>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
>> Elizabeth Keys: Brendan Wenzel
is an illustrator based in Brooklyn.
He's a graduate of Pratt Institute.
His books include Some
Pets, Some Bugs,
One Day in the Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus Tree and Beastly Babies.
His latest book is They All Saw A
Cat which he wrote and illustrated.
What a creative and visually
appealing way to remind us
that we each see the same
world in different ways.
All of the images are wonderful so
it's hard for me to pick just one,
but I think my favorite is the bee.
So if you haven't read the
book be sure you check it out.
For those of you familiar
with Brendan's work,
which shows a clear love
for the natural world,
you will not be surprised to learn
that he is a committed
conservationist,
interested in preserving
threatened places and species,
especially in Southeast Asia.
After his remarks Brendan will be
signing in book signing line 18,
which is down to your
right, starting at 12:30.
And with that I'd like to
introduce Brendan Wenzel.
[ Applause ]
>> Brendan Wenzel: Hey.
Is my mic on?
Can everybody hear me?
How are you?
Let me just get situated.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you National Book
Festival for having me.
Alright, I've got one
of these, let's see.
I'm going to test drive, let's see.
Is it working?
Well this is a strong start.
Let me see, alright, okay.
Okay. Hello everybody.
So, before I began I have a
couple of cat related questions.
How many people here have a pet cat?
Okay, not that many actually.
How many people have seen a
cat, maybe in their building,
at a friend's house, have had some
kind of relationship with a cat?
Okay, wonderful.
So, here's where things get a
little bit more interesting.
How many people here
think that cats are cute?
How many people think that
cats are kind of creepy,
slinking around, a
little mysterious?
Yeah. How many people
think that cats are boring?
And how many people think that
cats are really interesting?
Okay. So this is cool.
We have you know, many
people in this audience
but everyone raised their
hands for different questions,
which means that we all
have had very different,
unique experiences with cats.
Which means that when we see
cats we're all seeing them
in kind of, in different ways.
And so this was something
that I thought was
really, really interesting.
And so I wrote this book called
They All Saw A Cat about this idea
and about how different people
and different animals see cats
in very, very different ways.
So before I talk about that I'd
like to tell you a little bit
about myself and about
why I make books.
So the first thing to understand
is that I have loved animals
since I was like about this big.
This is a picture of me at the
Bronx Zoo in New York City,
probably at the age of 10 or 11, and
it was my favorite place at the time
and still really is
my favorite place.
And surrounding this photograph you
can see all the magazines and books
that I loved at that time period.
So National Geographic and
The Animals at Maple Hill Farm
by the Provensens and The Tales
of Uncle Remus illustrated
by Jerry Pinkney who's still
one of my favorite illustrators.
And so when I started writing
and illustrating stories I had,
they were of course about animals.
So this is my first book and it
was called The Frog and was all
about frogs and the
life cycle of frogs.
And my second book was
called Land of the Little
and it was all about baby animals.
And funnily enough when I
was published my second book
that I illustrated was
also about baby animals.
You may not have heard of this
because at that point I was writing
under the name BS Wenzel
instead of Brendan Wenzel.
When I got to art school I
also, I also drew animals.
This is a piece from my
senior project at Pratt.
And a friend of mine tried to
imagine the zoo of the future,
if we had traveled to other
planets and brought animals back.
So this was called The
Fantastical Intergalactical Zoo.
A couple years out of art
school I was doing nothing
that had anything to
do with animals.
Both my wife Magdalene and I
were working in office buildings.
And my only interaction with
anything that had anything to do
with the natural world
was coming home at night
and watching these wonderful
BBC wildlife documentaries
by David Attenborough, which I
was just consuming ravenously.
So at one point I said
to my wife, you know,
we've got to get out of here.
And she said yeah, we do, like
let's go see some actual animals.
And so we devised this plan.
If we could get to the
other side of the world,
a place like Melbourne Australia,
then essentially everywhere
else would more
or less be on the way home.
And so we did.
We left the US and for like a number
of magical years I found
myself crossing paths
with all these really cool
creatures I've been learning
about in these nature documentaries.
So the last shot was a kea,
which is a parrot in New Zealand.
This is a troop of macaques
grooming my wife in Bali.
These are some wallabies.
This is a vine snake on my arm and
I'm making this face because I found
out that this vine snake
is just mildly poisonous,
which I was thrilled to realize.
And everywhere, everywhere
we've travelled I always draw.
And so I draw with everything
I can get my hands on.
I draw with pencils.
I draw with markers.
I paint with watercolors which
come with me everywhere I go.
