TeachingBooks.net is delighted to welcome award-winning author Candace Fleming as our featured guest blogger.
Each month, we ask one distinguished author or illustrator to write an original post that reveals insights about their process and craft. Enjoy!
“Researching a Historical Picture Book”
by Candace Fleming
Photo © Michael Lionstar
I remember it clearly—the day the inspiration for Papa’s Mechanical Fish (Farrar, 2013) fell in my lap. I was sitting cross-legged on the basement floor of the Old Lighthouse Museum in Michigan City, Indiana, rummaging through a box of photographs when a crumbling, decades-old booklet slipped out from a manila folder. The booklet told the tale of a local inventor named Lodner Phillips who, in 1851, developed a submarine that not only had an air-purification system and a steam boiler, but a chandelier and velvet carpets to boot. I was intrigued. But it wasn’t until I read this sentence that I became obsessed: “He so perfected his submarine that one day he took his wife and children with him and spent a whole day exploring the bottom of the lake.”
Really? A family ride under Lake Michigan in 1851? It was a Jules Verne novel…only true!
Sure that I’d just found the subject for an amazing nonfiction picture book, I hurried up the stairs. What more did the museum have about Lodner Phillips? The curator directed me to a thin file containing a clutch of faded newspaper clippings, most published nearly a century earlier. From them I gleaned the basics of Phillips’s life: his date of birth, a list of his accomplishments, the year he died. But I didn’t uncover a single thing about him as husband, father, or underwater adventurer. Not one thing.
An online search was equally fruitless. Nothing extensive had been written about Phillips. His name did appear in a few maritime histories, but these passages—mere mentions really—added nothing to my understanding of him as a person.
Wracking my brain, I jotted down any and all possible sources of information: county clerk records, estate rolls, tax records. The 1850 U.S. Census, I figured, would be able to provide the names and ages of Phillips’s children. And what about the United States Patent and Trademark Office? Surely, the inventor sought a patent for his submarine. I even included the Department of the Navy in my search, in hopes that Phillips had written someone there about his invention. For good measure, I contacted experts from the Chicago History Museum and the Great Lakes Maritime Museum.
(Above) Lodner Philips submitted this drawing of his first submarine to the U.S. Patent office in 1851.
(Below) More than 150 years later, this same drawing inspired Boris Kulikov’s illustrations.
And over the next few months, I mined some riches, including hand-drawn blueprints of the submarine’s design, and archival photographs of the vessel being salvaged from the Chicago River. I even uncovered a detailed description of the submarine’s workings written by the inventor himself. But here’s the rub: not one of those sources provided clues to Phillips’s thoughts or feelings. There were no hints about his relationship with his family, and not a single, concrete detail about their incredible, underwater trip.
My idea for a nonfiction story was sunk (no pun intended). Good history—that is, history that connects with young readers—requires a human viewpoint.
I considered abandoning the project, but felt that by doing so, I would be turning my back on Phillips. So I decided to tell a different story—part his and part mine—using those few, known fragments of history, and filling in the rest with my imagination. No, it wasn’t the book I had set out to write. But in the end, it might be a better one. This tale is not just about a submarine. It’s about perseverance, the creative impulse, and the unwavering faith of a loving family.
I can’t document it, but I like to think Lodner Phillips possessed all three.
– An original article by Candace Fleming
This material may not be used without the express written consent of Candace Fleming. All images courtesy of Candace Fleming.
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Hi Candy,
I’m glad to know about Papa’s Mechanical Fish and about your process with it. Very intriguing! Your teaching about scenes at last summer’s Highlights Nonfiction Workshop was super helpful. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
As usual, Candace has found a cool but obscure topic for her next book. Can’t wait to read it!