The Museum inside Author Lynne Rae Perkins’ Mind

Newberry Award-winning author on her latest book, "The Museum of Everything"

By Kathleen Stocking | May 29, 2021

Lynne Rae Perkins, an award-winning Suttons Bay author and illustrator, has released a new book, “The Museum of Everything.” The book, a kind of map — or as publisher Harper Collins calls it, an invitation to go on “an imagination-fueled journey through the living museum that surrounds us all — is the museum. And the museum has in it, among other things, a cloud, a shadow, an island that could be a stone in a puddle. 

How does one think of something like this? Perkins says the book started when she stood on a hill on a tiny island and could see its edges. She could see the shore, the ocean surrounding it. From that came “The Museum of Everything,” which is about ways of seeing, ways of thinking.  

Why not have a museum with a cloud? Well, no reason. 

And it’s delightful to think of a museum that’s not like any museum you’ve ever seen. The Museum of Everything is a book for young readers, but adults will like it, too. It’s like a poem with pictures. 

“Most children’s books are also something adults can appreciate,” Perkins says. “Editors like that. Because they know the adults are going to be the ones reading it to the children.” Anyone who has ever read to children knows this is true. Some books get hidden in the sofa cushions and some are cherished. 

Described as a “poetic sorceress” by The New York Times, Perkins has a subtle sense of humor and lovely, surprising sense of the world around her. In her book “Nuts to You,” one of the characters is a squirrel in the park near her house, a squirrel with whom she converses. We believe this is a real conversation.  

“A book doesn’t start with just one thing,” Perkins says. “It happens with something small, then I forget about it. Then something else happens and it comes together.”

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Lynne Perkins is sitting on the sofa in her three-story house. Her dog, Hazel, some sweet and gentle mixed breed, is lying next to her. We’re on the second floor of this high house with high ceilings. We are in the trees. It’s mid-May, and the trees are in various stages of bud and leaf, the delicate and changing shades of green and rose that leaves hold only for a few days in the spring. Her husband, Bill Perkins, built the house. He makes furniture out of willow, and there’s a hand-made feel to the space. The radiators look like they came from an old school. The tiles around the hearth were a joint project; she made the tiles, and he installed them. Lynne notices a rose-breasted grosbeak at the bird feeder off the balcony facing the back hill and says, “That’s the first one I’ve seen this year.”

Bill Perkins is in and out. He brings tuna-patty-melts on toast. He says he’s going to take the dog for a walk. “No,” she says, “leave Haze. She wants to hang out for a while.”    

So, this particular book, “The Museum of Everything,” started, she thinks now, upon reflection, with standing on top of that hill on Cuttyhunk Island, where she was writer-in-residence for a school with one student and one teacher. The people on the island had done a community read of her book, “Sisters of the Salty Sea,” and had invited her to come for a week. It was November then, tall grasses, green-to-gold, and when she got back home to Suttons Bay, she tried to draw the island she had seen and now held in her mind, but the drawing didn’t satisfy her. Then she tried to embroider a small pillow-replica of the island. That didn’t work either. Then she made a tiny replica of the island and put it in a diorama. Finally, she felt she was getting somewhere.  

A diorama is a box with things in it. This can be a model of anything, big or small — prehistoric animals in a natural history museum taking up an entire wall, or small enough to fit on a bookshelf. It comes from the Greek for di, meaning “through,” plus orama which means “that which is seen.” Relatively speaking, it’s a new word, dating to the 1800s when people would look through a small hole at a painting of a landscape in which changes in color and direction of illumination create the illusion of changes in the angle of the light and the time of day. Lynne started out as an illustrator until one day her editor asked her if she’d like to write something; now she does both illustrating and writing.

“I wonder about things like, can a rock in a puddle be an island? And think about if the rock in the puddle is on a boulder in a pond,” she writes in “The Museum of Everything,” “And what if that pond is on a small island in a lake? And what if that lake is on a bigger island, out in the ocean?"

“Once you know the one thing in your mind,” she says, “then your mind is ready to see something else. When I figure out how something fits together, I feel this ‘Ahhh,’ and it’s just the best feeling.”

Creative people need to be free to have random thoughts, and unconditional love helps with that.  Perkin says she grew up with lots of unconditional love from her family, from her sister, like the one in “Sisters of the Salty Sea,” where they do “thought-sending” with each other, thinking of something and then mentally sending the thought. As Bill comes in to take Hazel for a walk, she says, “I have unconditional love from Bill.”

Hazel needed time to assess the new person in the house and, that accomplished, she’s ready for her walk.

“I had lots of unsuccessful relationships,” Lynne says. “Everyone does. I was young. I thought it was the nature of relationships that you worked at them. Then I met Bill.”

“We were lucky,” Bill says as Hazel follows him out. Circumstances occurred to allow them to find each other and be happy together.  

Her work, Lynne freely admits, has taken place in the context of a love-filled life. “If I had known my life would be OK, I would have been able to relax and enjoy it more.” 

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A few years ago, I was invited to Thanksgiving at the home of people in Suttons Bay, back in the hills and the woods, near where Lynne and Bill Perkins live. It was a gray and cold day, typical for that time of year; not snowing, but overcast. Lynne came through the door, gingerly carrying her Christmas card, like a cake that might fall, a small diorama with figures. She put it down carefully on a side table. She was clearly excited about the idea of the diorama. It was a new way of seeing. “She’s been doing dioramas,” Bill said, the way some other husband might say that lately his wife has been making afghans.  

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A book doesn’t happen overnight. It took two or three years, from first thought to the finished product, for “The Museum of Everything” to come into being. “I work on several things at the same time,” she says.

Dioramas helped her find a way to write this latest book; one of her previous books required needlework, and another cooking, for the thinking and writing to coalesce. Two of her books are dedicated to the couple’s two children, Frank and Lucy, now grown — Lucy working for NPR in Pittsburgh and Frank an engineer in Seattle.

Bill Perkins refers to himself as Lynne’s muse. He’s not exactly joking. A muse is someone who inspires and protects and gives comfort. He says he fell madly in love with his wife many years ago. The unspoken love between them fills their house, makes visitors want to be there. 

“Lynne gets tuna melts,” I say to Bill when he returns with Hazel. “What do you get?”

“I come home at the end of the day,” Bill says, “and we have these amazing conversations.” These are conversations, one can imagine from reading “The Museum of Everything,” that are filled with things one hadn’t thought of before, and which are funny and fun and lead to discovery and understanding. 

Before I came to talk to Lynne Rae Perkins, I looked up the word museum. It means a place for things inspired by the muses, and her book of dioramas in her imaginary museum fits. But her museum has things in it that one does not expect: hidden things, shadows, the rock in a puddle that’s a miniature island.

“I was walking one day,” Lynne says, “and the sun was out, and it had dried out all the dew, except where the shadow of the tree’s leaves and branches had left a darker pattern created by the moisture that hadn’t evaporated yet.” And so, she put the concept of a reverse shadow into a diorama and into the book.

At the end of June Lynne Perkins will have a book celebration at Horizon Books in downtown Traverse City. “It will be outside,” she says. “There will be long tables. And supplies. And when kids come, I’ll make dioramas with them.” The event is scheduled for 1pm June 26.

To learn more about Lynn Rae Perkins, check out www.lynnerae.com. For more information about the celebration of “The Museum of Everything,” search “Horizon BooksTC” on Facebook.