Interview with 2019 Geisel Winner Corey R. Tabor

Today's exciting interview comes to us via Carol Edwards. Carol is a longtime librarian, book reviewer and ALSC member. Now retired, she keeps her chops honed in various ways, but the most fun is the Colorado Book Evaluation (CBE) Discussions. This is a group that meets quarterly and nominates for many of the major ALSC awards leading to a mock discussion where winners are selected. Her interest in the Geisel Award has been piqued by the astute comments and rich discussions of fellow members. Having sat with Corey at the 2019 Newbery Caldecott Legacy Banquet, the suggestion to do an interview with Corey, from Guessing Geisel co-host Amy Seto Forrester, seemed like a natural fit! 

Headshot of Corey R. Tabor. Courtesy of Corey R. Tabor. 

Lucky me, I got to interview 2019 Geisel winner Corey R. Tabor this summer. I had a million questions, but here are Corey’s answers to the most important ones. 

Carol: Where were you when you got the call from the committee that you’d won? Were you thinking you might win? 

Corey: I was doing the dishes when I got the call. I dried my hands and paused my podcast and pulled out my phone, and saw a number I didn’t recognize. Must be spam, I thought. So I put my phone away and resumed my scrubbing. But then I paused. I knew the ALA award announcements were the following morning (when all of us children’s book authors and illustrators keep our phones fully charged and close by—you never do know). I definitely wasn’t expecting to win anything, but I had recently discovered that Fox is Late had won the mock Geisel here on Guessing Geisel, so I knew it was a possibility. I pulled my phone back out and asked my wife, who was in the other room, to look up the number. “Philadelphia,” she called. “Why?” I’d never gotten a spam call from Philadelphia before. And there are definitely librarians [who work] in Philadelphia. Then my phone started ringing again. Same number. Suddenly I was light-headed and a little shaky. I don’t remember what Sarah Stippich, Chair of the Geisel Committee, said when I answered. I only remember saying “Wow,” and “Thank you,” a whole lot, and I remember hearing a bunch of cheering, giggling librarians. Later, when my editor called to congratulate me I had to double-check with her whether I’d won the award or an honor. I didn’t trust my memory of the call and I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t just imagined the whole thing. The next morning, because ALA Midwinter happened to be in Seattle, I rode my bike down to the convention center and sat in an enormous room with hundreds (thousands?) of raucous librarians as all the awards were announced. What an unbelievable experience! 

Carol: How did you become an early reader author illustrator? What led you to this format? 

Sketch of Fox with a giant jetpack. 

Courtesy of Corey R. Tabor. 

Corey: When HarperCollins decided to publish my first Fox book, Fox and the Jumping Contest, they asked if I had any other story ideas for Fox. I don’t remember whether I actually did at the time, but (pro tip) the answer to that question is always yes. (Panic can be a good story generator.) They told me they wanted another picture book and two early readers featuring Fox. I had never considered writing early readers, but when I thought about it I realized that many of my favorite books from childhood were early readers: Frog and Toad; Go, Dog. Go!; The Cat in the Hat; Amelia Bedelia; the Berenstain Bears. I was pretty sure I knew how to write a picture book, and an early reader couldn’t be so different, right? A year or two later when it came time to write the early readers I realized, to my dismay, that I still didn’t know how to write an early reader (I do this thing where I always assume future Corey will be smarter and more capable than I am). But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I sat down and wrote something called Fox and the Everything Machine. I sent it to my editor and anxiously waited for a response. But instead of notes on the story she sent me a box of early readers. Her message was clear. So I went to the library and checked out all the early readers I could carry and I spent a few months studying them, absorbing them, trying to figure out how they work. 

Then I sat down again and wrote Fox the Tiger. Some stories take me months of agonizing to work out, but Fox the Tiger arrived pretty much whole. Sometimes there’s nothing more creatively freeing and inspiring than a set of strict rules. I’ve really grown to enjoy the early reader format and I hope to keep making them. (I’m working on my third and fourth Fox early readers right now!) 

Carol: When creating a book what comes first? Some artists get text and go from there. Given you create both text and illustration where do you start? 

Corey: My stories usually come to me as just the tiniest flash of an idea, often an image (a fox with a jetpack, a fox painted with stripes to look like a tiger) and then I’ll mull the idea over until a story starts to form. I’ll sit down and try to write and sketch out the entire story on a single sheet of paper. This stage is always ridiculously rough and would be pretty unintelligible to anyone else, but I’ve found that it’s best if I do it as quickly as possible, and don’t second-guess myself too much. Then I go back to the beginning and sketch everything out full-sized, adding details and visual gags and refining the text. The text and images are pretty inextricably linked—I rarely come up with the one without the other, and they absolutely rely on each other to tell the story. Fox is Late, for example, would be pretty nonsensical without the images: “Fox does this trick, Fox does that trick. Go, Fox! Go! Fox goes over. Fox goes under. Go, Fox! Go!”  

Story ideas for Fox is a Tiger. Courtesy of Corey R. Tabor.

Carol: Why fox? I love fox, but how did you settle on writing and drawing fox? And not an armadillo or a cat or any other creature?

Corey: It was an accident, really. It was around Christmas several years ago and I had recently made a pre-New Year’s resolution to start drawing in my sketchbook more (I’m still pretty bad about this), so I was sitting on the couch sketching the ornaments on our tree. One of the ornaments was this handmade, pine-coney, wooden fox my wife had given me. My sketch didn’t look much like the ornament, but the character I’d drawn really spoke to me—he seemed eager to jump right off the page and into a picture book. I drew the fox over and over, from different angles, in different poses, and then, I don’t remember why, I gave him a jetpack. That fox with a jetpack inspired me to write Fox and the Jumping Contest which ended up launching my whole career. 

Carol: Has winning the Geisel changed your life in any way? Big or small? 

Corey: Thanks to the Geisel my publisher flew me out to Washington DC for the ALA annual conference to accept the award. I got to meet and speak to hundreds of wonderful librarians, and I even got to meet some of my all-time favorite picture book heroes. The greatest thing about winning the award though is that it lets me keep doing my favorite thing: making children’s books! I’m very grateful for that. 

Photograph of Corey R. Tabor working in his studio. Courtesy of Corey R. Tabor. 

We are grateful too. Corey Tabor’s upcoming book, Snail Crossing is coming out in February 2020. I, for one, can’t wait.