This wasn’t my first SCBWI conference. But it was the first in the past four years (read: since the pandemic put a halt to all in-person events) and that alone was enough to make me pack my bags and drive three and a half hours north to St. Paul, MN last weekend.
Since I left my corporate graphic design job in 2018, SCBWI, or The Society for Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators has provided me with many things: community, knowledge, accountability, and as was certainly true this past Saturday, reunion with a more child-like perspective.
At the time I joined in April of 2018, I was a freelance ingenue and the somewhat disbelieving recipient of an illustration commission for my first book, Odd Animal ABC’s with The Blue Manatee Press. While I’m still working towards another published book (this time as illustrator and author) I have gained both confidence and craft in the intervening years. And that’s due in large part to many hours bringing pencil and paintbrush to paper. But I’d be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the people who have inspired me and kept me accountable in between those hours.
Three such people joined me at the conference at St. Paul College, my friends and fellow illustrators, Candice, Jane, and Dorothia. SCBWI is unique in that members cross a wide range of ages and levels of experience. I’m the youngest in my critique group of which Candice is also a part, and Jane and Dorothia are more than twice my age. If we have anything in common (aside from our shared interest in writing and illustrating for children) though it’s that each of us is well in tune with our inner kid.
And it was that childlike mindset that led Jane, Dorothia and I to play hooky from the Saturday afternoon conference sessions and skip a few blocks over to the indie Red Balloon Bookstore and then Wet Paint, a locally owned art supply store.
“We were kids in a candy shop! Or rather artists amid candy colored paint tubes and pastel piles of picture books.”
We were kids in a candy shop! Or rather artists amid candy colored paint tubes and pastel piles of picture books. Naturally, we all left totting heavy paper bags from both locales. (A pattern I continued on my way back home to Des Moines with a stop at Minneapolis’s rival picture book haven, Wild Rumpus (after a slice of Margherita at a local Neapolitan pie joint!).
Saturday night included another excursion, this time with Candice and Jeanette Levy (of Bloomsbury), one of the two art directors in attendance to Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis. There we wandered three floors of artist studios, sipped some not-so-kid friendly beverages, and chatted like old friends (of which two of us actually are!).
All in all, I left the Twin Cities with a belly full of pizza, a head full of new ideas, and a heart full of love for this community.
