief about her, so in some ways this story was very cathartic for me because I can read it and think, Yeah, I'm not alone. I'm not the only person who suffers a loss like this. The emptiness.

RS: You see the empty bed.

BM: And the energy is just drained out of you. That was me. That’s how I felt. And then in the kitchen seeing the pet bowls. Sitting at a chair and looking at a collar or some favorite toy or something of that animal. And they’re just not there anymore. It’s an emptiness in the house. An emptiness in patterns and how you get up in the morning and what you do. This was a very fresh experience of mine and I just projected it onto Tomie, or this Tomie character, who could be Santa Claus.

RS: Or Barbara.

BM: Or me, yes. Exactly. I have to grow a beard.

RS: This is all making me remember when a friend of mine's beloved poodle died after many, many years, and I was saying to her, “So how are you?” And she said, “You know, the thing about having a pet die is that it's very clean. You don't have the same mixture of feelings you do when it's a close friend or a family member.” You had this relationship with the pet, the pet is gone, and you don't keep trying to fix things with the pet the way you do with a dead person. She was oddly comforted by the fact that her feelings about her poodle stayed with her. She still loves the poodle, but it wasn't a complicated feeling.

BM: I think that makes a lot of sense because very few human relationships are as straightforward and uncluttered as a relationship you have with a pet. That's for sure. My dad died a long time ago, and I still have things I wish I could say to him. It's definitely a different relationship. I had to fly out to North Dakota recently to be with my mom who had surgery to remove a malignant tumor from her intestines. She's ninety-six, so she was elated that the oncologist told her that she could choose not to have further treatment. All this stuff that goes on with that and anticipatory grief, and when you have a very elderly parent you know this is right around the corner. So that, and the death of my father and other people who were near and dear to me, fed into this book too. But I tend to be a happy person by nature, and I can't get held down very long. I just have to spring forward and find joy in almost any situation.

RS: Find the rainbow!

BM: My son is director of the contemplative studies department at Brown, so he deals a lot with Taoist transcendental theories. And we've talked about death a bit. Taoism is not like Christianity where you go up to the pearly gates and you either get accepted into the biggest, grandest country club in the world, or in the universe, or kicked downstairs. In Taoism you just become part of everything. You go back into the earth, it's very much to do with the seasons and seasonal growth and things going into the ground and coming back so it's a different sensibility. There's a lot of joy in it and it's not judgmental. It's not like if you committed sins in life it’s going to come back at you later. So I think that part of it, too, is just the joy of reinvention or something re-created in a way, which exists in all religions, I guess, or all forms of spirituality.

RS: I think that I can see that expressed in this book. I mean there’s the glimpse of Brontë in the cloud, but we’re not meant to believe, “Ooh, it’s the spirit of Brontë,” right? We’re seeing it through Tomie’s eyes. It’s his realization that Brontë is in him, and he will always have his love for Brontë.

BM: And that is what moves forward. It’s just love. It’s just a book about love, really. And love transforming into something else. It’s not just in one object; it's not just in a physical body — love is existential. It goes way beyond the limits of one physical thing. And it's everywhere. There’s a meditation that my son likes to do called the Golden Light where you absorb things. You bring things in from outside that make you happy and you visualize them moving around in your body. Once they're in your body, you release them and it just glows out. You bring the joy of all of these experiences that you are bringing in as you’re meditating and they release into the world and they travel over rooftops and backyards and fields and mountains and rivers.

RS: There’s your snowman again.

BM: Yeah, exactly. Maybe Raymond Briggs was a bit of an existentialist himself.

RS: Do you know Tomie’s Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs?

BM: Yes, I was going to talk to you about that. Yes, indeed.

RS: Because that has one of the most beautiful endings. It reminded me of this book. Of Brontë. The character, who's Tomie also, after his second grandmother has died, thinks, "Now you are both Nana Upstairs." And with your book we do that as fans and friends of Tomie. Even though his death is not in the book, we can't escape it ourselves.

BM: That's true, and in the illustrations when Nana Upstairs dies, he looks out the window and he has this epiphany when he sees a falling star, and there's that arc that somewhat duplicates the arc of the rainbow in my book. And then he sees another falling star when Nana Downstairs dies. So yes, these two books are good bookends, I think, one for the other.

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