And I get to draw in
all kinds of cool places
like Christchurch New Zealand
or Ubud Bali or Tokyo Japan,
or on the streets of
Ho Chi Minh City.
And it was in Ho Chi Minh
City in Vietnam that my wife
and I were having such a great time
that we decided to
stay for two years.
And so we spent two years living
in this really wonderful city
on the other side of the world.
And spending out, spending time
in a place that was so different
from the country that we grew up
was wonderful for so many reasons.
But one of the greatest things was
seeing how just day to day life
in Vietnam challenged
to us in a great way
to reimagine our relationships
to everything that we found
that we're at one time familiar.
So things like architecture
and etiquette and fashion
and language all needed
to be reimagined.
And we had this great opportunity
to step outside ourselves
and see the world from an
entirely different point of view.
And at the time I said this is, this
is so, I was expanding and I felt
like it was so valuable but,
but I wasn't quite sure how
to explore that in a book.
What I did know how to do at the
time was continue to draw animals.
So these are some, these
are images of gibbons
that I created in Thailand.
And so I sketched animals
everywhere we went.
And just like in the picture book
world, sketches became finals,
and they eventually turned into
this series, which was created
to illustrate both more common
but also lesser known
creatures of Southeast Asia.
And I did this one, because I was
fascinated by these creatures,
but also because I wanted to educate
myself about all the different
and new, and new animals
that I would find
in the steamy ecosystems
around our new home.
This really wonderful thing happened
when I put these images
out into the world.
They very quickly began
to connect me to people
who also felt the same
way about these creatures,
who were fascinated by them.
And those were conservationists
and biologists.
And I was thrilled to find out
that they felt like there are,
there were plenty of places
that we could collaborate
and explore this enthusiasm
together.
So this is a map that I worked
on with the San Veasna Center
in Cambodia and I also worked on it
with the Wildlife Conservation
Society,
who has branches all over the world.
And this map was created to
highlight some of the less,
the less traveled areas
in Cambodia that are,
that are ecological hotspots.
And what we were hoping is
that maybe by creating a map
like this we could attract
tourist dollars to some
of the roads less traveled.
Through a project like
this I was able to connect
with the Wildlife Conservation
Society back home in the States.
And in 2015 I was able to work on a
redesign of the Bronx Children's Zoo
with some of my heroes from
my childhood which was really,
really fantastic and overwhelming.
I think that one of the, one of
the questions that I confront again
and again being someone who is
passionate about both the arts
and conservation, is finding
ways to share my enthusiasm
and my fascination with the
natural world with a wider audience.
And it's one of the reasons that
I feel very grateful that I get
to work in picture books.
Because I feel like picture books
are just the absolute perfect
platform for diving
into some of these ideas
in an interesting and expansive way.
And so working in picture books
I've been able to collaborate
with all these fantastic
authors, like Angela Dieter Lizzie
and Ellen Jackson and
Daniel Bernstorm.
And I've been able to get a glance
at how they see the natural world
and what inspires them about
animals and natural systems.
Just getting through
here, apologies.
Sorry, it seems we're
caught up here.
Okay. Author, other authors
are not the only people whose,
whose viewpoints that
I'm interested in though.
And one of the great
things about working
in picture books is I've
had the chance to meet
and work with lots of kids.
So these, these pictures are from
an art class that I taught in Nepal.
And you can kind of see these
fish tanks in the, in the picture.
And essentially these art classes
were held around these tanks
that were full of frogs and
insects and all these other animals
that we found around this
beautiful valley in Nepal.
One thing that I've heard
again and again in art class,
both in the States and abroad,
is a lot of kids saying
I've done a bad drawing.
I don't know if anybody has
ever, has ever said this
or ever felt this way, and
it's certainly something
that I've felt a number of times.
But my philosophy is that doing
a bad drawing is really an
impossible idea.
And every chance I get I
try to share this with kids.
Because I think that when
you're doing a drawing,
even if it's a drawing where you
feel like you've made a mistake
or you've not done everything
exactly the way you wanted to do it,
what you're ultimately doing
is sharing your point of view
or sharing your perspective with an
audience, with the outside world.
And so what you're,
what you're doing
for them is giving them a chance to
see something like a frog in a new
and interesting way that maybe they
haven't thought about it before.
And so kind of adopting that line
of thinking a bad drawing
becomes an absolute impossibility.
And I really, I really
like this idea
and I think it's very important.
And it's something, again, it's
something that I wanted to write
about and I wasn't quite
sure how to approach it.
So a couple of years ago Magdalena
and I returned from living abroad.
