Color and light, glass and memory. These all collide in this picture book in the most beautiful of ways and provide a tiny shard of hope in the darkness.

Emily Barth Isler is the award-winning author of the middle grade novels AfterMath and The Color of Sound. Her writing has appeared in Allure, Oprah Daily, O Quarterly, Kveller, Publisher’s Weekly, Today.com, and more. As the cofounder of the Burbank Book Festival in Southern California, Isler loves providing opportunities for all kinds of stories to be heard. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two kids. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram.

Vesper Stamper writes and illustrates books that tell stories of broken things being put back together. Her debut novel, What the Night Sings, was a Sydney Taylor Book Award winner, a National Book Award nominee, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. She and her husband, Ben Stamper, have all sorts of artistic escapades near New York City, where Vesper teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram.

THREE PIECES OF BROKEN GLASS is a picture book about broken glass. When a young girl is visiting her Great Grandma Inge, she accidentally breaks one of the beautiful water glasses. She tearfully apologizes over and over until Great grandma explains that’s it’s just a thing. That’s when she notices the three fragments of colored glass sitting on the windowsill. And then the story gets really interesting (I won’t spoil it). The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous! The way color splashes around this book is like light refracting around a room.

Welcome Emily and Vesper!

Me: Emily, this story is so beautifully told and so needed right now. What inspired the idea for this manuscript?

Emily: This family story, of the broken glass and Inge’s release from the Isle of Man, is one I heard over two decades ago, and I always thought it was an incredible story. But the idea that it could– should!– be part of a picture book came a few years ago from a conversation with my father-in-law (Inge’s son, Bob) and my best friend, Amy, about so-called “lucky charms,” and why we give meaning to certain artifacts from our lives. That conversation sparked the idea in my head that this piece of broken glass that has been handed down in our family was part of a much larger story of persistence and resilience and love. From there, once I thought of other examples of broken glass, the story became clear to me! 

Me: Vesper, your work here is stunning! The colors and textures weaving through the scenes are so beautiful! I saw a lovely process video on your Instagram of some of the watercolor painting work you did for this book’s end papers. Can you talk about your illustration style used here? How did it differ for this project compared to some of your other illustration projects? Did you also incorporate some digital techniques here?

Vesper: Thank you! This book really represented a time of rest for me. I work on multiple books at once, and I had just completed work on A Knot is Not a Tangle, which is far, far more detailed than Three Pieces of Broken Glass. It actually took a toll on my eyesight! From the first time I read the manuscript, I knew how I would illustrate it, which was the polar opposite—broad, bold strokes, and letting the paint truly dance. That’s how I wanted to depict light, which is notoriously difficult. I have a solar-powered prism in my studio window, and just as Emily’s text says, I would just watch the rainbows dance on the wall, observing how they moved and changed. That was my inspiration for the visual language in this book.

I don’t typically use digital techniques except to clean up my work. I have done a couple of books that I colored digitally, and I love that technique, too, but my work is always grounded in traditional materials, because I’m very sensorily-oriented, more than I even realized. I need to physically feel the material, or it’s as though the work doesn’t exist for me.

Me: Vesper, in that same Instagram post you quoted Scott Cairns: “The substantive qualities of the medium must become adored.” This throwaway line from an interview of Cairns has become a guiding philosophy, one I try to hammer home with my university students. A life built on artmaking is risky, not just financially, but because sometimes you get stuck in one aspect of the medium and forget that it has other qualities it may want to introduce to you. This book helped me get out of a certain rut—not that I’m not happy with other works, but the watercolor had something it wanted to say to me in this project.” What was it the watercolor had to say to you in the illustrations for this book? How did it shape the art you made here?

Vesper: It’s true that watercolor can be very precise and controlled, and that approach is another tool in my toolbox. But I try to treat each manuscript as an individual, the way I try to treat human beings. Each story really does tell me how it wants to be depicted. Don’t forget, the story is a medium, too—and its substantive qualities must also become adored! For example, I’m doing a book now that’s all in hand-painted paper collage, which is a first for me. I couldn’t envision that book any other way. Illustrating Three Pieces had to be in watercolor, both for its translucent, glass-like qualities and its ability to depict reflections effortlessly, but it had to be handled completely differently than my other books. This book also deals with family memories which are connected with world historical events, so that part of the visual language needed its own approach. In my illustrated historical novels, I’ve used black-and-white ink washes to give the sense of distant memory or archival material, so I brought that in here to contrast with the washy watercolors and create a distinction between past and present.

Me:  The text and  illustrations work so wonderfully together here in this story. How many revisions did each of you have to make to get this story to the final product?

Emily: That’s a great question– I don’t keep track of revisions concretely, so I can’t give you an exact number, but I do know that there are two people whose input helped shape the story along the way. First, my agent, Emily Keyes, encouraged me to make the narrative more concise in early versions, and to shape the story for the intended audience, which was hugely helpful. Then, once we sold it to Emma Ledbetter, then an editor at Abrams, Emma was incredibly thoughtful about the story and how to best tell it. I remember the first phone call I had with her about the book, thinking, “oh, this is the person I want to work with on this!” And what Emma does so well is that she asks great questions. She asked me something along the lines of, “why is Inge telling this particular story on this particular day?” and we had some great conversations about that, which led to the kind of outer-frame of the story, with the main child-character breaking a glass at a fancy lunch and learning her family stories in that context. And finally, Vesper added so much to the story– there were some lines Emma and I cut once we saw her sketches, because her illustrations tell parts of the story better than any words ever could! So it’s truly a team effort!!

Vesper: It doesn’t always happen this way—trust me!— but this book was more or less born fully formed in my head, like Aphrodite! I think because after my last book, I was ready for a bit of freedom in my painting, the illustrations in Three Pieces came to me as I felt that freedom wanting to bust out. I didn’t do any revisions, but I did do quite a bit of painting experimentation to see how it felt to open up my technique in that way. Emily’s text had the perfect amount of room for me to interpret the story as I saw it, and her repeated line about the glass casting rainbows on the wall, or on the girl’s hands, both gave me a visual conceit I could work with and enabled me to let go of control.

Me: What is something that surprised each of you in the creation of this story?

Emily: This is my first picture book as an author, so everything about this process has been a wonderful surprise. I think seeing Vesper’s first sketches for the book was such a profound moment for me– I had never had the experience of collaborating with an artist like this, and Vesper is a brilliant creative, both with words and with pictures, and I was blown away by how much her art added to the story. She was able to convey things I didn’t even realize I wanted to “say” through her illustrations. She took tiny details from the story and made them key elements of the narrative. I burst into tears when I saw her sketches– Vesper is like a composer who took my simple melody and orchestrated it with hundreds of instruments and added all these harmonies and themes I hadn’t even known were part of the symphony. It was the best surprise.

Vesper: I’ve done quite a bit of work that centers on Jewish experience, especially the Holocaust, and I always want to hold that with a lot of care and sobriety. What surprised me about Emily’s text and the images that came from it was the way she expanded the subject of what “broken” means. Often when non-Jewish people think about Jewish experience, it’s centered around trauma; moving through trauma to hope and resilience. That’s obviously part of it, but it’s also important to understand the joy and hope that are just inherent in the Jewish story, that are chosen for their own sake. I love that two of the pieces of broken glass are from events born of joy (the wedding) and hope (the premonition of Inge’s freedom). That’s been my experience of Jewish identity, and I love that that message is being given as a gift to readers.

Me: Do either of you have any advice for new writers and/or illustrators?

Emily: Less is more!! I think that before this process– and I now have three other picture books in various stages of pre-publications, each with different illustrators– I thought that as the author, it was my job to envision the basic outline of illustrations and convey that to the artist, but I quickly learned that gifted illustrators, like Vesper and the others I’m lucky to be working with on other books, bring in ideas I could never have imagined! And they’re far better than what I might have offered. The beauty of collaboration is the multiple perspectives that marry in a book like this– those of the author, the illustrator, their agents, the editor, the art director/designer (ours for THREE PIECES OF BROKEN GLASS is the incomparable Melissa Nelson Greenberg, who also brought so much to this process!!). I once thought that writing was a lonely job, but once I really got working, I have seen that there is opportunity to collaborate far more than I previously knew, and that the work is so much richer for it!

Vesper: Before you stress out about “making it”, learn to fall in love with your medium. Accomplishments come and go. The thrill of getting a book deal fades into the reality of the hard work. Establish a relationship of loving obsession with your work first, in private, where no one else can see, because that’s the fuel that will keep you going, and nothing can take that away from you. Let the professional chips fall where they may—but commit yourself to pursuing curiosity and growth, because there is no such thing as “arriving”, only falling more in love with making your work.

Me: Emily, I love the line you ended on in your author’s note: “May the legacy of those who came before live on in all of us as we seek to find beauty and strength in even the darkest, most broken times.” It strikes me as almost a benediction for the reader. What is it that you hope this book will achieve? What do you want readers to be left with after reading this book? 

Emily: I really hope that this book sparks curiosity in its readers, young and old, about their own family histories, and about other cultures. I hope a lot of people who aren’t Jewish read this book, and learn something beautiful about our culture and history, and find common threads that connect to their own cultures! I hope kids reading it are inspired to ask questions about their family’s stories– how they got to where they now live and why; what core beliefs have been passed down from generation to generation; what values are conveyed through the objects we hold dear? I wrote this story with my own kids and their cousins in mind– they were all too young or not born yet to really know their great-grandma, Inge, and her generation, but their stories of bravery, resilience, and sacrifice are so instrumental in our current, lucky circumstances, and they will always live on because we keep telling their stories. In dark times like what we are experiencing in the world right now, I hope that this story spreads more hope.

Here, here! Thank you so much for stopping by my blog today Emily and Vesper.

Dear readers, this book published earlier this month. If you haven’t had a chance yet to read it, I highly recommend it. It’s a beautiful story with such powerful depth and layers, colors and textures all found in broken glass. Trust me when I say, you won’t want to miss it!