Mac Barnett on Why Picture Books Are Real Literature
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. A picture might be worth a thousand words. So just imagine how much a picture book should be worth. But the truth is that picture books are often not afforded the respect of being real literature. They're seen as something you graduate out of.

Bay Area author Mac Barnett is trying to change that, and he's now got an official post to do it from. He's the Library of Congress's National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and we're going to talk with him about how to look at picture books. You'll never see Goodnight Moon the same way again. It's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Consider the picture book, or perhaps behold the picture book. This is what author Mac Barnett and a merry band of co-conspirators want us to do. He and his frequent collaborator John Clausen write a newsletter that's called Looking at Picture Books, and it is a mind-expanding examination of the craft of this work.

They began with a miniature manifesto back in October. Picture books are real literature. The best ones are artworks as great as any books humans have made. But like all children's literature, picture books are misunderstood and undervalued. A centuries-old problem we expect to have fixed after two or three posts.

Maybe they haven't quite cracked it yet, but Mac is here with us to finish off the job with a single forum interview. Mac is now the Library of Congress's National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, which means he probably staffs embassies in Narnia, the island where the wild things are, and at the laundromat where Trixie left Nuffle Bunny, or is it Canuffle Bunny? Welcome to Forum, Mac. It is good to be here. I can take care of that right off the bat. It is Canuffle Bunny. Yeah.

Do you agree with this? Well, I debated it. It depends on on whether you want to honor the author's intention. Right. OK. What is a picture book? All right. So a picture book is a story where words and pictures tell the story together and they share responsibility. So some of the information you get from the words is.

Some you get from the pictures. And that magic, that combination, that synthesis that a kid who's having a picture book read to them has to do, hearing words, hearing language, and looking at the pictures in order to make sense of a story, that complex magic, that's the whole thing. Because in a good picture book, there's usually going to be some tension between the words and the pictures, too. They do different jobs, and sometimes they contradict each other. Right.

Right. They're not like reading a PowerPoint, right? That's right. The words are going to run ahead of the pictures sometimes. I mean, I've learned this from reading you. Yeah, that's right. So sometimes you'll get different information. Sometimes the pictures will amplify or extend the text. But sometimes they'll tell you two different things about the world, and you have to choose who to believe, the words or the pictures. And usually it's going to be the pictures. Very sad for me because I only write these things. But it really is. It's an amazing art form, too, that...

You've got, all right, so you've got like language, written language, bellatristic prose, right? In fact, they're so short that you're brushing up against poetry. And some picture books are literally poetry. You've got visual art, but because they are read out loud, they're a performance. And there's a lot of theater involved. The adult who reads the picture book out loud is like an actor who has been cast in this play and does voices and stuff.

chooses the pace and the emotion, and those page turns that you get, that essential rhythm of the picture book. It's like a curtain rising 16 times during a performance. And is it always like that? Is it like always 16 times? Is that the standard format for a picture book? Yeah, they're short. They're usually 32 pages long. They can be 40, 44, sometimes 56 pages.

But rarely longer than that. Most picture books are 32 pages long. Which means for you, how many words do you write? I mean, it's going to be anywhere from zero. There are wordless picture books. 800, 1,000 is sort of where things top out now. The picture book is getting shorter. Some of that is just like...

The picture book is young. It's less than 100 years old. We're still figuring out how they work. And that realization of how much narrative work the pictures do means that texts have gotten shorter. Some of it, I think, is anxiety. And I think unfounded anxiety about kids these days and their screens and their attention spans and their cocoa melons. Yeah.

Do you trace your particular stream of picture book writing? What is your lineage, would you say? I think that I grew up with picture books. I was born in 1982, and my mom bought all of our picture books at garage sales. So I grew up mostly with the generation before mine and the generation before that, their picture books, which was great because actually...

The middle of the 20th century was this really rich experimental time in picture books. So Margaret Wise Brown, like a modernist poet who figured out that she was going to write for children. And but that wasn't her plan. It wasn't until she was training to be a teacher that.

that, you know, because poetry was not paying the bills. She figured this out. At school, everybody, like all of her assessors were like, Margaret will make a terrible classroom teacher. But the things that are making her bad in the classroom will make her potentially a great children's writer. This is like literally in one of her evaluations.

We actually have a piece of a little essay, which I've heard you talk about. You have it over there. Yes. This is like a classroom assignment, I guess, or something? That's right. Writing for five-year-olds? Yes. So she had to write an essay when she was at the Bank Street School of Education, which is a lab school in New York. And this was on sort of the philosophy of writing for five-year-olds. And it is called Writing for Five-Year-Olds.

