Jim Giblin has had two long and fruitful careers in children’s books, first as an editor, retiring as publisher of Clarion Books in 1989, and continuing to flourish as an author, most recently of The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (Clarion, 2009). He is currently working on a joint biography of movie pioneers Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith. In honor of Jim’s work and his many years of mentoring new writers, The Highlights Foundation has established the James Cross Giblin Scholarship Fund to enable writers to attend the writing workshops and conferences held at Highlights’ beautiful campus in the Poconos. The Highlights Foundation, who asked me to help spread the word about the scholarship and the illustrious and lovely Mr. Giblin, sponsors this edition of Talks with Roger.

RS: In my conversation with Mary Downing Hahn (Mary Downing Hahn Talks with Roger, June 2012), she talked about how you helped and guided her, how you brought her into the world, sort of. Who brought you in? Who helped you?

James Cross Giblin: There were a variety of people, and some of them had nothing to do with publishing. One was my college drama teacher — I majored in dramatic arts in undergraduate — a woman named Nadine Miles, a fascinating person and a good director. She wasn’t the type to say, “Enter upstage left, take three steps downstage, say your line as you cross to the sofa…” Miss Miles let us fumble around through the blocking. But once you got that right moment, she would direct it very closely. You’d have an insight into the whole performance. I played, when I was nineteen years old, an aged Russian sage in Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. It was mainly set in the basement of a rundown apartment house in Moscow. Miss Miles didn’t stop me until I rose from a bench, and she said, “Wait a minute. How old are you?” Thinking in those days, when I was nineteen, that sixty-five was ancient, I said that, and she said, “All right. Don’t you think his bones might be a little creaky? After all, he’s trudged all across northern Russia before getting to Moscow with his strange religious vision. Would he jump up from the bench, or would it be hard for him to stand up? Why don’t you try it again?” We tried it a couple of times more until she was satisfied. I edit that way. I’ve never been the type who would mark up the author’s manuscript with a lot of changes or suggestions. I always felt that it would freeze up the writer just as it froze up me.

Early in my career, I was fortunate to work as an assistant editor with Beatrice Creighton at Lothrop, Lee & Shepherd, long gone now as a separate imprint. Bea Creighton had a real knack for picking out a picture book manuscript, of seeing the core of an effective text and paring it down. She published Alvin Tresselt’s Caldecott-winning White Snow, Bright Snow (Lothrop, 1947), illustrated by Roger Duvoisin, and Tresselt and Duvoisin’s Hide and Seek Fog (Lothrop, 1965). I well remember the day when the associate art director came rushing in with final proofs just before Hide and Seek Fog was going on press. Patsy, the art assistant, said, “Miss Creighton, Miss Creighton, look at this spread.” Bea didn’t see anything wrong with it and said, “Well, it seems to read smoothly to me.” Patsy replied, “But don’t you realize, they left off the whole text on page twelve?” So Bea looked at it again, and she said, “You know, this text always needed cutting.” It was published that way and it won a Caldecott Honor. Bea saw what authors were trying to do and helped them do it. That’s what an editor’s job is.

RS: Do you find, working with authors, that Author A has a consistent tendency to write too much or too little? Do you know, coming into a manuscript by someone you’ve worked with for a long time, what you need to watch out for?

JCG: Mary Downing Hahn, in her earlier days, had a tendency to underwrite. But the wonderful thing about Mary — and it’s certainly not true of every writer — is that she would learn from her mistakes. If she made a set of revisions after my saying, “Let the character go more. Let her really explode in the scene. Let her go at it with her mother,” the wonderful thing about Mary was she always took the suggestion in her own direction, ending up in a much better place than I would ever have imagined.

RS: It’s interesting to me that the metaphors you use to talk about what you thought Mary needed to do are very stagecrafty. Do you think there’s a connection with your drama background?

JCG: Very much so, yes. I’ll even say to an author, “Give her a stronger entrance.” How does she bring up the mail to her aged grandfather? Is there any way she makes it seem like it might be interesting or exciting news? The character, I mean.

RS: Is there anything you see in publishing today that you envy?

JCG: I’ll say a good word for marketing. Certain books that they see potential in — and I don’t always agree with them about just which ones — they work hard to promote. Once I had been in the field for a decade or so, I often felt that nobody knew what they were really doing in terms of marketing. It was easier then, of course, because the key markets for trade publishers then were schools and libraries. Clarion was fortunate, too, because we had Marjorie Naughton. I hired Marjorie in 1962, and she retired at the end of 2010.

RS: The field seems more cutthroat today.

JCG: Oh, it’s much more cutthroat. I was once quoted as having said, and I don’t even remember this but I guess I did, that in the adult field it’s dog-eat-dog, and in children’s books it’s bunny-nibble-bunny. It isn’t that way anymore.

RS: What is the most important lesson that your editing career brought to your writing career?

JCG: Well, for one thing, I hope it taught me how not to be a demanding son-of-a-bitch with my editor.

RS: “Here comes Jim again.”

JCG: Yes, exactly. You know, a lot of authors have very unrealistic expectations about what their books are going to do. They can make themselves obnoxious by wondering why nobody invites them to be on television or why they’re not mentioned in People magazine. At writers’ conferences, there’s so much emphasis on marketing. Current wisdom states that the marketing people only have time to concentrate on their star people, so you have to self-publicize, and if that means being aggressive, you have to learn how to be aggressive. I don’t know how that’s working out, but I don’t advise it as a course of action. Of course publishers spend more money on proven commodities, because they want to follow up a success with another success. And until you prove that you can deliver a successful book to the house, they’re not going to give you as much attention as they give their star people. I think that should be understandable to anybody.

RS: Even the star people are being pressured to do a new book that’s as much like their last successful book as possible. Sequels, companions, things like that.

JCG: I’ve never thought that really good books come from that approach. But who am I to say, because one of our bestselling author-illustrators at Clarion is someone I still work with, and love working with, because she’s so imaginative and intelligent, and that’s Eileen Christelow and her five little monkeys.

RS: People love those five little monkeys.

JCG: They do, and Eileen will ask me plaintively sometimes, “Can I take a break and do some other kind of story?”

RS: And what do you say?

JCG: I say yes. Two of her best books are What Do Authors Do? (Clarion, 1995) and What Do Illustrators Do? (Clarion, 1999).

RS: Have you found a difference in publishing your own books?

JCG: I published my first book, The Scarecrow Book (Crown Publishers) in 1980. It’s been over thirty years now. There is more nonfiction publishing for the younger set now, and there’s much more use of color, especially color photographs, in series like Houghton’s Scientists in the Field.

RS: I love that series.

JCG: It’s a fine series. It fills a real need, I think, that nobody’s tapped before. Of course, nonfiction has gone through so many different phases.

RS: Kind of like books for boys, you know? It seems about every, oh, eight years or so, people say, “Oh my God, we’ve got to do something about nonfiction.” Or, “We’ve got to do something about boy readers.” One or the other. Then you see more attention for a while, and then it slowly recedes, and then it cycles back.

JCG: Yes, exactly. My friend Russell Freedman lucked out, I think, with Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 1987), because it came at the peak of a trend for recognizing nonfiction, including several nonfiction Newbery Honor Books: Rhoda Blumberg’s Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun (Lothrop, 1985); Patricia Lauber’s Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount Saint Helens (Bradbury, 1986).

RS: I remember your own early books as being concerned with social history.

JCG: Yes, that was what I devoted my books to in the eighties.

RS: And now we see more biography from you.

JCG: Yes, there was a definite shift. I, for better or worse, have always followed my own inclinations in the subjects I chose to explore, and editors have gone along with me. I don’t think if I were starting out today I would have as easy a time getting contracts for those earlier titles. I had a lot of fun writing those social history books, especially one called From Hand to Mouth, or, How We Invented Knives, Forks, Spoons, and Chopsticks, & the Table Manners to Go with Them (Crowell, 1987), which is, I think, my funniest book.

RS: Let There Be Light: A Book About Windows (Crowell, 1988), that’s my favorite.

JCG: That one was the most demanding to write. And I think probably one of the more creative of them, because it was an unusual idea, and I had a lot of fun researching it and writing it. Those were books I could do comfortably while heading Clarion as editor-in-chief and publisher, because they’re what I call beads-on-a-string books. There’d be a theme, like in From Hand to Mouth, and I could research a segment, or a “bead,” of the story and write it. There was not a driving thrust through from beginning to end. With the biographies I started writing later I had to go deeper and be more concentrated.

RS: Biography demands more attention to the string. You can’t cherry-pick.

JCG: No, and you can’t link up a few stray facts with a few more stray facts. When Plague Strikes: The Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS (HarperCollins, 1995) was a pivotal book in my career, and one of the most popular. It’s not a biography of a person, but in a way it’s a biography of three epidemics. I pushed individuals to the front of the story because I felt it made it livelier, and so that you could feel the personal effects of the particular plague. But among my biographies is my own favorite, a 2005 Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book, Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth (Clarion, 2005). I think I did a pretty good job with Hitler, too (The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler, Clarion, 2002).

RS: Are you attracted to bad boys, Jim?

JCG: Not in life, necessarily, but certainly in my writing. I think bad characters are just more fun to write about or watch in a movie. I’m paraphrasing Bette Davis, I guess.

More on James Cross Giblin from The Horn Book

More Than Just the Facts: A Hundred Years of Children’s Nonfiction by James Cross Giblin
Not-So-Trivial Pursuits: The Wrong Plot by James Cross Giblin

The post James Cross Giblin Talks with Roger appeared first on The Horn Book.

Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

While Paul O. Zelinsky garnered a Caldecott Medal and three Caldecott Honors for gravely beautiful work in rich oils (well, I suppose Swamp Angel is more like gravely funny), he is equally adept with a lighter touch. With Z Is for Moose, Paul and author Kelly Bingham shake up — literally! — the old alphabet book, beginning demurely enough with Apple but soon knocking the letters about and splattering them with an ample helping of blueberry Pie, all thanks to a desperate-to-be-M Moose.

Roger Sutton: Paul, just how much fun did you have? In your interview for Notes from the Horn Book, you said that you felt lucky to have been asked to do the pictures for Z Is for Moose. What were your initial thoughts after reading Kelly Bingham’s manuscript?

Paul O. Zelinsky: My first thought was: Hahaha, this is hilarious. And I have to say that it was a more developed manuscript than anybody suspects when they look at the book. It was part manuscript, part script. There were little notes and details for jokes that probably look like they were my idea, but they weren’t.

RS: They’re Kelly’s jokes, and you had to bring them to life visually.

PZ: Right. There were a few places where I made some little changes, but Kelly had already done an illustrated dummy (she’s also an artist). We had no contact while I was working on the book, which leads to a funny story. I had just carefully designed a cover with my name and her name — occupying the full width, strategically placed so that the moose’s antler was going to poke my middle initial out of place. Well, somewhere between when I started working on the book and when I finished, Kelly changed her name. All I could think when I found out was, “Oh my God, what if her name is now Kelly Li, two letters? I’m going to have to completely redo the cover.” Luckily, her new name was about the same length as her old name.

RS: How does she like the book?

PZ: She loves it. We’re actually meeting for the first time tonight — she’s coming over for dinner.

RS: What did you originally see in the manuscript that made you want to illustrate it?

PZ: I’m not really sure what guides me. A degree of enthusiasm, for one thing. If there’s enough enthusiasm, and there isn’t a voice saying “You can’t do this,” that’s pretty much what I go on. I was conjuring up the dull alphabet books from my childhood, ones that were sort of big, smooth, round, airbrushed, and dumb. And I was thinking this one would have a feeling of fun, like it would be almost a vacation to spend time working on it.

RS: In reaching the decision to illustrate a manuscript, do you see the pictures in your head before you say yes, or does that come afterward?

PZ: It’s been very different from one case to another. I don’t usually see pictures in my head. Sometimes what I see is: “This is what it should not be. This is the opposite of what I’d like it to be.” And that’s enough to get me going.

RS: It’s the warnings that come into your head, and you see the pictures as they emerge from your pencil or brush?

PZ: Pretty much. I didn’t have any idea what Moose would look like. I just hoped he wouldn’t look like Bullwinkle, because that was what kept coming into my head.

RS: Your website says that the finished art is watercolor and inkjet printout. Can you tell us what that means?

PZ: Sure. There are big areas of pure flat color, and rather than try to paint big areas of pure flat color, I did that on the computer. I had line drawings in pencil, which I scanned, and then in Photoshop I put those line drawings into a color image, and I created the frame for each page. Then I printed all of that out onto watercolor paper. What I had then wasn’t complete; there were things I left out so I could finish up in actual pencil. It was like Music Minus One [ed. note: karaoke, for you youngsters] for drawing. The backgrounds were there, the orchestration. But the foregrounds were empty and blank. And then I used watercolor to color those in.

RS: How would you describe your relationship with your digital tools?

PZ: I love gadgets, messing with the computer. I don’t necessarily like what I do on it all the time, but I don’t have moralistic compunctions about working on the computer.

RS: I wonder if people might think you would, given your Caldecott Medal for Rapunzel and your other really painterly painted books.

PZ: I don’t like making fake things. And digital images that look like fake paintings disturb me. But when they don’t look fake, I don’t really have a problem with it. You’re not looking at an original piece of art anyway: when it gets scanned for printing it becomes digital.

RS: The color scheme for Z Is for Moose is interestingly contrapuntal. Each page is framed. That’s one color. Then there is a rubric for the letter that’s being discussed, and that’s another color. And then there’s the background, and that’s a third color. And then there are the colors of the characters themselves. How do you make it all work together?

PZ: Basically, by feel. But because it’s such an orderly book, when making any kind of color decision you don’t want to go hog-wild and put in too much. I tried a lot of different combinations of things, and I ended up using five basic colors for the frames and background combinations. For example, A is for Apple — that’s a green border and light-blue background. Five pages later, F is for Fox, you get the same combination except now it’s on the left-hand page because five is an odd number. It was sort of fun having this little math problem.

RS: Did you work from A to Z, as it were, here?

PZ: Actually, I started with D, went on to E and F, and A. I don’t work in order because I usually learn how to do what I’m trying to do better as I’m working on a book. And so if I worked in order, the last page might look better than the first page, or different, anyway. In order to mask that, I jump around as much as I can. Also, I like to reward myself sometimes: if I dare to do something really difficult, I’ll save a picture I’m looking forward to and do it after the hard one.

RS: Do you have a point in a book where you say, okay, this is out of my hands?

PZ: I try to.

RS: And when does that point usually come?

PZ: About a year after publication.

More on Paul O. Zelinsky from The Horn Book:

* Five Questions for Paul O. Zelinsky

* Review of Z Is for Moose

* Studio Views: My Favorite Medium: Oils

* Caldecott winner Zelinsky’s favorite Caldecott winner

The post Paul O. Zelinsky Talks with Roger appeared first on The Horn Book.

Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

I met with the Merry Sisters of Fate at a New York coffee shop during a break from Book Expo America last June. While Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff each publishes independently, they seem to toss around one another’s drafts with a glee to make the Norns nervous. And not all the sharing is private: The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories is an aggressively (and amusingly) annotated compilation of story-posts from their shared blog. I was curious about how all this pen-pal-ing worked.

Roger Sutton: First of all, how do you three know each other?

Tessa Gratton: We all met on the internet. Maggie and I read each other’s blogs and started critiquing each other’s work. We hit it off instantly. One day Maggie said, “Tessa, there’s this other girl I’ve been working with. Her name is Brenna, and the two of you will now be friends.” A few months later we became basically inseparable when it comes to sharing our writing and working together.

RS: How long before you met in person?

Maggie Stiefvater: We set up a writers’ retreat, in Savannah, with a bunch of other young adult writers that we knew from cyberspace. It was very interesting to meet in person because it was exactly the same as talking online!

RS: Where do you all live?

MS: Virginia.

Brenna Yovanoff: Denver.

TG: Kansas.

RS: The stories from The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories first appeared on your shared blog, the Merry Sisters of Fate. How do you know when something is finished enough to put up online?

MS: The stories on the blog are completely unedited. We usually write them in the morning of our assigned day, then just throw them up there. Often our novels come from those stories. For example, The Scorpio Races started as a Merry Sisters of Fate short story.

RS: How do you find the writing muscles different in writing a short story and in writing a novel?

BY: The way that we’ve approached the short stories from Merry Fates is very specific because we are writing them really quickly and putting them right out there, unedited. So for those stories, a huge part of it is just challenging ourselves to try something new, take risks. Just be brave, put it out there, and see how it works.

TG: I wrote each scene of my new book [The Weight of Stars, Random House, May 2013] thinking about it as a Merry Fates short story. Each chapter is pretty self-contained; I wanted there to be character, plot, setting, world-building, all as if it were a short story. So Merry Fates has really helped me make everything count in my novels in a way that I don’t think happened before. The process was very much like building tiny muscles to create the larger novel muscle.

RS: Lots of people have great hooks and concepts they think they can turn into a story. I don’t think people need any encouragement to start a story, but how would you encourage a new writer to finish one?

BY: I was not a finisher for a very long time. I don’t think I finished a novel manuscript until I was in my twenties. Part of it was just maturing as a writer – and another part was finding an idea that I was passionate about the whole way through. Not just the spark of it, but the termination point.

RS: Tessa?

TG: I never had a problem finishing things. I wrote my first novel – it was a very short novel – when I was in junior high, and I wrote them in high school. The reason I like to write novels is for that emotional connection that can only come with the end of the story, leaving you unsatisfied until you get to that point.

MS: I was a huge unfinisher, like Brenna. I had over thirty unfinished novels by the time I hit college, and it was because I never knew what the end was. And, like Tessa said, it wasn’t just knowing the end of the plot, it was knowing the end of the emotional arc. That is my biggest advice to people who can’t finish things: know the end. And actually, that was one of the things I really liked about the website. It was inspired by the “painting a day” movement of artists who created an entire work from beginning to end every single day. Instead of just working on the same project for two years over and over, it was doing four hundred unique projects. And so with writing it’s the same way. You learn so much by finishing a project, and then finishing another project, and finishing. It really is a skill – getting to the end – that you can get better at.

TG: Because the website allows us to interact with readers, we’re able to learn what kinds of endings would generate the most response. Frequently, our most commented-on stories are the ones with really strong endings. And so you think, okay, how do I make this happen again?

