BB + LL: An Interview with Loren Long On His Upcoming Book, The Yellow Bus

You have to be of a very specific generation to hear the title “The Yellow Bus” and not get Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi” caught in your head along the way. Fortunately, Loren Long, the creator of this book (and a bit of a New York Times bestseller, amongst his other accomplishments), is capable of overwhelming even the strongest pop music association.

So yes! Loren Long is the creator of the aforementioned The Yellow Bus and whatta slam bang book it is! But don’t take just my word for it. Hear what his publisher has to say, description-wise:

“There is a bright yellow bus who spends her days driving. She loves carrying children from one important place to another. Every morning they climb in… Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, giggle, giggle-patter. And they fill her with joy.

As time passes, things change. The Yellow Bus gets a new driver, a new route, and new passengers, young and old. Until one day the driving stops for good, and the Yellow Bus is left on her own. And yet, no matter where she is, the Yellow Bus still finds joy and discovery in the world around her.

With stirring black-and-white artwork and powerful pops of color, The Yellow Bus is a poignant reflection on the many new beginnings life has to offer.”

On shelves everywhere June 25th, I had a chance to ask Mr. Long a question or two about the book. And hey. You know me. An opportunity to ask artists questions? Sign me up! Particularly when the artist in question can match me in alliterative initials. I warn you, though. We’re gonna get deep:

Betsy Bird: Loren! Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions today. In your long and storied career (pun intended) you’ve done books on everything from collaborative trucks to essential workers. THE YELLOW BUS, which you’ve also written, seems a bit different. Could you tell us a bit about where this book came from?

Loren Long: Thank you, Betsy! You’ve been such a positive, unique voice championing children’s literature over the course of my career, it’s cool for me to be doing this interview with you. THE YELLOW BUS would never have happened if my wife and I didn’t adopt a dog during covid. I never liked running, but our new high energy hound dog, Charlie, turned me into an every day runner. Charlie’s the best studio dog I’ve ever had but if he doesn’t get daily exercise, he can make it hard for me to focus on work. So…the idea for THE YELLOW BUS seeped into me over these past few years while running with Charlie along a bike trail. Every day we passed a rusted old school bus sitting in a goat paddock behind a Civil War era schoolhouse. Over time I started asking myself questions about that bus. Surely it started out bright and shiny driving kids from their homes to school and back. What kind of life did it have after that? How did it come to be sitting there abandoned in a field, surrounded by goats?  Yet as I ran along,  I somehow  never felt sorry for the bus. Something about it, parked in the field with goats jumping about in the spring and climbing  inside in the winter, gave off a happy, soulful vibe. I finally stopped pondering and began writing a sort of contemplative exploration of what the life of that bus might have looked like. The result became THE YELLOW BUS.

BB: Well, and a school bus is a perfect metaphor for the passage of time, since it’s one of the rare vehicles that you never really step foot in again after you’ve grown up. Looking at your book, I’m reminded of the fact that sometimes kids can feel a kind of nostalgia for a moment they’re currently living in. Like a preview of nostalgia-to-come. What would you like your own young readers to get out of THE YELLOW BUS?

LL: Betsy, ok dang, that’s kinda deep. I like it. And I do think you’re onto something there.  I’m probably not alone as a creator to tell you that I feel much more comfortable making the art than I do articulating  what the art means. Or what a reader should take away from it. Yikes. Well, I will tell you that as I was dreaming up, deliberating, writing and illustrating The Yellow Bus, I was mostly thinking of the ever elusive meaning of purpose in one’s life. You’re right, it’s true that a yellow bus is a perfect metaphor for time, nostalgia, and I would add, purpose. Of course, like any art form, once the book is released into the world it’s no longer just my own thing that I worked on by myself for months. So back to your question… I think it would be great if my own young readers can feel the contentment in the character of The Yellow Bus in my story, regardless of circumstance, and ask themselves why. And talk about it. And look for it in themselves.

BB: And on that note, do you happen to have any fond memories of school buses of your own from when you were a kid?

LL: I didn’t ride the bus for elementary school because we lived close enough to walk or ride our bikes. But I did ride the bus to school all three years in junior high school. It is nostalgic to this day. The rush to get to the bus stop on time at the corner every morning,  and waiting there with friends through the changing hot and cold weather. It was the late 70’s and one particular bus driver sticks out in my mind all these years later.  He was a friendly, free spirited kind of guy. My friends and I were at the perfect age to think he was really hip. He had long hair, cranked up Queen’s News of the World album, and gave us a thrill ride every single day. We sat in the back and felt like we were on a roller coaster. Needless to say, he didn’t last long. I guess not everybody appreciated his edgy style of driving as much as we did. Ha ha.

