Join Viet Thanh Nguyen (Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer) and acclaimed artist Minnie Phan in conversation with School Library Journal blogger Elizabeth Bird about their soon-to-be-published children’s book, SIMONE for Minerva
Read below for transcript, watch video here
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The stream is live. Hello. Hi there.
Betsy Bird:
Hello. Wonderful. Well, and welcome to everybody. I am so incredibly thrilled today because we have joining with us in conversation Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, and we have alongside him Minnie Phan, and we are going to be talking about a brand new book called Simone. But just to give you a little information just in case you want to know who are these people that we are looking at right now, Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor and novelist, his debut novel, The Sympathizer, which you may have heard of, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
He then won a slew of other things like, I don’t know, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship and all that fun stuff. But he has been increasingly prolific recently in the world of children’s literature. Coming in May is Simone, which is an unforgettable story of a Vietnamese American girl whose life is transformed by a wildfire, and we are joined as well by Illustrator Minnie Phan. Some highlights from her career include designing a 250-foot square mural for Google illustrating a citywide reading campaign for San Francisco Public Library, and of course, this book right here. So welcome, both of you. Hello.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, Betsy. Hi, Minnie.
Minnie Phan:
Hi.
Betsy Bird:
Thanks so much for doing this.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, yeah, this is going to be fun. It’s such a pleasure to be here with both of you, and hello to everybody in the audience as well.
Betsy Bird:
Well, it’s a great book, and I can’t wait for people to see it. Then they will be getting a little glimpse as we talk, but just a little glimpse because they’re going to have to get it for themselves.
Minnie Phan:
How about we pull up the cover?
Betsy Bird:
Okay, let’s pull up the cover. Voila. Here’s the cover. Now this is Simone, and it came into being through an unusual process for a picture book as I understand it. So first, Minnie, you created a sketch dummy or a storyboard of the story with only pictures and no words, and then get added the words. You went back and forth a few times until you were both satisfied with the story verbally and visually. So let’s just start with you, Minnie. Can you explain a little more about where the idea for the story came on and how Viet came on board?
Minnie Phan:
Yeah, so the central idea of the story is that art is central to how children especially imagine the world and process the world. The inspiration came from the way I responded to 2020. In 2020 in the Bay Area, we started off the year with the COVID-19 outbreak, and then there were fires that caused the air to be unbreathable and toxic. We couldn’t leave our house for additional other reasons, and the sky was red. It was so catastrophic and scary, and there was so many overwhelming moments in 2020, the thing that soothed me and gave me comfort was drawing. So I poured everything into writing, painting, sketching and just processing my world through art. So I thought, “What are children right now doing? How are they processing this big, scary thing that even me as an adult is having a hard time absorbing?”
So I thought about a story of art and how it affects children. Then during 2020, I was reading a newspaper that was covering San Jose and they were evacuating residents in response to the August complex fire. San Jose is known for being a very large Vietnamese enclave, and I thought, “Wow, here’s a community who has responded to disaster before and who has seen their world seem to crumble. Now what they responded to when they were younger or maybe themselves as children were rescued or evacuated are now doing that with their children from fires or from whatever catastrophe that’s happening.” So yeah, the inspiration for the book is my own relationship to art and my connection to the Vietnamese diaspora and Vietnamese experience.
Betsy Bird:
Thank you so much. Now, Viet, can you share your first reactions when you first saw Minnie’s storyboarding?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, even before that, Minnie referenced the August fire in San Jose and the evacuations, in fact, that fire came within, I think, a couple blocks, or the evacuation zone came within a couple blocks of my dad’s house where I had grown up as well. So it is really an intimate experience, this whole idea of wildfires and how if you’re in California and in many other parts of the world, this is a reality for so many of us. So yeah, when I got the idea from Minnie when she came and talked about this to me and I thought, “This is an urgent story.” The fact that it’s also not only about wildfires, but also about a Vietnamese American girl caught up in it, I thought that would allow so many personal layers from my own life as well to intersect with this other huge story about climate catastrophe.
So what happened was, I think Minnie came with the idea, and I took that idea and then wrote a script for it and everything like that. I wrote it like a screenplay because I think part of the challenge for me as a writer looking at a children’s book is a lot of the force of a children’s book is driven by the illustrations, and so they’re in play with the words. So as a writer, I can only use a very limited number of words that will actually appear on the page. Then the rest of that will be, what I did was give stage directions, what the layout should look like and the arc and the background of the story. Anyway, I gave that to Minnie.
Minnie then produced these illustrations, and I was blown away. I was like, “I can’t even draw stick figures.” I’m always amazed by anybody who has the capacity to draw anything, and Minnie’s such a brilliant artist. Her illustrations are simple, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. I think they’re simple, they’re elegant, but underneath there are all these layers and implications of meaning that she’s able to draw out with some very nuance, subtle things like the way that eyes are positioned, the gaze of the characters. I’m doing a terrible job explaining the art itself, but all I can say is as a non-artistically-inclined person, I was just blown away, and I thought that this was the right relationship between the formal simple elegance of her work and the spareness of the story as well.
Minnie Phan:
I actually think that it was a great collaboration in that I think the heart of the story for both of us having art and writing as a huge part of ourselves and identity really shows through the words that you chose to put in the book and the art that I decided to make. Actually, if you go through this, see in this next slide, here’s a photo of Viet and I when we were kids. On the right is me actually crafting something in elementary school, and on the left is Viet, who I think is the beginning of a writer. Just look at the glasses. I think that just means you’re going to be a writer. So yeah, I-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That is so generous. I just see a little nerd personally, but sure, a budding writer. I’ll take it.
Minnie Phan:
I think we were a combination meant to be, so I’m super excited and happy to be sharing this book with the world, and also, sharing this photo, which I think it just says a lot about the power of creativity that it has. I think for me at least, art and creativity has guided me through my life. I think for children, especially during this unprecedented time with all the different kinds of natural disasters, the strange presidency things, all these… I think children are going to find ways to process. Then on the next slide, we want to take children seriously as well. You’ll see throughout our conversation that the topics that we’re hitting are serious things that we respect, and we respect children and their capacity to learn. So we hit topics about firefighters and incarceration. On the next slide, we also talk about Vietnamese experience with national disasters as well. But before I go on too much, Betsy, please feel free to continue.
Betsy Bird:
Well, I just want to say if anyone in the audience who’s watching this has comments as well, feel free to write in your comment. We will be answering those at one point. I forgot to mention that earlier. Just real quick, though, and you may have already covered this, did you guys know each other prior to this or if so, how?
Minnie Phan:
So I actually attended Viet’s book launch for The Sympathizer in San Francisco at Intersection for the Arts in I believe it was 2016 or 2017. I had just graduated art school, and Viet, that was his very first novel. I don’t think either of us expected at all for where both of our careers have really catapulted. It was actually incredible that I felt like I was part of the special group who got to see him really take charge and become this powerful voice in the Vietnamese diaspora, and Viet, I still look towards you for inspiration. I love the opinion pieces. You write about the creative process and the meaning of work. Since that day, being in the back row, asking the very first question, I remember I asked the very first question during Q&A and you answered very well. It was very scary too, in a good way, like why I wasn’t expecting such a great answer.
I remember since that day it stayed in my radar and I thought, “One day I’m going to collaborate with him. One day I’m going to make a work of art with him.” So for Simone to come into the world was truly a dream come true because I was asked by Astra when I showed them my work, where definitely I focus more on the illustration than on the writing, our editor said, “What you have here is really powerful, but I need you to just punch it up with something. There’s something that’s missing.” I said, “I think Viet is missing. I think his power, his ability is missing.” So when I could approach anyone, anyone in the world to work with, I said to my editor, “There’s this guy you might know. His name’s Viet Thanh Nguyen,” and then it just happened. I made a wish and it came true.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Wow, that’s such a great story that I wasn’t a jerk. Yeah, no, it was 2015, actually, that was when The Sympathizer launched. I remember that event very, very well because it was put on by my arts organization, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. That came out of my college years that we young Vietnamese aspiring artists and writers and so on looked around, and we didn’t see enough images and representations of ourselves and the community and our history. There wasn’t really a supportive network or group out there to help young aspiring writers and artists of Vietnamese origins, and so we started that. Then lo and behold, 20 something years later, it’s a nonprofit organization.
It puts on this event, and it does exactly what we wanted it to do, which is to bring people together and to generate new exciting possibilities. So I’m just totally thrilled that these aspirations I had when I was a college student has led to this collaboration. I will say this is my second children’s book, and both of them completely by accident, and both of them have happened because of these artistic environments. So my first children’s book was with my son Ellison called Chicken of the Sea, and he did that when he was five years old. He did it because I was raising him an environment surrounded by children’s books and taking him to artistic events.
Took him to a writer’s residency where he met his favorite artists and writers at the time, Bao Phi and Thi Bui who had just done a book called A Different Pond. So I just follow the muse wherever it leads me, and sometimes it leads people like Minnie to me. She had this great idea. Honestly, I’m not good with ideas for children’s books, but when someone gives me an idea for a children’s book like Minnie did, then the rest of my writerly imagination can kick in and start to try to flesh it out. But for me, I think the hardest part for me is the actual idea because it takes a certain kind of imagination to see the world through a child’s point of view that I’m not sure I have, but Minnie definitely does.