MS: It taught all of us the difference between what is satisfying to us and what is satisfying and commercial, and how to make those two things more similar, which is really important when you’re writing about, say, killer water horses, or alternative Norse universes, or, you know, psychopaths.

BY: I do like to write about psychopaths.

RS: The three of you are so connected to your readers. How do you balance between what you want to do as a writer with readers who all want, say, ninja vampire fairies? How do you keep that line between what you want to write and what the reader wants to read?

BY: The way I try to do it is to write the first draft of anything like it is just for me. I don’t think about the audience until I’m revising, and then I have to start thinking about what is satisfying to someone else about each scene. And it’s something, as Maggie said, that I got a much better handle on through Merry Fates, watching how people responded to different types of things.

TG: I very firmly believe that if I love it, there will be an audience for it, because I love to read and I get so passionate about books.

MS: I think there’s a big difference between what readers want and what they need. I always try to ignore the first and give the second. It’s what I want, but it’s what readers need. And so I start out like Brenna writing the novel for myself, but in the back of my head, at least halfway through or before I get to the end of the draft, I have my readers in mind: What they need to know? How do I make the book most accessible while still staying true to what I want?

RS: I’m not quite sure how to phrase this next question. Brenna, what do you, as a writer, do better than your two sisters here?

BY: Oh my God. Probably atmosphere. I borrow plot from Tessa, and character from Maggie, and put them in my atmosphere.

RS: Tessa?

TG: I draw stories from the world I’m building. I create a world in the first paragraph then push the rest of the story from just that.

MS: We have this joke, from when we first started, that Tessa’s stories always did blood, Brenna’s always did dysfunction, and I always did angst. I love character-building more than anything, and so I would say that character is my strength. But we do learn from each other all the time. One of my favorite parts of The Curiosities is where we comment on which of our sisters’ stories we wish we had written, and why we think we could have written some of them ourselves – something being a “Maggie story” even though it was written by Tessa. We can definitely see the cross-pollination.

RS: You all write speculative fiction of some sort. Paranormal and fantasy are huge now, but they weren’t even fifteen years ago. What did you grow up reading that turned you into the kind of writer that you are today?

MS: I always loved fantasy. When I went to the library, I remember going for those unicorn stickers on the spine of the books that showed they were fantasy – Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Narnia. I also grew up sharing books with my father, who read all of these thrillers – Dean Koontz, Jack Higgins, Michael Crichton – so I can definitely see that combination turning me into the writer that I am.

BY: I come by my proclivity for dysfunction honestly. Some of my favorite books in high school were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Clockwork Orange, things by Bret Easton Ellis. Stories about strange or ugly people doing ugly things. I am also an avid Stephen King reader.

TG: I didn’t read anything that wasn’t genre fiction – Robin McKinley, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice. I was totally uninterested if there wasn’t magic or monsters of some sort.

BY: I like the way you use the past tense there. “I was totally uninterested.” You could have said that yesterday.

RS: Why do you think speculative fiction has held on so long? Normally we see – I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years – things come and go: romance, not-romance; problem novel, not-problem novel. But this has really held on for a long time. Why?

MS: I grew up reading myths. I loved myths more than anything. I used to read loads and loads of books on fairy tales, Greek stuff, anything I could get my hands on. I think it’s popular for the same reason that myths have always been popular: they are metaphors for other bigger issues. When I wrote Shiver it was all about losing your identity and growing up and becoming one of the horde instead of being unique, and I think that speaks to people subconsciously the same way that myth always has. It feels true in a way that’s not specific.

TG: The way that YA books are displayed in bookstores is not quite so rigid about genre. They’re found all over the place. And so we have books that are YA paranormal dystopic horror, and they could go in any number of places. There’s so much more room to play, and readers can read all of those things in the same book or in different books. I think this fluidity really lends itself to less of a rise and fall.

MS: Although I did find Scorpio Races shelved in teen nonfiction, and I’m not so sure about that one.

BY: Going along with both of those ideas, I think there’s something just so elementally appealing about the idea of extraordinary things in the world. People like the fantastical, the extraordinary, because they promise, like Maggie said, something bigger, something more allegorical, I guess. A larger general truth.

RS: What other kind of book (than the kind you’re known for) do you secretly want to write?

MS: Mine’s not secret. I want to write a graphic novel. I was a portrait artist before I was an author, and I would like to bring those two interests back into line again.

BY: I would love to do a realistic contemporary YA novel. That’s one of my favorite genres to read. As far as a secret ambition that will probably never happen – I would also love to write video game scripts, survival horror video games. I would make them so weird.

TG: I don’t have anything like that. Merry Fates lets me write whatever I want, whenever I want to, and frequently when I don’t want to write at all. I’m not interested in anything that’s not a novel or short story. I’m very much a basic prose kind of girl.

RS: What is the one best piece of advice you could give to a young writer?

TG: Go out and have adventures. The more you experience, the more you can connect with people and with the world and you can translate that experience into your stories.

BY: Speaking from personal experience, I would say learn to finish things. But don’t hate yourself too much if you don’t at first.

MS: Learn to love learning. Because you are always trying to get better about learning how to write, learning how to finish, learning how the industry works, learning how to write like your favorite authors, learning how to navigate the internet. As a writer, there’s always something to learn.

More on Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff from The Horn Book
*Horn Book Magazine review of The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories
*Merry Sister of Fate blog
*Maggie, Tessa, and Brenna‘s websites

The post Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, & Brenna Yovanoff Talk with Roger Sutton appeared first on The Horn Book.

Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

While Rebecca Stead’s first novel, First Light, was a quiet debut (although it’s kind of a wild book), her second, When You Reach Me, made a great deal of noise, becoming a New York Times bestseller even before it won the Newbery Medal and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction. Was it a hard act to follow? Rebecca Stead and I discuss her new novel, Liar & Spy.

Roger Sutton: My first question is where were you on Liar & Spy (if anywhere) when When You Reach Me was published?

Rebecca Stead: I was thinking about the main character…

Roger: Georges.

Rebecca: Yes. His name was Roy at the time, and I was actually thinking about a much younger book, either a very short middle-grade novel or a picture book. But I had nothing written when When You Reach Me was published.

Roger: What did winning the Newbery do for this book? Help, hurt?

Rebecca: I think it slowed me down, and it made me feel something I had never felt before: that people were looking at me. And that always ramps up your fear. I don’t think it really affected the writing process too much, I would just say I had a little bit of heightened anxiety. Plus, I was busy! I got all caught up in everything that was happening with When You Reach Me, and I was getting nervous about all that I had to do for that book.

Roger: I guess I wondered if you had that M. Night Shyamalan experience. He did The Sixth Sense, which got enormous attention, and it had this really high-concept element. And I thought, “Wow, I wonder if everyone’s going to expect Rebecca’s next book to do another huge, dazzling, high-concept kind of thing.”

Rebecca: I was deliberately trying to write a book that was very, very different from When You Reach Me.

Roger: It’s hugely different.

Rebecca: And I wasn’t at all interested in creating the kind of experience that I wanted the reader to have with When You Reach Me. But now that the book has been published, I’m a little worried that people are going to try to read it as an attempt to do the same thing.

Roger: One thing it does the same – but this is more thematic than anything else – is that we know Something Is Going On, and we’re wondering about it.

Rebecca: Right.

Roger: We don’t really know what the plot of Liar & Spy is until almost the end of the book (at least I didn’t). I felt like I was in good hands, but I had no idea where it was headed. With When You Reach Me, you’re actively confronted with a mystery, whereas here you don’t realize that you’re reading a mystery in the first place.

Rebecca: Toward the end of Liar & Spy there are two big things you find out. One of them was never intended to be a mystery at all. It was supposed to be a question that got bigger for the reader as the book goes on.

Roger: Are you talking about Georges’ family or Georges’ friends?

Rebecca: His family.

Roger: Okay.

Rebecca: And then on the friends front, there’s this mystery building that is supposed to be a mystery. And when you find out what’s going on there – I’m not trying to have a gotcha moment, I’m trying to create a really loud emotional beat.

Roger: In When You Reach Me we have a situation which is not possible by the rules we know in our everyday life, but what befalls the characters in Liar & Spy is, in fact, less spectacular than what one’s imagination might create. That seems to me a theme of the story.

Rebecca: Yes, exactly. I wanted the book to be truly realistic. I find that a lot of “realistic fiction” is not all that realistic in terms of the way people interact, or their level of sophistication. I really wanted Liar & Spy to be absolutely on the scale of real life. Which is limiting, of course, when it comes to creating a huge amount of drama.

Roger: Well, you risk being boring. So how do you escape that?

Rebecca: Yes, how do you escape that? It’s terrifying. The way I tried to make it happen was by creating characters that people cared about, or that I cared about, I guess I should say, and having them do and talk about things that would a) be interesting and b) maybe allow the reader to have his or her own thoughts about those conversations.

Roger: So many things worked well not only by being intrinsically interesting, like that taste test Georges’ science class does, which is just fun, but by being integrated parts of the story. Sometimes I’ll see authors throw in – I say throw in, which is disparaging; that’s how it feels to me – but it seems like someone has put his or her own little pet project or idea into a story but really hasn’t made it part of that story. Whereas I feel like you did.

