To Timbuktu (Roaring Brook, 2011), a travelogue written by Casey Scieszka (yes, the daughter of Jon) and illustrated by Steven Weinberg, chronicles how the two met and fell in love while studying abroad in Morocco—and then set off after graduation on a nearly two-year adventure to Asia and other countries in Africa.
SLJ caught up with the 27-year-old Brooklyn, NY-based couple to talk about the food, the people, and even the dangers they encountered—and whether we can expect to hear any wedding bells soon.
Most college kids study abroad in Europe, but you both went to Morocco—and then spent two years in mostly developing countries in Asia and other African countries. What drew you to these places?
Casey: When I was younger, I dreamed of studying in Paris because I'd taken years of French and Paris is such a dang delightful place. But once it was time to decide, I realized I wanted to go somewhere I wouldn't necessarily want to travel to on my own. Having been in New York for 9/11, the Arab world was definitely on my mind, and Morocco seemed like a fascinating crossroads of places and people. After that, I was just pretty hooked on getting my world turned upside down.
Steven: I always knew I wanted to study abroad somewhere a little different, and Morocco has always called my name. Plus, after 9/11 I was hearing so much about the Arab world and wanted to see it for myself. Morocco seemed like the best place where I could do that and study Arabic. Then Morocco really got me thinking about how accessible the rest of the world could be.
You both met, fell in love, and developed your relationship while traveling in far away and exotic places. How stressful was it to test your relationship in ways that most people don't?
Steven: I think not so much. For all of the stressful times abroad, there were probably 20 more really amazing ones. And, for the most part, we weren't getting stressed out by each other, but rather by stuff going on in these places, so it was great having a partner in crime to be there for you.
Casey: Since we met in Morocco, a "far away and exotic" place, we already knew what the other one was like in that kind of environment. Every other test only served to better our relationship, I think. When abroad, you have to be really open about potentially awkward topics like money and personal health, you have to be able to make plans together and be able to improvise when things don't work out. The only thing that got really hard was having to be each others' "everything." It's a great thing when your lover is also your best friend, but sometimes you just really need those other best friends, too.
How hard was it not knowing the languages and really trying to immerse yourselves in the culture and the people?
Steven: That's always hard, but the more time we put into learning the language and taking time to talk with folks, the more we got out of a place. I was never a good classroom language learner, so I found it really fun to be learning Arabic/French/Chinese etc. on the street and trying out new words immediately—usually at restaurants.
Casey: I love learning new languages! People tell me it's because I'm good at picking them up, but I always counter, "No, it's just that I actually practice and study!" As for immersing ourselves in the cultures, language is the key that opens that door for me. Food, too! There's nothing like sharing food and drink with people to make you feel like you've started to belong.
Steven shows off the book.
You also encountered some dangerous situations, which luckily you managed to escape from.
Casey: Without giving away anything in the book-although obviously you know we make it out alive-there were a few scary moments. In tough spots, Steven and I always tried to stay together and be respectful. But really, it's all about prevention. Don't put yourself in a potentially dangerous situation
Steven: More in Mali and Burkina Faso than in Asia. Whether it was the Bamako (Mali) police or a protective mama hippo, we tried the best to keep our cool and work as a team. You have limited cards to play as a foreigner so escalating the situation rarely helps.
Was it always your intention to turn your adventures into a book?
Casey: We had definitely not planned on writing a book when we set out on this adventure. The idea came from the most formative rejection of our lives. We had sent a completely fictional graphic novel proposal to a literary agent set in Timbuktu with a cover letter about how we had wound up living out there. He wrote back and said "Don't do the story, turn that cover letter into a book".
Steven: Exactly!
Did you know right away that it would target young adults?
Casey: We had imagined the book would be for young adults but more along the lines of what someone not in the book industry thinks that term means: adults who are young. Although in my mind that totally includes mature high schoolers.
Steven: We always knew it was going to be a book for people who want to travel independently, and in the past decade or so that's become a huge swath of people. From about middle school on, now there are so many opportunities to study or volunteer abroad, and I knew that was when I got the itch to get away from home and out in the world. But we have friends in their 20s, 30s, and older who see their travels and experiences abroad in the book. We tell them all the same thing: get out there!