When a child reaches the age of five, he is the sum total of all his younger experiences and discoveries in a brand new world. He carries with him the two-year-old's delight in sheer sound and pounding rhythms and the glamour of the two-year-old's own small self. The three-year-old's humor and love of pattern and his pleasure in the familiar sights of his own world

the four-year-old's further joining of sound and pattern with rhythm and content, and four-year-old's first playful flights into the humor of the incongruous things that he knows just enough to know are not true. And finally, the five-year-old's own keen humor and penetrating observation of the world around him, the careful watching of his own eyes and ears, the keenness of his nose and the sensitiveness of his touch, and the fine and vivid imagery of his own language.

Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. It is certainly true that a five-year-old has a keenness and awareness that will probably be displaced or blunted later. For the first time, he has the power of words, to use them and to hear them, to describe the things that his five-year-old senses perceive.

I mean...

That was Margaret Wise Brown writing in... 1939, I think. 1939. Of course, the author of many beloved children's books like Goodnight Moon. We're talking with Mac Barnett, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and author of the children's book Circle, Square, and Triangle. Of course, adapted into Shape Island on Apple TV. First cat in space ate pizza. Extra yarn. So many books written.

Joe writes in to say, although it places a little more emphasis on the value of color than I would prefer, I find the important book really helpful as a mentor text in my elementary reading intervention groups with its structured lyrical prose pattern and its vintage pictorials.

I find this Margaret Wise Brown book entices my most reluctant writer into sharing their ideas on paper. I always tear it up at the end when I read it to the littles. I recommend it to all my teacher colleagues. And we want to hear from you. What's a picture book or a scene in a picture book that's puzzling?

that's puzzled you, maybe stayed with you, and why? You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Or you can email your comments and questions to form at kqed.org or find us on all the social media things. Do you like The Important Book? I love The Important Book. Yeah, I think you can feel it's a collection of poetry, really, by a great poet. I think that's...

One of the huge insights of this piece and Margo Wise Brown's whole career, right, is she thinks that children are an audience for poetry, for literature, that in fact, young children are better at literary fiction and poetry than adults are. We think that something...

that is hard for us to understand is gonna be even harder for a child to understand, but often the opposite is true. - Look, what do you find? Like, what's something you find a kid can just grasp instantly that an adult might struggle with? - Well, I think that, you know, I think about this a lot. So, like, as a kid, you're constantly being thrown into situations you do not understand, right?

And you have to learn the rules very quickly or you get punished. Like dinner with your mom at your house is very different from dinner out at a restaurant. You can do things at your house that you can't do at the restaurant. And both of those things are different from dinner at home with your mom and your mom's new boyfriend. And you'll be telling a story that is fine in a restaurant. It is fine when it's just you and your mom. And now your mom is looking at you and she's like, we do not talk about this story in front of Kevin. And you learn about the story. You learn about Kevin. You learn about your mom.

instantly. That's what literary fiction is. You don't understand all the rules at first, but you figure it out. Like, literary fiction is dinner with Kevin. And kids are trained to do this. They are constantly being thrown into situations they don't immediately understand. They do not have orthodoxies, preconceived notions about how books must work. And so...

If they don't understand a book, they will bravely endeavor to figure it out. And that could be everything from, like, in this book, animals wear shirts but not pants. In this book, animals eat each other. In this book, you know, are there other examples of that in children's literature you think that are... That's right. Do animals talk or do they not talk? Arnold Lobel talks about this, the author of Frog and Toad, that every time you put an animal in a children's book, you have to establish the rules. Do these animals wear clothes? Yes.

How many clothes do they wear? Do they talk? Do they live in houses? Do they drink tea? And you establish a lot of this stuff in the pictures, right? You figure out how the world in Good Night Moon, right? Like what is Good Night Moon? If I asked you that, you would probably say this is a story about a rabbit going to bed. But

The text never mentions the rabbit. It never mentions any action whatsoever. We don't know that it's a bedroom from the text. It says, in the great green room. That does not sound like a cozy bedroom. The picture, though, shows us that it is. We get this instantly. Okay, this is a rabbit wearing pajamas, so it's a rabbit that's like...

pretty human-like. This is a room that has got a bed in it. It's got a tiger skin rug in it. So now the world is starting to get very weird. Like, do rabbits go tiger hunting? And instantly, now we have this ambiguity, this richness, these places where kids can figure the world out. Ah,

It's amazing. We are talking about the vital role that picture books play in engaging readers of all ages. I mean, why do we love these things? But we do. Mac Barnett, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and many million seller of books of various kinds. We want to hear from you. What is a picture book or scene in a picture book that's puzzled you or made you think?

