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| Photo by Justine Latour |
Charlotte Parent is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book Muriel and the Mystery. She lives in Montreal.
Q: What inspired you to create Muriel and the Mystery?
A: In the weeks before writing this story, I had been thinking about the unknown, uncertainty, and risk-taking (in my life and in my creative work).
I read a long-form interview with Anne Herbauts, a Belgian picture book author and illustrator, who talked about creating with one’s head “in the hedge”: she says, “It's the fact, in one's own work, of not staying in the middle of the garden, in one's known, where one risks getting bored and repeating oneself. You have to rub up against the hedge, to go into the hedge.”
The idea of the hedge is so wonderfully weird; it feels so true to my experience of creativity. The hedge around a garden is both a domestic and a liminal, slightly scary space.
The evening after reading the interview, I sketched a mouse having tea with what I thought of as “the Unknown.” I’m pretty sure this was my way of exploring the limit between the domestic and the mysterious, between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
The mouse became a shrew and the unknown became a mystery, but that scene is at the heart of Muriel and the Mystery!
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, “Parent’s enigmatic work promotes the open-minded embrace of the unknown.” What do you think of that description?
A: That sounds right to me. I don’t know if Muriel truly embraces the mystery in the end. She certainly makes room for it in her life, but her expression in the last spread is a little inscrutable; I’m not sure she is at the “open-minded embrace of the unknown” level yet. She’s working on it, though!
I appreciate that they called the book “enigmatic” – with this book, I tried to leave just enough strings untied, and to make interpretation a true collaboration between the reader and the book. I am a firm believer that children can handle weird, open-ended stories.
Q: Why did you decide to make Muriel a shrew?
A: Actually, the shrew came first! I drew a shrew one night, just because. She looked tense. I remember thinking right then that her name could be “Murielle.” Murielle is my grandmother’s name, and I think the apparent nervousness of little shrew I drew reminded me of her.
In French (my first language), a shrew is a “musaraigne,” and I liked the alliteration in “Murielle la musaraigne.” The name stuck, and so did the shrew.
My agent, Jennifer Laughran, would later tell me that shrews are notoriously very fearful animals that can apparently die from fright when startled. (She specified that she did not recommend incorporating this into the book.) It seems very fitting for Muriel, a nervous character who loves nothing more than a consistent routine, to be a shrew.
Q: Did you work on the text first or the illustrations first--or both simultaneously?
A: I wrote the text first. I was lying in bed with a Covid-induced fever. It took me 15 minutes to write– that’s not a huge feat in itself considering that it was a little over 300 words, but it felt huge because I had been laboring over the same picture-book texts for months before this story came to me!
Once I had the text, I drew a storyboard. Throughout the whole process, as I worked on the illustrations, I tweaked the text to make sure both elements worked well together. That’s one benefit of being both the author and illustrator!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am currently working on the final illustrations for an Early Reader series written by my brother, Félix. They tell the story of a large dog and a tiny mouse living together in a small apartment. I’m using watercolour for this project, and I am learning a lot!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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