04 Jun Bernard Gumz and a SKRUMtiously wonderful book! Giveaway alert!

EL: I love finding new books and meeting new kidlit people. Today I’m excited to introduce you to Bernard Gumz, author/illustrator of the extremely fun book, SKRUM. Follow old Barnabus as he runs from a purple furball named SKRUM. Yes, a furball. I’ll let Bernard tell you more, but I promise you, this book will have you smiling. 

Welcome, Bernard. Will you tell us a little about yourself? 

BG: My name is Bernard Gumz, and I live in Indiana. When I’m not working on animation or silly projects I’m holding on for dear life. I have a ten year old son and a five year old daughter. Between baseball, swimming classes, chores, and school, there aren’t enough hours in the day.

EL: Ah, I remember those days. But you obviously have scaped up enough time to write and illustrate this wonderful book.  How did you come up with the idea of SKRUM?

BG: My wife Laura is a big Monty Python fan. Years ago, we were on a road trip from Texas to Indiana. It’s a long drive, so we were kind of loopy and started pitching each other ideas for a children’s book. We thought it would be funny if an old British geezer was going around yelling “Help! I have a Skrum on ‘me bum!” We didn’t know what a Skrum was or what that meant. For whatever reason I kept working on that idea and eventually it turned into a book.

EL: Can you talk about your journey to publication with this book?

BG: I decided early on not to do any research on the do’s and dont’s of making a children’s book. Instead, I just kept writing and rewriting. Drawing and redrawing. When I finally thought SKRUM was in good shape, I started looking into how children’s books are published.

Maybe this has changed, but I recall reading that the average picture book is 32 pages, has a main character that kids can relate to and it’s best to avoid rhyme because it’s hard to translate to foreign markets. Skrum is 80 pages, has an old British weirdo as a protagonist, and is told completely in rhyme. I was a little concerned, but I believed in the story, so I queried a bunch of agencies. Probably around twenty different agents, all with personalized query letters. They were all nice and polite but all of them passed.

Skrum became just another collection of files in a folder on my computer. I thought it may be fun to revisit down the road and maybe turn into a short animation or something. A short time later my computer crashed and I lost everything. I was willing to let it all go but thankfully my wife had the data recovered. She still believed in the idea of Skrum as a children’s book but I had moved on. Skrum continued to collect dust.

Months, or maybe even a year went by before I noticed the #PBPitch hashtag on Twitter. PBPitch is where authors can give a short unsolicited pitch for their picture book or story idea, and publishers respond if they like it. I didn’t have anything to lose so I wrote a few sentences and attached some images from Skrum. The Little Press hit “like,” and after years of working on this book and what seemed like an endless road of rejection and misfortune I finally had a publisher.

EL I’m happy you wrote what you wanted and took a chance with #PBPitch! As an author/ illustrator, what usually comes first for you, the art, the words, or the idea? 

BG: In this case, the idea came first. I love doodling so I made some drawings of Barnabus, the old British protagonist and then started coming up with ideas for the Skrum, which is the monster chasing him. I knew I wanted the story to start in the desert, which would probably be a lot of orange and warm colors. I decided on purple fur for the Skrum. I liked the idea of purple and orange because I was a huge Phoenix Suns fan as a kid. Mainly because Charles Barkley is such a legend.

After I was happy with how the characters looked, I focused on writing. As I wrote the book I would think of images that would be fun to draw. Sometimes the writing would inform the drawings, and other times the drawings would inform the rewrites.

EL: Interesting! What inspires you?

BG: I’m inspired by all sorts of things. Animation, late night conversations with my wife, working on art and projects with my kids. Lately, the most inspiring thing for me came from the last place I expected. I’m not a very social person,  and when I found out school visits were a required part of promoting this book I cannot express the amount of dread that consumed me. I had more anxiety about school visits than anything else in this entire process. I thought about how my presentation would go and kept practicing it over and over in my head and out loud. I watched YouTube videos on what makes a good school visit and worried about it endlessly. There was no way I was going to read Skrum to an entire grade of students at once, so I scheduled several days of reading to kids during their time in the library.

When the time came to do my first school visit, it went great! It went even better the next day, and when I slowed down, involved the kids more, and started drawing on a whiteboard, I found myself actually enjoying it. I never thought in a million years that I would be saying this but visiting schools has been the best part of all of this. Not only did it help me get over a lot of antisocial anxiety, but it reminded me of why I was even doing this in the first place – to entertain and inspire kids.

My last school visit before the summer break was at Jeremiah Gray Kindergarten Academy. On my third day at the school, a teacher brought in a student named Alan. I give each student a little blank book to fill out as part of a goodie bag. It is meant to inspire them to become an author or illustrator or both. Alan was in a class I presented to earlier in the week and wanted to show me that he had been working on his book. On one of the pages he had drawn the vulture from my story. I drew him a quick doodle of the vulture and gave him a sticker as the first class came in. Later I found out that this was a very big deal for Alan. Alan has had to overcome more issues in Kindergarten than most of us have to face as adults. He had come a long way, and was able to sit for my entire presentation and had come out of his shell to share his drawing with me.

After hearing his story I felt compelled to return to the school and gift him his own copy of Skrum. I was happy to interrupt his class, give him a copy of Skrum and take a photo. What I did not expect was for Principal Hansell to hand me 300 thank you cards from the students I had read to the previous week. These thank you cards have the most wonderful art and messages you could imagine. There are drawings of the Skrum and Barnabus and other things from the book. Others have drawings of me giving the presentation or things that are special and personal to these kids. These are the kind of moments I was not prepared for at all but have been the most inspiring.

EL: That’s fabulous. You helped change a life. 

Ok, everyone, you can buy SKRUM wherever books are sold. Learn more about Bernard here. https://www.bernardgumz.com/

And now it’s time for a GIVEAWAY

Bernard will sign a promotional poster for one lucky winner (in the US)  and personalize it any way the winner would like. Check out this great poster below. In order to get in the running for this prize, please comment on this post. Let me know if you are a subscriber or shared the post to get an extra chance to win. GOOD LUCK!

Thank you for visiting today, Bernard. Good luck with SKRUM!

Until next time,

Ellen