Betsy Bird:
Well, and I got to say, you got to watch out now because you’re now going to get inundated with illustrators being like, “I have this idea.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Bring it on. Bring it on, yeah. Let me just say one last thing, which is I think I had the easy part because I wrote the story basically over a few days. Then I think Minnie worked on it for like a year, so I got the easy end of the bargain.
Minnie Phan:
Actually, about three years, but it’s okay, no one’s counting.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Three years, oh, my God.
Minnie Phan:
Actually, you know what, if folks want to get a little sneak preview of the book in the slides, in the next slide, we have some more photos of some interior art. So again, we’re hitting so many different topics and this is the art. So seeing this, it looks a bit like a graphic novel, but I did that intentionally. So I originally had a manuscript that was this very traditional picture book. It was spreads, it was single pages. But when I got Viet’s manuscript, it felt so visceral like a movie, and the way he described things was very poetic, that it was much more poetry than it was just, “X, Y, Z day, this happened,” it’s whatever, the traditional storytelling. So I thought, “How can I really condense the imagery and say as much as I can with the words?” ‘Cause actually, what you see in the word bubbles, that was dialogue. That was what was said in the manuscript, so everything else relied on the art showing the anxiety or excitement or comfort or fear, and also storytelling through color.
So the illustration starts off black and white, but there are glimpses of color that come through that represent what this person is processing. It could be, oh, this really bright orange, this fire or the rainbow of all my art supplies. In the next slide, it’s processing the very big things that we’re talking about in the slides too, things like firefighters, incarceration, evacuation. On the next slide, memory, displacement, Vietnam. On the next slide, the connection of art for not just the individual experiencing it, but to others as well, the interconnected relationship that we all have to art and creativity. On the last slide, I believe it’s the last one, it’s using art to try to understand and feel the world, to bring color back in and to heal. I believe that there might be one last slide, which is the cover. There we go, and that’s a good one to end on. So Betsy, all yours again.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I just want to say, look, you can see it. The work is so beautiful, it’s so stylized, which is what I love about it. Again, I don’t have the vocabulary for it, but it rocks because I just love the way that you play with the black and white palette, and then you very sparingly use color. This is what I’m talking about in terms of the spareness, the elegance, the very strategic use of color and design. I just think visually it’s remarkable work. Thank you.
Betsy Bird:
As you were saying, Minnie, the cinematic quality of it makes a more dynamic book.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yes.
Betsy Bird:
You could have the, here’s the text and the picture, and the text and the pic… and this is much better, breaks it up, makes it interesting. Everyone likes reading it. What’s so interesting about your collaboration is that you two were in communication. In a lot, maybe even most cases where there’s an author and an illustrator of a picture book, they’re kept separate, so they’re not allowed to interact with one another. One has done the words and the other one comes in with the pictures, and that’s a very standard way of doing it. For you two to be talking to one another and bouncing ideas off and things like that, some might argue it makes a better book in the end, and so it’s very nice. But I’ll ask one more question and then we can probably, if people put in their questions in the comments, I can read some of those as well. But Minnie, when Viet sent his first version of the words to this story, what was your reaction? Was there anything that you found challenging to illustrate?
Minnie Phan:
So any illustrator who has the gall to reach out to Viet for more stories has to also feel creative trust that I think something that was vital to my relationship with Viet on this book was that he really trusts my creative decisions. So I was able to make things like changes or cuts or additions that weren’t in his original manuscript necessarily, and I think some people would’ve been too afraid. There’s actually a lot of other details. There are also some questions that people may have, such as if you may notice that in the book that the mother’s pregnant. Well, who knows if that’s a sequel? But that could be a sequel or there was a whole nother backstory.
There was a whole nother thing happening that I wanted to include, but it would’ve muddied the message and the power of the work, and so I changed it. I removed it. The dialogue that I had with Viet about it was actually just through the iterations, that he would give me this text and I would send another version of the art. Then he would change it a little bit, and then I would send another version of the art, that it was a conversation through the work. So those challenging parts was trust, not in that we didn’t have it, but in trusting that I can say something and that Viet won’t get mad at me, or at least if he gets mad at me, he’ll hide it a little more.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Again, I’m a total newcomer to the children’s book world, so I’m just stunned by this idea that collaboration is not a normal part of the process. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m in the middle of wrapping up a TV series based on my novel, The Sympathizer, and it’s an intensely collaborative enterprise. That involves 400 people, but here it’s just two, so why is it so hard to collaborate between two people? I think it should be a relationship of artistic trust, and I’m glad we had that. Of course, collaborations are potentially fraught, but ours worked out really well because I trust Minnie too. Again, I looked at the art, what am I going to say? She’s the one in charge of that. I’ve worked enough with the editing process with editors that I trust, and I’ve worked on my own writing as my own editor.
