>> Phoebe Connelly: Good afternoon. I'm Phoebe Connelly, the deputy director of video at the Washington Post. We are a charter sponsor of the National Book Festival. I'd like to start by thanking the co-chairman of the festival, David Rubenstein, and the other generous sponsors who have made this event possible. If you'd like to add your financial support, please note the information is in our program. We will have time after the presentation for questions and have been asked to remind you that if you come to the microphone you will be included in videotape of the event which may be broadcast at a later time. So, without further ado, our guests today are Matt De La Peņa and Loren Long. They are the author and illustrator of this book, "Love", which they will be talking about today. Matt de la Pena is the number one New York Times bestselling Newberry Medal-winning author of 5 picture books including "The Last Stop on Market Street", and his new one which is coming out shortly called "Carmela Full of Wishes", as well as 6 critically acclaimed young adult novels. He received his MFA in creative writing for San Diego State University and he attended school on a full athletic scholarship for basketball, which I think is a pretty cool fact. Lauren Long is the award winning number one New York Times bestselling children's book author and illustrator. He is the creator of the Otis series of picture books as well as Little Tree and the upcoming "There's a Hole in the Log at the Bottom of the Lake". You might also know his drawings because he's the illustrator of "Of Thee I Sing" by Barack Obama. Before they get them started, they will be signing books at 2:00 pm. So, please welcome Matt de la Peņa and Loren Long. ^M00:01:48 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:53 >> Matt de la Peņa: Hello, guys. Thank you so much for having us here. The last time I was here I think, Loren, too, it was on the lawn. >> Loren Long: Yeah, it was outside. >> Matt de la Peņa: This is the first time they've done it inside. This is exciting. We're going to begin by just reading the book to you. Ready? You might notice Loren over here drawing. He seems to draw everywhere we go. So, Love. ^M00:02:18 ^M00:02:22 In the beginning, there is light and two wide eyed figures standing near the foot of your bed, and the sound of their voices is love. A cab driver plays love softly on his radio while you bounce in back with the bumps of the city and everything smells new. And, it smells like life. Love too, is the smell of crashing waves and a train whistling blindly in the distance. And, each night the sky above your trailer turns the color of love. In a crowded concrete park you toddle toward summer sprinklers while older kids skip rope and run up the slide. And, soon you are running among them and the echo of your laughter is love. On the night the fire alarm blares you're pulled from sleep and whisked into the street where a quiet old lady is pointing to the sky. Stars shine long after they've flamed out," she tells you, "and the shine they shine with is love." But it's not only stars that flame out, you discover. It's summers too, and friendships and people. One day, you find your family nervously huddled around the TV but when you asked what happened, they answer with silence and shift between you and the screen. In your dream that night, you are searching for a love that seems lost. You open and close drawers, lift cushions, empty old toy bins, but there's nothing. You wake with a start in the arms of a loved one who bends to your ear and whispers, "It's okay, it's okay." It's love. And, in time you learn to recognize a love overlooked. A love that wakes at dawn and rides to work on the bus. A slice of burned toast that tastes like love. And, it's love in each deep crease of your grandfather's face as he lowers himself onto an overturned bucket to fish. And, it's love in the rustling leaves of gnarled trees lined behind the flower fields. And, it's love in the made up stories your uncles tell in the backyard between wild horseshoe throws. And, the mad in rags outside the subway station plays love notes that lift into the sky like tiny beacons of light. ^M00:05:58 ^M00:06:02 And, the face staring back in the bathroom mirror? This, too, is love. So, when the time comes for you to set off on your own, heavy winds will sweep past your building and great, great clouds will congregate above. Your loved ones will stand there like puddles beneath their umbrellas holding you tight and kissing you and wishing you luck. But, it won't be luck you'll leave with because you'll have love. You'll have love, love, love. Thank you for letting me read that to you. ^M00:06:43 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:46 And, now what we're going to do is we're going to just briefly talk about where we come from and how we both arrived at this same book. Loren lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. I live in Brooklyn, New York. So, we're coming at it from