It’s the 100th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh. What better way to celebrate than by honoring all of the creators who brought him to life?

Annette Bay Pimentel is the author of several nonfiction picture books, including the Schneider Family Book Award honor book All the Way to the Top, Pura’s Cuentos, and Before Colors. She lives in Moscow, Idaho. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram or BlueSky.

HOW A BEAR BECAME A BOOK: THE COLLABORATION THAT CREATED WINNIE-THE-POOH is a picture book unlike any I’ve seen before. Here the words and the art take an interpretive dance together, weaving words and art in such an intricate way to show how the original character was born, not from one creator but many. This book follows a similar path, coming to life from all who touched it. So in the spirit of the book, I will be interviewing both author and illustrator today!

Welcome Annette!

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about your writing journey. When did you start writing picture books? How has that brought you to writing this picture book?

Annette: When I decided to get serious about writing for kids, I looked for a local critique group. I could only find one in the Florida city where we then lived, but I was very lucky that it was led by the brilliant Jennifer Swanson. Unsurprisingly, given that she was the leader, the critique group focused on nonfiction for kids. I was dubious about whether that was what I wanted to write, but I really, really wanted a critique group, so I dove in. Pretty quickly, as I began to read more deeply, I realized that nonfiction picture books were exactly where I wanted to be. Stories that have actually happened are especially thrilling to me, and I can’t think of anything that beats the delight of collaborating with an illustrator to make a picture book.

Me: I’ve never seen anyone write a picture book about Winnie-the-Pooh in quite this way. It’s a very unique origin story! What gave you the idea for this story?

Annette: My husband is a professor and a few years ago I knew our family would be in Europe for a year during his sabbatical. My process is very connected to the archives and libraries where I do research, so I started to look for projects that I could research there. Pretty quickly I realized that the 100^th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh was coming up.

In 2015, two beautiful picture books were published about the actual bear who inspired Pooh. I loved both of those books. But I’d never read a book for kids about E. H. Shepard’s role in creating the character. I very much grew up with the E. H. Shepard version of Pooh—I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Disney film version of Winnie-the-Pooh, in fact—and Shepard’s illustrations were central to how I understood the books as a girl. I often didn’t understand Milne’s jokes and would use the illustrations to figure out what was funny. So I thought Shepard deserved a shout-out!

Me: The way you’ve written this book is brilliant. It explores writing (where ideas come from, etc.) and publishing (how books are put together). It has such a lovely time playing with words, while slipping in the biographical information. How did you land on this approach? Was there a mentor text?

Annette: Aww, thank you! The book was originally going to be a standard picture book biography of E. H. Shepard, but my early drafts were boring. My critique partners kept pushing me to explain what I saw as the heart of the book. I eventually decided that the heart was the way the art and the text work in tandem.

While I was deep in drafts of this book, another of my critique partners, Eija Sumner, was revising the manuscript that became the metafiction picture book The Good Little Mermaid’s Guide to Bedtime. Eija and I talked about how she was constructing the book in narrative layers and how she shaped the mermaid’s voice to comment on the narration.

I wondered if I could manage a metafiction nonfiction book. It sounded like a fun challenge! I suspect that few people would ever guess that her feisty mermaid inspired my gentle bear.

Me: Ha! True! This is such a deceptively simple manuscript with an incredibly tight design. How many drafts did it take to get to this final state? Were there a lot of revisions or was this a gift from the Muse?

Annette: I have 20 versions saved on my computer before the one we sent out. I also did more revisions with the editor, Mark Podesta. He, along with art director Melisa Vuong, identified spots where the illustrations and book design could help the complicated narrative structure hang together.

It’s especially fitting that this book is about collaboration because it never could have arrived at its final form without lots of collaborators! 

Me: That IS very fitting! Can you tell us a bit about your research process for this book? How long did it take you to research all the different facts and tidbits that went into this story? Any favorite discoveries or research methods?

Annette: Before we left for the year in Europe I read as many published sources as I could—books about Milne and Shepard, critics’ explorations of the books, and historical accounts. In the UK, I spent time in the British Library looking at other books for kids published at the same time by the same publisher—I wanted to understand what was surprising and revolutionary about Winnie-the-Pooh’s book design. I examined Shepard’s sketches at the Victoria and Albert archives. I visited the archives at the University of Surrey to read handwritten correspondence about the publication of the books. And most delightfully of all, my husband and I rented bikes and explored Ashdowne Forest, the original Hundred Acre Wood. 

