On Friday, Texas Standard is broadcasting from Abilene at the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival, where Matt Phelan is this year’s featured author and illustrator.
His books include “Sweater Weather” and “Turtle Walk” – and he might be best known for his series of easy chapter books about Plum the peacock.
The Standard caught up with Phelan before he made his very first trip to Abilene.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What are you looking forward to being the featured storyteller at the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival? That’s got to be a big honor.
Matt Phelan: It is a tremendous honor, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I can prepare myself exactly for what is going to happen. It’s gonna be wonderful, and I’m so honored and humbled by the whole thing. I’m really looking forward to it.
This celebration includes readings of your book and buttons with your characters. Another part is unveiling of statues of some of your characters that you created, which really feels like this big and permanent honor. Can you tell me about that?
The statues – really, the permanence of that is the perfect word for it. I mean, it’s an incredible thing.
And the thought that those statues are joining the collection and being part of the National Center [for Children’s Illustrated Literature] and will be there for years to come, that my descendants can come to Abilene and see the statue of Plum and the Turtles – it’s hard to wrap my head around.
But it’s absolutely wonderful, and again, I couldn’t be more honored to be a part of this.
Let’s talk about your career. You are author and illustrator. Did one come first?
Yes, I actually started out as an illustrator. I wanted to illustrate picture books. And I spent a few years – I did about six or seven books maybe as an illustrator working with other authors. And then I had an idea for the first book that I wanted write, which is a book called “The Storm in the Barn.”
After that I’ve also continued to illustrate books by other people, because I still enjoy that. I love getting to play in a world that I could not have imagined on my own. And I also like to continue to write my own story. So it’s been wonderful being able to do both.
» MORE: ‘The kids are at the center’: How the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival has grown in Abilene
Well, your books might appeal to kids in a range of ages – some for the very young; Plum’s kind of this easy chapter book. You’ve also done graphic novels. Do you have a target audience? Do you have a niche? Or is it just general, to sort of all young people? 
Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better if I had a niche, but I really don’t. I love all the different kinds of books. And what’s wonderful about children’s publishing is there are so many different kinds. of books.
So you can have the picture books for the very, very youngest children into the early chapter books, and then chapter books for maybe third and fourth grade, they’re getting a little bit more confident in their reading. And then the graphic novels, which tend to be more the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade kind of group.
I like all of them. And I think that whole span of time is just a wonderful time where kids are very open to different kinds of stories and their imagination is at its peak. And I think when I was a kid, those were the years that I was learning to be creative and trying different things.
At the Art and Literacy Festival, you’ll be speaking directly to kids, which I know is not a first for you. But what’s your main message to early readers?
I’m very happy to be able to talk to kids and show them that books aren’t magic and they don’t just appear. And, you know, I’m just a normal person, and anybody can make books.
And creativity, which is the source of everything, all children have it. It’s a superpower that every child has. As people get older, sometimes they lose the habit of the creativity that they are born with.
And I like to talk to the kids about the creativity, the imagination that they have: Keep it strong all through their lives, because no matter what they grow up to be, creativity will help them. And it’s better for everyone: society, the world, everybody.
So I like to tell the kids that what they do, making up things and drawing, is basically what I do as a job. And I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.
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Okay, well, you hit exactly where I want to go, because I happen to have at least one little artist in my family who’s just constantly doodling or creating.
Like, we’ll go somewhere, and someone’s like, do you want to keep this? And I’m like, man, it’s prolific. I’m drowning in sketches. What’s the best way to encourage that exploration?
Oh, well, I think – and this is what my parents did for me, and what my wife and I have done for our children – is just having supplies around. Just have paper or just have colored pencils around.
I encourage them to just draw and not make a big deal out of it. Like, it’s not drawing time. The kids will naturally gravitate towards it, and everything they draw is great.
There’s time to develop drawing skills if you really like drawing and you want to learn more about it. But when they’re little and they’re just drawing for fun, however they draw is perfect.
And encourage that by just having the supplies around, noticing it and telling them that they just created something that didn’t exist in the world a few minutes earlier. And I think that’s amazing.
Well, you touched on this a little bit, but I gotta imagine when you made that leap from being an illustrator and feeling really good about your art that you did to wanting to tell a story of your own for the first time, that that must’ve been a little intimidating.
Did you feel like that was a big leap, or did you feel you were empowered to use your words to tell a story?
It did feel like a big leap in a way, because I had been illustrating books and I’d been very fortunate in the few years I’d been doing it professionally, I’d been working with such good writers – Susan Petrone, who won the Newbery Medal, and Eileen Spinelli – and it was just wonderful.
So there was that intimidation of knowing how good children’s novels were. What I did was I realized I could tell the story I wanted to write as a graphic novel.
Now being an illustrator, this was a little bit of a way for me to ease into it because I see stories and pictures anyway. So by using the medium of comics, it was a way for me feel more confident in telling a longer story.
