Is Your Picture Book Exhibit-Worthy?

Those of us who create picture books are probably just as excited as the lucky kids who get to visit The Rabbit Hole, a new museum in North Kansas City, Missouri that “brings countless works of children’s literature to life.” —That's from their website, which goes on to explain:

Visitors become explorers in an immersive, multi-sensory, narrative landscape... you can catch a ride with Nana and CJ on the bus to the Last Stop on Market Street; whisper “Goodnight Moon” in the quiet dark of the great green room; outshine Mr. Sun with Sam and the Tigers; feed jum-jills to The Funny Thing, or find yourself scaling the cliffs of My Father’s Dragon.

My favorite of the museum profiles I've seen so far is this video tour by the amazing librarian, blogger, and children's book author herself, Betsy Bird (a.k.a. A Fuse #8 Production) which you can watch here on Betsy's Instagram.

France's house welcomes visitors to view the wonders inside...  Frances series written by Russell Hoban and illustrated by Lillian Hoban. Photo from this The Rabbit Hole Instagram post.

As someone who writes picture books myself, I found myself daydreaming... what would it be like to see one of the worlds of MY picture books brought to 3-dimensional, tactile life in this way? 

The 1990s Montana town celebrating both Christmas and Chanukah so shimmeringly created by Paul O. Zelinsky for Red and Green and Blue and White. Or the pre-unification China of 500 B.C.E. where Yuan, Duke Ling of Wei fell in love with Mi Zi Xia, so lovingly fashioned by Jieting Chen for Love of the Half-Eaten Peach.

And I thought about how that's a pretty great exercise for all of us. Is the idea we're working on worthy of our time? The page? Does it have enough whimsy, or gravitas, or special sauce to make it a world of characters readers love so much they'd want to walk around inside that world and explore?

Maybe it's a litmus test for our passion. 

Is your current work in progress something you'd want to see built into a museum exhibit?

Hopefully this is both motivating and inspiring. If nothing else, it's a beautiful daydream...

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee