She writes, he draws. Her hair is pink, and her laugh is infectious. His hair is red, and he laughs a lot, too. They live and work together in a little yellow house in the Cully neighborhood of Northeast Portland with a new daughter named Clementine Pie.
They love to tell stories. Sometimes they draw them and write them down, and sometimes they finish each other's sentences, like they both can't wait to get to the punch line.
"We drove in that night in the snow and saw this house and made an offer the next day,"
says, starting one of their favorites, How We Came to Portland.
"We came in at night and saw the bridges and the river and said, 'This is it,'"
says.
"It was a very spontaneous decision," Taylor says. "We didn't know anybody here."
"It was a foreclosure," DiBartolo says. "There was nothing here. There was like one light bulb."
"We got here in the middle of the night," Taylor says. "It was freezing."
"The doors were hammered shut and screwed shut," DiBartolo says.
"It was January and we were like, 'What have we done?'" Taylor says. "Then we fell in love with it."
"After we expanded our social circle beyond people at Home Depot," DiBartolo says.
They both crack up. Life is good in the house built on art and love. DiBartolo and Taylor are a fun couple -- "they're adorable," says Arthur Levine, the publisher of their new book -- but their success is built on talent and hard work, not being lucky and cute.
In the eight years since they arrived in Portland from the Bay Area, they've gone from working in restaurants and selling art at Saturday Market to establishing themselves as a productive, critically acclaimed creative team.
Taylor has written three books and created a line of gift products called Laini's Ladies that's sold in more than 5,000 stores. DiBartolo is an artist who did the covers for all of his wife's books, wrote and illustrated a comic called "The Drowned" with Taylor, and illustrated other comics and fantasy role-playing games.
Their most recent creation,
is a finalist for the National Book Award in young people's literature. Taylor wrote the three stories that pivot on a kiss, and DiBartolo did a series of illustrations that begin each story and take it up to Taylor's first word. It's a strikingly original collaboration and a beautiful example of the way they've used their background and training to blend classic storytelling with a modern approach.
"It's like a book from the late 1800s and the 1930s, like
and Edgar Allan Poe," says Jane Putch, their agent. "The graphics are so married to the words."
That's a good description of DiBartolo and Taylor. He's an artist, but one with a strong sense of story. She's a writer, but one who can draw and make art out of anything. Her résumé can be summed up by the description on her Web site: "Writer. Artist. Daydreamer. Nerd." While DiBartolo bounces Clementine Pie on an exercise ball, Taylor starts to tell their story.
Taylor is 37, a Navy brat who lived all over the world. She loved to read fantasy novels as a kid, particularly Madeleine L'Engle, but the selection at the military library and PX was limited. As an English major at the University of California at Berkeley, she read the books English majors are supposed to read -- serious literature, classic and contemporary. Taylor worked in a bookstore and tried to write fiction, what she calls "writer's program angsty young person whatever," but fell back in love with children's books and decided to go to art school to become an illustrator.
DiBartolo, 39, grew up in the Central Valley of California. He was way into comic books as a kid and loved to draw but drifted away from it in high school and college. A few years as an insurance adjuster and an urge to get back into comics brought him to the California College of Art and brings them to another story, one that's a favorite of many couples, How We Met.
"It was the first day of art school," Taylor says. "We were the first two cars in the parking lot and we parked next to each other. Jim was literally the first person I set eyes on in art school."
DiBartolo picks up: "Our first class that day was together and we were randomly assigned to draw one another for the role sheet. It was like, 'You draw you and you draw you.' We had already kind of smiled at each other in the parking lot and then when we were assigned to draw each other. ..."
Taylor: "I was absolutely mortified because I'm not confident about drawing in front of people. Kind of scary."
DiBartolo: "Then we had other classes together and started to get coffee together."
Taylor: "Our first date was to a museum gift shop."
They laugh again, though Clementine is not amused. She's 3 months old and ready for a nap but fighting it a little bit, wanting to be where the action is. Taylor's hair is bright pink, dyed that way a couple of years ago because Taylor says she'd "never done anything weird" and as an homage to Clementine, Kate Winslet's wild-haired character in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." When Taylor was pregnant, friends jokingly asked whether the baby would be born with pink hair.
