Agent Laurel Symonds on the Creativity, Business, and Work-Life Balance of Kid Lit

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agent, business, Dogs, Doug Cenko, Laurel Symonds, productivity, Shelly Vaughan James, submissions

Agent Laurel Symonds began her publishing career in the editorial department of HarperCollins Children’s Books/Katherine Tegen Books in New York City and joined the Bent Agency in 2018. She’s also had positions in the marketing department at a small publishing house, in a library, and as a bookseller at one of the nation’s best independent bookstores. She’s looking for authors and illustrators from across the picture book-YA spectrum, especially underrepresented stories and voices. And! …She’s here to share some of all this kid lit wisdom she’s gathered before she sits on faculty for this year’s Working Writers Retreat.

SARAH PARKER-LEE: Your decades’ worth of experience with marketing, editing, bookselling, and publishing gives you a lot of insight into both the creative and business sides of kid lit. We can’t wait to learn from you at the retreat! What is one thing from each side you think authors and illustrators should know but often don’t?

Emma Chichester Clark’s TOTO Illustration Process and Her Muse—Her Dog, Plum

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chapter book, Dogs, Emma Chichester Clark, HarperCollins, illustrator, illustrator tips, illustrators, interview, Michael Morpurgo, middle grade, Plum, The Wizard of Oz, Toto

Emma Chichester Clark is the illustrator of the beautiful middle-grade chapter book, Toto: The Dog-Gone Amazing Story of the Wizard of Oz. Its 250+ full-color images showcase Chichester Clark’s signature style.

CHRISTINE VAN ZANDT: Welcome to Kite Tales! In Toto, you collaborate once again with author, Michael Morpurgo. How does illustrating well-known stories differ from working on new fiction? Does having a dog as the narrator change your focus when you work on the art?

EMMA CHICHESTER CLARK: In fact, it’s my sixth collaboration with Michael. We have also done versions of Pinocchio, Aesop’s Fables, Hansel and Gretel, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and a Christmas story called The Best of Times. Almost all of them were about well-known characters and I had to find my own ideas about that. This is a challenge because the images we all already know so well are imprinted in our heads. With each character, I have to draw and redraw them, over and over again, until I find someone that belongs to me but who is, at the same time, true to the character I’m representing. [In Toto], having a dog as the narrator was the most fun of all because I adore dogs. I have one, Plum, who is not unlike Toto in appearance and I spend a lot of my time trying to interpret what is going on in her doggy brain.

CVZ: You are also an author. Please give us some insight into your process, both as an illustrator and an author-illustrator.