Susan Cooper’s poem “The Shortest Day,” celebrating the winter solstice, is also a children’s book illustrated by Carson Ellis. They collaborated by mail.
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SUSAN COOPER: (Reading) So the shortest day came, and the year died. And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world came people singing, dancing to drive the dark away.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Thursday, December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
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COOPER: (Reading) They lighted candles in the winter trees. They hung their homes with evergreen. They burned beseeching fires all night long to keep the year alive.
SIMON: For more than 40 years, people have been reading and performing Susan Cooper’s poem “The Shortest Day” to celebrate the winter solstice.
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COOPER: (Reading) And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake they shouted, reveling. Down all the frosty ages you can hear them echoing behind us. Listen.
SIMON: In 2019, we spoke to Susan Cooper about the children’s book she created from the poem.
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COOPER: It’s a family celebration of the light coming back after the dark threatens to take over the world.
SIMON: We’ve been asking authors and illustrators how they work together or work separately to translate words into pictures. For “The Shortest Day,” Susan Cooper collaborated with Carson Ellis, the illustrator, by mail.
COOPER: I said in a letter to Carson that there is no story in this poem. We have to put the story in the pictures. So it’s up to you, kid.
CARSON ELLIS: (Laughter).
COOPER: And she certainly did.
ELLIS: It was one long, beautiful, very forthright, kind of daunting letter that Susan wrote to me kind of telling me what she wanted the book to be able to do, and it completely changed the direction I was going in. And it was really daunting. I read the letter and thought, oh, gosh,…
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