The number is 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. All the social media things. This is the song Lost Boy by Ross B. Ruth B. We'll be back with more right after the break. Neverland is home to lost boys like me. And lost boys like me are free. This is what your year will sound like in the new Lululemon glow up type. How did you do that movie?

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Friday, August 15th, Golden Gate Park. With Kings of Leon, Turnpike Troubadours, and Olin Hoffman. Zach Bryan. Tickets are on sale now at goldengateparkconcerts.com. Brought to you by your friends at Another Planet Entertainment.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We've got Mac Barnett, the children's book author, also now the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Tell us a tiny bit about the role and, like, sort of what it's supposed to do, right? You have to... You built out a platform, which is called Behold the Picture Book. That's right. Yep. And...

What happens now? So I'll be, my job is for the next two years to just be an advocate for children's literature. You're doing great. Thank you. Especially picture books. It's a lot of travel. So I'll be going across the country, doing events, talking to both kids and adults about how picture books work. And then, yeah, honestly, it's going to be wherever I can, just sort of calling attention to

how exciting this literature is and how smart the kids who read these books really are. I love that. Let's bring in Noreen in Oakland. Welcome, Noreen. Hi. How are you this morning? Hey, doing well. Good. I wanted to bring to our attention, again, my favorite children's book, and I miss having children so much because of the art around it, Good Dog Carl.

There's only two pages of literature, and that is, I'm going out with my friend, Carl, take care of the baby. And she leaves...

And there are pages and pages of these fantastic oil paintings of the dog taking the baby out of the crib, going to the park, encountering a circus, or going through an entire shopping mall with the baby on his back. That is so interesting. I mean, what do we make of Good Dog Carl? I'm looking at the art right now for people, as Noreen noted. These are oil paintings. This is kind of a...

I think of it as a slightly older style where the art is very fully realized. It's not sketchy. It doesn't feel like illustration. It doesn't feel like line drawings or anything. What would you say, Ben? I think that, yeah, that's right. There have been trends in picture books and you pick up design and art movements and those things get trendy. But

honestly, like, if you look at picture books now, you will see a surprising diversity of approach in medium photography. As I'm revealing my own taste. Yeah, I think... I think that's right. I think that... But...

Yeah, it's the taste of the times, too, probably. You will still see oil painting, but it does often feel like an older style when you see it now. And this is close to wordless, right? So I assume this is one that you're sort of interested in that interplay, a little bit of how it basically becomes...

Just pictures. I am. I'm really... And it does something that picture books often do too, right? The words come... They're very formal. Like, I'm going out with my friend to take care of the baby. It's a very funny line too. It's a funny thing to tell a dog. But this is an adult...

speaking with authority and giving a command, a rule, and then the pictures show this fun, this chaos, these rules sort of being bent and broken. And I think that that is often the relationship between text and image because the words really belong to the adults in a picture book. Your job as an adult is to read these words out loud and very often you are so worried about messing it up that you don't have a lot of time to take in the pictures.

While we're doing that, while we're reading to a kid, the kid is studying these pictures, seeing everything that's going on in them and learning more about the world than we know as adults because we're just so focused on these words. I think that's another thing that's interesting is like the picture book is a form of writing that immediately acknowledges the limits of language to describe our world, our emotions, everything. It is that skepticism of language is built into the form.

One of the things that I've been fascinated with with my own children, who are now 11 and 9, so we still read picture books often. Their own storytelling style is very different. I have my older kid who's like always looking around, like providing extraneous, what feels to me as a storyteller, enormous amounts of extraneous detail without ever advancing the story one single page. You know, it's like that's... And then I've got my younger daughter who is just...

through line drama narrative. Like, let's get to climax and let's like figure out what happens in this story. And that, that I, I love that they probably, even though we read the same books, we're actually taking entirely different things from it. One, one, like one,

following the narrative and the other looking at the doodles around the side, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I think that a picture book is two things, right? The artwork is both the book itself, the bound and printed thing, a text, and we're used to thinking of that as an artwork, but it's also this ephemeral performance. And...

If you've read a picture book as like a librarian or a teacher during the day, you will read it three times on the same day. It'll be the same weather, just a different time. But depending on who's in that class, it's going to be a radically different book because it is always going to be adjusted to both like the mood of the reader and the mood of the audience. And yeah, there are these...

What you're talking about, too, it's like reading a picture book to a kid. It's like instantly joining a book club, right? Like, it's a social thing. It is a picture book. A novel is read by an individual, and you can talk about it afterwards. But a picture book is usually something that happens between two or more people. Hmm.