Rebecca: I do believe there’s a great temptation to throw things in, as you put it, that you think are neat, or that you have a very clear, specific memory of and think you could do a good job writing about. What I find is that it’s like a seed you plant. You can try it, and if it will grow and connect with other ideas in the book, and you can see connections that you can actually realize on the page, then you’re allowed to leave it in. But if it just kind of lies there and doesn’t really add up to anything or there’s no chemistry with everything else going on in the book, then you have to take it out. I had a couple of things I tried to force into this book that just lay there.

Roger: How do you find out that something’s just lying there? When do those become apparent to you?

Rebecca: I think if you can take something out and it doesn’t change the book, it doesn’t need to be there. For instance, there’s a scene in Liar & Spy where Georges and Safer are watching the lobby cam and Georges accidentally says a word out loud, and then they talk about words that are also what they sound like, and then Safer comes up with one.

Roger: Bounce.

Rebecca: Yes, bounce and yank. And I went back and forth about whether that scene was too slow or the point was too heavy, a heaviness in the book that I didn’t want. I decided that actually, for me – and when something works for you, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope that it will work for someone else – it really said something about the ways in which Georges had to protect himself at school. That wasn’t protection he needed with Safer. And I think the reason I wrote that scene in the first place was because of my own idea of what friendship is. For me one of the most important things is not feeling like you have to protect yourself if you’re with a real friend.

Roger: And being allowed to talk about things that the kids at school might think are dorky.

Rebecca: Yeah, I like to talk about weirdness. We all have strange thoughts and ideas, and when you really trust someone you can express them. And they can express them to you, and that’s one of the joys of life.

Roger: I didn’t notice that scene at all as something you could bump out. So it worked for me. Is that something you rely on your editor to call you out on?

Rebecca: Yes. Although with my editor there’s latitude and freedom. Wendy [Lamb] extends a lot of faith and gives the material a huge amount of breathing room. She’s someone you can tell your weirdness to, so if you have weird stuff in your book, she’s not going to jump on it unless it’s something that just doesn’t track. I absolutely trust her. We’re similar readers in the sense that we may be looking for the resonance of very small moments.

Roger: I think Liar & Spy shows that you’re someone who is really trusting of her readers. You don’t have a cliffhanger happening on every page, which has become more and more frequent, unfortunately. So it’s good that you have an editor who trusts you to trust your readers.

Rebecca: When you trust your readers, you’re hoping they will see what you see. Not every book is for every person. This is a fairly quiet, sensitive one about sensitive kids. There’s not a lot of rock-and-roll here. And at the same time it is the purest kind of offering that I have to give as a writer. There’s all kinds of trust necessary.

Roger: In this book, as well as in When You Reach Me, you have this great kid’s-eye view on the neighborhood (different neighborhoods, but both in New York). Is that from you? Your kids? How do you think you see that way?

Rebecca: I think it’s from my childhood. I’ve lived in neighborhoods like both of the ones I’ve written about. It’s all that stuff you have stored up in your head from that stage of life. I don’t know whether I could visit a new neighborhood now and have a kid’s set of observations about a place. I no longer can really think like a child, though I can remember thinking like one. I did go back to a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn and walk around, but mostly I was trying to remember what it was like in those neighborhoods as a kid.

Roger: Do you remember what lunch table you sat at? Was there a cool kids’ table?

Rebecca: I don’t think I ever had to deal with a cool table situation. In middle school – when I had the hardest time and was confronted by a lot of verbal crap and meanness – we went out for lunch. I would buy a chicken roll sandwich with extra mayonnaise at this deli on the corner, and would sit outside the school and eat it.

Roger: Alone?

Rebecca: No.

Roger: Oh, good.

Rebecca: In eighth grade I definitely wasn’t alone, because my best friend from elementary school came to my school. I did have that one friend who saves you. We were actually sort of bullied for being so close. But luckily neither of us lost faith; we stuck together.

Roger: Everybody needs a friend like that.

Rebecca: Yeah. I feel like there are stages in many, many people’s childhoods when you don’t have one good friend like that. It can happen a lot in sixth and seventh grade because that’s when things are changing so quickly. It’s like a desperate dash for some kind of acceptable identity, and it can get ugly.

Roger: And that’s, I think, a hard thing to deal with right now in writing for kids, with our emphasis on anti-bullying. I think you bravely deal with bullying in a very realistic way. The sort of everyday kind of bullying that goes on. We’re not talking about something horrific.

Rebecca: Right.

Roger: I mean, it feels horrific to the kid it’s happening to. But to me that is part of child life. We can’t X it out of existence just because we think it’s bad.

Rebecca: Exactly. And it’s not necessarily a traumatic story with a dramatic comeuppance. Sometimes it’s just a way of life for a while. And you may have a friend or two while it’s going on, and you may not. It’s always so comfortable to write about kids who may be different in one way or the other, but they always have some friend. A weird friend, or a popular friend, or something.

Roger: Or an at-home friend who’s not an at-school friend. Or the opposite.

Rebecca: Right. I didn’t think about all of this deliberately before I started writing, but I did think about the fact that I was writing about a kid who was getting toward the end of a year when he really hasn’t had a friend in a while. Not ever, but in a while.

Roger: Well, I’m glad you found him one.

Rebecca: Me too.

More on Rebecca Stead from The Horn Book

*Boston Globe-Horn Book Award speech for 2010 fiction winner When You Reach Me

*Profile of Rebecca by editor Wendy Lamb

*Roger and Rebecca announce the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book winners at BEA

*Rebecca’s Good Taste: More on the Science Class Taste Test

The post Rebecca Stead Talks with Roger appeared first on The Horn Book.

Rebecca Stead’s latest book, Liar & Spy, features an entertaining (and educational!) subplot about the sense of taste. Main character Georges’ science class participates in a taste-test experiment that Rebecca, while reminiscing with me for a Talks With Roger interview, remembers from her own school days:

Roger: Is that a real thing, that taste test?

Rebecca: Yes, I did that.

Roger: And what kind were you?

Rebecca: I was a non-taster. The myth from the book [of non-tasters being soul mates] didn’t come from real life. But I think maybe the reason I came up with that idea is that we all put these pieces of paper in our mouths, and everybody really did make all these retching noises and ran for the water fountain, and I was one of two people in the class who didn’t taste anything but, you know, paper. And the other person was a kid I had sort of a crush on.

Roger: Ooh.

Rebecca: And so at the time I thought, “What does it mean that Tomas and I don’t taste this?” As it turned out, it actually didn’t mean anything.

Roger: He’s not the father of your children, then?

Rebecca: No. Although, I think, had we had children, they would probably not have been able to taste that chemical either.

I also asked Rebecca about her favorite tastes. Here are the results:

Sweet: Caramel (preferably mail-ordered from a place in Montana)
Salty: Olives (any kind)
Bitter: Espresso
Sour: My father-in-law’s whiskey sours
Umami: Parmesan (by the hunk)

Then Rebecca turned the tables to find out mine:

Sweet: Spice drops
Salty: My homemade Chex mix
Bitter: Irish black tea
Sour: I put lemon on or in anything I can
Umami: Paprika

Anyone else want to share? And did anyone else do this taste test in school?

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Mister Death’s Blue-Eyed Girls is Mary Downing Hahn’s thirtieth novel, and a notable departure from her usual middle-school territory. Markedly YA, the book is based on an event from Hahn’s own adolescence, when two girls she knew were shot to death by a still-unknown person.

Roger Sutton: I want to start with the book’s dedication page which reads, “To Jim, who has encouraged me to write this story since 1980.” Tell us what that’s about.

Mary Downing Hahn: My first book, way, way, back, with editor Jim Giblin, was The Sara Summer (1979). It was a pretty mediocre book, but he kindly published it after many, many, revisions – seven, I think. He must’ve thought, “Maybe the next one will be better. I’m as sick of rereading this as she must be of rewriting it.” Which was true. So then, you know how it is with editors, they always want to know what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about. I told him about what had happened when I was a teenager, and that I wanted to write that book – I was trying to write that book – but I just couldn’t find my way in. And he said, “Oh, I’d like to read that.” Mind you, this is 1979 or 1980, and I’m saying, “Yeah, I’ll work on it.” But then it fell by the wayside. I wrote, as you know, many other books, but whenever I was between projects Jim would say, “What about your idea from a long time ago, about your friends who were murdered when you were in high school? How’s that coming along?” And I would say, “Well, it’s not.” I’d go into it sometimes and I’d struggle with the story, I’d lay it aside. Part of what was going on, I think, was that I had a lot of unresolved feelings, and I also was never sure I should write about what happened. Fear, which I was calling laziness, I guess. Inability to focus. And then that whole beginning part with the murderer came into my mind, and I could see it so clearly and feel it so immediately, and I thought, “Well, this is how the book should start, with this scene.” And then I thought, “God knows where it will go from there, but at least I’ve got a beginning.” And that beginning put me in the right direction to start putting a book together, but it took a really long time.

RS: And all of your books have been with Jim, haven’t they?

MDH: Yes.

RS: I think that must be a record.

MDH: Well, it doesn’t happen today because editors don’t stay around as long as Jim.

RS: Or you.

MDH: Or they change publishing houses, you know, which Jim has never done. Even though he just works as a consultant now, he’s not a full-time employee of Clarion. But so many friends of mine, their editors quit, they get a job someplace else, the relationship ends. I think more people now have relationships with agents than with editors. And I don’t have an agent, I just have Jim.