We had lived in Vietnam and
we'd spent time also in Nepal.
And I set up this little
studio and started pacing back
and forth thinking about what I
wanted to write about and what kind
of story I wanted to tell.
And so I thought about
animals that I'd seen,
and I thought about animals that had
seen me, and I thought about animals
that had chased me, and I thought
about animals who I'd loved
like my cat Showcat in Vietnam, and
I thought about people that I'd met,
and I thought about art that I'd
seen, and I thought about art
that I made with people
that I had met.
And then I was doing
a lot of thinking.
So I started thinking
about getting a snack.
And so I walked down to my kitchen
and then I was, I started thinking
about the mouse that
lives in my kitchen
because it had been using
my pantry as a rest room.
And so I started thinking about
getting a cat, like my parents
because my parents certainly
do not have a mouse problem.
And, but then I started thinking
about being in Nepal and walking
through tiger habitat on foot and
how vulnerable that made me feel.
And I thought well maybe I feel
a similar way about a tiger
that a mouse feels about a cat.
And then I realized
that's not exactly right
because a tiger usually wants to
eat deer where a cat very much wants
to eat mice all the time.
And so I went back to my studio
and I started thinking again,
which is always dangerous.
But eventually I wrote
down this line.
And that line was the mice saw a cat
and the cat was a frightening cat.
And I thought it was
a little bit clunky.
So I did what an illustrator
does and I drew a picture.
And so I drew this picture
of all these little mice
and they're running away from
this big kind of terrifying cat.
And then I said okay,
now I'm going to try,
try my hand at writing this again.
And this time I said okay,
let's keep it to just one mouse.
We'll have it about the experience
between this one animal
and this cat.
And then I thought well
this, the frightening cat,
I mean that is clearly an image
of a very, very frightening cat.
And so I scratched that out as well
and then went back
to the drawing board.
And I ended up with this.
And I, and I really liked it.
I said oh this is you know, the
text and the image are interacting
in exactly the way that I would,
that I was kind of hoping for.
And I took a step back and started
thinking about all the other animals
that might see this cat
and how every animal
that would perceive this cat
would see it in their own way.
And as I started to kind of take
on the character of this cat,
as these animals and open up
my art vein, and I went oh,
like a flea is not going to want
to use the same materials as a bee,
where a flea might
want to use something
like colored pencil to
communicate that cat.
Maybe a bee with its
compound eyes would,
would sort of use water color.
And maybe a snake sensing
heat would want
to use acrylic and loose crayon.
And so I had just a blast for
six months reading as much
as I could every night about each
of these animals and then waking
up the next day and kind
of adopting this character.
And then just trying to create
art as a snake, as a skunk.
So the result is this
book They All Saw A Cat.
And I think if I have time maybe
I'll have some kids come up
and we can, we can read it together.
Would anybody like to come up on,
up on stage or we can read the book?
Let me just grab the
book really quickly.
Come on up guys.
How are you?
Nice to meet you.
You guys want to sit down here
and we'll read the book together?
Alright. I'm going to sit,
can I sit in this chair
so I just face outward
and then, alright.
And then you guys want
to come right in here.
Can we sit on the floor?
Alright. Wonderful.
Look at this.
How is everybody doing?
>> Good.
>> Brendan Wenzel: Good.
Thank you for coming up.
Alright. So, this is my book.
Alright, so this book is
called They All Saw A Cat.
These are the end papers.
Alright. So, as we flip
through the book I'm hoping
that everybody can keep
their eyes on this collar
and on this bell, alright.
We all see that?
We've got a red collar
and a bell, alright.
So, the cat walks through the world
with its whiskers, ears and paws.
And we have this cat, right.
Just walking through the world.
And the child saw a cat.
And so we see this cat and it's
a very, very cute cat, right.
It's fuzzy and it's friendly.
And the dog saw the cat.
What's happening to the cat?
Yeah, he's looking a little
bit creepier here huh.
And the fox saw a cat.
Yes, they all saw the cat.
The cat walked through the world
with its whiskers, ears and paws.
And the fish saw a cat.
And the mouse saw a cat.
Where is the mouse,
it's right down here.
And the bee saw the cat.
Yes, they all saw the cat.
Can you guys imagine what
it's like to be a bee?
Buzz, exactly.
The cat walked through the world
with its whiskers, ears and paws.
And the bird saw a cat
up above the clouds.
And there are five animals
hiding in this page.
Can anybody see one of the animals?
We'll just do one, there we go.
Can anybody find the bird eggs.
There's a bird egg
somewhere in here.