different places, different upbringings. And, we wanted to find the most inclusive word we could render in a book and for us it was love. So, a little bit about me first. This is my dad. He was a just a kid when I was born. He was the first in his family to be born in America. We call him the Mexican Hippie Surfer because he's Mexican but he likes to surf, which is not normal. And, that's me, the big boy right there, that liked tacos. So, my dad's Mexican, my mom's white. Now, this isn't the greatest picture of me. By the way I thought that there was an undiagnosed medical condition happening here until I just had a son a few months ago and he's even fatter than me. So, it's just purely genetic. But, here's my mom and they were both teenagers when I was born and we grew up right on the Mexican border. And, I did play basketball in college. I became the first in my family to go to college thanks to a sport. That's why all you young guys if you love sports it could take you places that you never imagined. I'm just going to flash through a couple of my previous books, Last Stop on Market Street. [Applause] That's nice. Where did I come out on landing on Love? I just remember there was so much divisiveness in the country, you know, when I started to write the book. And, I had a daughter at the time. Only a daughter, and I remember thinking, "What is the one thing that we all share no matter our political beliefs, no matter what our social standing in the country is?" And, I felt like it's love. It's the kid growing up in Brooklyn has love hopefully. The kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania has love in their family. So, that's where I landed with this book. And, I was very fortunate enough to be able to share this experience with Loren Long. And, now he's going to tell you a little about his background. >> Loren Long: Alright, so Matt de la Peņa grew up near the ocean. In San Diego, near the Mexican border in an exotic, wave place where people surf. I came from an exotic land called Missouri. There's my childhood. So, it was one of the best things about doing the book and actually collaborating with the author is getting to know him. I really learned a lot about his culture by sharing my culture. You can see what I look like. Here's my dad and my mom. Nobody in my family were artists, you know? They liked, so this is Missouri, then we moved to Kentucky. This is when you're an 11 year old kid on your birthday your mom might put a horse when you live in Lexington, Kentucky. We didn't wear shirts or shoes. No Kentucky jokes. Now I live in Ohio, but it was really wonderful for me to grow up in this environment. A couple of teachers. We have educators in the room by show of hands? Yes, yes, a couple of special teachers. By this time, mom and dad salesperson, secretary, no artists. We didn't go to art museums. We didn't do those things. The only time we went to an art museum is when we visited my grandmother in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And, we went to this, I used to call it the Cowboy Museum. It was the Gilcrease Hills Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was filled with Frederic Remington paintings. I wasn't an artist, but I loved to draw and I had a couple of special teachers. This is my middle school, my seventh grade influential human being in my life. And, I'll go ahead and straight up just tell you it was a mostly white school that I went to. Seventh grade, this man was the head football coach. He was the coolest guy in the building. He would never know shrimpy Loren who was the furthest thing from a football coach except he was also the art teacher. I heard him say my name once and I looked up and I said, "I can't believe Mr. Pennington uttered my name. And, he was holding my drawing. And, I'll never forget the sound of hearing Mr. Pennington use my name and it's just an amazing thing. That was love. He didn't have to help me out but he started giving me a little extra attention. By the way, I was never the best artist in my class. There was always some annoying kids that were better than me. But, I really loved it. I really loved it. Then, I had another teacher, Miss Clifton. I'll never forget Miss Clifton to the day I die. By the way, that's me with all that hair. That's me as a, like a freshman or a 10th grader. She's teaching me how to use oil paints. She was bringing her art books from home. "Loren, this is Vincent Van Gogh, have you ever heard of him? Loren, have you ever heard of Norman Rockwell?" So it was very influential. I've come all these years to realize that was absolutely an act of love on her part. Here's some of my books. One of the biggest joys of my careers is illustrating The Little Engine That Could, one of my favorite songs when I was little. We'll go through these quick. Otis The Tractor was the first thing I ever wrote. I never thought I would write something. I wasn't a great reader when I was little. It was an attention thing. It was easier for me to draw pictures and play and goof around than it was to focus on reading. So, as a result I never thought I would grow up and be a writer, and I wrote my own story about a little tractor. And, we have six hardcovers by the way. They make great gifts. And, yeah, the kid from Lexington, Kentucky gets this phone call. President Obama, yes! ^M00:13:37 [ Applause ] ^M00:13:40 I'm living in Cincinnati, Ohio, and somebody from New York calls me because the president and his family chose me to illustrate his amazing love letter to his daughters, Of Thee I Sing, A Letter to my Daughters. At that point, check that one out. And, Little Tree. When my sons, who I feel like are your age, went to college, I was having a hard time with it. My wife wasn't even having as hard a time as I was. For some reason, it was hard for me to let go and I wrote a little fable. And, who knows that I could write something but it actually gave me comfort. And, I thought if it comforted me, maybe it would comfort somebody else. So, Little Tree. And, then I think we're on Love, right? >> Matt de la Peņa: Yeah, we are. >> Loren Long: And, then Love, and then I get this. This is called the manuscript. So, Matt de la Peņa lives in New York, I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had been fortunate enough to meet Matt. I knew about his career. I knew of his Newbery Medal career and I get in my phone call from my agent, a text called Love, from Matt de la Peņa. I read this and I'm thinking, "I'm in." I want to give Love to the world. And, then I read it and Matt's text went into some different places. I'll never forget the first time I read this piece right here and I said, and I read, "The sky above your trailer turns the color of love." And, I actually said, "Did he say 'trailer?'" And, I'm like, "This goes into different areas." This book allowed me to take my art, my Otis The Tractor and Little Engine That Could career, into a little different area. And, I'll always be grateful for that, Matt. In Matt's text he talks about how beautiful love is, how you receive it, how you start to recognize it. It's also a little messy in places right? Love isn't always perfect. And, I said, "You know I've been painting the same way my entire career for 15 books. It's time for me to do something a little different." So, has anybody ever heard of monoprints, monotypes? What I did with Love, it's unpredictable. I have a way of painting my art into oblivion. People have to tell me to stop, you know? Nobody ever has to say, "Loren, paint more." They always have to say, "Stop." Right art directors, editors? Because I'm like a working artist, I'm going to work on this painting until I prove this thing is good to the world every time, even after I've illustrated Barack Obama's book. I'm still having to prove myself. Anyway, I sometimes get a little too detailed to so I decided to do monotype prints. So, I'm looking at, okay so first I'm looking at the manuscript. There's no book, right? It's just paper, and this is what I'm looking at. And, I'm pretending I'm a movie director and this is the part where it says, Matt, can you read that for me? >> Matt de la Peņa: Sure, it's, "And in time you learn to recognize love overlooked, a love that wakes at dawn and rides to work on the bus." And, originally the line after that read, "A pair of old house slippers that fit like love." And I was thinking of my grandmother. >> Loren Long: So, you took this text. So, if you all got that text what would you draw? That's what I'm asking myself. I feel like I'm five years old again drawing Snoopy on the kitchen floor. There's no difference. So, I decide I'm going to make a moment in this little movie and I'm going to show the child from behind and he's watching his parents. That bus represents his parents and I thought how clever am I? I'm going to put oversized slippers and I'm going to nail this and the slippers represent the parents. But, when I saw the picture it didn't ring true to me. It almost felt like a desertion, like someone is being deserted. It was too heavy. It wasn't the right note. It wasn't the right moment in our movie. So, I changed it. You can see here I've changed the socioeconomic of this little boy simply by the props that I put in his room. Now, I've got a big picture window, right? I've got kind of a different type of fancy drapes. I'm still grappling with what kind of underwear this little boy is going to wear. >> Matt de la Peņa: The tighty whitey here? >> Loren Long: Yeah, this is the tighty whitey here, the blue and gold. >> Matt de la Peņa: And, apparently your wife was not a fan. >> Loren Long: No, my wife by the way comes into my studio, which is in my home. And, she says, "I don't like the tighty whiteys." And, I'm saying, "This is authentic, man. Tracy, this is art!" Yeah, so you can see here I also put the figure. I put the parent walking to that bus. And, then I felt like it wasn't quite right. I remembered my own brother at a time when my two parents left before we did for the school