Just One Question with Kyo Maclear
Author Kyo Maclear, photo by David Wall
I first fell in love with Kyo’s writing for adults several years ago, inhaling her capacious and deeply moving memoir Unearthing and immediately moving onto Birds Art Life. After that, I dove headlong into her writing for children, which is, I believe, one of the most beautiful bodies of work in all of Canadian literature. In collaboration with some of the most talented and exciting artists working today, Kyo has produced an incredible number of breathtaking picture books, stories that take the form and it's readers seriously, whilst also making room for play and experimentation.
Kyo’s new book, A Door is to Open, is her fourth with illustrator Julie Morstad. A beautiful list poem celebrating doors in all their forms and functions, it pays homage to two earlier picture book greats, Remy Charlip and Ruth Krauss, whom Kyo describes as ‘Door People.’ It’s a beautiful term, one that perfectly describes Kyo herself. Her writing open doors for her readers onto interesting lives, places, and ways of knowing the world. Beyond her books, Kyo is constantly holding doors open for other creatives and members of her community, sharing her attention, her enthusiasm, and her remarkable insight.
Kyo Maclear is an essayist, editor, novelist and children’s author. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages, published in over twenty-five countries, and garnered nominations from the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the National Magazine Awards. Her nonfiction books include the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and winner of the Trillium Book Award, and Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets (2023), winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.
She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Huron-Wendat.
A Door is to Open is available from Tundra books!
Q/ This is the fourth book you’ve made with Julie Morstad. Has the process of working together changed from book to book? Are there particular gifts or challenges that come with collaborating with an illustrator on multiple books? What do you love most about Julie’s work?
Julie and I have become very good friends over the years. Sometimes it feels like we share a brain, only she makes mine feel roomier, more open, more colourful. Something like this:
The legendary Eames House, built by Charles and Rae Eames in Pacific Palisades, California, 1947. Photo from the Eames Foundation website.
We were lucky that our remarkable editor, Tara Walker, introduced us in person quite early on. I was already a devoted fan of Julie's books Milk Teeth and The Wayside. Our second book, Bloom, was where our active collaboration truly began.
I think of collaboration as a door. Some open slowly. Others swing wide open. The first time I met Julie, I knew she was a swing-wide-open-and-invite-you-right-into-the-heart-of-things kind of
person.
I still get a little nervous, a little thrilled, whenever I begin something new with anyone. Collaboration works against my silo tendencies, and I'm grateful for that.
Julie and I are both a little obsessed with doors. I've been thinking about them even more lately, because I believe we are living in a time of closed doors. I think of artists and activists, including Remy Charlip and Ruth Krauss, who helped inspire this book, as Door People. They keep doors open. They hold them open for others. That, to me, is one of the most generous things a person can do.