Me: I’ve seen the sketches at the V&A as well! They were a revelation to me. Speaking of revelations, Faith Pray’s illustrations in this book are absolutely magnificent! I cannot believe the work she did to honor the original work Ernest Shepherd did, working in similar mediums as well as incorporating words from some of his original writings! Did you have any illustration surprises? Any favorites?

Annette: Faith’s art is gorgeous and absolutely central to how the book works.

When I submitted the manuscript, I had very clear ideas about where I thought the page turns should be. But beyond feeling page turns in the rhythm of the manuscript, I don’t usually have very exact pictures in my head of how the illustrations should look. In this manuscript I included art notes but I had only the haziest idea of what it might mean, as the art notes suggested, for the bear to emerge from a cloud of words.

Luckily, Faith also grew up loving Winnie-the-Pooh and understood the process my manuscript describes—that characters start as ideas, then become words, and then can become pictures. She experimented a lot and came up with a beautiful way to show that process illustratively. She used snippets of Milne’s handwriting and snippets of type from the first edition to create a blurred approximation of a bear at the beginning. As the reader turns the pages of the book and reads about the process of publication, the bear becomes more and more distinct, slowly getting an outline and features, and finally becoming a totally adorable Pooh.  It was a delight to watch the illustrations move from early sketches to finished art.

I realized pretty late in the editing process that, except in the subtitle, the text never explicitly says that the bear is Winnie-the-Pooh. Mark and I talked about it, trying to decide whether we needed to include his name somewhere. Eventually I decided that Faith’s art did the work of showing readers who we were talking about. 

Me: You have several picture books published at this point in your career. What advice would you give to aspiring picture book writers?

Annette: Reading widely and deeply in nonfiction picture books is central to my process. I write nonfiction picture books because I love reading them, so it is a joy to feel an obligation to read. My books are always going to be in conversation with other nonfiction picture books, and it’s nice to listen in on some of that chat!

That’s great advice. Thank you for stopping by my blog today Annette.

But wait, dear readers! There’s more! I also interviewed the illustrator!

Faith Pray is the author-illustrator of The Day We Got Lost, Perfectly Imperfect Mira, and The Starkeeper, among others. She comes from a family of talented children’s book creators, but her extraordinary talents for capturing light and shadow and conveying emotion and story through line work are all her own. Faith lives with her husband and children plus two cats in the Pacific Northwest. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram and BlueSky.

Welcome Faith!

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative journey? When did you start creating art and/or illustrating picture books? How did that lead to where you are now as the illustrator of this book? 

Faith: Thanks so much for having me, Jena. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. My dad is a children’s book author-illustrator, and when I was a teenager, I submitted manuscripts to his editors, and got the most gracious rejection letters back. They must have been very encouraging, because I kept writing.  Years later, I was pregnant and on bedrest with twins. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I wrote a novel. The novel went on submission, and I got an invitation to revise and resubmit. Then the twins were born, and chaos reigned. I kept trying to revise the novel, and then we had two more babies, and more chaos, and by the time I thought the novel was ready to resubmit, that first editor had moved to a different imprint and was working on picture books. At that point, I only had quick bursts of time to work on writing while caring for four kids under 5, so I started to work on writing picture books instead, and somewhere in the middle of that, I had a stroke, which left me with months of headaches and dizziness, hospitalizations, and eventually, surgery to patch a hole in my heart.  That experience left me struggling to find myself as a writer again. So, I took a class in visual storytelling as a form of therapy. And through that class, I realized, with or without a flow of words, I could tell stories –  with pictures. And maybe the words would come after that. So I set out to grow myself into a picture book author-illustrator.  And have since found my way back into writing as well. 

Me: Wow! That’s quite a journey! Speaking of writing, Annette Bay Pimentel’s writing in this book is incredible. What was it about her manuscript that drew you in and made you want to be a part of the project?

Faith: I had been wanting to push myself as a storyteller and illustrator beyond my known world for awhile, so when Annette’s playful, interactive manuscript showed up, I was captivated. I love the way the narrator pulls the reader in as part of the story, and the challenge of figuring out how to create a bear out of air and words. Plus, I’m a huge E.H. Shepard fan, and the Winnie-the-Pooh books were my favorites from childhood, so the subject matter had me immediately hooked. And, figuring out how to bring Annette’s text to life was the most enthralling puzzle. I couldn’t wait to jump in.  