bus. My brother, my oldest brother's responsibility was feeding me. And, he would always make toast. And, so I brought in another figure. You see I've made the windows smaller. I've changed what kind of subject I'm making just by those little details. >> Matt de la Peņa: And, so this gets kicked over to me and I think this is an interesting detail. Not everybody knows, normally when a picture book is created, the author and the illustrator stay separate. They never discuss any of the process. They only meet when the book is done. But, Loren and I had a different situation. We actually talked on the phone multiple times. We talked out everything. And, when I got this sketch in the mail or in my email I actually thought whoa, this is a whole other layer of Love that I hadn't originally considered. And, for the first time in my career I changed the text because of a sketch. So, I took out the oversized slippers that I thought of my grandmother, I remember from her closet. And, I said you know what, I'm going to put this toast in. So, it changed the line to, "A slice of burned toast that tastes like love." >> Loren Long: And, that's my favorite line in the book. >> Matt de la Peņa: Of course. >> Loren Long: It is a good line. >> Matt de la Peņa: It's a great line. That's a great piece of writing. >> Loren Long: It was actually cited in a review and I was like, "Can I take credit for this?" >> Matt de la Peņa: Well yeah, you can. >> Loren Long: So, just real quick, in part because of what I told you about me being a bit of a perfectionist, I wanted to do monoprints. Instead of taking my paint from my palette directly to the illustration board or the canvas, we used a brayer and worked on glass, plexiglass. And, for you monotype specialists out here, forgive me this is the first time I've ever done this, because I was trying to jump in the dark. I was trying to do something to match the depth of Matt's text. So, I would ink up the brayer and I would wipe it on to the plexiglass and smudge it away and pull it away and use paintbrushes to add, use Q-tips to pull away and draw and manipulate the ink. Then I would take it down to a studio and then I would take it down to the little makeshift basement printing shop that I set up. I convinced my wife I should buy a press. Put this on, and then took a piece of paper that was damp, put it down, run it through that roller and it actually mashes the ink onto that paper. You come out and you pull that paper up and it has an impression. And, that doesn't look like much but I thought okay, those are my figures. That's my figures, but I can't do the background. So, I did that on another page and you can see the one on the right is a real dark background, the wall. And, I'm having fun. It's like I can never paint these textures with my hand and paintbrush like I've been doing for 20 years. But, I did something called a ghost print. That background is too dark, so I ran that same piece of glass through on a new clean piece of paper and I got the lighter one. And, then, how many of you guys do collage art? I'd never done collage art, but I needed to to put these images together. So, I cut the window from the right, glued it onto the left, cut he figures out, cut them out, glued them on, and I've got my painting. It doesn't look finished, but I've got the structure of my art. I've got stuff that I'd never done with textures and rawness that I thought sort of matched the text about love in Matt's work. And, then here I finished by painting like I always do, with paint brushes and some color pencils, putting extra attention on the expression, just a little touch in this big brother, his face. But you want to get that emotion right. And, then, Matt, you saw this. >> Matt de la Peņa: Yes. >> Loren Long: This is when you-- >> Matt de la Peņa: This is probably when I actually changed the text and you might notice that this is pretty well made toast and I was like, "I don't trust this brother's toast making skills." So, I burned it and now watch the final detail. He burns it. >> Loren Long: Yeah, that was an all-nighter to burn that toast. >> Matt de la Peņa: But, you know we would just like to say it's such an honor to share this book with you at the National Book Festival. So, thank you so much for having us. >> Loren Long: I have one thing to do. >> Matt de la Peņa: Yeah, and then Loren actually has something he's produced here. So, if you're an educator raise your hands. I see we have a lot of educators. >> Loren Long: Who's in an elementary school? What are you? You're a reading teacher? Okay, what's your name? Christina, do you have a classroom? Do you have walls? Alright, your name is, how do you spell your name? Okay, I might misspell it but here we go. >> Matt de la Peņa: So, it's kind of cool because he's given these out everywhere we've presented. >> Loren Long: I-N-A, right? >> Matt de la Peņa: It's kind of fun. >> Loren Long: Thank you guys. I'm just going to sign this and give it to you. >> Matt de la Peņa: Thank you.