The Museum inside Lynne Rae Perkins’ Mind Newberry Award-winning author on her latest, “The Museum of Everything”
By Kathleen Stocking Lynne Rae Perkins, an award-winning Suttons Bay author and illustrator, has released a new book, “The Museum of Everything.” The book, a kind of map — or as publisher Harper Collins calls it, an invitation to go on “an imagination-fueled journey through the living museum that surrounds us all — is the museum. And the museum has in it, among other things, a cloud, a shadow, an island that could be a stone in a puddle. How does one think of something like this? Perkins says the book started when she stood on a hill on a tiny island and could see its edges. She could see the shore, the ocean surrounding it. From that came “The Museum of Everything,” which is about ways of seeing, ways of thinking. Why not have a museum with a cloud? Well, no reason. And it’s delightful to think of a museum that’s not like any museum you’ve ever seen. The Museum of Everything is a book for young readers, but adults will like it, too. It’s like a poem with pictures. “Most children’s books are also something adults can appreciate,” Perkins says. “Editors like that. Because they know the adults are going to be the ones reading it to the children.” Anyone who has ever read to children knows this is true. Some books get hidden in the sofa cushions and some are cherished. Described as a “poetic sorceress” by The New York Times, Perkins has a subtle sense of humor and lovely, surprising sense of the world around her. In her book “Nuts
to You,” one of the characters is a squirrel in the park near her house, a squirrel with whom she converses. We believe this is a real conversation. “A book doesn’t start with just one thing,” Perkins says. “It happens with something small, then I forget about it. Then something else happens and it comes together.” Lynne Perkins is sitting on the sofa in her three-story house. Her dog, Hazel, some sweet and gentle mixed breed, is lying next to her. We’re on the second floor of this high house with high ceilings. We are in the trees. It’s mid-May, and the trees are in various stages of bud and leaf, the delicate and changing shades of green and rose that leaves hold only for a few days in the spring. Her husband, Bill Perkins, built the house. He makes furniture out of willow, and there’s a hand-made feel to the space. The radiators look like they came from an old school. The tiles around the hearth were a joint project; she made the tiles, and he installed them. Lynne notices a rose-breasted grosbeak at the bird feeder off the balcony facing the back hill and says, “That’s the first one I’ve seen this year.” Bill Perkins is in and out. He brings tunapatty-melts on toast. He says he’s going to take the dog for a walk. “No,” she says, “leave Haze. She wants to hang out for a while.” So, this particular book, “The Museum of Everything,” started, she thinks now, upon reflection, with standing on top of that hill on Cuttyhunk Island, where she was writerin-residence for a school with one student and one teacher. The people on the island had done a community read of her book,
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“Sisters of the Salty Sea,” and had invited her to come for a week. It was November then, tall grasses, green-to-gold, and when she got back home to Suttons Bay, she tried to draw the island she had seen and now held in her mind, but the drawing didn’t satisfy her. Then she tried to embroider a small pillowreplica of the island. That didn’t work either. Then she made a tiny replica of the island and put it in a diorama. Finally, she felt she was getting somewhere. A diorama is a box with things in it. This can be a model of anything, big or small — prehistoric animals in a natural history museum taking up an entire wall, or small enough to fit on a bookshelf. It comes from the Greek for di, meaning “through,” plus orama which means “that which is seen.” Relatively speaking, it’s a new word, dating to the 1800s when people would look through a small hole at a painting of a landscape in which changes in color and direction of illumination create the illusion of changes in the angle of the light and the time of day. Lynne started out as an illustrator until one day her editor asked her if she’d like to write something; now she does both illustrating and writing. “I wonder about things like, can a rock in a puddle be an island? And think about if the rock in the puddle is on a boulder in a pond,” she writes in “The Museum of Everything,” “And what if that pond is on a small island in a lake? And what if that lake is on a bigger island, out in the ocean?” “Once you know the one thing in your mind,” she says, “then your mind is ready to see something else. When I figure out how something fits together, I feel this ‘Ahhh,’ and it’s just the best feeling.”
Creative people need to be free to have random thoughts, and unconditional love helps with that. Perkin says she grew up with lots of unconditional love from her family, from her sister, like the one in “Sisters of the Salty Sea,” where they do “thought-sending” with each other, thinking of something and then mentally sending the thought. As Bill comes in to take Hazel for a walk, she says, “I have unconditional love from Bill.” Hazel needed time to assess the new person in the house and, that accomplished, she’s ready for her walk. “I had lots of unsuccessful relationships,” Lynne says. “Everyone does. I was young. I thought it was the nature of relationships that you worked at them. Then I met Bill.” “We were lucky,” Bill says as Hazel follows him out. Circumstances occurred to allow them to find each other and be happy together. Her work, Lynne freely admits, has taken place in the context of a love-filled life. “If I had known my life would be OK, I would have been able to relax and enjoy it more.”