RS: Why do you think this story stayed with you?

MDH: It had such a profound impact on me as a teenager.

RS: Was this the first time someone you knew had died?

MDH: My grandmothers had both died by then, but that’s different. These were people my own age, and I never thought that people my own age could die, let alone be murdered. Things like that didn’t happen in 1955. The suburbs were a safe place, where nobody even locked their doors.

RS: Do you think this experience had anything to do with your becoming a writer of suspense novels? I know that’s not all you do, but you do do that expertly.

MDH: I’ve often thought that. And in many ways, I’ve drawn on the fear those events instilled in me. I was so afraid of things afterward. I still worry when I go into, say, a park, and I’m walking along a trail, I still have this deep-down fear that if I go poking into the bushes I might find a dead body. I think it’s dead bodies that really haunt me. I didn’t see Nancy and Mike, but I was so close to where they were found. I was right there in the park heading down toward them with my friend Rosemary when the other kids in the neighborhood all came running out screaming that Nancy and Mike were dead. And we just turned around and ran. That part in the book is almost exactly like it really was.

RS: I think one of the scariest things in that scene is that we’re in broad daylight.

MDH: Yes.

RS: And it’s the last day of school. The heroine has had this sort of semi-sexy night before, a little adventure, a little drinking, a little necking. But now it’s daytime, and everyone’s looking forward to the summer, and boom.

MDH: Right, exactly. We actually had the stuff for the picnic in our hands. I was carrying the hot dogs. The first time I tried to eat a hot dog after that I broke out in hives all over.

RS: What particular challenges did you face in taking what was a real episode in your life and turning it into a novel?

MDH: The biggest fear – and it hasn’t gone away – is that I would infringe on the emotional privacy, on the grief, of someone who’d been there at the time. Or that they would read the book and say, “Nancy wasn’t like that.” Yes, the story is based on something that really happened, but it’s fictional, and the characters are fictional. The only character that’s really very much like anyone in real life is Nora, the narrator, who is myself. Which was another scary thing about writing the book. I felt like I laid myself on a platter for people to dig in and say, “God, what an emotional wreck this girl is. What is she making such a big deal out of all this stuff?” The murder really did end my friendship with Rosemary, and I always felt like I let her down. I never wanted to be in Rosemary’s house, or see Mike’s yard, or see her mother or her little sisters. I was just such a coward. I didn’t even go to the funerals in real life. I was terrified of funerals. I’d been terrified of funerals before that, and death and dying. They always talk about teenagers thinking their lives will never end. I expected my life to end at any minute, every day. Every time I crossed the street, practically. And that had been true before the murders, so you can imagine that after the murders, I was really a wreck for quite a while.

RS: Did you find that writing the book changed your attitude toward your teenage self?

MDH: It made me like my teenage self more. It made Nora seem very dear to me, like she was this little part of me that I remember so vividly. Not just the fears I had, but the way I started to grow, and to go outside myself and be open to things. I never met a guy like Nora does, the guy in the bookstore, but that was something I wish had happened.

RS: So you gave your younger self a present.

MDH: Yes, that’s exactly it. I was so insecure, I had so many doubts and anxieties, and I gave them all to Nora. I gave her all the terrible things, so I wanted to give her some nice things too. Meeting a guy in a bookstore. Having a dream of going to Greenwich Village.

RS: Which I assume you eventually got to do.

MDH: But not until I was in college. I didn’t get to go hang out there. I never had the nerve to do that. I was a coward. I’m still such a coward.

RS: Do you think still? You write such scary books.

MDH: I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t write scary books unless you’re easily scared yourself. I think Stephen King must be the most terrified person in the universe. He can’t even go to the 7-Eleven without imagining things crawling out of dumpsters. You have to be easily scared to know what it’s like to be scared.

RS: I think you’re right. I also thought it was interesting that, although you really do know how to create a page-turner, this book isn’t a page-turner in that sense. It’s not a race to find out who the killer is.

MDH: I totally agree. In that way, it’s very different from anything I’ve written before.

RS: The book talks quite a bit about Nora’s loss of faith. First, any talk of religion is pretty rare in young adult books. Second, Nora unambiguously and firmly loses her faith, and does not get it back. That is pretty revolutionary.

MDH: A story comes to you; it isn’t like you choose it. You have no real control. If I took the religion out, it wouldn’t be the story that it is. There are a lot of reasons to doubt things. And I really did have an episode with a priest like Nora did in the book, where I tried to talk to the priest about my doubts and he thought I was pregnant.

RS: In terms of your own relation to these murders, and to this personal history, does anything feel different, finished, changed as a result of having published the book?

MDH: I’ve thought about that and I’m just not sure. I don’t dream about it as much as I used to. I think that as long as there aren’t any repercussions from people who knew those girls, I’ll feel like I’ve, in a way, put it to rest.

RS: What do you think you’ll write next?

MDH: Since I wrote that book, I’ve probably started five others. I haven’t been able to finish any of them. The thing is, I don’t feel like writing any more ghost stories. So then I think, well, you’ve really killed your market now. An offensive novel about a girl who loses her religion, and that’s it! You’d better be glad you saved some money when you had it.

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RS: When I was a kid, on the last day of school, you’d clear out your desk and take all your stuff home. And the first thing that we would always do, the next day, was play school with our liberated supplies. Why do you think kids enjoy school stories so much? Did you read them?

T. R. Burns: Did I read school stories? Yes, absolutely. I think it’s the shared common experience that maybe kids like to imagine doing differently. Or at least I did. I was a good girl, a good student. I got very good grades, and school was important to me in the academic sense. But there were other kids who had different priorities; just having fun and doing mischievous things and experiencing school in a different way. When you’re on vacation — or when you’re reading — it’s your time to imagine how school could be different.

RS: Did you have friends among the troublemakers?

TRB: I had a close group of girlfriends when I was Seamus’s age. There were about five or six of us, and we were all really, really good. Occasionally — usually during sleepovers that were fueled by lots of snacks and with parents being out and it being late at night and having the security of one another — occasionally there would be a prank phone call. I don’t know if I’ve ever told anyone this before, but you know how on the backs of shampoo bottles and other products like that there’s a 1-800 number to call if you want to complain or discuss your problem with the product or whatever? We would call the 1-800 numbers and make up stories about the shampoo, like how it turned our hair green.

RS: I think you did a good job in Seamus of showing what it’s like to get into trouble, really, really, really without meaning to.

TRB: All the kids at Kilter Academy are naturally talented at their specific troublemaking skills but they’re also very good kids. In future books, we learn that that they all came to discover their troublemaking talents quite accidentally. It’s all innocent fun for them, but they’re good at it. And maybe in the other parts of their lives there are other things they’re not very good at, but their skills at troublemaking are what give them confidence and help them feel better about who they are. But what’s interesting — and what was fun for me to write — is that kids seem to have a natural ability to find trouble even without meaning to. And I guess some children, those with weighty consciences, feel really, really guilty about it, especially if they do something as severe, if accidental, as shooting the substitute with an apple!

RS: And then there is that wonderful surprise we get at the end.

TRB: Yes. Which is quite a revelation for Seamus. He’ll have to figure out how that affects him and his standing at school in the next book.

RS: How far ahead did you have to plan this out?

TRB: When I first started writing I had not planned very far, so it took a while for me to find the story. I knew how the first book would end — I knew what that final scene would be — but I hadn’t thought past that. My agent wanted me to think bigger: bigger picture and more dramatic. So before we did anything else, before we submitted or I even had a finished draft of the first book, I did go through and outline, loosely, an arc that would go beyond The Bad Apple. I had to think about the greater issues of Kilter Academy — what the real purpose of Kilter Academy is, and what its headmistress Annika’s ultimate goal is, and all of that. Right now I have five books in mind. Three are signed up so far, so we’ll see how it goes.

RS: There seems to be a lot of pressure now to publish books in series.

TRB: I don’t know that I felt pressure. I like writing series. [Writing as Tricia Rayburn] I have two trilogies: the Maggie Bean books, which are for tweens, and the Siren Trilogy, which is YA. I really enjoy being able to go back and revisit the characters. I’m part of their world and vice versa, so it’s fun for me to explore that much deeper.

RS: When you began The Bad Apple, what did you start with?

TRB: I really wanted to do something with a male main character because I hadn’t done that before. I came up with a list of maybe five or six small kernels of ideas, and sent them to my agent. What she responded to most was an idea about a young kid thinking that he killed a substitute teacher but actually didn’t. Once I then got the idea of the school for troublemakers, I was surprised at how — not easily; it’s not easy — all the other aspects of the story came to me pretty quickly, like the Hoodlum Hotline, the Good Samaritans, the demerits for good behavior. It must have been all that observing I did back when I was a good girl. I was taking mental notes without even realizing it.

RS: It must be a hard thing to do, to keep the action going on an immediate level, and at the same time you’ve got these larger themes that you need to carry from book to book. Showing a little piece of the puzzle at a time.

TRB: There is definitely a big arc that goes far beyond the school in its present form. In the next book the characters go across the country for a particular reason. There will also be more exploring as far as the relationship between the kids and their parents — how kids can be resentful and sometimes parents (or other adults for that matter) don’t know best. At the same time, your parents are your parents for a reason, and you need them and they need you.

