Author and illustrator Mo Willems has become a Knuffle bunny to the world. He's the creator of popular children's books with tales of Pigeon, Elephant and Piggie and the Knuffle Bunny.
He is also the Kennedy Center's education artist-in-residence.
Photo: Mo Willems
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Like the beloved stuffed rabbit who gives comfort to a child in his books, Willems has helped kids cope with the pandemic and the US election by encouraging them to join him for regular doodle breaks.
He tells Jesse Mulligan that he hopes his books and doodling open a door to a place that people haven’t been yet.
“What I’m hoping for is to give the tools to have kids and grown-ups go out and create their own stuff. All of my characters are purposely designed so that a 5-year-old can make a drawing of them that reasonably looks like it.
“What I’m really hoping for and what really excites me is the day when those kids create their own characters and go off and make their own stories. I really hope to be more of a diving board then a pool.”
Willems says the idea for the doodle breaks came after a performance he was scheduled for was cancelled due to the pandemic. He found himself feeling nervous about what was ahead and realised others were probably in the same boat.
“If I found doodling calming and helpful, maybe other people would as well. I was really looking for a way to be alone together.”
He says books and doodles are driven by the kids reading or doing them and he likes to leave space for them to fill it in.
“By putting in 49 percent of the work, I’m really giving the kid an opportunity to make that work… it’s this sort of magical elasticity of suggestion, but a lack of control, that allows kids to work at their own pace.
“I’m not doing the work, the kid is. I’m just setting the room with the objects that allow them to construct something and I think that’s where the magic comes in – the things that I’m not doing rather than the things that I am.”
Willems says, as a writer, he thinks a good book is a question you don’t know the answer to.
“I think children are philosophers, they’re always asking questions like philosophers do; why is this happening, why isn’t that happening. And, like philosophers, they don’t make a lot of money and a lot of them live at home.
“I too am a philosopher and the question really flummoxes me: what does it mean to be a friend? Is it always being nice, or is it always being honest. Is it a mix of the two, what are those mixes – how do you figure that out? Those questions interest me and if I can ask those questions in a book form, they will probably interest other people too.”
Willems hopes that parents doodle together with their kids as well as read books.
He says at his own household, paper will cover the dinner table as the family doodles together.
“My father-in-law is a businessman and, in the beginning, he was somewhat intimidated and only drew spreadsheets, but then those spreadsheets became abstractions, then he started going to museums and seeing which colours connected in which ways… it really opened up a whole avenue of expression that he wouldn’t have had before.”
He says that drawing is an empathetic act because we begin to think about the characters we draw and locations we put them in.
“We need art. Art is not important, it’s essential. We need food, and when we don’t get food we get cranky and angry.
"We need self-expression, we need beauty and, if we don’t get it we become hateful.”