When You Were Gone, I Went Farther Than You — An Interview with Canadian Picture Book Author Sydney Smith
Everything that appears has meaning. Even when the meaning remains unclear.
I was waiting on a street in Berlin, Germany, to enter the theatre and see Annie Ernaux’s novel A Girl’s Story adapted for the stage. It was Ernaux’s requiem for the girl she had been sixty years earlier. She says: “I, too, want to forget that girl. Truly forget her, no longer feel the desire to write about her. To stop thinking about that girl’s desire and madness, her foolishness and pride, her hunger and the blood that stopped flowing in her. I have never succeeded.”
The falling snow made me duck into a small library on the street to escape the cold. Afraid that my shoes would drag in mud and water and dirty the floor, I sat down in the picture book section near the entrance and began flipping through books at random. In a box of books labeled S on a wooden shelf, several picture books caught my attention: one page of fractured panels pressed close to the leaps of consciousness and its nowhere-to-rest; a full-page image opened into a blurred, gray-blue world, while snow slashed down fiercely. Where the brushwork was thick and intense, it was no more tangled than the blank spaces; the blurred outlines of human figures seemed to hold violent horns about to pierce outward from within the body. Looking more closely, I realized that all these picture books were illustrated by Sydney Smith.
When I left the library, I was holding several heavy picture books in my arms and had no hand free to brush the snow from my face. When I entered the theatre, I could not stop thinking about the solitude, gloom, and sudden warmth in those books, and a kind of deep trust in life.
On stage there were many frames. As the lighting changed, they were sometimes windows, sometimes mirrors. As the actress’s inner state shifted, the frames were sometimes doors one could pass through freely, and sometimes cages locked layer upon layer. It was a solo performance. The actress kept shifting her tone, entering the various doubles of the self, speaking alone before a mirror, picking up the microphone or putting it down, putting on a wig or taking it off, performing, dissociating, and shaping herself in the very act of remembering the past.
Was this a mysterious counterpoint between two forms of art? On the stage of Sydney Smith’s picture books, there are also many frames. Sometimes they depict the gradual passage of time; sometimes they dissolve time’s authority. Sometimes they show the omnipotent summons of memory; sometimes they reveal the fractured and fictional nature of recollection. Sometimes they hold multiple corners of reality in fragmented form; sometimes they make visible the many layers of time and space that a single thought can open in an instant. Sydney Smith’s self-authored picture books Small in the City and Do You Remember? also use the solo performance to reveal that dramatic events are no closer to what we call theatre than the very act of remembering.
Why does looking back toward the future move Sydney Smith so deeply?
I wrote to ask him: what has made you who you are? Sydney Smith said: “It is an interesting exercise to look back at everything that moved me toward who I am now. It is important to recognize the privilege I had in following the path I most longed for. I was very fortunate to have a family who loved and encouraged me. Before I had the words to define it, I was given the space to follow my passion. The solitude of childhood allowed me to explore art. I came to rely on drawing. When I was fortunate enough to hear this calling and to have the freedom to follow it, I entered art school. There, what I learned was not how to draw, but how to think: how to explore a concept, develop a language, and offer the audience a glimmer of truth. But the most valuable gift I received, again and again, was space: space to play, space to make mistakes and explore, and space to listen quietly. My parents provided this generous space, then my teachers, and then myself.”
Early in his career, Sydney Smith collaborated with the Canadian writer Sheree Fitch on three classic children’s books. In 2015, he published two picture books, moving from the realism of Grant and Tillie Go Walking to the expressive, wordless picture book Sidewalk Flowers. I was curious why he had freed himself from the carving of detail and turned instead toward concise ink lines and soft washes of color. He also began using multiple panels on a single page to present the passage of time and close-up shots, like delicate cinematic storyboards. Why had his visual style changed in these ways?
