Q&A with J.H. Diehl

  

 

 

 

J.H. Diehl is the author of the new book The Daydreaming Sink: A Book of Household Limericks. Her other books include the middle grade novel Tiny Infinities. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Daydreaming Sink?

 

A: The Daydreaming Sink started out as a daily exercise while I was drafting a novel, to prove to myself that I could start and finish a piece of writing (a five-line verse seemed doable, while the novel went on and on…).

 

Digging deeper, I can say that, while limericks are by tradition humorous and about mischief and breaking rules, they often also capture a feeling of being an outsider, a not uncommon state of mind for writers drafting novels. But my biggest inspiration was my dad, who passed down to me his love of puns and nonsense.

 

Happily, after a wonderful editor at Chronicle Books bought my novel – a middle grade book called Tiny Infinities – I got busy with that and set the verses aside.

 

Then, during the pandemic, my friend Kathryn Freeman and I started walking our dogs together every Thursday afternoon. We’ve been friends for decades and have collaborated on a number of projects, including my first picture book, Loon Chase.

 

During one of our walks, I told Katie about these nonsense limericks, and she started creating drawings for them. I am forever grateful, because I think her wonderful, whimsical drawings make the book.

 

Q: Have you been writing limericks for a long time?

 

A: No, but I’ve been hearing their rhythms for almost as long as I can remember. Nearly every night of my childhood my dad read to me from the great books he’d grown up with.

 

Since he became a parent late in life, these were mainly novels, stories and poems by 19th century authors. He particularly loved Lear. I can still hear his chuckling overtaking him as he read Lear’s Book of Nonsense out loud.

 

Q: Do you have a favorite Edward Lear limerick?

 

A: I guess it must be “There was an old man with a beard,” the limerick I parodied in my “Epilogue for Edward Lear” in The Daydreaming Sink. It captures the spirit of absurdity and simple silliness that I love about nonsense writing. Lear never gave his limericks titles, by the way, so they’re typically identified by their first lines.

 

I favor that particular limerick even more now because of the fantastic portrait Katie drew of Edward Lear. Her drawing very cleverly echoes both the original verse and the one in The Daydreaming Sink.  

 

Q: Your website says of the book, “It is a book to dip into when you need a moment that is entirely unrelated to the news.” Can you say more about that?

 

A: The Daydreaming Sink is a humor/gift book: a collection of extraordinary ordinary objects – a sink, a kettle, a doormat, a safety pin…they daydream, they dare they groove they gripe. It’s a book I hope will give readers a smile or two. You can take one bite – that is, enjoy them one at a time – or read all 36.

 

Something I learned from my dad reading to me out loud is that nonsense writing can be a kind of literary balm. That is, an echo, through humor, of the fact that life doesn’t always make sense.

 

I think it can help to ease some of the not-funny real-world headlines, issues and events we live through, which also sometimes feel like they make no sense.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A novel set on a ship chased by a U-Boat as it crosses the Atlantic in 1916. It’s based on a family story.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: If Edward Lear’s name is unfamiliar, perhaps you’ve heard of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” his most famous poem. Lear was a renowned landscape painter in his day, and once gave Queen Victoria painting lessons. He lived an extraordinary, difficult, fascinating life.

 

I highly recommend Jenny Uglow’s biography, Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense.

 

Kathryn Freeman and I first met in Poland, near the end of the Cold War, when our spouses were both posted to Warsaw as foreign correspondents. We broke a cardinal rule in picture book publishing by successfully submitting Loon Chase together as collaborators.

 

Kathryn is an artist and storyteller whose paintings are known for their poetic realism as well as their magical narratives. She has created large murals for public libraries in Bethesda, MD and Jacksonville, FL, and Pomegranate has reprinted her paintings on its products.

 

An exhibition of her work is planned for 2027 at the Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art at Florida Southern College. She blogs and posts about her new work here. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with J.H. Diehl.