StreetScenes
2010
Author Marc Brown enchants the Lower School
Quick: what's almost as thrilling as a visit from Santa Claus? It's a visit from Marc Brown, the creator of Arthur the Aardvark and other fascinating creatures, who gave an absorbing presentation before the School for Children's Lower School students on the morning of November 10 in the Auditorium. The author of more than 100 children's books and the award-winning TV series based on Arthur the Aardvark, Marc's appearance was a gift from a School for Children grandparent, who won the presentation in a charity auction.
Marc explained to the eager children that he was there to "help you with your work, and with your writing books and scripts for TV shows and other things." Writing, he emphasized, was like learning to play the piano or basketball. You had to practice a lot to get better at it and to get what you were doing just right. It was the same with drawing as with writing, he added. That was why it was important to keep on working and trying.
He described how Arthur came to be: his son Tolon asked him for a bedtime story about a strange animal, so he started at the beginning of the alphabet, with an aardvark. As he said this, Marc began to draw a real aardvark on the drawing easel, one with the long pointy nose that aardvarks have, and with ears that he noted looked like "ping pong paddles." Over the years in his many books for children, Arthur the Aardvark's nose got progressively shorter and he began wearing glasses. Then Marc showed the children how they could draw Arthur themselves. He created Arthur's face by drawing a series of U's: for the head, a big lower U was connected to a big upside-down U; a tiny upside-down U connected the two round lenses of Arthur's eyeglasses; two dots indicated his eyes, two other his nose, and a small U served for his smile.
Regarding story ideas, Marc said that he gets them from everything and everybody, and so could the students. For instance, Grandma Thora is his grandmother, D.W. is based on three of his sisters, Francine on his sister Bonnie, Mr. Ratburn on his old math teacher Gary Rathburn. He also turned many of the kids in his third grade class into characters in his books. He showed slides of his early life in Erie, PA and of his home on Martha's Vineyard, with its five ponies, two goats, two cows, turkeys, chickens, one blue peacock, ducks, and two cats. His wife Laurie is also an artist and sometimes they collaborate.
In the spirited question and answer period that followed, the children asked him about the genesis of various favorite characters and stories. As he answered them, he urged them to read as much as they could, and to keep creating their own stories and pictures.
