Once the vote was past (the clear-cutting measure was defeated, and so,
a year later, was the compact), Shetterly was left with a trove of
information about forestry and nowhere to put it.
"I thought, ‘I want to do something with this information,"
she said last week.
Before the vote, Shetterly had interviewed and gone on a woods tour
with Mel Ames of Atkinson, a small-woodlot harvester who had helped to
draft the referendum question banning clear-cutting.
"I thought to myself, ‘The most important thing, of everything,
is that he knows his land so well.’" The trouble with some
"industry foresters," she figured, was that they didn’t know
the land they were harvesting very well, and might not understand its
ecological complications or care so much about its future.
That thought in mind, Shetterly set out to write a children’s book
explaining forest management, Ames-style.
She wrote it, and then she wrote it again.
Her friend, Falmouth children’s book author Amy MacDonald, told her
politely that an early draft preached too much. Less polite, her adult
offspring, son Aran and daughter Caitlin, told her it "stank."
More people read it. Again she rewrote it. And again.
Although she had a point to make, she knew she didn’t want the book
to be mired in the politics of tree-cutting in Maine.
"I just tried to make the people as real as I could," she
said.
The result is "Shelterwood," published this month by Tilbury
House in Gardiner. The tale, honed now to simplicity, is of a Maine
woodlot owner introducing his granddaughter to a woodlot that will one day
be hers, and teaching her how to harvest it so it will last.
A little over a year ago, book accepted by Tilbury House, Shetterly
approached a friend, Blue Hill painter Rebecca Haley McCall, to see if she’d
like to be proposed to the publisher as illustrator. Shetterly remembers a
long introductory conversation about "grandfathers and grandchildren,
the woods, responsibility and books we remembered as children—and how
does a children’s book enter your heart."
Both agreed that words and art should "create for children an
imaginary world that they could explore," she recalled. "Neither
of us had to say everything—neither I in my writing nor she in the
illustrations. Together, we could create some things and give them the
freedom to imagine others."
Last week, a year’s worth of collaboration under her belt, she said,
"the book is so much Becky’s.
"For a children’s book, if it doesn’t look good the words don’t
matter."
McCall is adept at landscapes and still life, but Shetterly said she
had admired McCall’s portraits because "you know they have lives
and histories.
"She has a real rapport for the human form," Shetterly said.
"Her figures have souls inside them, and that gives them weight and
authenticity."
Illustrating a book "stretched me," McCall said.
"I had to stick with what I was given. If I had trouble with a
maple, I couldn’t change it to a pine tree. In your own studio, you
paint what you want to paint but also what comes easily to you."
McCall was the one chiefly responsible for figuring out what to
illustrate, and where the pictures would fall in relation to the words.
But she got plenty of help on the subject matter.
She, too, visited Ames for a woods tour. (To this day, Shetterly still
will hold up a leaf to her and say, "OK, what’s this?")
Her husband, Rob McCall, modeled as the grandfather, and young Jenny
Berkowitz of Blue Hill posed as the granddaughter.
By invitation, Shetterly dropped by periodically so the two could
discuss—and, occasionally, wrangle over—what McCall was painting.
"My worry was that I shouldn’t show up so much that she wouldn’t
have autonomy," Shetterly said. "...I was very aware that I’m
a writer, not a painter...what do I know?
"Of course, when you’re writing you have a picture of what
people look like. As they were painted, they became more hers than
mine."
"I wanted you to be there with me, to love the images too,"
McCall assured her. She thinks she and Shetterly basically operate from
"the same palette."
Sometimes, Shetterly changed her words to match McCall’s pictures.
Other times, McCall was the one to change.
There was, for example, the Summer Warbler Incident.
In one scene in the book, Shetterly described "summer
warblers" singing in tree branches. McCall painstakingly researched
birds, and triumphantly came up with something called a "summer or
yellow warbler," which she painted as a yellow bird singing in a
tree.
Turned out that Shetterly hadn’t intended to be that specific as to
breed, but had merely wanted the reader to know that it was summer and
that there was a warbler in a tree. She had to break it to McCall that
yellow "summer warblers" are Midwestern birds, and don’t even
live in the Maine woods.
Shetterly’s response to the mishap was simply to erase the word
"summer" from her sentence. McCall wasn’t so lucky. "The
poor woman had to repaint the warbler," Shetterly said.
The compromise birds—still yellow—are black-throated green
warblers. They do live around here, Shetterly said.
