Children’s book author visits St. John’s School

Children’s book author and illustrator Teri Sloat visited St. John School last week and shared with her young audience how she crafts her stories and illustrations and the importance of living a creative life. In a presentation titled “Falling in Love With Words and Books” Sloat walked the audience through her own creative process, including her origins as a teacher, falling in love with the books she read to her students.
“Words are like paint brushes,” she said. “And I use them to paint from my imagination.”
Sloat currently lives in Sebastopol, but for more than a decade spent a significant amount of time in a Yup’ik village in Alaska. In addition to her children’s books, she has also undertaken a project to create illustrated and written versions of Yup’ik folktales.
“I had to figure out how to go from the oral tradition to print,” Sloat said. “How was I going to represent actions and expressions with words?”
Her book “Berry Magic” is based on a folktale about how all the different kinds of berries came to grow on the tundra and she used its creation to illustrate this process. She also told them how the Yup’ik use a “story knife” which they use to carve images into the mud as they tell their stories to create living illustrations.
Copperfield’s Books was also on hand with a collection of Sloat’s books.
Sloat discussed with the students through some of her books how she crafts rhymes and also uses descriptive words like “strutted” versus “walked” and “gentleman” versus “man.”
“Writing in rhymes tickles my brain,” she said, to titters of laughter from the audience.
She also discussed the role of an illustrator, and how she decides when to do her own illustrations and when to work with an outside illustrator. She used a draft of one of her books to demonstrate why it’s important for the illustrator to read the words.
“If the story says a red scarf, the scarf has to be red,” she said. “The illustrator has to gather the words, gather the characters, gather what house they live in, gather what they are wearing, gather it all.”
She sketched on a white board as she talked about the creation of a book called “I Am A Snake.” She discussed how a larger head and smaller body denotes a young animal, and how sometimes the images she has in her head don’t end up working for the story.
She then held a brief question and answer period with the kids. Students asked if she has a special room where she writes (yes, although for years she wrote at the dining room table), what her favorite book is (whichever one she’s working on right now), and what was her first book (“From Letter to Letter,” written 28 years ago).
In the end what she hopes is that young people take away the importance of believing in their own ideas and imagination.
“I really want to talk to kids about imagination, and that just because your ideas are different, doesn’t mean they aren’t the best ideas; to not put those ideas away just because they don’t see others doing the same things,” she said.