My favorite thing is when sometimes my younger daughter will go get like three or four of our favorite books and she'll say, let's play the hits. Which means I must have said that a few too many times when she was growing up. Let's bring in Aida Salazar. She is an award-winning children's book author. Her picture books include Jovita Wore Pants and In the Spirit of a Dream. Welcome, Aida. Aida, can you hear me?

I think you're there. Okay, we'll come back to her in just a second. Let's bring in Erica in Oakland. Welcome.

Hi, I was just going to talk about Maurice Sendak. Everybody knows where the wild things are, but he also has In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There, which don't make any sense when you read them. Outside Over There is about a baby who gets stolen and ice baby. And anyway, I don't it doesn't make any sense. But my kids love those books. What do you what do you think? And I think, you know, what do you think they love about America?

Well, I think he's able to capture some... I don't know, if you ever listen to a toddler speak, a lot of the times it doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't have a lot of coherency, and it just jumps around in kind of like a stream of consciousness. And I feel like it has that sort of feel to it. Yeah, yeah. Mac? In the Night Kitchen was my favorite picture book when I was a kid for a long time. And it is. It's such a wild, hallucinatory book. It is about...

A boy who falls out of bed, falls out of his clothes, into the kitchen in the middle of the night, where three bakers who are identical and all look like Costello from Abbott and Costello, they...

They try to bake him into bread, put him in the oven, but he bursts out and then builds a plane out of dough to get milk. And then it ends. And that's why, thanks to Mickey, we have cake every morning, which, of course, is

We don't. This is not like a breakfast food. And it is absolutely brilliant. It's a work of experimental literature. And yet, as a kid, it made so much sense to me. That is what it was like to sit and think about...

what if I snuck down to the kitchen at night? What's happening down there? Are people busy? Are they making things? Would I have an adventure in a plane? Um, and I really like, I look at that book now and it is just an absolute marvel, but it also makes me really proud of my young self because I say like, I got this book as a kid. I, I, I totally understood it and not on some intellectual level. Uh,

this level of immediate joy and recognition and play of an artwork There was no cultural status to liking that book. It just made sense to me. It's so interesting Yeah, I mean I've been reading a lot of cognitive science and a lot of the theory around it now is saying our Consciousness and our experience the world is kind of this controlled hallucination, right? We're making all these predictions around the world and our perception is really the correction of those predictions and sometimes with kids

you just feel like their hallucination is a lot less controlled. What they're imagining the world could or might be has much wider boundaries and zanier possibilities than we do as adults. Yeah, and I think that reading fiction as an adult, I hope to get...

And that's what I'm coming to art for, right? To be like knocked off my priors a little bit and to expand or change my mind. And kids are already there. And so you can just do that work, which is like what you've just described is also the work of the artist. You can engage in art making with a child much more easily than you can with an adult.

Aida Salazar is back. Welcome, Aida. I am. Thank you so much for having me. Hello. Yeah, no problem. I mean, why don't you tell us just a quick bit about Jovita War Pants and sort of what inspired you to write the book? Yeah, well, Jovita War Pants is the story of a Mexican freedom fighter. She is actually my distant great aunt. She's a woman who in the 1920s dressed as a man and fought for religious freedom in Mexico. Oh.

That's cool. Yeah. And it's just a tremendous honor to have written a story about my distant relatives. Yeah. What do you love about picture books?

Well, a lot of what actually has been said today, I mean, there is this wondrous space. I come to picture book writing as a poet, mostly. And, you know, and as poets, we work in economy, right? We work in wonder, we work in lyrical language and imagery and so many different kind of aspects that, you know, standard fact telling and fiction, you know, standard telling of a story don't really exist.

truly captured. And, and so what I love about picture books is that is that when I write them, I'm able to really kind of tap into a poetic space, a poetic sensibility, and, and imagine ways to kind of inspire, inspire children to kind of like, really not only like escape, but also

learn in really kind of meaningful ways and just you know this this merger of a visual language and a Textual language those two together make make a very particular kind of yeah Last thing before we let you go was there a picture book you loved as a kid I didn't I wasn't read to as a child For a number of reasons I grew up with

in the Latinx community and that wasn't a practice. But I was given this book called Where the Sidewalk Ends by my fifth grade teacher. And it's a book of poetry and illustrations. And that

just opened up so many different avenues and, and not only of humor, but poetry and visual expression that I hadn't ever seen before. So I would say that. Ah, beautiful. Aida Salazar, thank you so much for joining this morning and people can of course check out her books, Jovita wore pants and in the spirit of a dream. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

You know, I did not grow up with children's books. In fact, it's sort of notorious in our household that I did not have a child. I had sort of more of the dad who was sort of like, hey, here's Thomas Pynchon. You know, it's like, dad, I'm nine. Come on. You know, I felt like in my household there was...

an encouragement and and and i i think some of it came from me to just like grow up faster be read adult novels like i don't i don't remember children's books i don't i only remember reading these zant series by pierce anthony i also read those very embarrassing book series in retrospect yes uh but that's kind of all i remember after that it's just adult novels you know um you know grim grim east coast family drama you know at 12 um

What about your own kid? Like you've got a three-year-old. Do you think that you will encourage a lifelong run of picture book reading? Yeah, I think I will. It's both how I grew up and how I feel about picture books. So I think we'll set it up the same way. You know, when I was a kid, my mom got a bookshelf. We didn't have a ton of books. And so a lot of the bookshelf was empty.

