If You Like Butterflies

Lola M. Schaefer is the author of many award-winning books for children, including An Island Grows; What’s Up, What’s Down?; and Pick, Pull, Snap! Where Once a Flower Bloomed, an NCTE Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts; and What’s Up, What’s Down? She lives with her husband, Ted, in the mountains of north Georgia, where she has her very own butterfly garden bursting with activity. Lola invites you to visit her online at lolaschaefer.com.

Gabi Swiatkowska is the illustrator of many acclaimed books for children, including Mary Cassatt: Extraordinary Impressionist Painter, which was named a CBC-NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book, as well as My Name Is Yoon, an ALA Notable Book for which she received the Ezra Jack Keats Award. Gabi lives in France, where she spies on the butterflies in her garden. She makes little notes with drawings about their daily goings-on. And she likes to grow plants that are hospitable to butterflies.

If you’re born on this planet, you’re set for a colorful life, whether you want it or not. I found myself in Eastern Europe, in southern Poland, in a little village with a weird name.

I don’t remember making that decision.

The first thing I remember are the crows. Crows are to Poland what ravens are to London. The crows would hold daily conferences right in front of my house, spreading their black selves like a carpet over the grassy field. I’d run up to them and watch them rise like a shimmering giant, watch the sky swallow them up.

I wrote stories until it was decided that there was too much kissing going on—in the stories, of course, not in real life. I was forbidden to write any more. I drew pictures, of princesses mostly. As there were no objections, I kept at it all through elementary school, gymnasium, college, and right into my professional life.

While at elementary school, I really did believe I was a princess. Not the Disney kind, but one more along the lines of a Russian folktale, the princess lost and never found, waiting patiently for the day it was officially announced.

I entered the Lyceum of Art at fourteen and discovered it was full of princesses, as well as knights. Sometime around the third year of school it dawned on me that if I was the “lost and never found” kind of princess, there was no use waiting for the official announcement. So I climbed on top of my wardrobe to take a look at things from a different perspective and decided it was time to go to America.

I took my dog with me. My dog was very fond of eating toilet paper, and since we had no such commodity in Poland at the time, I figured he’d do better in America. Plus, I couldn’t bear to leave him behind.

Gabi Swiatkowska was born in Tychy, Poland, and attended the Lyceum of Art in Bielsko-Biala, as well as the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. She divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and Paris.