The Great Bill Peet

I don't remember reading Bill Peet's picture books as a child. But as I read them now, with every turn of the page comes a trickle of long-lost memory. At this point I have revisited at least a dozen of his books, and I am forced to conclude that I must have read all thirty-some of them once upon a time, with one interesting exception.

Bill Peet's stories are occasionally in verse - the Caboose who got Loose being perhaps his most noteworthy. His verse, when he uses it, is clunky. He has a tendency to force a stress onto the wrong word in a familiar word pair, such as train WRECK instead of TRAIN wreck. He also sometimes adds or drops syllables at random, trashing the rhythm he just established.

The Kweeks of Kookatumdee has such pervasive rhythm issues that reading it out loud to my kids was an exercise in futility. Prose would have been easier to read aloud! Since the whole point of verse is the reading out loud experience, Kweeks shoots itself right in the foot.

And yet Peet tells such marvelous stories! Kweeks is one of my favorites, dealing with a flock of flightless birds living on an island which has but a single food-producing tree. After failing to mediate themselves, they fight over the food. One bird grows grows gargantuan while the others get so thin that they can finally fly away.

It's a didactic story, but it is also wide open to interpretation. Was Peet talking about gluttony? Bullies? Communism versus capitalism? The roots of warfare?

My own manuscript is crafted similarly. It is didactic, but different (adult) readers are going to walk away from it with different messages.

Hopefully, not too many will find my story offensive. That is the danger of treading into didactic territory. Even Bill Peet, who I would at this point call my role model, wrote stories that leave me cold. Chiefly among them is the Caboose who got Loose, featuring a female caboose who bemoans her life of being towed about. The only action she takes in the entire story is her decision to accept her miserable, passive situation. I would call it sexism, but the main character in Chester the Worldly Pig makes the same non-action, deciding gruesomely to return to a farmer and await his slaughter. Think that's creepy? Add to that Peet's admission that Chester is essentially an autobiography dressed up as fiction, and you get a downright tragic glimpse into the mental workings of the author.

I had mentioned that there is one interesting exception to Peet's books. Bill Peet wrote an actual non-fiction autobiography. And he did it in picture book format. Bill Peet: an Autobiography, is a massive tome by picture book standards – almost 200 pages! And Peet didn't pull the teeth from his life's story to change it into fuzzy bedtime stories: on page one he writes about his father abandoning the family. Growing up poor, limping through school, an oppressive grandfather, the Depression, working working always working, and a 27-year string of miserable experiences while working for Walt Disney; these are the dark gems of his life that he captured in drawings and presented as children's reading material!

I don't mean to sound disproving. On the contrary, I am thrilled to see that the children's book industry is so open to dark and honest subject matter. Not only did this unlikely work of children's literature get published, it won a Caldecott!

Mostly, I am thrilled for the chance to see into the professional history of an author and illustrator whose work I find both so admirable and so frequently flawed. Peet was an animator and storyboard artist first, a visual story-teller second, and only after much effort did he finally become a writer. And he reinvented himself, methodically trying out multiple avenues for his his artistic bent before becoming a parent and, in reaction, finding a comfortable second career in chidren's books.

Perhaps I can do the same.