Home
When writing about a picture book I start by reading the author and/or illustrator’s bio. I like to know the story (or the person, I should say) behind the story. Carson Ellis paints and illustrates, she also teaches workshops and designs album covers. Her picture book “Du Iz Tak?” won the Caldecott Honour and E. B. White Read Aloud awards.
Home is the first picture book she wrote & illustrated. A whimsical portray of ways of living, both mythical and ordinary. A journey that takes us from rural to urban, nautical to lunar homes. With deep colouring- blacks and greys with a touch of crimson in the recurring brick chimney, a girl’s stripped t-shirt, the French flag, the minimalist geometric window frame, the drop of ink on the artist’s palette. This book makes us consider how peoples and cultures live, the way creatures take residence in nature, be it permanent or temporary. It even invites us to ponder the future: a Victorian home depicted inside a force field greenhouse structure against a planetary background. It holds an important question about displacement and belonging and where we might find it.
If you’d like to listen to the story, please visit the Mama Reads Instagram by clicking here.
For a beautiful review of Home by Maria Popova, visit the Marginalian.
Back in 2007 I packed my blue suitcase and moved from São Paulo to Vancouver. It’s been 18 years and in that period of time I’ve lived in 16 homes. I collected zip codes from the western most plateau of that city all the way to the Interior of the province. The amount of packing and boxes that were too heavy to carry aside, there’s a feeling of AFLOATNESS. Not a word, I know. But a definite feeling. One I struggled with at times but over the years, learned to embrace.
Georgia & Audrey
Backyard shed of our home on East 49th Avenue, Vancouver, BC. Circa Summer 2015.
Dwell number 6 on that list is when my daughter was born. And HOME took on a different meaning. It was no longer my young self floating from a lease to a summer sublet, now home involved a green crib, a pine toddler-height bookshelf, a corner to park the stroller at the end of each day. Home wasn’t mine alone to live in and to remember. It was a part of the fabric of memories my daughter would carry with her. I learned to celebrate each place for its quirks- to inhabit those spaces like it’s forever, to hang the picture frames, the prayer flags, no matter how brief that forever may be.
This house was made by my daughter, Georgia, back when she attended the GreenThumb Montessori preschool in Vancouver, BC.
I see tangled fiber bits that somehow make sense- and reside not entirely contained in the structure of the house. A simple rectangle invites us in. Perhaps that’s the beauty we find in the feeling of HOME? A place that holds our messyness, invites others in, and allows space to simply be?
Book: Home (Canada & U.S.A)
Words & Pictures by: Carson Ellis [you can follow her Substack SLOWPOKE here]
Published: 2015 Candlewick Press