Me: I’ve never seen anyone illustrate a picture book about Winnie-the-Pooh in quite this way. It’s a very unique approach. Can you talk about your illustration process a little bit? What media did you use to create the illustrations in this book? Are you mainly a traditional or digital illustrator (or a blend of both)?

Faith: How a Bear Became a Book is a book about making a book, and also about the making of Winnie-the-Pooh, and about collaboration, but told in these overlapping threads of story. When I read the text, I pictured each thread of story weaving together. I decided each story thread needed to be told in a different layer and medium.

The spreads that represent E.H. Shepard’s work are made with tools Shepard used, beginning with pencil, then adding a mix of black and walnut ink, then watercolor. The narrator is made of pencil, ink, watercolor, and colored pencil.   

Every bear in the book has a layer made out of words. I wanted to give it a chaotic dreaminess, using Milne and Shepard’s actual loopy handwriting and notes as well as pages from my own childhood copy of Winnie-the-Pooh for the words. So I bought a reproduction of  Milne’s handwritten Winnie-the-Pooh manuscript, and used scans of those and of other papers, art, and letters written by Milne and Shepard, then printed them onto freezer paper, and  transferred the ink through the screen-print stencils to form bears made out of words. I also wanted to bring in an etherealness to represent imagination becoming tangible. So I created stencils from each bear and some of the other elements in the book, then used a brayer to screen-print those elements onto mulberry paper, which created fibrous, speckled shapes that I could layer into each spread and give them a depth with this faint, airy shape.

I scanned all of those traditionally made art boards and layered them together in Photoshop. I like to use traditional mediums whenever possible, and then compile, edit, and save digitally, which makes everything much easier when sending it to the publisher. 

See a video of Faith’s art process here!

Me: That’s an amazing approach to this project! Do you have a favorite spread that you illustrated for this book?  If yes, which one?

Faith: My favorite spread is the one where, after Ernest Shepard had spent time sketching at Milne’s house and the surrounding Forest, he goes back to his studio and begins to create Winnie-the-Pooh’s imaginary world that we know. I wanted the illustration to feel transformative, so it’s a mix of pencil sketches, ink, screen printing and reverse transfer printing, and I asked my editor Mark and art director Melisa if we could include the outer edges of the artboard, where I test paint daubs for accuracy. It reminded me of some of E. H. Shepard’s sketch studies. I like how it all turned out. You can see a door in a tree, and a partially finished drawing of Rabbit’s house, and there’s a pencilled map of the Hundred Acre Woods.

Me: With all the intricate details you included in the illustrations, were there a lot of revisions? How many drafts did it take to get to this final state?

Faith: The nature of the book and the way it was illustrated meant that most of the work happened in my planning stages – weeks researching, weeks sketching Shepard’s work to get a feel for his style, weeks gathering references from archives and books. I also created multiple layouts for each spread so that less revisions were needed after I sent in thumbnails. In addition to that, I spent lots of time experimenting with mediums until I solved the puzzle of what belonged where, and how to make the finished illustrations look the way I envisioned. So, once our editor, art director, and Annette weighed in on favorite layouts and any historical accuracy, less revision was needed. 

Me: Amazing! What is one thing that surprised you in creating this story?

Faith: I was surprised because I didn’t think I was a nonfiction fan. In my natural habitat, I’ve always leaned into imaginary worlds, mysteries, and fairy tales. I didn’t think nonfiction could be so captivating! The more I researched, the more I wanted to find out about A.A. Milne, Ernest Shepard, the bear Shepard used to draw Winnie-the-Pooh, what kind of drawing table he used, whether he was left or right handed, what sorts of sketchbooks people used at the time, what people wore in those days. I actually tracked down old film clips of Shepard drawing, and Milne and Shepard walking in the Hundred Acre Wood, and I reached out to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, and was sent scans of a hundred pages from their Milne and Shepard archives. I loved the detail finding. Every puzzle, new piece of history, and every art medium experience lit me up.

Me: I love that and can relate! You have several picture books published at this point in your career. What advice would you give to aspiring picture book illustrators?

Faith: Read heaps of picture books, especially ones published in the last ten years, and notice what you like – art mediums, color palettes, compositions, character design, consistency. Be open to learning new things. Connect with other illustrators.  Draw every day if you can. Set achievable goals for yourself and keep it up! 

That is great advice Faith. Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today.

Dear readers, this book published last week. If you haven’t had a chance yet to check it out, you will definitely want to track down a copy. It’s an incredible feat both in writing and illustrating that you won’t want to miss!