Ashley Bryan's world - prize-winning children's author, illustrator, puppet maker, and storyteller opens up Black culture for children - Interview

American Visions, Dec-Jan, 1997 by Donna Gold

As he tells the tale "The Turtle Knows Your Name," about a child who learns pride in self and in heritage, the name that the turtle knows-- Upsilimana Tumpalerado--bounces off Ashley Bryan's tongue like a ball on the street. Bryan's storytelling voice is astonishing, expressing an unfettered joy in pure sound. He sings his stories, or, better yet, he vocally strums them, articulating each syllable of each word to reveal its sound, its meaning, its connection to the whole. When Bryan tells a story. his fingers snap and feet tap as if he were a jazzman incorporating geometries of rhythm into the Iyrical words of the tale.

He is a consummate performer, but performance is but one joy in the life of this storyteller, author, illustrator, painter, puppetmaker and toy collector. Bryan's delightful illustrations to the standard "What a Wonderful World" (sung by Louis Armstrong) have been used in numerous classrooms across the nation to inspire children. His powerful storytelling voice captivates listeners of his audiotapes of Caribbean and African stories.

Underlying it all is his multicultural toy chest of a house on Little Cranberry Isle, off the coast of Maine--a life's collection of all manner of wooden, metal, paper, flying, hanging, cuddling, performing and twirling toys that populate his world like hundreds of children. Among the toys are Bryan's puppets--sculptures that he creates from stones and shells and other found objects. Some summers, he performs with them in shows for local children.

The back porch is lit by the stained-glass panels that Bryan creates from beach glass that he collects on his daily walks to the ocean. Upstairs, beyond the airplanes and rockets hanging from his ceiling, is his studio. Here is where he writes and illustrates, but primacy is given to his paintings--lush canvases of flowers that some assume come from his ancestral home in Antigua, but that actually grow in his neighbor's garden on this windswept island he calls home.

This regal man, with a lion's mane of gray hair topped by an urchin's knit cap, started summering in Maine in the late 1940s; he has lived here year-round since retiring 10 years ago from teaching art at Dartmouth College. Since then, he has illustrated, written or edited dozens of children's books, and he has received one Coretta Scott King Award and several Coretta Scott King honors--all after a life that includes admission to New York's highly competitive Cooper Union, a Fulbright scholarship, and years of teaching in church basements, universities and most everywhere between.

Bryan takes great pride in saying that he published his first book at age 5. As the author, illustrator, binder, publisher and distributor of the alphabet and counting books that he made in his kindergarten classroom, he was so pleased with the praise heaped on him that he kept on "publishing." This was in Harlem, during the Depression. "We were poor," Bryan begins, settling at a dining table that is wedged between a case of Japanese dolls and a wall of various pull toys. He corrects himself: "No, we weren't. We had food and clothing and shelter. And my father would have birds. I once counted 100 birds."

Bryan's father was a printer of decorative greeting cards. His mother loved to sing. "New York City was a different world," Bryan recalls. `There were no fears. We could go to the Botanical Garden, the Natural History Museum, the art museum. We made our own toys--airplane models out of tissue paper. It was the time of the Work Projects Administration; there were artists and musicians in the schools. We all drew, painted, played instruments." Among his six brothers and sisters and the three orphaned cousins taken in by his parents, Bryan was the only one to make a life in art, and he champions creative expression for children: "The arts are the most important thing for growing people and for creating a citizenry for whom you don't have to make a jail."

Though Bryan never had children of his own, he spent 15 years helping raise one sister's five children. Now, at 74, he travels, performs, visits family and friends, and creates paintings that celebrate nature's bounty and books that honor human heritage. Some of his books and illustrations feature ancient folk tales- stories that Bryan first read as skeletal outlines in anthropological tomes and that he expanded into rhythmic, poetic prose. "It means a lot to me to open up aspects of black culture to people," he says.

One series of books--Walk Together Children; All Night, All Day, A Child's First Book of Spirituals; What a Morning! The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals; and Climbing Jacob's Ladder: Heroes of the Bible in Black Spirituals (all Atheneum)--features traditional spirituals with illustrations that look like pale stained glass. Other works feature African-American poetry, such as his tape Ashley Bryan's Poems and Folktales (Audio Bookshelf) and his most recent book, Ashley Bryan's ABC of African American Poetry (Atheneum, 1997).