The Cyclical Journal, the Heroic Fable, and the Palindrome: A Daniel Nayeri Q&A and Behind-the-Scenes Essay on Drawn Onward

There are treats and then there are treats. Am I about to engage in a Q&A with recent Newbery Honor winning author Daniel Nayeri about his latest (and quite epic) picture book Drawn Onward? I am. But is that all that I am doing? By no means. Today, one and all, I am pleased to be delivering to you not simply a Q&A but also a very exclusive behind-the-scenes essay about the book by Daniel, accompanied by sketches by the illustrious Matt Rockefeller.

Drawn Onward, for the record, isn’t out until October 8th but it is, and this is the scientific term, a doozy. I’ll let its publisher describe it:

“In this enthralling and emotional palindrome picture book by Daniel Nayeri and Matt Rockefeller, a young boy grieving the loss of his mother embarks on a lushly fantastical adventure that illuminates what remains when our loved ones are gone.

All alone

He was not so brave…

His heart needed to know

The answer.

This lyrical, heartfelt story a young boy who’s lost all hope braves the dark forest to ask, “Mom, were you glad you were mom?” Gorgeously illustrated, Drawn Onward gently guides readers through the depths of grief and provides comfort and hope to those who seek answers when it feels like all is lost.”

Let’s talk a bit about the book itself, and then Daniel will give you an even more in-depth dive in:

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Betsy Bird: Hi, Daniel! Delighted to talk to you today! Drawn Onward is a fascinating mix of fable, graphic novel, and fairy/folktale. Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of the story?

Daniel Nayeri: It started with the V-structure. The palindrome. Jon Agee and Marilyn Singer have both made beautiful picture books with the form (OTTO and MIRROR, MIRROR respectively). So I had those to admire. And there’s a gorgeous picture book by Ann Jonas from 1990 called ROUND TRIP that you read forward, and then flip and read backward. The black & white images reverse themselves so that the negative space of one becomes the positive space of the other on each page. I adore these sorts of rigid structures and I think there’s still a lot of design space to explore.

To love palindromes is to be okay with a little bit of wiggliness when it comes to sense. I remember writing, Are we not drawn onward to new era? in my notebook and thinking, “if you squint it sorta makes sense, right?” But that’s not exactly true. It should be, “onward to a new era.” The only reason to omit it is to preserve the palindrome.

One finds there are lots of these squirrely bits when you get to longform palindromes, reverse poems, or visually symmetrical comics. And I’m okay with that.

But what I wanted to know was if I can tell a complete story that didn’t simply “work” in a palindromic structure, but rather demanded it.

What sort of journey feels cyclical? What sort of journey looks like a descent into, and then rise out of, a pit? Grief, certainly. The recursion of a memory. A heroic fable.

That’s how it began. A palindrome about a boy going on an adventure as a metaphor for grieving the loss of his mother.

BB: Dear god, man. Well, as you’ve just alluded to it, the heart of this book is the relationship between a mother and a son. Or, more precisely, a mother’s absence, and a son’s coming to terms with that loss. What role has your own mother had on your writing and your career?

Daniel: My mother has been the central figure in an autobiographical novel of mine called EVERYTHING SAD IS UNTRUE. She plays a large role in that sense and in the larger sense that she’s a part of everything I do. But in this case, I wouldn’t say there is any connection between me and the boy here. Much of a writer’s task is to imagine the interior lives of others, to feel them as deeply as our own, and to present them as sympathetically as we would want our stories told. For this boy, his grief is about the loss of his mother. Thankfully, I haven’t shared that grief. But in other ways, I have plenty I can find in this young man to call us kindred spirits. His deep longing for a good mission. His wandering feet. His anxious heart in relating to others.

And I believe we all have our personal grief. Young readers, especially, need to see that process in my opinion, even if their tragedies haven’t yet been so massive for many of them.

In fact, a close reading of the book will show the boy traveling through his grief in the same V-structure as the palindrome. In the figure below (fig1), you can see as he begins in the shock and numbness of his loss. He has an emotional outburst that he doesn’t himself understand. As he travels through the various worlds, he’s suffering from the anger, fear, even panic of his sadness. He isolates himself, from the fairies for example, even when he could help them. He simply doesn’t have the bandwidth for new relationships.

But after that transformative embrace from his mother, he begins the process of healing, of making himself open to new relationships, and being able to see the troubles of others, such as the dwarves or the sea serpent. He finds new strength and new hope.

Of course, this is the subtext of the story. I don’t expect a young reader to pick up Elizabeth Kubler Ross immediately after. But given the amount of loss we’ve all suffered in the past few years, it seemed worthwhile to model the experience of grief and recovery for kids.