Sydney Smith said: “By 2015, I was ready to present a more confident and energetic drawing style. I began working with Groundwood Books, and my editor Sheila Barry encouraged me to take risks, to explore the emotional journey of both character and reader. I also felt the need to stretch different muscles, so Sidewalk Flowers became an experiment in heavy black ink lines, sweet shapes, and bright colors. Over the years, I have discovered that the style of image-making can be deliberately cultivated, but in the end, what my style is does not depend on me. Readers will recognize who I am in everything I do. I may be an artist who loves watercolor or ink, realism or cartoons, but the truth I bring to art is the style of telling a story. When I choose to use more expressive ink lines and sequential images, it is a risk. I love the magic of full-page images and sequential images. In the space between each image, time passes. It may be one second; it may be one year. This is an unquestioned understanding between artist and reader. If I work in a way that feels new and exciting to me, I open my heart to the art and to the story. By doing so, I become a beginner again and again.”
A beginner is one who bends down, one who splits himself open, one who moves toward the unknown, one who quenches his own thirst.
The gaze of a beginner is like a child’s: clear, unpossessive, without boundaries. Like the little girl in Sidewalk Flowers, who moves through the city, silently picking flowers and giving them away, passing on wordless love and blessing. Small in the City, another book set on city streets, also follows a child’s perspective to explore the edges of life. Sydney Smith uses similar expressive methods to construct black-and-gray scenes, punctuated by a bright touch of red. Although Smoot: A Rebellious Shadow also focuses on the interaction between a city and a child, it is a story about a shadow leaving a boy to pursue freedom and happiness, so Smith allows black to become the protagonist, moving through colored landscapes. I asked him how he grasps the secrets of composition and the meanings hidden within the rhythm of color.
Sydney Smith said: “When the shape of a black shadow occupies and drives the composition, it creates visual attraction. When highlights or color serve as a thematic element throughout the story, they also draw the eye. In Sidewalk Flowers, red brings the reader’s attention to the little girl and represents the joy spread by her beautiful act of sharing. In Small in the City, vibrant red adds an assertive tone to the city. First there are the parking lights and brake lights of cars, and finally the red berries on the bushes. When we see paw prints in the snow, red becomes a kind of visual counterpoint.”
I especially love how the colors, images, and compositions that appear again and again in Sydney Smith’s work gradually turn into something new. Breakthrough is a force of reversal. Repetition, then, is not stillness, but a latent process of brewing and generating movement: the red dots in Small in the City, the yellow raincoat in My Baba’s Garden, the brown teddy bear and red bicycle in Do You Remember? … What I cannot stop thinking about is the mine and the sea in Town Is by the Sea.
Sydney Smith uses four sets of double-page spreads with similar compositions to emphasize the immense, pitch-black rock walls pressing down on the small laboring figures inside the tunnel. Besides presenting the passage of time and the sudden arrival of disaster, these images also visualize the difficulty of mining work and the fragility of life. The page before each of these four oppressive mine images repeatedly shows an open seascape, as if saying that the child’s freedom is purchased through the father’s sacrifice of freedom. The recurring sentence in the book—“And this goes on”—beats out a steady, plain rhythm of life, where even the danger of death is part of the everyday. And so, the ordinariness of day after day conceals the peril of day after day. In this coal-mining town, the fate of every generation of men has already been passed onto the shoulders of every child.
I asked Sydney Smith why, when conceiving Town Is by the Sea, he chose repeated compositions. Why, in the full double-page spread of the miners returning home, did he choose to present it through multiple panels? He said: “Joanne Schwartz wrote a very rhythmic text. Like waves on the shore, it beautifully repeats, ‘My father is digging for coal deep under the sea.’ Each time those sentences repeated, I wanted to draw the progress of the father’s work. To me, if a book can convey an emotional message, it does so not by text alone, not by image alone, but through the combination of the two. A sequence of images on the page can visually attract the reader, while also serving as a way to describe repeated action, changing action, or the passage of time. If a wordless image appears again and again, and the only change is a sliver of sunlight crossing the floor, it not only shows the passage of time, but also suggests the character’s focus: the child is waiting by the door, waiting for the father to come home safely.”
