Wanted to get a picture of these before I gave some away. Met with four of my longtime writer friends yesterday over lunch and wanted a special pysanka for each. Gary Barwin, musician and author of many books of poetry, kids books and novels, including the hilarious Yiddish for Pirates got the giant bird on green background. That’s a parrot, inspired by what’s on the cover of Yiddish for Pirates. Judy Ann Sadler writes picture books, including her most recent, The Digger Dance, but she is also the queen of craft books — she’s had them published regularly since the 1990s! I had to give her something creative, so she got a red bird pysanka. Gillian Chan, author of historical fiction and fantasy, just finished an exciting new novel, and green is her favourite colour. She also loves fish motifs so she got the green pysanka with a circle of fish. Barbara Haworth Attard, who writes historical fiction, plus one of my all-time favourite contemporary novels, Theories of Relativity, one of the first YA novels about homelessness, loves to quilt when she isn’t writing, so she got the pysanka with the bees and the yellow pinwheel pattern which is much like a quilting motif. (I gave each a quail pysanka as well.)