I realized just because you have an idea, it doesn’t mean it’s so awesome it can’t be changed as the story evolves. I just want to give a shout-out to Maria Russo who’s in the audience right now. She is our editor for this book. With my first children’s book, I had no editorial feedback, and we did it, and it was done, and it was out there. This book, Maria’s feedback was really great in terms of helping us to shape the narrative at certain points. So yeah, just to draw attention to the fact that for me, bookmaking and art making, sometimes it’s purely individual, but oftentimes, it’s quite collaborative and especially when you’re working on a book, so many other people are involved. So I’m grateful for the whole team that’s been with us on Simone.
Minnie Phan:
Yeah. I do also want to shout the art director behind the book was Amelia Mack, who was just phenomenal and also really pushed herself on this book as well, that she actually gave me notes that at first were so hard for me, but as I reflect on the experience was so necessary, really, really necessary. I think she would not have pushed me if she didn’t believe that I could do it, so shout out to Amelia.
Betsy Bird:
Yes, and I can attest that, in fact, all the people you have mentioned are fantastic, including Maria Russo. So yes, all that you say is true. Fantastic. You both actually live in California, so in that sense, you had a lot in common when you were making this book from the start, and you both have lived through that threat and devastation of the wildfires. Can you say a little more about that? Did either of you draw on accounts of real events when you were creating this story of Simone and her family?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
You want to go first, Minnie, or you want me to go?
Minnie Phan:
Sure. Yeah, I’ll go first. So I personally did not have to evacuate the area that I live, nor did my parents, which I’m very grateful for. However, I’ve lived in California my entire life. I’m born and raised in the Bay Area, and wildfires have just naturally been a part of my life as much as earthquakes have. I have memories of growing up with wildfire smoke, and I have community who have lived in places like Santa Rosa that has had to evacuate. I have community members who whenever there is a wildfire, we post online, we say, “Hey, I have a room in my house, you can always stay. If you need anything, let me know.” Most people, or at least I hope most people, everyone is prepared to evacuate. We have go bags. We have emergency supplies. We are aware that this is a reality. It’s not something that we can just pretend doesn’t exist or doesn’t affect us. If it doesn’t affect us specifically, it’s going to affect someone that we know. So again, I have not personally evacuated yet, but this is a issue that’s still close to home.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, of course, same experience. I don’t think about it constantly, but I certainly think about it. So there are go bags in my basement and all that kind of stuff, and this idea that we as Californians have to be ready for a natural disaster is something that none of us can avoid thinking about. But in writing the story, besides all that, as a writer and a storyteller, I’m always interested in how many layers can I bring into the story? How many connections can I make without overwhelming the story? So the basic arc of the story is about a young girl’s experience with her mother fleeing from the fire and then how they cope with it by the end. But these are human beings in the world, and they bring their lives to it, and they bring their eyes and their perceptions to it.
So for me, I thought, “Well, what are they going to see and what are they going to remember as they are forced to flee?” That’s why certain elements of the story appear, so it was really important for me to include incarcerated firefighters. That’s a key part of how the California fights firefighters is to use prisoners and she sees that, the little girl, Simone, sees that. Why shouldn’t she see that and why shouldn’t she ask questions about who these people are and why they have, I think it’s California Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, CDRC printed on their fire uniforms, right?
Minnie and I have talked about this, but the reason why it’s important to feature Vietnamese characters here is that they’ve all been forced to flee before. The mother’s generation fled from Vietnam because of the war. Then also there are natural disasters in Vietnam that I hear about whenever it happens. Flooding in Vietnam is a regular thing, for example. So all that makes its way in; not the war specifically, but the act of fleeing from flooding in Vietnam. So I think I wanted to do children’s book while acknowledging a certain kinds of history in the belief that you could pull this off so, again, without overwhelming the basic arc of the story.
Betsy Bird:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Some people have a really hard time talking about difficult topics like natural disasters and displacement of children and things. So a book like this really helps to have on hand. How do you think Simone can help start that conversation, and what are some of the important conversations that you hope will happen because of Simone?
Minnie Phan:
So I want to say that we are sharing a lot of big adult topics that seem like, oh, grownups are the ones who are talking about climate change and natural disaster and all that kind of stuff. But in the story, the book that we made in Simone, it is one part acknowledging and recognizing what’s going on, another part, children working together, coming together and being creative. This is not a book that I intended to make just for parents to feel and read, but it was for the children to see themselves. So you see in the story and in the art moments where the art is connecting children and starting conversations and giving them a way to work together.