BB: First, I’m giving you 10 points for mentioning Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Next, I’m getting all kinds of hints of references with this title. Everything from Steven Universe (a lot of Steven Universe, actually) to Legend of Zelda to even a bit of The Sword in the Stone. But that’s my frame of reference, not yours. When you were writing this, what influences were you drawing from? What was in your head?

Daniel: I’m not familiar with the others, but for Matt and me (and our agent, Joanna Volpe, and our editor Andrew Arnold), we were all enjoying the conversation this work has with The Legend of Zelda. We’re all big fans, and for me, outside of the iconic visual language it has produced, is the notion that Link is “the hero of time.” Maybe it was some corporate sleight of hand to explain away the fact that they were going to make dozens of games with the same basic premise, but the explanation that these iterations are actually part of the meta-story is brilliant. I like to think that Borges and Calvino would have been tickled by the entire thing.

And now, decades later, we havea symbolic language in those stories as rich as the American super-hero or the various fairy tale traditions. What do bracelets do? They help you pick up giant rocks, of course. What happens if you throw a boomerang into a fairy fountain? It returns magically improved. There are too many to count, but they tap into primal stories about wisdom, power, and courage that rotate around one another in a forever-spinning tri-force. The power of these sorts of stories is in their repetition.

And similarly, it felt that DRAWN ONWARD’s story demanded its format in order to create the feeling of those repetitions.

BB: The book is a quest story and feels as though it should have its own genre. It’s wordless in that the characters in the book never make a sound, but there’s an overarching narration from you, the omnipotent author, that manages to both explain the action on the page and keep a carefully separated distance from it. When you envisioned this story from the start, did you always see it this way? Or were there a variety of iterations?

Daniel: This was a work of true collaboration, which means there have been dozens of iterations. I think that’s the magic of a good partnership. You manage to hear one another enough so that each iteration feels in some way a step forward. You don’t feel as though you’re each pulling the material in opposite directions.

When I first crafted the story, it was completely wordless. I imagined the likes of FLOTSAM by David Wiesner, THE RED BOOK by Barbara Lehman, and ZOOM by Istvan Banyai. As Matt developed the images we created versions with word-level palindromes, palindromic refrains, and so on. All the while, Matt was working his way toward comic frames, whereas initially they were full-page spreads. We sent it back and forth until it felt right.

BB: Let’s talk a little bit about what your collaborative process with artist Matt Rockefeller looked like. The story is yours but the text is sparse. So how did you and Matt work together? Did you create a beat sheet and then just hand it to him? Did you go back and forth on what different scenes might look like? What was your process?

Daniel: I wrote a full script. It would have made lots of editors furious, the ones who say they don’t EVER want to see illustration notes from the writer. Well, this was entirely illustration notes. It set forth the architecture of the story.

Thank goodness we found Matt Rockefeller, who not only understood it immediately, but also offered endless amounts of grace on that front. He began to work on character designs, and by then we knew we didn’t want it to be completely wordless.

That was May of 2020. It took years of poring over every detail to get it where we wanted. Thank goodness, again, because it’s nothing short of a pleasure to pore over Matt’s art. 

BB: Reading and re-reading the book you end up noticing all kinds of details you never saw before. For example, there’s a shot of the boy’s house both at the beginning and the end of the book that doesn’t seemingly change itself, but all the decorative elements surrounding it change significantly (and tell a story themselves). How much of that was your contribution and how much Matt’s?

Daniel: That’s a perfect example of the sort of storytelling Matt does so well. He would send new drafts of sketches based on our conversations and we’d talk on the phone for hours imagining what details we could add. But every time, he’d say, “did you notice this?” or “did you catch the subtle nod to that?” and I’d have to admit I had missed it. The pages were lush and he had carefully considered every detail. 

BB: Okay, this one’s just for me. On the cover of the book the mom holds a stone. The dad holds something else. What is it?

Daniel: AHA! You’re an eagle-eyed observer, Betsy Bird. I was prepared to offer a cryptic answer that would satisfy no-one, but Matt’s brilliant answer was too good to keep from you. Dad is holding the page with Mom’s recipe that he finds in the cookbook at the beginning of the story. It’s this dish that they’re trying to make, and which incites the boy to go off in search of the ingredients.

And you might also note that all the ingredients were actually in the Dad’s garden the entire time. Does that mean the journey was in the boy’s imagination? Not to me. But the possible reading is there, and I adore Matt’s incredibly thoughtful details throughout. There is always something more to discover and new meanings to unravel.

BB: Shoot. That’s freakin’ brilliant. Okay, finally, what else do you have coming out these days? What’s next for you?