And as we got picture books, she put them in the bottom shelf. And those bottom shelves filled up. And as I started reading novels, she didn't put the picture books away. They just went on the shelf above those. And so when I looked at my... When I was graduating at my bookshelf, it was this history of my reading life. And those picture books never went away. And I think that maybe unintentionally, that just validated them as...

sharing space with the rest of this literature. And there would be times when as a teenager, I would see the spine of a book and I would remember intensely reading it as a kid, pull it off the shelf and look through it. And yeah, I do. That's a lot of what our son's bookshelf looks like already. And he's three. I love it. Jenny in Berkeley wants to shout out a book. Well, go ahead, Jenny.

Hi. I love doing outdoor education, and one of my favorite books to help kids, encourage kids to explore and find affinity and personal connection in nature is Everybody Needs a Rock. And it's by Baird Baylor. And she just, she writes in such a...

conversational way. Like she's really talking with like kid to kid. And it's just these tips like from another kid about how to find rock that you can hold in your pocket that feels good in your hand that will listen to your secrets that smells good. You know, like,

I love it. I have rule number four pulled up here. Don't get a rock that is too big. You'll always be sorry. It won't fit in your hand right and it won't fit your pocket. A rock as big as an apple is too big. A rock as big as a horse is much too big.

I actually love this book, but I love it as an adult. It's so 1970s, pull it out at the commune. The illustrations are amazing. And you're right, there's something about that spare style. Yeah, I think her collaborations with Peter Parnell are just beautiful. Yeah, thank you, Jenny.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think, well, one, it just like all of these books, everything we're talking about, it brings home the fact that like this is a form, not a genre, right? Like the picture book is not about cute animals learning important life lessons. There are a lot of picture books that work that way, but so many don't. We have nature writing. We have family history. We have poetry. We have all kinds of like scientific nonfiction. All of these kinds of books are

all of these kinds of stories and some of these things are non-narrative can be told in the picture book. And there is tremendous overlap between adults and kids. These books are read together. I do think that like

When there is divergence in the interest of kids and the interest of adults, it is the job of the children's writer to be on the kids' side. And so sometimes there will be books that are inaccessible to adults that we don't enjoy reading out loud, that we hide under our bed. Do you have one of those? Oh, yeah. But I try to do my best. You know what it is for me? Make Way for Ducklings. I cannot take that book. It represents sort of like...

Just this staid, formal, like the pictures are beautiful, but they're not really doing storytelling. It really overestimates people's interest in Boston landmarks. I just can't do it. Cannot agree more. Cannot agree more. Make way for ducklings again. Okay, sure. Yep.

Maybe this time they'll get hit. No, they don't. They never do. They never do. David writes,

Tactile and colorful, I counted over 150 picture book titles on our shelves. Like old friends, they are waiting patiently for our first grandchild to be born in June. You know, yeah, William Stig is...

One of my favorites, maybe he's most famous for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, right? Which is about a donkey who turns into a rock. And that's right. Like part of it is the pain of his parents. And it is this access of a kid. What would happen to my parents if I disappeared? That's this unbearable middle of the book. And that's an adult emotion that I got access to as a child through that book.

book. So interesting. We're talking about the vital role picture books play in engaging us and opening us up to the world. We're joined by Mac Barnett, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Earlier in the segment you heard from Aida Salasad

Another children's book author. Her books include Jovita Wore Pants and In the Spirit of a Dream. We're going to get to more of your calls and comments after the break. You can try forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned. Settle down. Build a home and make you happy.

Hear that? Spring is back. And so is Church of Seafood. With eight-piece shrimp, surf and turf, or fish sandwich. Each starting at $3.99. Offer valid at participating locations. With the Venmo debit card, you can turn the mini golf outing your coworkers paid you back for into a trip to Miami with your best friend, earning you up to 5% cash back. Use Venmo to pay for the things you love to do.

