When a Caldecott Medalist asks a Governor General’s Award winner to illustrate a book, you can bet that there’s a good reason. Brian Floca, who works out of a Brooklyn studio shared with other great children’s book creators, is perhaps best known for his award-winning picture books Moonshot (2009) and Locomotive (2013). After completing an illustration fellowship on Peaks Island in Portland, Maine, he was inspired to write a story of wind, weather, and siblings facing down the elements. But with other projects vying for his attention, he didn’t know when he’d be able to get to the book: “I just saw this thing dying a slow death on my hard drive, as many things do,” he says.

But when Sydney Smith, the award-winning Canadian creator of such books as I Talk Like a River (2020) and My Baba’s Garden (2023), visited Brian’s studio in June 2022, Brian saw an opening,  and asked Sydney to illustrate the story. As Sydney puts it, “I’d never collaborated with someone who was already a visual thinker, so that was really interesting. I don’t know how Brian feels about it, but if I had something that I was working on, I would definitely want to see how others would approach it, because the results are always different than you would expect.”

The result is Island Storm (Neal Porter/Holiday House, July 22), in which two small children venture out into the world before being chased by inclement weather back home to the arms of their mother. In a starred review, Kirkus calls the book a “phenomenal tale of pushing limits,” for which Floca and Smith drew on memories both personal and literary. We spoke with them about their unusual collaboration over Zoom; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you two work on a book together, you’re doing so as co-creators. Are you kept separate, as many authors and illustrators who make picture books are, or is it a collaborative process?

BRIAN FLOCA: We had a couple of conversations about things that might have impacted the storyline and the characters’ motives, but beyond that it was Sydney. Sydney had it.

SYDNEY SMITH: There were definitely certain things that I was exploring visually, like, was there space to bring in another aspect of the story, some sort of subtext or plot, or something that deals with the human experience in a different way? But we found that it was not necessary to go too deep. So much of it was there in the text already. Just following these two characters was enough to see the connection and bond that they have. They’re siblings, but there’s also this friendship and care that they have for each other.

FLOCA: Sydney brought to the book so much of the warmth of the relationship. And then the way the mother character comes into the book at the very end is all Sydney. It’s such a lovely way to end the book. When you’re both the author and the illustrator, there’s a tendency to tie everything up and make it an airtight thing. But that’s the beautiful thing about this collaboration. There’s enough space between the text and images that you have the possibility of different readings.

Brian, what did you think when you saw the finals here? What were your impressions?

FLOCA: The first thing I saw was the cover image. I literally was laughing and shedding tears of joy. It’s so strange and powerful to have written something and hand it off to someone, and then it comes back to you as this totally different, much richer, thing. Sydney did beautiful work. He filled it out and brought it to life.

SMITH: It was really important that I was able to tell my kids that they’re in the book. There’s an older and a younger sibling, and I wanted to base the way that they looked on my two kids. They modeled for me a little bit at the very beginning. I wanted them to see themselves in this book.

FLOCA: That was a conversation, right? Because the manuscript doesn’t necessarily make clear who is taking this walk and going out in the storm.

SMITH: That was an interesting thought exercise. How would it change if it was a parent and a child, or a child and a pet? But I thought of my experience growing up. I have an older brother who would take me hiking through the woods. He was eight years older than me, but it meant that he was allowed to go on his own, and he could just drag his younger brother with him. We would get lost and get stuck, and there were moments where I’d be worried, but he would always bring us back. And I wanted to put that theme of sibling dependence into the visuals.

Brian, when they do go back, the mom is there, and you have this moment: “Home to towels, dry clothes and dinner, home to warm beds and blankets.” Were you consciously making a reference to Where the Wild Things Are?

FLOCA: Yeah—you’ve gotten in trouble, but there’s that moment of forgiveness. When Max comes back, he comes back to thedinner, but he doesn’t come back to the mother. The mother’s not there, and that’s a significant difference. There is something a little stark about that last scene of Wild Things. Just the soup and no parent.

SMITH: There’s that spread in the book where the mother is holding the kids, but then opposite that, the mother is kind of wildly running toward them with a flashlight in her hand. I, as a parent who reads picture books, think that it’s really important to include this. It’s perilous for the children, but it also represents how scary it is for the parent, and for parents to recognize that and see themselves represented as well.

FLOCA: I will say the kids were in a little bit more trouble until that painting of Sydney’s with the embrace. I went back into the text and shifted and cut a couple of things, because it’s such a powerful moment, and I didn’t want the text to undercut that. They were in a little more hot water originally. Sydney bought them an extra dose of forgiveness.

Betsy Bird is a librarian and writer in Evanston, Illinois.