Jackie’s Drawing - An interview with Andrew Katz to delve into an interesting write, Interviewer -Shah Jehan Ashrafi (Mauritius)

Jackie’s Drawing - An interview with Andrew Katz to delve into an interesting write 

Jackie’s Drawing is Andrew Katz’s recent picture book. Published on May 13, 2025, by CrackBoom, this book is a post-pandemic reflection as it re-imagines the pandemic lockdown. It depicts themes of isolation, creativity, the natural world, environmental awareness and serves as a mental and art therapy while having an educational value. The story is about a young girl called Jackie who is unable to pursue her creativity because she cannot draw due to a haze that affects the outside world. She is forced to stay inside her house and feels so trapped in it that she cannot draw anymore. Soon, a dragon, namely a chimera, appears and Jackie sits on its back to travel and connect to the outside world that was inhabited by many animals as human beings had to stay indoors. When Jackie returns home, she is able to draw anew. The illustrator Tony Luzano’s pictures enhance the book’s essence. During my interview with author Andrew Katz on August 2, 2025, and according to his explanation given to the CBC radio in Montreal, I understood that the haze is left open to the reader’s interpretation. However, Katz’s fascination with the fact that wild animals were seen walking on streets in some parts of the world during the pandemic in 2020 remains the source of his inspiration to write this interesting picture book. The power of imagination, the author’s own treasured possession, seeps throughout the story and the illustration. According to Katz, he wanted to bring his readers ‘to experience things’ rather than ‘tell them to experience things’. The main theme of Jackie’s journey is resilience through creativity and connecting back to nature. Katz’s attraction to the natural world has always been present in several of his picture books, namely in How to Catch a Bear who Loves to Read (2018), in I Just Want to be Super (2020), in A Starlit Trip to the Library (2022), and in Little Hearts in the Snow (2025). Presently working at Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, Katz has a devotional passion for juvenile literature and stories. He holds an M.A in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal. The winner of the Director General’s Award for teaching excellence in 2013, the writer teaches children’s literature courses and gives his students the chance to write stories and gets the illustration department at Dawson College to illustrate those stories. While reading Jackie’s Drawing, I could see the elements of magic realism inherent in it and the Dragon or chimera that takes Jackie on its back to travel to the natural world reminds me of the voyage taken by Aladdin on the magic carpet. This subjective experience and reconnection to the self by connection to the other has always been important in Katz’s works. In his interview, the writer admitted this fact by saying that the connection of the self and the other is seen in ‘a child playing with a blanket and a teddy bear’ to mention J W Winnicot’s transitional space where the self can rely on the world, a creative space, to see oneself. Jackie’s haze can be read as a veil between worlds and Jackie crosses borders to connect to the world and leaves her own personal space to show that the self becomes complete by taking the journey to the other. In this measure, Jackie’s book can be read as a transnational literature picture book that calls for connection. The theme of migration is present in the form of the voyage that Jackie takes to the natural world. Katz’s chimera is also a mixture of the human beings and other animals to make it a hybrid creature. Taking a journey on such a creature’s back symbolizes survival by becoming many things just like transnational individuals strive to cope with multiple realities. The chimera can be reinterpreted in several ways. It represents the complex and contradictory identities of migrants, war’s monstrous outcomes that stitch together fear, nationalism, and violence or globalization paradox that creates both connection and conflict. However, Katz states that ‘we need the wild imagination’ and the chimera or the dragon is not ‘chaotic’. Jackie’s drawing celebrates ‘wildness and innocence’ and has healing properties. Nature’s comeback is evident in the story, but it remains Jackie’s emotional space that serves as a therapy to reclaim her creative abilities.

By Shah Jehan Ashrafi