"I believe our dreams are REAL THINGS, not wisps and air, and it is our job in this life to make them come true, because no one else will do it for us, and because this is our one and only 'wild & precious life.'"
--entry from Taylor's blog
After arriving in Portland, Taylor worked at Il Piatto and Papa Haydn's, DiBartolo at BridgePort Ale House. Taylor started to sell their artwork at Saturday Market and was doing OK with the detailed oil paintings that took months to create. Then she made some collage paper dolls one year as gift tags and saw her niece playing more with the tags than the presents. The first day she took them to Saturday Market she sold out before noon.
"It was my best day ever and a big light-bulb moment," she says, rolling into How Laini's Ladies Went National, another story in the Dreams Are Real series.
"I totally sold through the Christmas season and then once the market closed I worked all these months developing the line," Taylor says. "By spring we were taking them to New York to the national stationery show where we found a manufacturer."
"I was finishing 'The Drowned' on the computer," DiBartolo says.
"At the Javits Center."
"On a computer in the cafe while she was going around looking for. ..."
"I was looking for a company that might be a fit and we were really lucky to meet (Bottman Design). I stayed at the Saturday Market until the products were in the market and in stores and I gradually segued out of doing Saturday Market and focused more on writing."
Laini's Ladies is a line of ornaments, cards, magnets, pads, fans, candles, bath teas and bookmarks. It's in more than 5,000 mostly boutique stores. ("Not in any mass chains, although we wouldn't object," Taylor says.) She used to cut the paper and then the laminate while she was watching TV and says that once her ladies went national it felt strange to sit down without scissors.
"It still astounds me the way a story can pour forth from a word like that. It makes me feel as if anywhere, anytime, all around, anything could burst into story -- as if the world is some great advent calendar, with all those little doors waiting to be opened and reveal their mysteries. It's SO COOL!"
--entry from Taylor's blog
Taylor is a big creator of blogs. Besides her personal blog, called Grow Wings, she's got
, about "things that astound and amaze me about our planet," and two writing blogs.
is "everything I think I know about writing a novel," based on her experience with "Lips Touch" and the first two books in her Dreamdark series, "Blackbringer" and "Silksinger."
Those are big books that took years to write. Taylor loves them and has plans for three more in the series, but she wanted to write something completely different. She started another Web site called
with a woman she'd never met, a Canadian living in England named Meg Genge. Each week they posted a short writing prompt designed to get the words flowing. Three prompts -- "monster," "music" and "real life" -- resulted in longer stories by Taylor that had dangerous kisses in them. Taylor thought about submitting them to magazines, but DiBartolo thought they could be a book and got busy doing some art. They'd talked about doing an illustrated book together since art school and decided to submit the story and art as a package.
Levine, who has his own imprint at Scholastic Books and was the U.S. editor of the Harry Potter series, was thrilled when he got the manuscript for "Lips Touch."
"It's a very special combination of a number of different qualities," Levine says. "The writing is very beautiful and evocative and specific in the way I always look for in a book. The plotting of each part is very intricate. And it was hot."
Hot as in trendy or hot as in. ...
"Hot as in hot. It's very sexy and romantic."
Levine says the stories in "Lips Touch" are "very complete. What Jim manages to bring to the table is to give it a bit of history, to add something to the story before it begins. I thought that was very creative."
So did the National Book Awards committee. Everyone's thrilled about "Lips Touch" being a finalist, and Taylor and DiBartolo are off to New York for a few days of events leading up to the awards ceremony Wednesday night. They've got some new projects waiting back home in the yellow house -- another young-adult novel for Taylor, an online comic DiBartolo is illustrating, a book for younger readers they're doing together and are excited about. Taylor writes in a small, brightly painted room. DiBartolo's studio is up a narrow set of stairs.
Ideas flow back and forth. Sentences start one place and end another. Stories come out of nowhere and end up in books. Dreams come true.
"A writer is on safari for ideas every single moment of his or her life, waking and sleeping. And when an idea pops up from behind a baobab tree, you capture it. Write it down. It's yours now. I hope you'll do something with it!"
--entry from Taylor's blog