One publisher after another told Mo Willems that a talking pigeon determined to drive a bus was an “unusual” idea, but not one for them.
“It really was spaghetti on the wall; nobody expected much of it at all,” said Willems, speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this month from his home in New York.
Two decades-plus and millions of delighted children (and adults) later, Willems has a new picture-book adventure featuring the world’s most famous pigeon: “It’s My Bird-Day!”
Has pigeon learned anything during the last 23 years?
“Barely,” Willems said. “The pigeon is becoming a bit more self aware. The pigeon has made discoveries, like its first name is ‘The.’”
Willems, 58, will be in Chicago later this year to accept the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award. The annual award honors an author “whose significant body of work has enhanced the public’s awareness of the written word,” according to the foundation. Past recipients have included: Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Amy Tan and Ann Patchett. Willems will receive the honor October 13 at the UIC Forum.
“I’m waiting for them to realize a terrible mistake has been made,” Willems joked.
Lanky, with a thick mane of slicked-back silver hair and a shaggy white beard, Willems looks like a man who, in another era, might have been a Nordic explorer. He’s actually a child of Dutch immigrants and born in Des Plaines, although his family spent only four years here before moving to New Orleans.
“I remember a neighbor’s dog,” he said of his time here.
Willems did not have a happy childhood, he said, choosing not to elaborate.
“Books and comics saved me,” he said.
Those childhood memories color the pages of his own work.
“Not every child is seen in their home or in their life. Some children are so unseen that they feel that they are unseeable. What a very lonely, sad place to be. So I try to make sure characters look at you at least once in every book,” he said.
Hence Pigeon’s almost hypnotic one-eyed gaze.
It’s true too of “Elephant & Piggie” early reader books, in which Willems explores the trials and triumphs of two best friends.
“‘Elephant & Piggie’ have to redefine and refigure out their friendship constantly. It’s exhausting, but it’s wonderful,” Willems said.
Willems’ drawings may have the appearance of doodles, but, he says, there is a key difference: “Drawing has intention, and a doodle doesn’t.”
“Every now and then a doodle becomes organized enough that it turns into a drawing and maybe becomes a character or something else,” he said.
There is, he said, “an inordinate amount of work to make it look easy.”
“A lot of the composition, a lot of the page turns and the design is supposed to make it look like the ink is wet on the page — like it just happened,” he said.
And, interestingly, Willems first draws the sketches for the middle of the book.
“As you’re working on a book, the drawings always get better,” he said. “So you start it at the middle because if you’re noticing the drawings in the middle of the book, the story is not doing what it needs to be doing. So those are my worst drawings.”
Willems’ books are best read out loud — and loudly, even if it’s in a space where inside voices are preferred.
“The point is, it’s punk rock. Yelling in a library is radical and fun. … The readers are my orchestra. If you read, ‘blah, blah, blah,’ the kid is going to think it’s boring,” he said.
The key is for adult readers to shed their inhibitions, to undergo, as Willems puts it, a “shame-ectomy.”
Goofiness, he says, is undervalued.
“Silliness is very intimate — people forget that,” he said. “They think it has to be all heart-warming and touching, but humor and silliness are the things you’re going to remember.”
Willems’ silliness has even infected opera, including 2023’s “The Ice Cream Truck is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,” performed at the Kennedy Center.
But surely opera can’t be allowed to include the lyric, “Oh dear, I smell a smelly fart”?
To which Willems replies, “Who says?”
“Opera and picture books are very similar in that they are about characters loudly explaining their interior feelings. … There is a lot of overlap there. The music is beautiful and it’s ridiculous. And anything that is ridiculous is worth doing,” he said.