Alphabetique is not only a collaboration between a writer and an illustrator, but between a writer and her editor, and an illustrator and her art director. As a quartet, we moved forward into the music of this book. The first notes of the tales began as poems. Then they transformed into stories, as if from space to time, with the radiant guidance of editor Lara Hinchberger. When the tales became formed in their imagery, CS Richardson, art director and author of the inspired abecedarian novel, The End of the Alphabet, stepped in with a brilliant layout. He then encouraged the visual poems of Kara Kosaka, collages that not only realized the images in the tales, but magically returned the stories to their imaginative source. It was an enchanted intuitive process, one that held us in thrall as it took place, and we all thank each other from the bottoms of our hearts.
Some of the very early verse versions were published in the following literary journals: Barrow Street, Cerise, Margie, Painted Bride Quarterly, PN Review, Poemlemon, Poetry International, Rattle, River Styx, The Southampton Review, and Washington Square. The current versions of “The Poet” and “Q’s Quest” appeared in Poetry. Thank you Kathleen Anderson for representing this book. Thank you Anne Holloway for your copyeditor’s conjuring. Thank you Ruta Liormonas for your steady hand as Alphabetique enters the world. Thanks always to Mike Groden and to Phillis Levin.