As a child, author-illustrator Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw was so shy that she didn’t want anyone else to see what she was drawing. “I was either in a cardboard box or in the closet—that’s where my studio was, and I would just draw all the time,” she remembers, speaking over Zoom from her home studio in the mountains of North Central New Mexico, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Now, Kostecki-Shaw no longer hides her creative talents and instead uses art to foster communication and friendships around the globe. Like You, Like Me, her latest book, was inspired by a pen pal relationship between her daughter, Tulsi, and a slightly younger girl in Tanzania, Vanessa. Kostecki-Shaw has been homeschooling her son and daughter for nine years, and she used letter writing as a skill-building exercise. Her children wrote not only to her, but also to their cousins and neighbors. They even kept little mailboxes in the woods. Later, Tulsi wrote to authors she liked, and eventually, she asked for a pen pal. One of Kostecki-Shaw’s friends—a librarian at an international school—helped Tulsi and Vanessa connect.
The girls gave Kostecki-Shaw approval to use their names in the book. “They were pretty excited,” she reports. Kostecki-Shaw’s vibrant, torn-paper collage art shows the girls communicating from across the world, discussing the details of their lives: ponderosa pines, African drumming, red-tailed hawks and cheetahs.
A number of spreads feature each girl side-by-side on their own page, mirroring the other in creative ways and making it easy for readers to notice the similarities and differences between their two worlds. About midway through the book, Tulsi looks at a flicker feather that she wants to share with her friend. Kostecki-Shaw says, “I just tilted Tulsi’s head up, and thought, maybe this is a point where they could actually look at each other, even theoretically.” In the finished spread, the flicker feather picked up by Tulsi magically appears on a beach in front of Vanessa, as she holds onto a shell that appears in Tulsi’s possession in the next spread. “It almost feels like they’re in the same place,” Kostecki-Shaw says, “even though the backgrounds are different. From this point on, they’re looking at each other.” Like You, Like Me, she says, is a book about “coming together and sharing more and more.”
Like You, Like Me is a companion to Kostecki-Shaw’s earlier book, Same, Same but Different, which is also about two pen pals: Elliot in the United States, and Kailash in India. As a child, Kostecki-Shaw had a pen pal in Belgium, and for the last 15 years, she’s had an adult pen pal from France. “She once sent me a small hand-sewn envelope with fine red earth clay from where she was born in France,” Kostecki-Shaw says, “and I sent her flicker feathers and a tiny clay flicker bird I made. That’s where the inspiration came from for Vanessa and Tulsi sharing the shell and feather.”
“I love just sharing the inspiration that comes from connections with people you meet around the world, whether it’s through traveling or pen pals, or however you meet them.”
Kostecki-Shaw grew up in St. Louis, and her global curiosity was initially ignited by her father, who traveled often and widely for his work—the basis for her book, Papa Brings Me the World. “I remember just wanting to go with him, to see all those places,” she says. Her first book, My Travelin’ Eye, was inspired by difficulties with a lazy eye, which made learning to read a struggle. “I loved stories so much, and I loved books,” she recalls, “so I would copy all the art and ask everyone to read to me. I loved that books showed me other places to go.”
As an adult, after working for a number of years as an artist for Hallmark cards, she traveled to Nepal and taught English, and she also spent about five months in India. “Before I wrote Same, Same but Different,” she explains, “my life looked so much like Elliot’s. And now my life looks a lot like Kailash’s in some ways. It’s much more connected to nature. We live on a little homestead and we have goats and chickens and ducks, and we’re just a little bit more rooted in community.”
Several years ago, she and her family built her art studio themselves, with the help of a builder friend. “It was so empowering to me as a woman and as an artist to create my own space,” she says. Like You, Like Me is the first project she’s completed in that space, and she relished being able to spread out while creating collages with hand-painted papers and oil sticks. “It just felt so freeing. I would cover surfaces and just paint papers for days, making all kinds of patterns,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about the seasons and nature here in New Mexico, and the color palettes of photos from Tanzania, and looking at patterns that would show up in the ocean, leaves and flowers there.”
She uses a variety of techniques to add texture. “Texture is one of my favorite things. In addition to carving and stamping shapes,” she continues, “I printed with rubber bands and miscellaneous small objects, splattered wet paint and scratched dry paint with an old raggedy paintbrush. I made textures by pushing and pulling paint blobs around with a small piece of chipboard and a brayer, and I printed patterns with oil sticks. Basically, kindergarten play.”
As a child, she feared writing: “Even now, I have to face that little bit of fear of writing until I get far enough into the story where everything fades away, and I’m just having fun in the story and making art.” Now, as an author-illustrator, Kostecki-Shaw loves being able to simultaneously adjust both words and art, letting them “just dance together until they find their way.” She adds, “I love just sharing the inspiration that comes from connections with people you meet around the world, whether it’s through traveling or pen pals, or however you meet them. They just open you up to new ways and make your life so much more beautiful, whether through a conversation or an experience. My life has definitely gotten a lot more beautiful because of people I’ve met.”
