An interview with Shaun Tan
Friend to Drawn! Naseem Hrab, who works at the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, has graciously shared an interview she and Jellaby author Kean Soo conducted with illustrator Shaun Tan during his tour for Tales From Outer Suburbia, which is released in the US on February 1st. Here’s Naseem:
After attending two presentations, two signings and one interview with Shaun Tan in less than 24 hours, I can officially say that I will never tire of him or his work. Shaun is behind some of the most brilliant and fascinating picture books of recent years (The Lost Thing and The Red Tree), as well as the critically acclaimed graphic novel, The Arrival. He’s even worked as a concept artist for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar’s WALL-E. And he’s one of the nicest, most humble and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet. His newest book, a beautifully illustrated collection of 15 short stories titled Tales from Outer Suburbia, is a departure from his usual work that upholds his incredibly inventive style.
Kean Soo and I got to chat with Shaun while he was on the Toronto leg of his Canadian book tour. In our hour long interview we talked about what it was like to create Tales from Outer Suburbia, his work habits, life with parakeets, and of course, what he’s working on next.
-Naseem Hrab
NH: I’d like to start off by asking you about Tales from Outer Suburbia. What’s the history of the project? How long did it take you to create it?
ST: There are some pieces in Tales from Outer Suburbia that are quite old. The story “Make Your Own Pet†is actually from 2000, so it’s about eight years old. A lot of the other ones were all produced in the space of about 2 to 3 years. It was quite a protracted period. I would dip into the stories—have them in the drawer, so to speak—and review them, and then maybe spend a bit of time with them and then come out again. I was working on The Arrival mostly, so The Arrival was my main occupation for a while. It was a very rigorous book to do. At times the crafting of it was a little bit painstaking and almost dull, because you know you’ve already conceived the ideas needed and you just have to physically realize them, and that’s hard. And the conceptual, playful part of my work was taking a back seat, so I kept sneaking away to write a little more for Tales from Outer Suburbia because it was so much fun. And then I’d go back to The Arrival, so it was about 2 to 3 years of doing that.
One story I wrote in a car because I had an appointment to see an accountant, and I got the time mixed up, so I showed up 2 hours early and had nothing else to do. Strangely, it was a pretty good draft! But that’s unusual. And other stories were like a year or two of revisiting and rewriting. I kept writing and re-writing “Grandpa’s Story†in different forms again and again because it wasn’t quite right. It was quite difficult.
