William Joyce: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore started unexpectedly as almost every book I do does.  I never sit down and try to write a story about anything in particular, they’re just ideas come into my head and usually in response to something that’s going on in my life be it good or bad. So in this case it was something kind of sad and poignant in that my mentor at Harper Collins, my publisher since I started publishing, fellow name of Bill Morris, who had been at Harper Collins for 50 years. He had finally retired, because he was ill, he was dying. So I knew that he was doing bad and I was flying up to see him. He’s part of that lost and last generation of old-time publishers who would take new guys and gal under their wing and show him the ropes and show them everything about publishing so you really knew what the hell you were doing. And so I was lucky to be part of that last generation to experience that. Since he was soon to be gone it just made me really sad ‘cause I knew something was being lost that probably would never come back. And so I was flying to see him and the title just came into my head and it’s sort of a play on his name---I mean Bill Morris / Morris Lessmore. And he was also diminutive, he was about five foot two, you know wicked of wit, and very dry humor, and so it seemed somehow right. So I wrote the story on the plane, it all kind of tumbled out really quickly even did sketches for it. Got to his apartment I had never been there in all the years I’d known him. But there he was in this hospital bed and it was just the hospital bed and books from floor to ceiling. So we had a nice visit and I read him the story and he enjoyed it and seemed particularly pleased by the play on words in the title of his own name. And so then he died three days later so I was really glad that I’d gone to see him. You know I gotta finish this book I mean just for his sake. And then Hurricane Katrina came and I live in Louisiana and that was incredibly disruptive and that kind of took me off of books for a while. But in a weird way it ended up reaffirming my belief in the power of books and stories. Cause I would go into the shelters—in our town we had like 40,000 people that were displaced. But a bunch of organizations had gotten together and with incredible speed had managed to round up several million books and get them in the hands of the kids in these shelters. So you’d go in you’d see a kid reading a book and be totally absorbed in that book, totally lost in that book. And all the disorienting difficulties of being, of living that way, seemed to vanish. And I found that really powerful. But I also had a grant to get the stories of people who’d been displaced. So all those things kind of dovetailed into the story of Morris Lessmore. With some friends who are in the business who had been refugees from Katrina and from people I’ve worked with over the years we formed a company called Moonbot Studios and the first story that we decided to do as a short film would be The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.   Music Credit: All of the following used by creative commons and found on WMFU’s free music archive at www.freemusicarchive.org Excerpt of “Space + Light” composed and performed by Zeptosound. Excerpt of “Winter Sunshine” composed and performed by Evgeny Grinko, and   Excerpt of “Sunrise (a song for two humans)” composed and performed by johnny_ripper.