So kids are what’s most important in this book, I think, kids and their reaction to the big adult stuff. The conversations I hope to happen between children and adults is not so much answering the things that are being asked, like, “How do we solve climate change? What’s the answer?” It’s not necessarily finding the solution, but it’s more beginning the conversation and starting to be curious about the world asking things. Perhaps it’s less about the child being able to process everything and more the parents being able to listen, really listen and see the child as they’re drawing or painting or speaking or whatever emotions coming through.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, I think children’s literature can do deal with a lot of complicated things. I read a lot of children’s literature now with my four and 10-year-old, and so I have a lot of trust in children’s capacity to discuss and to think about some very difficult issues. But I also am moved by children’s literature when it’s just simply beautiful. There’s a dimension of children’s literature, which works at the emotional level in terms of our responses as readers, whether we’re adults or children to the narrative and then also the art as well. So that works outside of whatever supposed message the book is trying to deliver. So I just think it’s a beautiful work of art, and I think that, for me, is always the first issue. I read a lot of children’s books where I’m like, “Oh, the message is too strong. The message is so obvious and the art is not great, and so it’s not really a great book.”
So I think the first thing, the book has to just affect the reader emotionally at the level of the aesthetic, and I think the book does. That’s all due to Minnie and the incredible illustrations and color that she did. Then I hope it’s a book that’s not message-y. I don’t respond to pedagogy in children’s literature. Although we’ve been talking, again, about some big issues and stuff, I don’t think the book is pedagogical in that sense. I think the book finds the human drama in which if you’re a reader, you can bring out whatever message you want, but I don’t think it’s a forced drama that’s in the story. Again, we have two characters, Vietnamese-born mother, American-born child. You put them in a dramatic situation, they’re going to react, and their own personal histories and feelings and perceptions are going to come out. That’s the story, and that’s what I wanted to do with that.
Betsy Bird:
Well, I think you did it very successfully. I think also at the same time, this is one of those books where adults are really appreciative of it, but it doesn’t lose that kid centeredness, that kid accessibility. A kid is still going to really enjoy this book, which is the kind of thing that we forget about sometimes when we talk about picture books that are really good. But I think a kid could really enjoy this.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I remember watching the Peanuts on TV and the adults, you never see the adults. You see their knees and they go, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,” and it’s almost like this in the book. It’s mostly the kids. Mostly the kids.
Minnie Phan:
Yeah. Yes. It’s also the perspective of the child. Yeah.
Betsy Bird:
That’s good. We’re pretty much out of time. Real quick, I just want to end and ask what all are you guys working on next? Can you say?
Minnie Phan:
Oh, actually, you know what? Before we jump into that, I want to share with this audience the title of Simone and why we chose Simone.
Betsy Bird:
Good idea. Why don’t you do that real quick here, and maybe we can just end with that then? How about that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, sure. As I was writing the story, I had to give the character a name, so I chose Simone because that’s the name of my daughter. The way it became the title of the book was I actually had another title, and then Maria and I and Minnie, I think, went back and forth on various kinds of titles and so on and so forth. Then all credit to Maria, at one point she said, “Well, what about Simone as a title?” I’m like, “Why not? I love it.” I never would’ve dared to suggest it for myself for the title, but again, all trust to Maria, she thinks it’s a great title. I think it’s a great title.
The reason why my daughter’s name Simone is because my partner Lan Duong and I, we wanted to give her obviously a strong name, but a name that would connect her to history in various ways and a feminist name. We were thinking of the famous Simone’s of history, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil, Nina Simone, we wanted her to have that legacy. So none of that is evident in the book itself, but again, as a writer, you choose words. You choose names with resonance, and you hope that there’s a vibe, there’s a feeling, and people will connect that eventually, I hope.
Betsy Bird:
I love that. I had no idea that the title was so important in that way. I love that. Oh, that’s so sweet. Well, thank you both so much for joining us here today. Yeah, Simone is going to be out pretty soon on bookstore and library shelves everywhere, so I think everyone’s-
Minnie Phan:
May 7th.
Betsy Bird:
… going to have to get it.
Minnie Phan:
Mark your calendars for May 7th, everyone.
Betsy Bird:
May 7th, everyone. All right. Thanks, everybody, who was joining us here today. We appreciate you being here.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks, Betsy. Thanks, Minnie.
Betsy Bird:
All right.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks, everybody.
Minnie Phan:
Thank you.