Can you tell us about the creative process behind the book?
Steven: Our collaborative process is basically a big table, where we sit on opposite ends and hash it out.
Casey: We started with the funny stories that we wrote home about and used the format the felt most natural to us-me just speaking to the reader, Steven drawing whatever he felt gave the best visual punch. Sitting at that big table, we'd talk about the story we wanted to tell, what I should write, what he should draw then we'd do it and show it to each other immediately after we were done, then revise and revise. Journals and sketchbooks were good for getting our timeline straight and details we had forgotten along the way.
Steven: And I drew and painted a ton while we were abroad. From sketchbooks and cartoon a day journals to full on oil portraits. I didn't know I was going to be doing preliminary art for this book, but that was all very helpful to look back on and work from. We also took tons of pictures, and I found myself looking at photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picassa to see additional angles of the sites we visited that have been heavily photographed.
Did you try to keep politics and poverty to a minimum?
Steven: No, but we did think a lot more about all that while living in West Africa than in China. There's just so much more poverty in your face and people talking about politics, so we tried to fill in the reader best we could assuming folks might have never heard of Mali before picking up the book. With China, that section is much more about us learning how to live together and having a blast, but we did try to convey a sense there that, like any country, there are problems, but people were much less inclined to speak with us about them.
Casey: We were constantly fighting against letting the book get too long, and you often need a lot of space to do justice to a place's politics and economy. We also didn't want people to feel like they were reading an academic or journalistic essay. Our story is more about the people and our personal experiences than about "Mali today" or "Modern China".
Kids reading a novel in Bambara.
Tell us more about your literacy foundation and its goals.
Steven: We've tried to make Local Language Literacy as simple as possible: we print local language reading material in countries where there isn't much of it and educators want it. So in Mali, we printed what ended up being the first ever novel in Bambara (Mali's dominant maternal language) from a story Casey wrote about daily life in Mali. The book is now used by the school where we taught in classes for young adult readers and adults learning to read for the first time. Our next project is publishing a Wolof-French bilingual picture book in neighboring Senegal, a country facing similar language issues as Mali.
Casey: The only additional goal would be to inspire students who read these books to say "Hey, I can do that" and then go do it, too.
OK, here are some obvious questions: What was your favorite country?
Steven: Morocco. We met there and have been able to return so many times now it feels familiar and foreign in best ways. I'm a sucker for cafes and the look of the place, plus now we've got a bunch of friends there.
Casey: People love to ask us this! For food? China. For the depth of friendships made? Mali. But if you look at simply the numbers-how many times we've gone there, how seriously we've considered buying property there-Morocco wins by far. And having met there, that place will always be sentimental for me and Steven.
Which country had the best food?
Steven: China is hard to beat. A lot of other places we went to have great food, too, but it was tough to eat the best meal unless you had someone's mom make it for you. Beijing is a city of cheap and delicious restaurants featuring the best of all types of Chinese food.
Casey: Agreed! It's cheap, absolutely delicious and everyone eats out, so it's a very communal experience.
What was the most romantic?
Casey: Morocco! Long walks. Stolen kisses. Like I was saying before, that place will always have a certain draw for us.
Steven: I'll always remember walking around the streets of Rabat in Morocco with Casey when we were studying abroad and really badly wanting to make out with her and not being able to because it was Ramadan, people don't do that there, and on and on. Is that romantic? I guess I like breaking rules because we did ending making out in several dark alleys. Take that Paris, "city of love"!
Which one surprised you the most?
Steven: I didn't really know what to expect from Vietnam, but we had a great time in Hanoi and nearby Halong Bay. Hanoi has a real walkable downtown area, which seemed really hard to find in Asia. That, plus the amazing spring rolls and real coffee, made me very happy.
Casey: Laos! Its food was terrible. That really took us by surprise since it's sandwiched in between such cuisine big hitters like Thailand and China.
Which country left you with a memory that will last a lifetime?
Steven: Mali is a great place, but past all of the beautiful parts, it is tough. It's dusty, hot, and people are yelling "whitey" at you a whole lot of the time. I still have a lot of that orange dust in clothes from Mali four years later. It just hits you to the core. When I'm hot, now I get the phantom feeling that I'm wearing the pretend wedding ring that I wore in Mali.