BB: Sounds like Otto from The Simpsons. So you’re an artist that slips with seeming effortlessness between books written by other people and written by yourself. What are you able to bring to a book that you’ve written yourself versus written by somebody else? .

 LL: I really love writing, but consider myself much more of an illustrator than a writer. I’m just not a prolific writer. This is to say I’ve felt very fortunate in my career that I can illustrate other people’s amazing stories while my own stories are germinating. To answer your question, in general I think my approach to illustrating a picture book manuscript is the same whether I wrote the piece or someone else did. But I do think when illustrating my own manuscript, there is a little advantage. For example, while I’m in the writing phase, working out the character or the setting or the plot, I can already benefit by starting to imagine what the character would look like and how I would handle the way the art looks in certain moments of the story. Like many children’s book illustrators, I often imagine I’m directing a little film and the mood in the art and how and when the page turns are set up help bring the “film” to life. Certainly mood is paramount in both writing and illustrating a picture book. So I think when I illustrate a book that I’ve written myself, I’m able to bring that innate synched up mood from the start with no guessing or disconnect between two different people.

BB: A fact that many people may not know about you is that you are, in fact, color blind. Now you’ve created a book where the pop of yellow plays a significant role in the interpretation of the storyline. Could you tell us a little bit about how you’ve found ways to adapt to your own work over the years?

LL: My color blindness has been with me from the very first time I started to try to make a painting with tempera paints in Junior High School art class. It’s certainly not unique to me, different degrees of color blindness are fairly common. I don’t look at it as a disability and never wanted to draw attention to it. It’s mostly an annoying obstacle.  My specific issue is that I can’t tell the difference between brown, green and gray. They mostly look the same. I also can’t see the difference between blue and purple and light blue and lavender. I also have trouble discerning and recognizing subtle (or more grayish, toned down) shades of any color. This is why I could never be a classical portrait painter like John Singer Sargent. I can’t see the subtle shades of green and pink and blue that are present in a person’s skin tone. There are two ways I get around it in my work. First, it’s pretty silly, but when laying out colors on my palette, I always put the blues and purples and browns and greens in the same spot on opposite sides of the palette. Far from each other so I don’t accidentally dip my brush in the wrong one. When wet paint is on a palette it can play tricks on you and look different and darker sitting there. To doubly protect myself, I label them with a sharpie next to the blob of paint, “BLUE”, “PURPLE”, etc… Of course, I know which is which to start because they are labeled on the paint tubes.   I’ve always felt like an underdog when it comes to painting, especially when it comes to color. I have to keep my color approach simple,  starting with the local color of an object and using a strong light source for a value structure (lights and darks) within a composition. And perhaps the biggest way to deal with the color blind obstacle is help from people around me. When we finally learned I was colorblind in my teens, my mother was there to help me with color. Now, I never let a painting go out the door unless my wife, Tracy, has looked it over. She helps me see color, especially the problem colors but also different shades of subtle color if I wanted to match a particular color effect. For example, let’s say we’re both looking at a gorgeous sunset with lots of amazing gradated bands and shades of color on the horizon. I can still see the beauty of all that grandeur. I am still overwhelmed by it. I’m just not seeing what everybody else is seeing. I can’t identify all the hues.  I can’t pick out all the subtitles tones of hue color in what I’m seeing. This makes it hard for me to paint that sky. To duplicate that effect, I’d have to have a photograph of the sunset and have Tracy list all the colors she sees. And then I could do my best to paint it with my own take involved. So if you see sunsets and skies in my books, you know there’s a scrap of paper somewhere where Tracy has helped me list off all the colors in each sky.

BB: Full credit to Tracy, then! Finally, just to round us out, what are you working on next?

LL: Thank you for asking, Betsy. I’m working on a new picture book written by Matt de la Pena which is kind of a follow-up to our picture book, LOVE. It should be out in Spring of 2025.

Man! This guy’s a good interview! Thank you so much, Loren, for being so patient with me and answering my questions so completely. Thanks too to Molly B. Ellis and the folks at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for helping to put this together. The Yellow Bus is out, as I’ve said, June 25th of next year. Be sure to look for it then!

Filed under: Interviews