Just One Question for Sara O'Leary — THE NEEDLE AND THE KNIFE

Author Sara O’Leary holding artwork by Qin Leng from their new book, *A Friend is a Friend*, out now from Groundwood Books.

I first encountered Sara O’Leary’s nine years ago, when I walked into my oldest daughter’s kindergarten classroom for meet-the-teacher night and saw a huge, joyful bulletin board display dedicated to her book A Family is a Family is a Family. At the centre was a big picture of the cover, surrounded by photographs and illustrations of students’ families, and loving, sometimes hilarious descriptions dictated to the teacher by each kid. It was a beautiful way of saying to all the kids and their families there that this was their school, they belonged, they were welcome.

Fast forward to this past winter: I couldn’t believe my luck when Sara announced she was starting a virtual co-working community for picture book creators on Substack. Any creator at any stage of their career was welcome to show up. Once or twice a week, we log on to Zoom to engage in a version of the Pomedoro Method, an approach to time management that involves working in 25-minute focused intervals with short breaks between. It is remarkable how fast the 25-minutes go, and how quickly I can sink into a flow state when surrounded by other creatives doing the same. During our breaks, we chat about what we were working on, ask each other questions about process, share news, and laugh. It is an incredibly valuable opportunity to connect with some truly remarkable creators and actually get work done to boot! I’m so grateful for Sara’s generousity of spirit, which truly exemplifies the warmth and openness of the children’s literature community at its best.

Given my status as a Sara O’Leary superfan, I jumped at the chance to preview the latest instalment in her series with Qin Leng, A Friend is a Friend is a Friend. Set at a summer camp, it explores a deceivingly simple question: what is the best way to make a friend? It’s something kids are often expected to intuitively know how to do, and yet even as adults we stress about it. It’s a pitch perfect read aloud—warm, gentle, funny, and poetic. Qin’s art is, as always, joyfully loose yet detailed, soft yet vivid. A Friend is a Friend s a Friend would make a wonderful addition to any school or classroom library, but it would also make a wonderful gift for any kid feeling nervous about heading off to camp this summer.

Sara O'Leary is a Canadian children's writer and novelist. She is the author of a number of critically acclaimed picture books including The Little Books of the Little Brontës, A Kid is a Kid is a Kid, This is Ruby, This is Sadie, A Family is a Family is a Family and When You Were Small. Her novel, The Ghost in the House, is published by Doubleday Canada.

Q/ This is book begins with the statement “Summer camp is a great place to make new friends! Apparently.” Did you go to summer camp as a kid? If so, was it, in fact, a great place to make a friend?

A/ When we first started talking to Qin about making a third book in our series together, she asked me if it could be set in a summer camp because she really wanted to draw trees. I was happy to go along with that idea, and I really think the story benefited from the new setting. Our first book A Family is a Family is a Family is set in a classroom because it made sense to me that kids at that stage are moving from the family being the center of their life to school taking up at least a good part of their day. Then, in the second book, A Kid is a Kid is a Kid we are out in the playground. This was to show kids on their own, working out how they deal with socializing with other kids. So really, we needed somewhere new to go and camp was a natural.

What A Friend is a Friend is a Friend gains from the sleepaway camp setting is the feeling that there are no adults around to dictate behavior. Of course, from a health and safety POV this is unacceptable. But I love how in Qin’s illustrations the kids seem to be doing alright on their own. I particularly love the final spread where they are hurtling toward the lake with absolutely no sense of mortality!

When I was a kid, I went to a strange sort of summer camp. It was in Northern Saskatchewan near the place where my family had a summer cabin. It was always a thrill as a kid, going north far enough to cross the tree line. At this camp, both the kids and the parents from the alternative school I attended were there. Whatever grade I was in at the time, there were only two of us in that grade for the whole class, so of course we were friends. And we’d idolize whoever was in the grades above us. The class had students from grades one through seven and so when they stuck us all in a dormitory full of bunkbeds it was a peculiar form of anarchy. Were the little, little kids really in with us? I can’t remember. I do remember a lot of screams in the night as people found frogs that had been helpfully left in their sleeping bags. The parents all had cabins away from the main building where we were and we’d see them again in the morning when it would be somebody’s parents turn to make everyone’s breakfast.

We all knew each other. We all knew each other’s parents and things like who was going to be the next to divorce. It was a very 70s sort of camp experience.

Looking at Qin’s work on this book does bring aspects of it back—how cold the lake was, the way the air smelled different up among the trees, and the way it felt we’d stumbled into a world that was purely made for kids. But if I think about it now, it seems to me that the friend I made by going to summer camp was Qin!