Author and illustrator Booki Vivat creates graphic-prose hybrid novels (much like the Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries books). Her debut novel and first in the Frazzled series took off for many young readers and I enjoy seeing her planner doodles on Instagram. Booki’s latest graphic-prose release is Meet Me on Mercer Street, a gentle mystery about a girl who feels lost when her best friend suddenly moves out of the neighborhood. I chatted with Booki about writing in the prose-graphic format, the power of community, and the value of documenting her life as an artist. I know you’ll enjoy this interview!
Interview with Author Booki Vivat
Hi Booki, welcome to Reading Middle Grade! It’s great to have here. I enjoyed your latest graphic novel, Meet Me on Mercer Street. I loved the concept of a mysteriously missing friend as a vehicle for confronting gentrification. What inspired you to write and draw this story?
Like many others, I spent most of 2020 isolated and cut off from community because of the pandemic. When I wasn’t stuck in my apartment alone, I was walking around my empty neighborhood in Brooklyn. Everything felt so different, and all the people and places that made my neighborhood feel like home were suddenly gone. I lived across the street from a laundry & dry cleaning service and a local corner store, and I realized I missed them. I missed the normal rhythms of everyday life and seemingly mundane interactions with neighbors. I missed the familiarity and comfort of knowing and feeling known in a place. I was totally in my feelings about what was going on in the world and kept thinking about what it meant to have community! I guess you could say that feeling was still on my mind when I started working on Meet Me on Mercer Street.
You write illustrated middle grade, which I think of as a cross between graphic novels and prose. Why does this format appeal to you?
I grew up in a time when only written novels were seen as legitimate, and anything comic or graphic was trivialized. But as a kid, I gravitated to all kinds of stories! Nowadays, it feels like there’s been a shift in the conversation. People are talking more about the importance of visual literacy and the benefits of teaching readers how to discover meaning through images as well as written text. That’s why I love illustrated middle grade fiction and this hybrid format between graphic novels and prose! The combination of text and art adds another layer to the storytelling that also feels accessible to readers of all levels.
As a writer-illustrator, it’s my favorite way to make a book! I’ve always been a huge fan of doodling. There’s a loose quality to it that gives you a lot of creative freedom. The challenge is channeling that energy into a structured narrative and figuring out how to use the art to tell a good story. For me, that’s where the text comes in! The best part about this particular format is the flexibility of being able to shift between text and art. Because of the fluid style of the book, I get to decide the best way to capture emotion or communicate my ideas and then piece them together however I like!
Also, an added bonus of this illustrated novel format is getting to add little visual Easter eggs and references. Like the poster of Harriet the Spy in Kacie’s room—a major inspiration for the character of Kacie! Meet Me on Mercer Street is full of those kinds of details, and hopefully kids will read this book over and over again to find new things they didn’t see before!
Kacie learns a lot about the joy and value of documenting your life. I love your monthly planner doodles. Why did you want to write about a kid learning to document her experiences?
I grew up drawing stick figures and doodling in the margins of my notebooks, which eventually evolved into keeping an illustrated planner. Everyone documents things differently. Using illustrations to keep track of what’s going on in my life and how I’m feeling works best for me! In general, my doodles tend to have a very personal, emotional bent to them. Unlike Kacie, I’m not the greatest observational artist, but I’ve always found value in being able to look back at how you experience and perceive a situation. Looking back can reveal so much! I wanted to apply that to the story somehow, so I decided to make Kacie an aspiring artist who uses her art and observational skills to try and understand what is happening in her community.
You had a long hiatus after your last Frazzled book. How was writing this book different from creating the Frazzled series? Was it scary to return with a totally different protagonist?
I had never written or illustrated any books before Frazzled! I learned so much this series—not just about how to tell a story with both art and text, but how I want to continue to use my voice as a storyteller. The stories in Frazzled really stem from Abbie Wu and all of her inner feelings, but with Meet Me on Mercer Street, I started from the outside and worked my way in. I started with the idea of a friend moving away and a main character trying to figure out why. What kind of questions would it bring up? How would it make her feel? What could she do about it?
I felt like I knew exactly who Abbie Wu was from the very beginning, but it took me a while to figure out Kacie! She went through many different iterations and changed a lot as I was trying to understand who she was and how she fit into her neighborhood. It was a little scary starting from a totally blank slate with a totally new protagonist, but that ultimately gave me the freedom to fully build out this story and challenged me to really explore the complicated questions that were on my mind.
I realized from Kacie’s story how much more worrying it can be for kids and tweens when they’re kept in the dark vs when adults share age-appropriate information with them. Was that something you wanted to relay in this story?
Definitely. The book starts off with Kacie’s best friend moving away, which was very familiar to me because when I was a kid, my first-ever best friend also moved away unexpectedly! At the time, I didn’t understand why and I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of unfairness in being a kid and having no control over anything. That was the feeling I wanted to explore in this book!
As a kid, it’s easy to feel left out of the conversation—especially when those conversations involve “grown-up stuff.” Now that I’m an adult, I kind of see why that happens! Things change and life is complicated and sometimes that’s hard to talk about… even for adults. It’s hard to talk about things that don’t have simple explanations or straightforward solutions. Things like money and power and change! But even though kids may not be able to understand it all on their own yet, they see a lot more than we think. And that’s worth talking about!
Will we be saying Kacie again, or is this a stand-alone story?
I have such a soft spot in my heart for Kacie and the entire Mercer Street neighborhood, so I’ll never totally rule anything out, but so far, the plan is for this to be a stand-alone. That may seem surprising because some people will see the ending as open-ended and want more definitive answers, but sometimes life is like that, and I wanted to give readers space to sit with the unknown and imagine what the resolution looks like for themselves. As a reader, I love stories that feel like snippets of larger worlds. I like to think of all my books as zoomed-in moments in the lives of the characters in the story—lives that can continue in our imagination beyond the book itself. Hopefully, my readers will embrace that idea with Meet Me on Mercer Street even after they finish the book!
I loved watching Kacie find the warmth and belonging a community can bring, especially when you let yourself be seen. What does community mean to you?
This is such a big question! It’s a question that I’ve been asking myself a lot lately and one of the main ideas I wanted to explore in this book. I’ve thought a lot about this quote by Asian American activist Grace Lee Boggs—“You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself belonging to it and responsible for changing it.” It made me wonder… What does it mean to really belong to a community? What does that look like? Why is it important?
In a lot of ways, this book is a celebration of community and the power we can have when we care for the people around us. I don’t think I can fully answer this question here, but I hope that reading Meet Me on Mercer Street will answer it for me.
Are you working on anything else you can share with us?
Sadly, it’s a little too early for me to share details about potential new projects! I will say that I definitely have a seed of a new idea. Hopefully, I can get it together and grow it into something good! Stay tuned!
Is there anything else you wish I’d asked you?
Hmmm, let’s see… what is my favorite surprise detail? I was being silly one day and decided to draw my own little author cameo in the book. Readers should keep an eye out for me at the Mercer Street Block Party! Ha!
Thanks so much for being here, Booki!
About Meet Me on Mercer Street
Meet Booki Vivat
Booki Vivat is the New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of the FRAZZLED series. She grew up in Southern California, telling stories and doodling. Before becoming an author-illustrator, she taught middle school English abroad and worked in publishing in New York. Now she lives in Oakland, California and makes books for kids! Follow her on Instagram at @bookibookibooki and learn more at www.bookivivat.com.
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- Allie Millington on Her Debut About a Talking Typewriter
- Kate O’Shaughnessy on Her Writing About a Tween Leaving a Cult
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