There you go, there they are.
Wonderful.
And the flea saw a cat.
And the snake saw a cat.
And the skunk saw a cat.
And the worm saw a cat.
And the, and the bat saw a cat.
Yes, they all saw the cat.
Yes, they all saw a cat.
And what's happening here?
This cat is made up of all the
different ways that we've seen
that cat throughout the book.
A child and a dog and a fox and
a fish, and a mouse and a bee
and a bird and a flea, and a snake
and a skunk and a worm and a bat,
the cat knew them all,
and they all knew the cat.
And the cat walked through the world
with its whiskers, ears and paws,
then it came to the water.
And imagine what it saw.
What's it see?
Alright. So, like I said before, to
make this book every day I woke up
and I imagined I was
a different animal.
So what I'm hoping is that maybe
you guys one want to imagine
that you're an animal
with me right now.
Do you guys want to do that?
Alright, cool.
So let's come, well you guys
can sit here and I'm going to go
over to this drawing board and what
we're going to do is we're going
to imagine that we're
transforming into bats.
You guys can sit right here,
you can sit right here.
Can you see me from over here?
Alright. Alright.
So what I'm going to do is I'm
going to draw on this board,
and we're going to turn
into bats together,
and I'll tell you how to do that.
And so as I draw I'm going to
transform a kid into a bat.
But what I want you
guys to do is imagine
that you're transforming
just like that kid into a bat
and we're going to become bats.
Does that sound fun?
Alright. So we're going
to start, excuse me.
Alright. So we're going
to start with a kid.
Here we go.
So we got our body,
right, we've got a body.
Do a head.
Got some eyes right,
what's here, what are these?
Arms, there we go, alright.
What comes at the end of arms?
Fingers, right, five fingers.
And then down here.
Okay. So we've got our human child.
Now let's start with our body.
So human beings have
a smooth body, right.
But bats are covered in
something and it keeps them,
it keeps them warm and
night when they fly around.
Does anyone know what it is?
What is it?
It's fur, alright.
So I'm going to draw some fur
over here and what I want you guys
to do is imagine growing
furry fur all over you, okay.
And this is going to, and for a
bat this is going to keep you warm
because you're flying around
and it's called a night, right.
And it's going to get
cold in that cave
where you're probably
sleeping all day.
Alright. So now we've
got our bat fur.
Has everybody grown bat fur?
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Alright, alright.
Now let's go to our legs.
Alright, so we've got these long
people legs, but we're not going
to need those long
legs as a bat, right.
We're going to need little
tiny legs but what we're going
to need is long, long toes so
we can hang on to that branch.
So I'm going to draw little bat legs
and everyone imagine
their legs shrinking down
and those toes getting really long.
Alright, here we go.
Everybody grown bat legs?
Alright. Yeah, alright.
And then we'll do a little bat tail.
Alright. Now does a bat have arms?
What does a bat have?
Wings, that's right.
So this is the fun part.
So I want everybody to imagine
growing big long bat wings, ready.
Those fingers are stretching out
and becoming really big bat wings.
How you guys doing, are
you growing those wings?
Are you flapping around,
everybody flapping?
There we go.
Alright. And then we've got
one last adjustment to make,
and that's up here, because
we've got our ears on our side
of the head, where
are the bat's ears?
Where does the bat have ears?
Up here on the top, right.
Alright. So let's give us
some big, big bat ears.
Wow, alright.
That's a bat.
Alright. Alright.
And then the last, the last step
is now that we're bats we've got
to shrink way way way way way way
down so we become tiny little bats.
Alright. Now, here is your mission.
Now you have to go home
today as bats, okay.
And when you get home I want you
to think, how do I see the world?
How am I going to, how am I
going to see the world around me?
And what you can do is you can go
I don't know anything about bats,
maybe you can go to the library
and you can read as much as you can
about how those bats see the world.
And then you can make a
piece of artwork as a bat.
And you guys all might want to
make a piece of artwork as a bat
with different materials.
You might see it, see the world
in entirely different ways.
Does that make sense?
Does that sound fun?
And so what I'm hoping is
that when you read this book,
when you read They All Saw
A Cat you can go through
and imagine how every one of those
animals see the, sees the world.
And maybe you'll look at how I think
these animals see the world and go,
I don't think that was right at all.
I think animals see
the world like this.
I think animals see
the world like that.
And that's my, that's my
greatest hope for this book is
that you guys will take it back
and have lots and lots of questions
about the book and the world
and about how different
things see this one cat.
So anyway, thank you so much
for coming and listening.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
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