RS: What’s your troublemaking talent?

TRB: When I was Seamus’s age, on the rare occasions that I did something bad, I managed to get out of it. For example, I played the violin in middle school and I usually took the beginning of orchestra rehearsal as my chance to use the restroom; in all my other classes I’d have to be there early, at my desk, books out and everything, but for whatever reason I thought orchestra was a little more relaxed. So I would ask our conductor if I could use the restroom, and one day he said no. But I really had to go! So I left anyway, and then when I came back, he told me I had detention. And that was just the worst thing. I was mortified; I just couldn’t believe it. When I went home and told my mother what happened, I utilized all of the theatrics in my twelve-year-old’s arsenal: I cried and apologized and said I’d never do it again and I explained the situation. I don’t know if my mother believed me or if she just wanted me to be quiet, but she called my orchestra conductor and somehow got me out of detention.

RS: Whoa.

TRB: I knew what I was doing. I didn’t whine and cry and all of that because I felt like venting, I had a hunch my mom would pick up the phone and act on my behalf. I thought I was preserving my wholesome good-girl reputation, but actually I was being very manipulative.

RS: Really a master manipulator.

TRB: I know.

RS: In some ways your book reminds me of Holes, where we also have an innocent kid shipped off for detention, but of course in Holes it’s a truly gruesome place. And instead of the evil warden lady, you give us the mysterious nice lady, Annika, running things at Kilter Academy.

TRB: But is she nice?

RS: She had better be. I like her.

TRB: She’s very helpful. But everyone’s doing what she expects them to at this point. She may have other goals and reasons for the school that we’ll find out about later.

RS: “She may?” Does that mean that you’re not telling, or you don’t know?

TRB: I’m not telling.

RS: I think that the hero of your book, and heroes of books like yours, where they are sort of The Chosen One, must be really appealing to kids. Like Seamus doesn’t really think he’s wonderful. He gets into this school because of an accident, and then he succeeds in this school because of a series of accidents. But nevertheless there’s something special about him.

TRB: Yes. He was chosen for a reason. And I think he’ll do a good job in fulfilling his role as the books go on.

RS: And we will find out what that reason is?

TRB: Absolutely.

RS: I’ll take your word for it.

Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

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Mac Barnett and Adam Rex’s Chloe and the Lion is a complex affair of metafictional play, appropriately taking place on a stage and peopled by puppets. They include a feisty little girl, a lion—and the author and illustrator, arguing with each other about just what turns the story should take, such as when in-the-book Adam challenges in-the-book Mac to illustrate the darn thing for himself, whereupon we see Chloe become one very badly drawn girl. I began the interview by asking Adam and Mac how they gauged children’s understanding of such literary antics.

Adam Rex

Adam Rex: You look at things like Looney Tunes cartoons and the Roadrunner, right? Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel on the wall of a mountainside, and the Roadrunner runs right through but the coyote gets flattened against the rock. That’s a funny joke, but there is a complex metafictional thing going on there, and we understood it as kids. I loved metafiction as a kid. It’s game-playing, and it has a pretty broad tradition in kids’ entertainment. It’s just maybe that the picture book is getting into the game a little late. Mac and I talked about the seminal Looney Tunes cartoon “Duck Amok” where the animator is basically, you know, just messing with Daffy and putting him through all kinds of torturous paces. Look at a picture book like The Monster at the End of This Book, the old Sesame Street and Grover book published in 1971. That’s kind of the grandfather of books like ours. I read Chloe and the Lion to one pre-K-to-kindergarten class, and they seemed to be laughing at all the same stuff as the fifth graders that I read it to later in the same day.

RS: Mac, you told me about enthusing about The Stinky Cheese Man to a friend in college only to find out that friend, Casey, was Jon Scieszka’s daughter.  How did you happen upon the book in the first place?

Mac Barnett

Mac Barnett: It was the only book in the library at my summer camp that I could stand. I got sick of everything very quickly. It was a remarkably bad library. The Stinky Cheese Man really was the only thing in there that could hold my attention.

AR: I worked at a Waldenbooks when I was in high school and into college, and it was there that I picked up The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. I hadn’t looked at any kids’ books, of course, for years, because I hadn’t been a kid in years. But I was thinking that I might like to tell stories and draw and paint pictures for a living, and seeing that remarkable stuff being done by Jon and by Lane Smith and by William Joyce came at just the right time for me.

RS: That was a real boom time in picture book publishing.

AR: I realized that later when I actually was trying to get into the industry and was told over and over again by editors who were looking at my picture book dummies that “If you had shown this to me, like, five years ago, I totally would have bought it, but boom time’s over, kid.” And so I just packed up my things and made the lonely walk back to my New York flophouse.

RS: I have a technical question about picture book collaboration. What do you do when, for example, in this book, the character Mac says to the character Adam – “so if I say Chloe found a birthday present on the ground, the next page better have a picture of a big pretty birthday present, wrapped up in silver and tied with a pink bow.” And you turn the page and the text says “Very funny. This better be fixed by the next page.” This is all meaningless without a picture to provide the punch line. How does that joke get made in a manuscript?

AR: I think Mac has a good understanding of when that kind of stage direction is really necessary and when it isn’t. I understand a lot of picture book authors fill up their manuscripts with details about art and stage direction, and that’s generally the first thing that the editor removes when sending it along to somebody like me. But I think Mac understands when he has to give just a little clue of what he’s thinking of. And he is all too happy to be surprised by what his illustrator comes up with.

MB: A verbal joke paid off by an illustration is one of my favorite things to do in a picture book. For the last page-turn in that sequence I just put in brackets, “This is the worst humiliation here,” and really left it up to Adam to decide how to trash me.

RS: And Adam, what’s the difference for you between being in charge of the whole thing from the outset when you do the text and the pictures, and when you’re following someone else’s text?

AR: The collaboration with another author can push me a little harder than when I’m working on my own. I’m thinking about Mac’s book with me, Guess Again, where Mac came up with all these rhymes that have surprising outcomes. Had I written it myself I would have taken great pains to go really easy on myself, finding visual gags that would have been very easy to come up with. But Mac wasn’t thinking about the visual gags, or how they would be resolved. He was just making the text as good as it could be. That book really challenged me to come up with images that were as clever as the text was.

RS: So Mac, thinking as an author, and Adam, thinking as an illustrator, who is your dream collaborator? It can be anyone, living or dead.

AR: I just finished a book with Neil Gaiman. I’m not sure when it’s going to come out, but all of the artwork is done. He was always on a shortlist of people I would drop everything to work with, so I’ve had one of my dream collaborations already.

MB: I would like to work with James Marshall. The Stupids Step Out was my favorite book as a kid, and I love Marshall. I think he’s a classic underrated funny guy. I was this close to saying Tomi Ungerer, but I think that guy’s better when he’s not collaborating, so I wouldn’t want to mess with what he’s got. I love that he does whatever he wants. If he wants a character to come in three-quarters of the way through the story, he does that. If he wants to introduce a character on the second-to-last page, he does that. He’s not concerned with character arc. There can be great picture books with character arcs, but not every picture book has to have a character who has an epiphany at the end, and he’s not concerned with those things, and he explores the different ways of telling satisfying stories that don’t play by those rules that I feel get enforced pretty heavily.

Spread from Chloe and the Lion

RS: Do you feel like you have to play by the rules, you guys?

MB: Sometimes I have to break a sweat keeping the stuff I want in a book.

AR: No one in editorial or advertising illustration is encouraged to try anything new, because otherwise how would the art directors ever know what they’re going to get? So working instead in picture books, I think I’ve been very lucky. I just lucked into this job that allows me to play as much as I want to. And so far everyone’s been very indulgent.

RS: One thing that drives me crazy in editing book reviews is when a reviewer says “trademark illustrations by Joe Blow.” Meaning they look like everything that Joe Blow has ever done. It’s lazy reviewing, but I can see why they resort to that kind of shorthand. Because so many illustrators do try to make a particular look for their work.

AR: I think it would make me die a little inside to read “trademark illustrations by Adam Rex.”

MB: That said, you were telling me the other night, Adam, that Joe Blow was your dream collaborator.

AR: He’s so good. Yeah, I got a little pang when you were dissing on Joe Blow just now.

RS: Did either one of you guys have to learn something new to do this book?

AR: I was pushing at the outer limits of all of my natural ability on this book. Somebody, upon hearing that I don’t consider myself either a good sculptor or a good photographer might wonder why I made a book that was primarily featuring the photography of sculpted puppets, but it was something I wanted to do for so long, so I just did the best I could with my meager abilities. And I did learn more than I ever cared to know about the making of doll clothes.

There was a lot of digital sleight of hand, obviously, but the one piece of doll clothing I’m most proud of, though, is the puppet Adam’s shirt, which is actually made entirely out of toilet paper and glue. And toilet paper has proved to be surprisingly durable. A year and a half later that shirt is still perfectly fine after having posed and reposed on that wire puppet.

RS: And you had one puppet for each of you?

AR: Yeah, that’s right.

RS: And you would draw in the eyes? I think the eyes are amazing. The pupils remind me of James Marshall, in that they make me remember how much expression he could get simply by moving the pupils a quarter of an inch one way or the other way.