Visit Venmo.me slash debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A., pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Terms apply. Dosh cashback terms apply. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're joined this morning by Mac Barnett, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. His platform, as they call it, is Behold the Picture Book. Let's bring in Jerry and Berkeley. Jerry, welcome. Hey, thanks a lot. Hi.

Appreciate this show and hearing these insights. One thing that fascinates me so much about the children's books is the subtext for adults, for the parents reading them. So I enjoy that piece. In particular, one book was Zoom. And Zoom, I'm not sure it has any words, but you begin with this just red text

graphic, and when you open it, you see it's a rooster's head. And when you open that, you see the rooster somewhere, and then it keeps expanding, and you're zooming page after page. It was so fascinating that by the time I put the book down, I got online and ordered one for myself. Yeah. This year with adult friends. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Mac, I feel like you've been sort of making this argument sort of implicitly that, you know, yes, these things are for children and they meet children with great respect, that good children's books meet children with great respect and see their view of the world as valid and as full of potential as like a human world.

But also, in a funny way, particularly as you get older, now we get to, like, peek in, too, and maybe re-expand our worlds by dipping into these children's books. And sometimes find out how much we have in common with kids, that a lot of curiosities that kids have about the world are a lot of big questions, are questions that we still have, but we've stopped asking. And if you hang out with a kid, they will ask you all kinds of huge questions, right? Like, why...

What happens after we die? Can trees think? Why is the sky blue? And you'll realize, like, I never answered these questions. I just kind of stopped...

Asking them. And now I have to answer them for this kid. And you have two choices, right? You can either make up a pat answer or you can kind of try to engage in these deep mysteries of life. And I think that's the job of literature, of art. It's a place where we don't answer kids' questions always. We just kind of ask and ponder alongside them. My favorite thing I ever heard a kid ask, it was right here in the Mission probably 15 years ago. And the little kid and his dad were walking along behind me

And the little kid goes, can you die of amazement? And I was like, if you could, I'm doing it right now. So clearly you can't. There's your answer. I did a school visit the other week and it was at an elementary school and there was a poster board with post-its that kids had written out questions by hand and put all over there. And so there were things like, is cancer real?

There was, why is my name Addison? A question we're all asking, Addison. Why am I good at art and not soccer? And I was like, I got bad news. I can tell you the answer. I'm in the same boat. And why can we not do what we want? Like, this is everything, right? This is the human experience. So it's no surprise that when we're trying to meet kids where they are, we end up in

in touch with these deep human truths. It's what they're wondering about all the time. It's weird when you tell them what they're interested in is ontology, that they're not interested in that. I don't know why. It's weird. Let's bring in another guest. We have Laura G. Lee, another children's book author. Her picture books are Soy Sauce and Cat Eyes. Welcome, Laura. Hi. Thanks for having me. Yeah, totally. Well, let's start in the reverse here. Tell us about a picture book that you loved as a kid.

You know, I thought about this as you asked the question to Aida, and I think I was part of the generation that grew up on like Grimm and like Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. So a lot of the fairy tales back then were kind of telling kids morals and what they—scaring them, basically, and telling them what they should be doing in life.

But I remember the one that like psychologically affected me was Bedtime for Francis. Actually, I was going through a lot of nightmares and I remember sort of these archetypal images from the book that I still remember today when I have a five year old now who's going through some nightmares and just like the shapes on the page. So I think that that stuck with me. And I think that's what picture books can do. They can really change.

stay with you for a while. Yeah. The Francis books for me were the first time where I was like, oh, I actually missed out on something by like

speeding through my picture book phase as a kid because I like attempting to sing Francis's little song. This is about, is she a badger? Yeah. Yeah. This little badger and all her adventures with her tea set and when she's going to run away and just those books. I mean, I'm sure when my kids leave the home, I'm going to just sob over those books. You know, they have such a deep resonances like both as a parent and as a kid. Yeah.

Tell us about your, tell us about Soy Sauce.

Yeah, I just came off of a book tour for Soy Sauce. That was really awesome. I got to visit like 13 schools all across the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest in the past month. So that was a lot. Welcome back. It was awesome. Yeah, and I think it's a book. It's a nonfiction book about soy sauce and kind of the history and how it's made, told through three different cultural lenses, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. And I think...

And when I was going on tour, it was an interesting time when the book came out. I really wanted to think about what I wanted to talk to kids about in terms of this experience. And I really kind of dug deep into more of a personal history of soy sauce. Like I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, Korean American in the 80s. And soy sauce was like our only like...

to our culture in some ways. And so talking about it to kids now who love it, and it's really everywhere. Everyone knows it, but back then it wasn't the case. So it was great to have conversations with kids right now about fitting in and what makes you feel comfortable in the lunchroom, so to speak. Amazing.