Daniel: Both Matt and I are working on our own stories, but I hope we aren’t finished in this world we’ve made. I think there are more stories to tell in new and interesting forms. Perhaps next time Dad can join in the adventure. Maybe it could even involve a journey deeper inward, to explore the boy’s imagination. Afterall, DRAWN INWARD is a palindrome too. Maybe we’ll give a shot.

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Oh no. We’re not leaving it at that. Because ever the wordsmith, Daniel has more for you today. And this is fairly unique. He’s presenting us with even more inside information into the book. Take a look in this one-of-a-kind guest piece:

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This is a behind-the-scenes look at DRAWN ONWARD, a picture book by me (Daniel Nayeri) and the brilliantly talented Matt Rockefeller. It involves years of back-and-forth discussions, visions and revisions, a powerhouse super-agent in Joanna Volpe who conducted the whole thing like an orchestra, and an editor Andrew Arnold, who gently asked all the right questions, generously managed all our requests, and set a table for us within the publishing house worthy of the Michelin committee.

Already, it feels like an epic, and we haven’t even introduced it to the world yet. Here’s hoping you like it. And here’s the story so far…

In May of 2020, I got a note from Matt Rockefeller saying he’d be willing to work on a project I’d been dreaming up for years before that. A picture book told as a palindrome…but more than that, a story that demanded a reverse structure.

It begins with a little boy, sitting with his dad in their living room. Over them hangs a family portrait from a time when his mother was still alive. The young boy is despondent. His father goes to make dinner, a recipe his wife used to make.

When the father asks the boy to gather a few of the ingredients from their garden, the boy is overcome with his emotions and rushes out of the house. Soon, he finds himself in the dark woods, lonely and afraid. So begins the adventure into several enchanting worlds, the underground mines of the dwarves, a sunken city, a desert of fairies, and finally, a ruined castle where he meets his mother and asks the question his heart has been longing to know.

This is the pivotal center of the book’s V-shaped structure. From here, the boy is renewed by his mother’s answer and returns back up through those worlds, now able to help the denizens, as he undertakes a journey for his own healing.

That was the story and it began as a script for a wordless picture book.

(fig2)

The plot of a heroic adventure and the theme of grief all made sense for the palindromic structure. But it would require someone who could deliver a lush fantasy world with detailed backgrounds with some rather complicated limitations, given all the symmetry required.

When Matt came aboard, one of the first thoughts was, what if there was palindromic text as well?

I worked on that, while Matt delivered early character studies.

(fig3)

Before long my inbox was a treasure trove of early sketches. We wanted the story to feel unencumbered by time or place. The style of the art progressed, but the tender-hearted boy stayed largely the same.

(fig4)

Around this time, we were lucky enough to have Andrew Arnold and the wonderful team at Harper Alley join, and none too soon, because the story structure and the art were about to have their biggest struggle.

The text had too much going on. A normal 32-page picture book made up of mostly spreads and vignettes wasn’t enough to express all the actions involved.

Thankfully, Andrew and co., being experts in the sequential art of comics, and what with Matt having made several graphic novels, the notion (which now seems obvious, but I assure you was not at the time) presented itself: Why not a picture book with panel frames? A 40-page early comic of sorts? Perhaps, for some young readers, the first foray into the form?

We put away the early spreads and Matt returned to the drawing board. Of course, this meant that every panel he drew going down one side of the V-structure, he would have to mirror on the way back up. No sweat.

Matt delivered the first of what would be MANY symmetrical sketches.

(fig5)

These sketches became, over the years, my favorite collaborative experience I’ve ever had as a writer. I would print them out and pore over every detail. This is how Matt began to work out the puzzle of mirroring the visual frames. And this is how I began to finally work out the text. A reverse poem.

Matt began to incorporate the text into the refined sketches.

(fig6)

Years went by. Some of us moved houses. We sent each other pictures of toddlers on the beach and welcomed a new baby together. Adventures were everywhere.

Soon, the sketches started to come in color.

(fig7)

I was agog. I was delirious. I was too nervous to clap too loudly, lest I wake myself up from the dream. And that was even before I saw the finals.

The little boy’s story had formed over the long four years in what seems like endless iterations. We went back and forth over the V-structure. We told ourselves the story of grief and hope, back and forth. To ourselves, and now, hopefully, to our readers.

Thanks for reading.

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Dear heavens. That was incredible. I want to thank Daniel Nayeri not simply for the amount of work he has poured into DRAWN ONWARD (on shelves, as I said before, on October 8th everywhere) but also to Jenny Lu and the team at Harper Collins for helping put this together today.

Filed under: Guest Posts, Interviews