Michael Hall is the author/illustrator of The New York Times bestseller, My Heart Is Like a Zoo, as well as the critically acclaimed Perfect Square, It’s an Orange Aardvark, Red: A Crayon’s Story, and Frankencrayon.
Before becoming a children’s author, Michael was an award-winning graphic designer whose work has been widely recognized for its simple and engaging approach.
Michael lives with his wife, Debra Kelley, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and it seemed significant to me that my name and my state’s name had the same first four letters.
During the school year, I went to a laboratory school on the University of Michigan campus, which was about a half hour walk from my home. It took closer to an hour to walk to the Michigan football stadium where I spent many beautiful Saturday afternoons with my friends.
If you squint, Michigan can look like a hand. I spent most of my childhood summers in Leland, a small town on the state’s little finger, where my family has a small cottage on Lake Michigan. (Michiganders tend to point to their hands when describing where they live.)
I wanted to be a writer of some sort from an early age and loved creative writing assignments in school. But I am dyslexic, and reading was a chore, so in college, I focused on the sciences, where my reading didn’t hamper my studies. It turns out that very few people speed-read an organic chemistry textbook.
Later, I worked in a number of academic and commercial laboratories and found myself putting off my plan to go to graduate school. It was then that I discovered a thing called graphic design. For me, it was like writing, but with images rather than words. So I spent a year studying design before moving to Minneapolis where my wife, Debra Kelley, and I opened a graphic design shop that focused on creating trademarks and guidelines for their use.
My work as a designer has everything to do with my approach to making picture books.
While working as a graphic designer, I became fascinated with the different ways words and images can interact with each. And that is what inspired me to make picture books. As it turns out, many qualities that I looked for in my trademarks — such as economy, timelessness, ambiguity, and humor — are also qualities I strive for in my picture books.
Red, Frankencrayon, and It’s an Orange Aardvark are examples of stories that began with a metaphor, and I went about writing the words and making the pictures at roughly the same time.
My Heart Is Like a Zoo and Perfect Square began as visual exercises. I made lots of animals out of hearts and lots of pictures from modified squares before knowing what sort of stories the shapes might want to tell.
Cat Tale began as a word exercise. I thought it would be fun to make a string of leapfrogging sound-alike words. Like this: They flee a steer. They steer a plane. They plane a board. They board a train.
Red, Frankencrayon, and It’s an Orange Aardvark are examples of stories that began with a metaphor, and I went about writing the words and making the pictures at roughly the same time.
My name is an acronym for this short conversation:
“My innards churn happily after eating lemons.”
“Have another, lemon lover.”