It’s good to be on the porch writing, wishing for a breeze, but filled with thoughts brought home from the Simmons Summer Children’s Literature Institute. On Thursday night, Ekua Holmes answered thoughtful questions posed by Callie Crossley about her mixed media artwork. Ekua spoke about how she valued the community growing up in Roxbury, and her grandmother’s drawer with scissors and junk mail. She told us how before illustrating a picture book, she reads the manuscript many times, “finding new ways to look at the words.”

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Ekua spoke about how chose the best images to stand next to poems for the collection Out of Wonder, and for a picture book biography, researches beyond the manuscript to make a book that “takes you past the headlines of a life.” Here’s a picture from Carole Boston Weatherford’s lyrical picture book biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Voice of Freedom.

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Ekua Holmes said, “Story telling is not a singular act. There is a element of divinity in the stories we tell.” And she told us she loves sunflowers because of all the possibilities in the many seeds. I’m so happy she illustrated the cover of Stone Mirrors.

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Another highlight for me was a conversation among author Candace Fleming, illustrator Eric Rohman, and editor Neal Porter about the eight years it took to make the award-winning picture book Giant Squid. Respect was a word that Ekua Holmes used a lot in her talk, and was wonderful to see the respect this author, illustrator, and editor held for each other but most of all the book and its readers, wanting to give the very best.

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Giant Squid is a book about what we don’t know, and rather than offering facts, the object is to get readers to want to go find out more. “I’m not doing this so kids can write reports. I’m adding my voice to the conversation about the topic.” Candace Fleming said. And “All good picture books have a musicality, a pace, a beat, a rhythm that goes along with the mood we’re trying to impart.”

Julie Berry and Tim Wynn-Jones also spoke to the mess, mystery, and plain old time often involved in the process of making an excellent book. Every detail counts, and Julie mentioned the need to not focus just on a main character, but all. “A book is only as good as its secondary characters, just as a play needs ensembles. … Every character should have the specificity, oddity, and honesty of reality.” Both spoke of the need to keep going when one feels lost, for answers can be found in what you’ve written. “What are the images that stay with you? … When you’re writing well … trust those passages to find the key to the story,” Tim Wynne-Jones said.

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My talk was about the gaps we find in history, which I try to fill in, though not completely, with poetry. Often these are like the gaps and rough edges that we find in collage. That art celebrates uncertainty, fringes, fragments and inheritance that doesn’t dictate what can be taken or left behind. Collage often creates tension between what’s given and what’s chosen. Truth can be found in ragged lines rather than lines moving straight toward achievements, in what blurs, like memory. Jade, the main character of Piecing Me Together, a recent novel by Renée Watson says of her art: “I am ripping and cutting. Gluing and pasting. Rearranging reality, redefining, disguising. I am taking ugly and making beautiful.”

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After a summer blogging break — busy gently wrestling poems into place, swimming, and dog-walking — I plan to write more about the value of what’s broken tomorrow or Friday.