AR: Yeah, that’s something I really admire. Sometimes I’m kind of obsessed with a lot of texture and surface detail and a painterly approach. People who can tell as much or more about a character with just a slight movement of a pupil or a little dip of an eyebrow – those are the people I really admire.

Puppet heads

MB: I’m always really interested in form, and this book required me to get into some formal considerations that I hadn’t thought of, but I also do make my artistic debut in this book, which I think the world has been waiting for.

RS: Badly Drawn Chloe was actually yours?

MB: Chloe is mine. That lion is mine. And to give you an idea of what a sweet guy Adam is, he called me up, and he said, “Mac, you know, I really feel bad asking you to do this. I’ve been paid to illustrate this book, so I feel bad asking you to do some of the work, but I’m really having trouble drawing badly enough, and even when I try to draw badly, my drawings aren’t as good at being bad as when you try to draw well.” So then I parsed that sentence, and I found out that he was insulting me – he started off so sweet, and then got so rude. I think Adam will probably see I got kind of a primal energy and a rude charm to my work.

AR: That was part of your rude charm, sure.

MB: Thank you, Adam.

RS: Where will you go from here? Are you going to do something else together?

MB: Yes. I have a presentation I give at schools about how a book is made, a question you get asked a lot. It’s just me and a whiteboard I did one day to fill time, and it shows all the things from editorial to printing to pirates, the Bermuda Triangle, all the disasters that go into making a book. It’s very involved, and I think it’s about ten percent useful. One day a kid raised his hand and said, “I have an idea for a story you should write.” And, normally, when a kid says that, they mean a story about a panda and a snake and they have a dance.

AR: Or Spongebob fighting ninjas, or something.

MB: Yeah. As many trademarked characters as possible.

MB: But this kid said you should turn this presentation into a book. And he was right, so I’ve written How This Book Was Made. Adam’s going to illustrate it, and it will be a lot less useful than Aliki’s How a Book Is Made, but will, hopefully, have more arm-wrestling with tigers.

RS: Yeah, but does it have ninjas in it?

MB: It’ll look like I’m pandering. And then zombies, and –

AR: And it’ll become a black hole singularity of pop culture at that point, so we should probably stop.

Mac Barnett, Roger Sutton, Adam Rex

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Roger Sutton: We want to talk about Why We Broke Up. Why did we break up, Daniel? It’s still sad.

Daniel Handler: I don’t know if you and I were ever really together.

RS: Oh, that’s how you see it, do you?

DH: I’m just using the same old line I always use.

RS: Looking back on your romantic history, what would you say your ratio is for dumper/dumpee?

DH: Oh, I think I was entirely dumped. A couple of times I did the passive-aggressive trick of being a sullen jerk so I would get dumped rather than having the courtesy to say “I don’t want to be in this relationship any more.”

RS: I’m usually the one who gets dumped, too. I only dumped somebody once.

DH: So you and I have no idea what we’re talking about.

RS: Then let’s talk about something we do know about… In Why We Broke Up Min is clearly the aggrieved party. But she’s also the dumper.

DH: Yeah. It seems to me that oftentimes in young relationships once there’s a problem of some significance then it’s almost like they’re both racing for the dumper buzzer. When I was writing the book, I wanted to construct a situation in which Min is the one who’s heartbroken but not the one who’s been dumped.

RS: I think that you did a really great job of taking what was an unlikely couple, bohemian Min and jock Ed, and making us see why they were drawn together.

DH: I’m not sure they’re an unlikely couple. I mean, I think they’re an unlikely couple to last, but I don’t think they’re necessarily an unlikely couple as far as that goes. Particularly being that one of them is quite the lady-killer.

RS: Except he’s the kind of lady-killer that girls like Min are supposed to scorn.

DH: Yeah. But as a non-lady-killer, certainly in high school, I saw that that the louder a girl scorned the lady-killer, the more likely she was going to end up with him at some point.

RS: What accounts for the book’s extraordinary weight? Is it the paper? Is it the binding?

DH: It’s the emotional heft.

RS: Well, they do seem to go together.

DH: I think it’s the paper. In order for Maira Kalman’s paintings to look as splendid as they ought to, we needed to make the book on paper that was splendid, which is to say heavy.

RS: How did you and Maira work together on this?

DH: Well, we had previously collaborated on a picture book, 13 Words. We had a good time collaborating, and when we talked about doing something else, I thought it was her turn to make the first move. And she showed me all of these paiasntings of tiny ordinary objects, which was a surprise to me, because her paintings are often so fantastical.

I tried to think of what makes ordinary objects seem a bit magical, and it seemed that their having a romantic attachment to them would do it, so that an ordinary object is made wondrous by romantic memory and imagination. And then I started thinking about all the objects going in a box, and then it being dumped on someone’s front porch. And, probably because I’m always the one being dumped, I pictured a girl dumping a boy.

RS: I thought you did a great job there of assuming a girl’s voice. I mean, you had this whole Lemony Snicket persona, which is one thing, and now take on this very straightforwardly, unabashedly romantic, real-life, real-girl kind of voice.

DH: My first novel for adults, The Basic Eight, was from the point of view of a teenage girl, so it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar territory for me. It’s always difficult for me to talk about this without sounding pervy because I end up saying, “There’s just something about teenage girls . . .” But I do think that, narratively, what might seem like an ordinary story happening to a grown man, for instance, becomes instantly more interesting when it’s about a teenage girl.

RS: Why is that?

DH: I think young women are given colossal expectations. Simultaneously there’s no room for them in society and yet they’re encouraged to go everywhere. They’re both overprotected and underprotected, and they’re all possibility but they’re also all happening right now. There are a lot of things that just seem to collide when we’re talking about young women between the ages of twelve and twenty.

RS: Which is really the audience for this book.

DH: I guess. I don’t quite understand what YA literature is. To me it’s the genre where the authors publicly talk the most about the lessons they want to hand down to the reader, even more so than in picture books, I’d say. It seems like everybody who’s writing a book for a fifteen-year-old is trying to save a particular kind of fifteen-year-old from a particular kind of thing. But because I fell into writing for young people accidentally, I never approached it like that. Because I don’t edit myself based on audience, it’s been nice to have no idea who the reader is supposed to be. Now the book is finished and being published, I’m quite curious to see who shows up.

RS: Do you know that you have a sentence in this book that’s 330 words long?

DH: Is it? I don’t word-count my sentences, but that doesn’t surprise me.

RS: Page 257. It starts on page 257. I didn’t even realize how long it was till I counted. This is a compliment–I didn’t feel like I was back in high school having to read Faulkner or anything. Just this amazing tumble of words.

DH: I remember when we were working on it, it was definitely on purpose to have that sentence end with the word “forever.” Three hundred and thirty. Yeah, hoping for the record but we should get that on Twitter and see if someone has found a longer one.

RS: I can do that.

DH: That’s why I mentioned it.

RS: When I started the book, and Min started talking about her passion for movies, I felt so unsophisticated because I didn’t know any of the films she was talking about. It was quite a while before I decided, “Wait a minute, Roger, it’s not you. These movies are made up.”

DH: That was a lot of fun. I like movies, but when I was younger I ran with a crowd that really liked movies, and so I remember both the joy of seeing extremely arty movies and the boredom of being in movie theaters not understanding certain kinds of things.
Before I started this book I was looking at some novels that I really liked when I was seventeen, eighteen, and to my embarrassment, the vast majority of them were sexually explicit. But in my head, that’s not how they were. In my head, what I liked about The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love was its passion and experimental language and location in an old-fashioned world. And when I reread it I saw that it had something like seventy-five blowjobs. But I didn’t remember that at all. And it was like that for a handful of books that I reread.

After that screening of Library of the Early Mind we did at ALA in New Orleans, I was talking to a couple of librarians and they asked, What kind of books do you think we can put in the hands of adolescent boys? I said that seems like a silly goal for a writer, but if I ever decided that what I wanted to do was write a book where the primary audience would be adolescent boys, it would be filthy. And then I started talking about The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I said boys would love it. It would be a real book. They would learn things and their minds would be engaged and their hearts would be engaged but also their loins. And I think that’s when they said, “I believe the reception is just about over. Nice to meet you.”

RS: People do have funny expectations of authors. That you’re going to do things for a particular audience. That you can help bring boys to reading. I mean, is that your job?

DH: It might be part of my job description, but I don’t think it’s a good thing to sit down at my desk and think about. But probably all writers feel engaged in the process of carrying literature forward in one way or another.

RS: Do you know the book This Is Not for You, by Jane Rule? I think of it because of the direct address of your book, the sort of you, you, you of Min addressing Ed. Was that hard to remember to do, or do you just fall into it?

DH: I don’t think it was that hard because I really felt the angle of telling the story to somebody. I’m trying to remember when we copyedited if there were a lot of “he saids” that had to be changed to “you saids,”  but I don’t think there were. It felt very firmly in mind, because you tell a story differently to different people, and this story is directed at Ed.

RS: Poor guy.

DH: I’m glad you feel that way. There’s more and more sympathy I’m hearing for Ed, which is nice, because I had nothing but sympathy for him when I was making this book. But being that most of the first readers were women, there was tremendously little sympathy for him.