Mac, I'm also fascinated that, you know, you mentioned that it's a form. Picture books are a form, not a genre. So like the nonfiction picture book, right? Does that do something different? Yeah. I mean, I think it works the same way. Sometimes the balance of text and image will be more

a little heavier on the text, but it's the same thing. It's going to be words and pictures to explain something about the world, which is great. It's great to have those pictures alongside there too. I think that what we've seen in a sort of a recent explosion of picture book nonfiction has been a true embrace of the picture book's form. It's not just this word dump. It's not an

encyclopedia entry spaced out to 32 pages, but looking at ways that the illustration can really do a lot of the explanatory work of nonfiction. And, you know, you illustrated and wrote, right? So from the... Do you agree with this? Like, that you were taking on the pictures...

having this crucial explanatory yeah yeah i think that for making soy sauce it's such a tactile sensorial thing that i really wanted to bring that to life um and show how it's made and how it can be experienced in the process and the story and the story is fictionalized but i think that the the process is it's sort of a hybrid non-fiction fiction book um they weren't quite sure how to categorize it at some point but um yeah it teaches you a little bit of about the uh

the science behind it, but then it also kind of teaches you a little bit about the magic, how long it takes and how different cultures approach it. So yeah, it's really, um, man, we have gotten so many good comments and we're going to try and run through some right now. Um, okay. There's going to be some shout outs here. We're going to make a list, uh, for listeners, by the way, for the web, because so many people have,

written in with different things. Ken writes, pancakes for breakfast. Not one single word in the book. This forced me to narrate the story, which I did differently each time. A favorite for my kids. They loved it and asked for it daily. And reading it was a huge growth edge for me as I was not that dude who flexed creatively. I love that, Ken. I love that for you. My favorite example of this is in I Want My Hat Back.

This is about, it's such a great book. It's by a long-time collaborator of Mac's. And there's a scene in which the bear begins to run back to get his hat back from this rabbit who has stolen it. And every time I would do my, you know, my, you know, your sound effect. And

And one of the glories of parenting I have realized is that your kids take on your sound effects. Yeah. So now my kids, when they get to that page, if they're thinking about it, that's how they do running sound now. I think like one, this shows the way, like how important the adult reading the book out loud is right at that point, you are one of the authors of that book because you are adding that in, you are making that noise. This is, this is an artwork that only exists this way when you do it.

And what you just described then is kind of the most powerful thing. It's the best compliment I get. When these books get woven into families or classrooms, that it becomes sort of inside jokes or lines that are cited. When it just becomes part of like the family lexicon. That is so powerful. Yeah.

I know you have something to say about this comment. Jean writes, I have noticed that recent picture books have become more didactic, as if they're written by therapists who are explicitly teaching children a lesson. One example is the one about bucket filling, which I see in almost every elementary school. We tend to shy away from these kinds of books because they usually don't leave much to the imagination. I was wondering what you thought. I think this goes as old as children's books. Are these tools to mold behavior...

to instill virtue, to really control kids? Or are these a place where adults and kids meet as equals, where we just try to tell a story? I think that some of this is just like a category thing. There's didactic stuff. There's a whole raft of kindness literature for adults, right? These are sections...

In an adult bookstore, we just think of them as... Self-help for children. It is. Self-help is a huge category for kids, but we confuse it with fiction. And I think just realizing that these books can do different things. Personally, my interest is especially in fiction for kids. And I really... It bums me out. It bummed me out as a kid. And it bums me out as an adult when a story is just a vessel for a message. Mm-hmm.

On the other hand, Kim writes, I'm 70. To this day, my favorite picture book is Dr. Seuss's Yertle the Turtle. As an adult, I realized my love of this story and the last picture represents my strong sense of socialism. Let's bring in Katie in Sebastopol. Welcome, Katie. Hi. I was calling because I have an 11 and 9 and a 3-year-old, and we love picture books, but

We have so many favorites, but one of our absolute all-time favorites, the one that I'm keeping even when they're grown, that we just busted out for the three-year-old is Count the Monkeys. Oh, who's that by? I just went by Mac Barnett. Sounds good. That sounds like a good book.

It is a fabulous book. And so I just wanted to say thank you. Oh, yeah. How does Count the Monkeys work, Mac? It is a counting book that a very chirpy narrator says, like, this is going to be fun. It's easy. We just turn the page and we're going to count the monkeys. And then there are no monkeys in the book.

