Adam Gustavson is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book The Aliens Do NOT Want to Go Home. His other books include The Froggies Do NOT Want to Sleep. He lives in New Jersey.
Q: What inspired you to create The Aliens Do NOT Want to Go Home?
A: The Aliens Do NOT Want to Go Home is a follow up to The Froggies Do NOT Want to Sleep, published by Charlesbridge in 2021. I’m a big fan of what I might call the anti-bedtime story… books that are perfect gifts for (often single) aunts and uncles to give.
To be a child is to be subject to the controlling whims of adults. Somewhere in that sea of schedules, manners, and mealtimes there is almost always a family friend or relative who is on the pro-kid team, who admits that no one wants to go to bed or stop the game or sit still.
The bookshelves that parents curate probably reinforce the values and structures of your immediate family. The books that the Fun Aunt gives you are allowed to push against that.
My kids’ favorite books — and mine — were always the books that my older brother bought. These were stories that wound everyone up at bedtime and that needed to be read in different voices and accents, and it was as if they just fell out of the sky. We bought books carefully; he bought them with a really wonderful recklessness.
In The Aliens Do NOT Want to Go Home, I wanted to get to the feeling of a family party where all the cousins are together and time has no meaning — right up until that moment when you’re plucked up and strapped into the minivan.
The Froggies Do NOT Want to Sleep got at a basic truth through increasingly ridiculous and impossible examples. It was really a metaphor for play and creativity, the way that ideas lead to ideas that lead to games and discoveries that weren’t there before. Structure wise, it’s basically a list.
For the follow up, I didn’t want to make the froggies more than they were--make-believe avatars who live in a book--so I focused on an alien being they drag back to earth through play.
The way it plays out is different, though: there’s nothing unusual in the text. It’s a riff on the “unreliable narrator.” The list of excuses for not going home is perfectly reasonable, but the images unwind into a full-on space invasion.
Q: Did you work on the text first or the illustrations first--or both simultaneously?
A: I worked on the text first, for the most part, but was constantly auditioning little alien monsters in sketchbooks along the way. Since the narrative is mostly a list of excuses for not going home yet, it was important to figure out what species of creature was the best choice for a given excuse.
Likewise, alien invasions come in two main forms, don’t they? There’s the classic War of the Worlds rural landing, and there’s the rampant destruction of a downtown area. The excuses needed to somehow get us from one to the other and back.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it “[g]oofy, highly imaginative, and immense fun.” What do you think of that description?
A: I thought that was some pretty high praise.
Okay, I really liked those three summations for two reasons: the first is that I am definitely goofy, but I was absolutely aspiring to create something imaginative and fun.
The second is that books are pretty hard; ideas are hard to corral, stories are hard to write, and this one took almost a year to do the paintings for. (I take my silliness seriously.) I also gave myself a dozen main characters of different species who had to stay consistent as the sun set and the lighting and colors shifted.
The hope is that work that might take years to complete becomes an immersive 15-minute experience… but one continues to reveal its secrets with repeat readings.
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?
A: I hope they laugh. I hope they come up with voices for the monsters. I hope they take Barbie dolls and stuffed animals and toy trains, LEGO sets, Hot Wheels cars, and old Fisher-Price castles and mash them all together into the same storyline. I hope they put on space helmets and ride rocking horses to pick up groceries for imaginary guests.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m slowly figuring out what happens to the pig and the chicken who get swooped up in the alien invasion.
Purely as an illustrator, I’m also getting to work on a new nonfiction children’s book about parachuting in the early 1900s.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One big thing that crept up on me while I was working on this book was that aspect of creating so many characters and keeping them consistent. There were a few I had to just break down and make models of, so I could draw them from life and examine them from different angles.
I also drove around the countryside and wandered though Google Maps looking for the right sort of farm, and eventually constructed it out of paper so I could plot out the action and vantage points for the book.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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