Sydney Smith collaborated with Canadian poet Jordan Scott on two picture books. I Talk Like a River is filled with washes of color that blur and tremble at the edges of things, like the inner chaos that the stuttering boy in the story cannot speak. My Baba’s Garden, by contrast, has thick, grounded brushwork, presenting the wordless empathy between grandparent and grandchild as solid as a mountain. Sydney Smith said: “In these two picture books, I explored a way of drawing that could express emotion more fully. This was an exciting change for me. I could use experimental techniques to express the confusion felt by the characters. In My Baba’s Garden, the focus is on the warmth of love and mutual care. I believe our love defines who we are.”
Our love defines who we are—I repeated this sentence several times and realized that it is also the beating heart of Sydney Smith’s self-authored picture books Small in the City and Do You Remember?
Out of love, the boy in Small in the City searches the snowy city streets for a lost cat. Out of love, the boy in Do You Remember? looks out at the city lit by morning light and weaves a nostalgia for the future. Both picture books set their narrative frame within a conversation between “you” and “I.” By the end of each story, the frame has shifted: in Small in the City, the “you” is not the boy’s self-soothing speech to a mirror, but the missing cat; in Do You Remember?, the “you” is first the intimate listener in the whispered conversation between mother and son lying in bed. When the mother asks, “Do you remember when we went for a picnic in the grass…,” the “you” in the question is the boy. But when the boy asks, “Do you remember that time I had a birthday…,” the “you” becomes the mother.
Later, the boy gets out of bed and asks his mother, “Can we make this a memory too? We can say: ‘Do you remember our first morning in the new home? Just you and me. We weren’t worried, and we weren’t scared. We knew we would be okay.’” After the boy finishes speaking, he turns and sees that his mother has fallen asleep. He lies back down in bed and says silently, “I will. I’ll remember.” In that moment, unheard and unanswered, “you” becomes “I.” A wish laid bare becomes a silent vow. Words spoken aloud become a secret.
When you were gone, I went farther than you.
Small in the City reveals the truth of the solo performance; Do You Remember? lights up the stage of the solo performance at the ending. But both are warm in tone, revealing the deep connection of love.
I asked Sydney Smith how the process of creating alone differs from collaborating with other writers. He answered: “When I collaborate with other writers, the text is the foundation on which I build images. When I write for myself, my challenge is to make everything function on as many levels as possible, so that words and images share the task of storytelling. We come to know life by reading words and looking at images. What I share with other writers has no borders; it is the transmission of human experience.”
I feel that the writing in Sydney Smith’s self-authored books is more intimate and lyrical, and that more of the images are spaces for emotion rather than spaces for narrative. I asked him whether these two books he both wrote and illustrated began first with words or with visual images. He said: “Before I conceived the story of Small in the City, I had already filled my sketchbook with small drawings of cityscapes, waiting for the story to arrive. It was a story about a child in the city, about a city disappearing in a blizzard, about loneliness in a city where millions of people gather. A year later, the element of the cat appeared, and instantly Small in the City became complete. I was satisfied, but I knew it was not always so easy. Do You Remember? began with a theme as vast as the ocean. It was the story of my childhood, of my family breaking apart, and it stirred up many unresolved emotions. It turned out to be the most challenging, because I was still like the child I had been, worried that my sadness and sense of being lost would make others sad. But to ignore the truth of memory would be dishonest to my family, to my readers, and to myself.”
What is honesty? Winding and complicated thoughts coil quietly through every page of Small in the City and Do You Remember? Honesty means not rejecting what remains unresolved, not fearing the presentation of one’s real entanglement, refusing the temptation of clarity and simplification, refusing to stand outside in order to speak of the inside.
When every fold of the inside is clearly left in place, a wish spoken into emptiness becomes a looking back toward the future. Looking back is tender. Everything that appears has meaning. Creation is the act of connecting gazes and laying the past to rest. Just as Sydney Smith said: “When it comes to memory, what do you remember? Do you still remember those turbulent, dark, uncertain things? The answer is that I remember love. Unconditional and always present. I try to make every memory worth remembering.”
Originally published in OKAPI Reading Life Journal.