And and it's like a counting book that goes wrong and just falls apart over 32 pages And is that how you were thinking like this was the the concept you came with it's gonna be a counting book that goes awry Yeah, I think I think like failure is one I and you'd only realize this afterwards that you're like one of my themes is like failure and and the actual book itself failing to do what it sets out to do and

Yeah, yeah. Let's bring in Patty in Menlo Park. Welcome, Patty. Oh, no. Did we just lose you, Patty? You there? Okay. Catherine in Seattle. Welcome. Yes. Hello. Matt Bennett, it is an honor to be on the air with you. I could go on forever about picture books, but I want to talk about the current book that I'm giving today.

to families with new babies. It's this little light of mine. The words are the words to the song. The illustrations are by E.B. Lewis, done in watercolor of a small black boy, I would say early elementary school, in his black family, in his black rural community. Mm-hmm.

In the story, you see him interacting with people and helping people and being part of his community and then coming home. I have a photograph of one of the children I nannied at the age of eight months crawling towards this book to open it.

Something about the little boy in the yellow shirt is incredibly appealing. Catherine, thank you so much. This little light of mine, illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Yeah, E.B. Lewis is one of our greats. And I think music and picture books are so closely intertwined, too. We've talked about poetry, but they also exist in...

We hear them and they're a way of carving out time. When you read picture book writers and illustrators talk, they often talk about it as songwriting and there's some deep connection that I don't even fully understand. But I think more and more of the picture book as a musical instrument that gets popularized.

played by an adult. Well, you guys, you and Sean, another one of your collaborators, sometimes actually sing little funny songs. That's true, yeah. Sean Harris, an illustrator I work with a lot, he is also a musician and we write music into our books a lot, which I love. The Francis books have that too. Yes. But always, the onus then becomes on you. You gotta make the melody. You gotta make the melody. Yeah. So we help people out and we sing. Yeah, I wish I'd pulled some of you singing, particularly the

Things on the Moon, you know? Boy, that is a good one. Why don't you talk a little bit about people that you think that you've just run across in your role here who you feel like are also trying to push the picture book in maybe interesting directions? Yeah, I think that it's a really exciting time for picture books. People working today who I think are showing us new things that picture books can do. Christian Robinson.

Carson Ellis. Carson Ellis is great. Do His Talk. That was a completely groundbreaking picture book that showed me new things this could do, and it came out a few years ago. X-Fang, who has two books out right now. The newest one is We Are Definitely Human. Oh, yes. I'm looking at that one right now. Yeah. She's fantastic. She's one of the most exciting people working right now. The Pumphrey Brothers. Jess Hannigan.

All great young picture book makers. Oh, yeah. It's so cool. I mean, it does feel like I, as someone who had my children in this kind of core picture book age in the 2010s, I felt like I was seeing a resurgence of new work in the picture book realm. I mean, you were part of it. Carson Ellis is a part of it. Mo Willems is a part of it.

And my final question is, would you let the pigeon drive the bus? No. I mean, that book is, I feel it's carved that entire generation, like 20 years worth of kids are going to have that book also so deeply carved into them. Absolutely. Yeah. Last few shout outs here. Just want to run through some of these comments here.

Jen writes, big fan of Mac Barnett. Thanks, Mac. I went to SFPL the day it closed before the COVID shut down and borrowed 80 picture and nonfiction books for my kid. One of the books was Amos and Boris by William Sandberg.

Stag, you said? Stag, yeah. Stag. About a mouse who helps a beach whale return to the water. You have to be out of the sea really to know how good it is to be in it, he thought. That's a line that clearly encapsulates a feeling for me that I've never been able to describe as simply as Mr. Stag did. My kid is now 11 and I still love to sneak picture books in when she'll accept one. I get so much from them and the dialogue and wonder they bring.

Eileen writes, I'm 72 years old, the youngest of four kids. I remember my favorite picture book handed down from sibling to sibling. Its spine was duct taped to hold it together. We read that book to destruction. I don't remember the name of the book, but I vividly remember the pictures, dragons and castles and a lady with a pointed hat and veil. Wow, I wish I had that book now. Just thinking about it is making me smile.

We have been talking about children's books. We have been joined by Laura G. Lee, children's book author and illustrator. Her books are Soy Sauce and Cat Eyes. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks again. And we've also been talking with Mac Barnett, of course, the new National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and author of so many children's books. Go check him out. Thank you so much, Mac. Thank you for having me. This was fun. The 9 O'Clock Hour Forum is produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, and Dan Zoll. Our interns are Brian Bowe and Jesse Fisher. Jennifer Eng is our engagement producer.

Francesca Fenzi is our digital producer. Judy Campbell is lead producer. Danny Bringer is our engineer. Katie Springer is the operations manager of KQED Podcast. Our VP of News is Ethan Tove and Lindsay. And our chief content officer is Holly Kernan. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Have a great weekend. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kinn.

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