Meghan Marentette

Rumie, out in the world

31 Days, 31 Lists: 2024 Fabulous Photography Books for Kids

If you’re an artist like me, who works alone in a studio on projects that are solely yours, you’ll understand that sometimes it can feel a bit like working in a vacuum. When you finally emerge from the studio with an artwork or a book to share with the world, you’re never sure if anyone will ‘see’ it quite the way you’d like. In short, your artwork no longer belongs to you, once you share it – it’s open for interpretation, and you have no control over that! So it’s very, very exciting when a reviewer sees your work in the way you hoped someone would.

Betsy Bird’s review of Rumie Goes Rafting, my debut picture book, means a lot to me for that reason – she really ‘gets’ the heart of my intention. When illustrating my Rumie stories, I am trying to make a fantasy world that feels real, with the puppets and props (‘models’) all made by hand and photographed in actual nature, or on sets of a hollow-tree home I make from materials I find in the forest. In her blog, A Fuse 8 Production (School Library Journal), Betsy Bird makes it clear how that process, and the lack of “digital trickery” in Rumie’s world, can bring delight to a reader:

“…So the real danger with models is movement, right? How do you make static figures look like they’re moving on a page? Marentette jumps right in from the title page. There you see Rumie running down a hill towards the water. If there’s any digital trickery at work here, I can’t see it. Then you open the book and boy, it’s lovely. You just can’t fake natural sunlight in the woods, can you? The book tells the story of impatient Rumie and her desire to take a raft for a ride with disastrous consequences. It does a rather delightful job of showing action in a seemingly static form, and I loved how Marentette handled the expressions on the characters’ faces. This one’s a keeper. “

(Insert ecstatic emoji here!) There really couldn’t be a better recognition of my process than this – except from the children who read Rumie! On that front, I am thrilled that some children believe that Rumie is a real creature, living in the woods. I took Rumie’s bedroom set to my book launch and posed a Rumie puppet at the window in the same pose as the scene in the book (see below), and one three year old child said, “But where is the real Rumie?”

He was so convinced that Rumie was real that when he saw the static puppet in person, he thought it was less real because it wasn’t moving, as he believed it was in the book. What a fantastic thing – that a child could take Rumie off the page and into his own imagination, where he can go any time to enjoy Rumie’s kind, creative world…

Rumie’s bedroom, an illustration by Meghan Marentette from *Rumie Goes Rafting* (Owlkids, 2024).

Update!

Hi everyone! I haven’t written a blog in years, which isn’t very shocking if you know me — I rarely leave the fantasy world in my head! But here I am, updating my website because I’m working on a project I’m really excited about. If you want to find out more, click here – it’ll take you to my About page, which will help fill in the gap of what I’ve been up to while I gather some photos to share in the coming weeks. Meanwhile you can follow my In stagram page, which is where I’m most active, on Stories.

Click here for more photos of the process in my indoor and outdoor studios

A Tolerable Isolation

The wish I hear most often from fellow writers is for a secret lair where the only legal entrant is themselves. The most wistful of these wishes I heard from a Scottish tweeter who wanted a hidden door behind a bookshelf that led up to a secret attic room. Does that not conjure up some wonderful thoughts?

Aah… smell that steaming hot chocolate warming your hand as you skip that last creaking stair on the way up to your hideaway. Victory! Nobody knows where you’ve gone and they’ll never find you. You cosy up in your cloud-like chair by the porthole window, overlooking acres of wild, unpeopled landscapes. Your favourite snacks and pens line the drawers of your desk. You may never leave — save for that darn doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day. ARGH!

So I find myself now faced with an incredible offer to write, for the first three weeks of February, in a small cottage overlooking a lake in the hilly lands of the Nova Scotian valley. The only thing is, I’m beginning to doubt whether this is actually a tolerable isolation.

Do we actually want complete isolation? For three whole weeks?

I suspect that what we really want is for those in our lives to give us space, time and the control we need over our own brains – to create that secret lair metaphorically. We need to be able to enter and exit as we choose, to be fed and watered and pampered for a few minutes and then wander back off to Neverland to see what happens next.

For most writers, this is a pure fantasy and perhaps why so many of us dream of isolation. So that nobody CAN get in the way. And we don’t have to feel guilty when we say to our loved ones:
“Ever hear of knocking?”
“I’m sure your sock will turn up.”
“It’s there, on the bottom shelf. Just LOOK, would you?”
“Okay, enough already. I am not here. I do not want to hear that you are here either. Do not breathe.”
Or simply: “Please go away…”

I wonder, though – in my second week of isolation, will I wish someone would knock on the door with a sweet little paw, whispering:

“Do you want some soup?”
“How’s it going?”
“You look tired, why don’t you take a break?”
Or simply: “I love you.”

Anyway, it will be an experiment of sorts. I will report back with Tales from the Valley of Isolation. I may surprise myself and never want to leave, but I suspect I’ll be looking out the window, not always at the one overlooking unpeopled landscapes, but the one overlooking the driveway, wishing my sweetheart would turn up, uninvited.

We shall see!