Let’s Be Bees! A Q&A with Shawn Harris About This Newly Created Storytime Staple

Back in June of 2024, I was attending the American Library Association conference in San Diego, as one does. And somewhere in the course of things I ended up at a lunch that was presenting a wide range of lovely titles. Whale Fall by Lynn Brunelle and Justin Chin. The Table by Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins with Jason Griffin. With Dad by Richard Jackson and Brian Floca. And… a slightly odd 2025 picture book as well.

It wasn’t really like anything else I’d seen in a long time. For one thing, it was exceedingly simple. Let’s Be Bees by Shawn Harris was a story about a father and child pretending (and becoming) a range of different animals, critters, and objects, making sounds for each one of them. Drawn entirely in crayon, it quickly struck me that this wasn’t just any old picture book. It’s an ideal readaloud for toddlers and preschoolers. In other words, the rarest of storytime gold.

The book is slated for publication on February 11th, so the time seemed right for me to return to it once more. And while I’m at it, why not ask Shawn a thing or two about bees, the waxiness of crayons, and more?

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Betsy Bird: Shawn! Such a delight to get to talk to you about LET’S BE BEES. It’s the young picture book of the season in my library. If you would be so kind, please give us a little background on where the book came from. It’s a bit of a departure from some of your other picture books after all.

Shawn Harris: When I finished working on Have You Ever Seen a Flower?, I thought, “well, that was fun becoming a flower— now I want to be everything else on earth.” That’s the premise— it’s pretty simple, really: let’s be the earth.

BB: The book is remarkable for a number of reasons, but the thing about it that has all my local librarians in a tizzy is how it’s such a great readaloud for younger children. It seems absolutely perfect for preschool storytimes (which can be a tricky thing to find). We see so few picture books for these youngest of ages in a given year. Why did you aim for that particular age range when writing and illustrating the book?

Shawn: Preschoolers are such a big and important audience of soon-to-be readers. Most of my favorite books from childhood stick in my memory as readalouds, and so, my love for stories and art was solidified way before Kindergarten. Of course, communicating with people this age requires a simplicity of vocabulary and form, but the best stuff retains a profound, and often complex world view. That’s tricky! In writing, drawing, and designing (all components of a picturebook), simplicity is deceptively difficult. The fewer words or lines used, the more weight each one has to carry. I wish I could always get there!

BB: I had the pleasure of seeing you present this book in person at the last American Library Conference. During the course of the talk you happened to show us the original art and it wasn’t at all what we expected. Some of it was, in fact, gigantic. If you would be so kind, could you tell us a little bit about why this book was drawn at such a large scale and then shrunk down a bit to fit the picture book sized pages?

Shawn: Well, the giant crayon drawing you saw (5 ft across) actually didn’t make it into the book! Once I scanned that and resized it for the book’s trim size, the illustration didn’t look like it was made with crayons at all, which sort of defeated my purpose in showing kids art made with the same materials they had sitting on their tables at home. Experimenting more, I found that if I drew the originals (much) smaller than the trim size, and scanned them at a very high dpi, the waxiness of the crayons got accentuated like I’d hoped. Most of my time working on picturebooks is used experimenting like that. When I finally dial in the look of the book, it can all happen very fast, but I need a few months to arrive there. I often think that eventually I won’t need so much time to find my footing in a new book, but invariably, I do.

BB: As you just mentioned, and with many of your other books, you drew this in crayon. You use crayon a fair amount in your titles and, forgive me, but I have literally no idea why. I’m sure you’ve explained this innumerable times, but could you give us a glimpse into why you like that particular medium?

Shawn: This is actually my first time making a book with crayons (though I have wanted to for a long time!) Have You Ever Seen a Flower? has a similar look, but that one was colored pencils. Anyway, crayons are such a ubiquitous, elemental art tool that I think just about every kid has used– it felt like a potential direct route to communicate with my readers on a level they were familiar with. I guess I also wanted to make sure we were giving kids a tool they could use to actually make good art with. Nothing is more frustrating than picking up a pair of kid scissors that crinkle the paper instead of cut it, or trying to tune a ukulele made for kids that doesn’t have tuning pegs that give the instrument any chance of staying in tune. How can we expect kids to get enriched and inspired if even a professional adult artist (or ukulele player) couldn’t make their tools produce anything presentable? (Of course, the same is true of the books we give them– these things need to be high quality if we want them to grow to care about any of this stuff at all.) Anyway, crayons passed the test for me. Great tools!

BB: Not that you have any sway over this, but do you think that there’s any chance that this book could become a board book in the future? The colors, the simplicity, and the tone all combine to make it potentially an ideal title for a board book adaptation.

Shawn: I’d love that– I’m not exactly sure what the path to printing a board book is, or if a 40-pager can be adapted into one without trimming spreads, even, but I love the way they feel in the hand, and think that’s something I’d love to make one day.

BB: Finally, what else do you have going on these days? What’s next for you?

Shawn: I have another Teeny-Weeny Unicorn book coming out this Spring, and another First Cat In Space graphic novel coming in the Fall. I just finished art for another picture book written by my oldest friend and racquetball enemy Mac Barnett– we’ll share more about that one soon!

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You can tell this interview was conducted before yesterday’s announcement, else Shawn would have said “I just finished art for another picture book written by my oldest friend and racquetball enemy AND NEWLY APPOINTED NATIONAL AMBASSADOR OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE Mac Barnett.”

Huge thanks to Shawn for answering my questions and for giving us some insights into his titles. As God is my witness, I could have sworn Have You Ever Seen a Flower? was done in crayon. Let’s Be Bees is out February 11th on the shelves of fine purveyors of books everywhere. Thanks too to Anne Abell and the team at Holiday House for helping to put this Q&A together.

And just for fun, here’s Shawn explaining a bit more about the book, for your viewing pleasure:

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews