I feel a like I stepped off a 1000 foot cliff at the beginning of this year and began a dreadful impersonation of humpty dumpty. Some of you may have heard I was laid low, very low, with an autoimmune illness, a complication from a bad case of mono that actually began last year. I’m still battling to regain strength, but a loving husband, caring friends, good doctors, and a bitter dose of chemo drugs applied every week have begun to put the pieces back together. Like humpty, I’ll never be quite the same, as I am reminded each and every week I face down that last bit – the chemo, and struggle to get my joints moving, my hands working, and my feet walking, but I am beginning see bigger and bigger pieces of my old self shining through the rubble. I’ll never be smooth and flawless, my scars will forever show, but perhaps all this time and energy spent gluing back my health will make me stronger in a way, autoimmune illness and all. I’ve had an awful lot of time to think about life and art in the last 9 months. I see that I spent the first 40 years racing through life, always trying to get somewhere faster. I was impatient with myself and burned through energy like it was an endless resource. But a little wisdom has seeped in over the many months I’ve had to lie flat on my back mostly, and I appreciate every small gift that life has to offer.
It feels like it was ages ago that I finished my upcoming book, Red Sled, but I just received my first copy of the book from my editor at Atheneum. Turning through the pages reawakened the delight I had in creating this book and I am reminded and overwhelmed at what a gift it is to create my stories. I still feel like I’m that earnest little 4 year old who was so moved at seeing my first picture book. I was forever changed and sculpted by it. That first picture book not only fueled my imagination, it gave light to a lifelong passion for creating art. From the day I opened the very first book, I knew I wanted to make my own, even if I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever make that dream come true. Red Sled was a story that began long ago, around that time my imagination was first startled awake. In my childhood musings and daydreams the characters of this book kept me company. It took years for me to grab their abstract elements out of the ether and put them to paper. But I’m grateful for all the happy hours I spent chasing them down in the wandering paths of my imagination, before setting them down in just the way I would have loved as that 4 year old girl. Somewhere in this sore, achy body that little girl is smiling bright.
So I am very excited by the fact that Red Sled is soon to be coming out – November 1st to be exact! I wish I was fully recovered and could charge on ahead with life, working hard on new stories, and hitting the road to share this book with my readers. But for now, I must persevere with my treatment and embrace all the kindness that comes my way when readers reach out to me and send me well wishes. I hope readers find this book. Its creation was such a celebration for me. And I was thrilled when my editor sent me the first review – a STARRED REVIEW from Kirkus!
Here it is:
Red Sled
Written by Lita Judge
(Atheneum; ISBN: 9781442420076; November 2011; Fall catalog p. 31)
Judge’s latest may be virtually wordless, but it packs a powerful visual punch that will stick with readers long after the final page is turned. At the end of a winter day, a child props the titular sled outside a cozy cabin. A bear finds it there and sets off to enjoy the ride of all rides, joined in turn by some other forest denizens. As each joins the ride, the animals’ positions change: The bear is on his back with the rabbit perched on his feet, then he is atop the moose’s antlers, a position next occupied by an exhilarated-looking porcupine. By the end of the hill, the tower of animals on top of the sled is quite shaky and collapses, “fluoomp…….ft” in a heap. The entirety is wordless but for the carefully chosen onomatopoeic words that perfectly capture the sounds and bring the adventure to life: the “scrinch scrunch” of footsteps in new snow, the “sssssffft” of the sled on its run and the “whoa” of the animals as they enjoy the ride. When the fun is over, they return the sled to the cabin, where the child puzzles over the footprints in the morning. Though rendered simply, Judge’s pencil-and-watercolor animals are gloriously full of life and infectious joy. Readers will be hard-pressed to finish this without letting their own joy show through. Pure genius.
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