RS: Oh, no, I think he’s sympathetic, and attractive, and you can see totally why she’s into him, and you can see why he does what he does—I don’t want to give anything away in the interview—but he doesn’t understand why she thinks he’s done something wrong. It really takes him a while. It’s not because he’s stupid, it’s because he’s a guy.

DH: My publisher Megan Tingley keeps quoting this line that Ed sputters during the breakup that she finds morally despicable but I find absolutely understandable. It’s where he says, “She lives nearby.”

RS: Right up there with “we were on a BREAK.” All right, I have one last question. Do you keep any old-girlfriend memorabilia?

DH: I do.

RS: What’s the most interesting thing you have that you can share with us?

DH: I mostly have notes and photographs. I have a huge number of photographs that I took with my college girlfriend, on a road trip. It must have been color film, but printed through black-and-white technology or something. They’re all sepia-toned. That road trip was the beginning of the end, so even by the time the photographs were printed, they already looked elegiac. We look so young and fragile, and we thought we were very sophisticated. We thought we were going to be together forever, and even from the body language in the photographs you can tell we weren’t going to make it.

RS: Why did you break up?

DH: She met a woman. Yeah. That’s another novel. That’s a much longer novel. That will have a longer sentence than 330 words, I’ll tell you that much.

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Roger Sutton: Your new book, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, weaves together historical facts—about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, real people like Rosa Parks and Dr. King—with the stories of the relatives of your fictional narrator. It must have been quite complicated to do. What was your entry point?

Kadir Nelson: Initially it was overwhelming; it was a huge amount of history to cover. The narrator was the key to distilling it, because she could make it very intimate. I wanted to tell this great American story as if it were a story, not a series of facts. When I began, I thought the book would be narrated by this ancient voice from across the ocean, maybe an ancient African spirit. It was very broad and nebulous, but as I started to shape the voice, it became something more specific, the voice of an African American woman who was a little over a hundred years old. I found that she could talk about people in her family — not only herself, but her grandfather, great-grandfather, her ancestors. I figured I could have these relatives touch different parts of American history. She could talk about the last slave in her family, for example, and how when he became free he fought in the Civil War and then went out West as a buffalo soldier. Later the family would all move up from the South to the North, the Great Migration. She could have relatives in the great World Wars, and she could talk about her personal experience as an African American experiencing the civil rights movement. I could address the significance of it all in a very intimate, personal way. I wanted the book to read and feel like this narrator, this elderly woman, was inviting a young child to sit on her lap, saying, “Let me tell you this story as I remember it.”

RS: What I like is that you don’t make her into Forrest Gump. She doesn’t run into all these historical people. Just enough to be convincing, to sort of ground her in history. But you don’t get a lot of unlikely “so then I was walking down the street and I saw Rosa Parks coming in the other direction.”

KN: Right. And I made a choice not to show the narrator’s face, except when she was a little girl, as a photograph. You see her from behind, and you see her hands at the end, but she’s part of that anonymous group of people that we don’t hear or read about. But her and her family’s contributions to the formation of the country and to the character of America are just as important as those by people we do read about.

RS: In researching this book, what was the most interesting or surprising thing you discovered?

KN: When relatives and friends talked about the last slave in their families, they knew their names or they could describe them. My aunt’s aunt remembered that the name of the last slave in her family was Pap. I was so pleased that she remembered his name. And it was such a great name. Very sweet. Hearing those personal accounts really helped bring that part of history alive for me.

RS: Did you find that writing this book gave you a new connection to your family?

KN: It helped to open up a dialogue, because in African American culture, details about slavery were not shared openly or willingly very often. I addressed those historical taboos because they’re a blemish on our national character. You hear it over and over again, that this was a country that promoted its freedoms, yet a large part of the population was enslaved.

RS: It’s also an integral part of the history. It’s not like we were a great country but had this nasty habit of slavery. As your book points out, in many ways, slavery built this country.

KN: We became a great country because we had slaves.

RS: I love those two pages in the book where on the left side you have a picture of a really inviting walk down to a plantation house. You just want to get on that path and walk to that beautiful house. And facing that illustration is information about just why the house is so beautiful: slave labor. I thought it captured the irony really well.

KN: I knew I wanted to visually show the irony of a country that was free yet held a number of its people enslaved. Another way I did this was to show this proud president, George Washington, sitting on his horse, and his slave standing next to him, holding his hat.

RS: That painting is interesting for a lot of reasons. It looks like eighteenth-century classical portrait painting. The mood is pastoral. There’s this nice light that’s glinting right off of George’s face, with the black groom in shadow next to him. But it’s a very peaceful-looking painting.

KN: That’s part of the paradox. And if you look at the image of the slave ship, it’s a beautiful day, and yet you see what’s going on in the image, and that’s not so beautiful. It was that juxtaposition I was aiming for.

RS: So many of these paintings look like you started with the sky as your canvas. The first thing I noticed about the book was how much use you made of the sky in conveying the mood of a painting or commenting upon text. Like the picture of the young slave boy, young Pap. Here he is barely clothed, but it’s a beautiful day. That painting is two-thirds sky, at least.

KN: The sky helps tell the story. It adds emotion to the image. The intense, saturated blue sky complements the intensity of the look of the boy. If you look at his countenance, he’s a little boy, but he’s a little man. He has kind of an old spirit. Or if you look at illustrations like the slave ship where there’s a dark cloud hanging overhead, or, say, the image of Harriet Tubman, where there’s a really emotional sky behind her, I’m using the sky to add to the emotion of the subject.

RS: There’s also a sense in so many of these pictures that we’re looking up, we’re looking up at the central figure. In the Frederick Douglass picture we’re looking up at him and he has something of that same look in his eye as young Pap does in his picture — determination and strength. But by the time Douglass is here the clouds have rolled in behind him. You know, heavy weather ahead. And then you turn to the next page, and the clouds are even bigger, with Harriet Tubman. It’s a very capital-R romantic ideal, this marriage of subject and setting. The way those are integrated throughout the book is one of its achievements.

KN: You touch on something that was very intentional when it comes to the style of the art, specifically of the image of George Washington or the woman sitting in the pile of cotton. I’m drawing on historical sources, whether they’re old daguerreotypes or classical American paintings, images by Thomas Eakins or Frederic Remington, for example. The style was a conscious choice. I’m really glad that you picked up on it.

RS: I like the portrait of the Revolutionary War soldier, where again we have that determined look staring out at us from the page, but the landscape is very eighteenth-century American.

KN: I wanted to present images from American history that we’ve never seen. We’ve never seen an African American Revolutionary soldier in that way.

RS: Painted in that heroic manner.

KN: Right. We’ve seen images and engravings of battle scenes but nothing that would present the subject with as much reverence. That’s what I was aiming for. Even with the image of young Pap. We’ve seen pictures of children who were slaves but not with that much power. Or presence.

RS: And intimacy. So many of the images we see of people who weren’t famous in those times, like — I’m not talking about the Washingtons and the Lincolns. But historical people. We look at them at a distance and say, “Oh, so that’s what people looked like in the nineteenth century. That’s what a slave looked like.” Whereas Pap looks like an individual.

KN: Right. With a character and a spirit.

RS: The double-page spread of Fort Wagner, 1863, that’s the little-boy page to me. This is the one that the boys in the library are all going to open up to and not be able to take their eyes off of. It’s really an amazing painting.

KN: Oh, thank you. I worked on that for months. I wanted it to have that intimate feeling as if you were right there with those soldiers on the beach storming that fort. And I wanted you to see the powder, the smoke from the cannon blasts, and their muskets, and the sand being sprayed as bullets were hitting them, coming off of the boots of a soldier. I wanted you to be in that scene.

RS: The color is just stunning — I mean, there are seventeen shades of blue here, sparked by the yellow flaring from those cannons. And then the smoke misting over. I asked you what you had learned about history from writing this book. What did you learn about painting from illustrating this book?

KN: I was employing a new technique that I hadn’t necessarily used before. Going along with that juxtaposition of freedom and slavery, I’m playing with the juxtaposition of a very cool palette versus a very warm palette. For instance, there’s an image of two men who are out of work during the Great Depression. The men are standing in shade, and they’re illuminated mostly from the top, from the blue of the sky, as well as the light that’s coming up from the reflected sunlight that’s hitting the sidewalk in front of them.

RS: At the bottom of the painting, just a little sliver of it.

KN: It’s a very small part of the painting, but it’s so important, because it creates a space, a dimension between. I’m playing with the warm sunlight versus the cool hues within that shaded area.

RS: Then you turn the page to see Joe Louis on top of the world.

KN: That’s what he was. He was a very powerful and a very good-looking person, and he was also a hero according to many, which is why he’s portrayed sitting on top of the world in Harlem, New York City.

RS: But very human at the same time. It must have been hard in this book to resist over-heroizing these people, particularly the real people, to keep them on a human scale.

KN: Well, one way is to present them from a perspective where you are looking up at them, but to show their humanity in their expressions and in their eyes. They’re heroic but also very human.

RS: It’s not an easy thing that you’ve done here. How are you going to top this one, Kadir?

KN: That’s a good question. That’s what I ask myself every day. I don’t know. It all depends on where I am spiritually, and that’s what will determine which way I go next. It’s a matter of turning that into something that’s tangible and not didactic. Where I’m not preaching to the choir but –

RS: Not preaching, period.

KN: Not preaching at all, yeah.

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