Interview: Jessixa Bagley on Work, Family, and Hamburgers

Jessixa Bagley took the kidlit world by storm with her debut picture book, BOATS FOR PAPA, which wowed readers and won numerous awards. Since then, she hasn’t stopped, with LAUNDRY DAY receiving the Ezra Jack Keats Honor for picture book writing. How does she balance her creativity with the rest of her life? We asked her…

Booking Biz: What does your average day look like?

Jessixa: At the moment, an average day for me is pretty packed. I get up around 7 or so, do the morning routine with the family until 8am then rush out the door. I have a day job so I work from about 8:30-5:30. I get home around 6pm. Then I do the family routine at night- dinner (made by my lovely and kind husband, Aaron), cleanup, put my son to bed (which involves a lot of reading to him. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day). Then if I’m lucky, I get from about 9-9:30 to reset before I get to work. I try to start working on my books by 9:30pm. Usually while I’m working, Aaron is unwinding from the day spent with our little boy, and we’ll put on a movie or a show — always one that we’ve seen so I can just listen to it and not have to look up off the page. This aspect of my life makes it so I am always SUPER out of touch with current media. (No, I haven’t even watched Game of Thrones.) My usual routine is to work until about 12:30 or 1am, but I’m currently on a deadline, so I usually don’t finish until around 1:30-1:45am. This way I’m getting in about 4 hours of working a night. Then I crawl into bed and hopefully fall asleep quickly, but sometimes I can’t fall asleep until after 2:30am. I take Friday and Saturday night off. It’s pretty grueling.

Booking Biz: When you’re not writing and illustrating, what do you like to do best?

Jessixa: Well that’s a tough one, I feel like writing and illustrating are how I also spend my downtime! When getting to have free time that’s not connected to working on a book, I like to draw for fun and think of story ideas! My brain is so busy all the time, it feel like a luxury just to have space to think about stuff I don’t have to. So any chance I get, I think about more books I want to make. Does that make me a weirdo?

But OTHER than that, I love spending time with my husband and son. They make me grounded and present. I also love to make things with my hands — this has been ever since I was a kid; there was always something so meditative about making physical things — it’s like I can be focused and unfocused at the same time. Once, I was working on LAUNDRY DAY (which was a very labor intensive book), and I had worked up to the last second to hit my deadline. I was so burnt out that I “decompressed” by building a replica of the house in the movie Beetlejuice and three elaborate Halloween costumes from the movie for my family. My husband thought I was crazy. I love to make things out of cardboard and also do needle felting. I’d probably be a hardcore crafter in an alternate universe.

Booking Biz: Where do you get the inspiration for your books?

Jessixa: I get most of my inspiration for my books from my life in some way. BOATS FOR PAPA was (unintentionally) about my childhood of having a long distance relationship with my father who lived on the other side of the country. That book focused on a relationship between a mother and a son (who is artistic) and them dealing with absence. I didn’t realize until I was done with the book how much of my own experiences I put into it. I also based the setting on Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where I went a lot when I was a child.

BEFORE I LEAVE is about moving away from your friend and cherishing those last moments with someone before they leave. That book was inspired by the feelings I had when my best friend in second grade moved away and also later when I was in the sixth grade and had to move.

My most recent book, VINCENT COMES HOME, is a book I collaborated on with my husband, and it’s pulled from our experiences having to move around a lot both separately and together. It’s about a cat that lives on a cargo ship and travels the world but doesn’t know what “home” is. In one of our apartments in Seattle, we would see the cargo ships coming and going, and we always talk about how sweet it would be to have a cat live on a cargo ship. Years later, we made a book about it! The resolution is based on our experiences moving around and how incredibly sad I would get whenever we moved because it felt like we were leaving our home, but I would always realize that we took our home with us (in ourselves) when we left. I have found that taking inspiration from my life has been the most rewarding type of writing, because I am able to connect with myself and also my readers.

I am currently working on a picture book based directly on an experience I had in sixth grade. It’s about how hard it is to share your feelings.

Booking Biz: Did you always want to write and illustrate books for children, or was there another career you wished for as a child?

Jessixa: I used to dream of making picture books and comics for as long as I can remember. I think maybe by second or third grade, I had decided that’s what I wanted to do, when I figured out you have to do something. I even went to my first writing conference in third grade. I was always making my own stories and coming up with characters that had back stories. I would make my own books and comics for fun, and I remember thinking about it all the time. Even as I got older, I kept an interest in picture books when I should have been reading middle grade chapter books. I just loved how picture and words could tell a story. I feel incredibly lucky to make comics and picture books, because it really is a dream come true for me. I joke that I am basically the same person I was when I was seven years old: I love hamburgers, Pee Wee Herman, and making my own stories.

Booking Biz: If you ruled the world, what would it look like?

Jessixa: Well, aside from drastically changing everything so we can all live in peace and harmony, I’d find a way to make hamburgers and french fries health foods.