Casey: I'd say Morocco because aside from meeting Steven, my host family there has changed my life-in how I think about opening my home to people, in how I approach learning a language, in how I conceive of my place in the world. I can remember sitting in their kitchen during the lay over on our way to Mali and thinking, "How wonderful and insane is it that these people were once complete strangers I literally couldn't say a word to and are now they mean so much to me?" It means that every single person I meet has the potential to become just as important to me.
Steven and Casey in Mongolian garb.
Tell us about some memorable people you met.
Casey: Aside from all our friends who we're still in touch with, there were these two truck drivers Steven got drunk with on a long train ride through the south of China. At first we thought they were super sketchy, but we wound up all having a great time and talking about some really serious topics.
Steven: Well, besides Casey... we had this amazing dude take us horseback riding in Inner Mongolia. We've since forgotten his name but this was right when the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" came out, and he had all the swagger of Johnny Depp, so he's now known as Capitan Jack Sparrow. He posed us for the incredible photo that I drew in the book of us in Mongolian garb, and he just wouldn't stop telling Casey how handsome I am, and forced us to smoke a cigarette with him at 10 in the morning. What a guy!
Are there any plans to turn the book into a movie?
Casey: Hah! We actually just wrote up a little "treatment" for it at the suggestion of someone who works in the industry. We were totally shocked by just how rigid the format for storytelling in a movie is.
Steven: We'd love to do it and are figuring out how to get that treatment to the right people. Our friends certainly enjoy playing the "who would play who" game. I think Harrison Ford could pull me off.
How was it working together, and do you plan to continue doing so?
Steven: Nothing better. Casey's amazing and smart and funny. The book is kind of about us coming together as lovers and collaborators, with the book being a product of that. But it didn't stop there. We still have one big old desk, figure out story/design problems together, and still occasionally want to kill the other person. Nothing better.
Csaey: We can't stop! It's funny, because every time we need to send in a quick bio for a book event or something like that, we always wind up looking at the other person's and going, "It's all the same stuff but you wrote yours better." We are very much professionally joined at the hip these days.
I hear you're entering the world of picture books. Please tell us more.
Steven: We tend to explain To Timbuktu as a giant picture book, so working on one under 500 pages is really appealing!
Casey: We're working on a million different kinds of manuscripts, including picture books, but at this point our focus is just getting To Timbuktu out there. We have been joking about making a sequel, where we travel through South America and wind up in Peru just so we can call the book To Titicaca. The idea kind of stuck though, as we bought tickets to Colombia for this summer!
Forgive me if this is way too personal, but any plans to wed?
Casey: My Mom just asked me yesterday! (We were making plans to go out to a cousin's wedding in Michigan this summer.) Like I told her, not any time soon. Got to save something for the sequel!
Steven: I think if we told you first, our moms would kill us, but we'll let you know when we do. Plus, I had bookseller in California tell me she wanted to be first to know, so the list is getting kind of long. There's plenty of marriages and kids going around where we live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, so we're not in any huge rush. But as I mentioned, we've already pretended to be married in several countries, USA is bound to be on that list soon.
Sorry, but I have to ask: what was it like growing up with Jon as a dad?
Steven: No one ever asks me that!
Casey: It was terrible. He's only funny on paper and with his fans. No! It was great. We got crazy bedtime stories, I learned so much about the writing process and what it means to be self-employed, and he and my mom are both so supportive of Steven's and my artistic endeavors. I couldn't ask for better parents. It's also wonderful to be professionally coming into my own in a world in which I already feel very much at home.
What a great interview. I've been hearing about this book for a long while and can't wait to read it. Jon must be very proud of both Casey and Steven. Bravo!
Posted by Brian Kelleher on June 7, 2011 05:18:02PM
It was a very enjoyable book--both the drawings and the story. A very real sense of the countries that you could only get by living there as the citizens do. Some great laugh-out-loud moments too!
This is a book I will recommend to those who like armchair travel books as well as those who would like to experience living in a foreign country.
Posted by Diana Sandberg on June 8, 2011 05:12:24PM
RSS
