About this episode
In this episode, Minh discusses how he overcame his insecurities to achieve his dream of becoming a picture book author. He also recounts the transformative experience of writing the biography of the beloved Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and shares an absolutely breathtaking story about their encounter. Minh shares his philosophy on why we should all blur the lines between the real and the imaginary.
"That barrier between what is “real” and what is not, when that's more fluid, I think it's that's where the fun of fiction comes in. Especially when you're writing for kids.” - Minh Lê
Life is full of barriers. Barriers between reality and the imagination, the spiritual and physical world, and perhaps most crucially, the ones we create for ourselves. When a barrier is a boundary, it can be a good thing. But in many cases, the barriers we create are holding us back. Minh Lê’s life was defined by many of these self-imposed barriers until well into his adult life. But slowly, through nudges from friends and family and a lot of self-reflection, Minh began to learn that the only thing in between him and his dream of being a picture book author, was himself.
Minh is a children's book author best known for "Drawn Together," winner of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, as well as the Eisner-nominated "Lift" and "The Blur." He also authored the Green Lantern graphic novel series and contributed to numerous short story anthologies. Minh has a full-time day job and is also very active in the kidlit community, especially his work with We Need Diverse Books. He is intentional with his time and dedication and has made a deep impact on children’s literature.
On the podcast, Minh expands on his stories about meditation with his reading challenge, "Meditative Picture Books." With this curated list, Minh invites young readers and their grown-ups to embrace the present moment fully.
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This episode's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Erin Baker, media specialist at Durham Middle School in Georgia. She tells us her secret sauce for getting the whole school on board with reading initiatives and why it involves some unlikely allies.
Contents
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Chapter 1 - The Vietnamese Mini Van
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Chapter 2 - As Few Words as Possible
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Chapter 3 - You Haven’t Even Tried
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Chapter 4 - Dreamtigers
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Chapter 5 - Lucid Dreaming
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Chapter 6 - Even Fewer Words (a silent retreat)
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Chapter 7 - Meditative Picture Books
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Chapter 8 - Beanstack Featured Librarian
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Chapter 9 (Bonus) - Baby Minh and Baby Dan
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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Links:
- The Reading Culture
- The Reading Culture Newsletter Signup
- Minh Le
- Minh Lê (@bottomshelfbks) • Instagram photos and videos
- Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges | Goodreads
- Thich Nhat Hanh | Plum Village
- Durham Middle School
- The Reading Culture on Instagram (for giveaways and bonus content)
- Beanstack resources to build your community’s reading culture
- Jordan Lloyd Bookey
View Transcript
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Minh Lê:
That barrier between what is "real" and what is not, when that's more fluid, that's where the fun of fiction comes in, especially when you're writing for kids.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Minh Lê spends his life looking beyond boundaries, whether they're the ones we adults insist on placing between fiction and nonfiction, or waking and dreaming, or the bounds between our physical reality and spiritualism influenced by his Buddhist beliefs. His books transcend those bounds and result in both profound and silly stories that kids and adults alike love, but the most challenging barriers Minh has broken down are the ones he created himself.
Minh Lê:
We are driving around and she says, "You act as if you failed at writing a children's book or failed at publishing a children's book, but you've never actually finished one and sense it out in the real world to even give yourself a chance to fail."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Minh is a children's book author, best known for Drawn Together, winner of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the Eisner-nominated Lift, and the Blur. He's also the author of the Green Lantern graphic novel series and a contributor to many short story anthologies. In this episode, he tells us about how he pushed beyond his insecurities to fulfill his dream of becoming a picture book author. He also shares about the life-changing experience he had while writing the biography of beloved Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, and he shares his foolproof hack for getting to sleep each night. Although full disclosure, listeners, it's not one that most of us will be able to copy. Oh, and stick around until the very end for a little bonus story time.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways, @thereadingculturepod, and you can also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, onto the show.
So, let's start with your growing up life. Were you born in the United States or were you born in Vietnam?
Minh Lê:
So it's interesting. I was born in the States. I was born in Connecticut. My parents came over from Vietnam on college scholarships before everything got really bad. They stayed here and the rest of my family came over as refugees later. Then once they were there, the rest of the family, when they came over, they came to live with us. So, it's like we became this little pocket of Vietnamese community in Connecticut. The joke I always tell is that you could fit all the Vietnamese people in our town in a minivan, and that minivan belonged to my uncle. It was like we were the Vietnamese community there.
Actually, my grandparents, when they came over, my grandmother started a little Vietnamese grocery store and then they started the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in Connecticut. So, they became this hub of the Vietnamese community. So, I was around that a lot, but like a lot of kids in my generation, I grew up feeling caught between worlds. At school, I was one of the few Asian kids, and at home, I was the too American kid. Even though I had a super strong family life, super strong community, great friends at school, internally, I always felt like I was floating in between different identities that I think I had created in my own head. It was a great childhood, but because of my own personality and hang-ups, I created these barriers and structures that I felt like I was always bouncing against.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. I definitely want to explore that a little more later, the idea of those barriers. When you were younger, were you reading a lot, Minh? I know you have this deep love for picture books and I wonder if you were reading those growing up as well.
Minh Lê:
I've always loved picture books. My sister and I were very much library kids. Our parents would take us there, and I remember my mom taking us to the library. I have two sisters, and we would be those kids that you see two little legs and a pile of books coming up to the circulation desk. So, we always had books around and there's something about picture books to me that there's something elemental, very essential about a great picture book. One thing that I love about it is if you read a book when you're a kid and you fall in love with a book and you have a relationship with that book, that's a friendship that you take with you for the rest of your life. You can reread it over time.
What I love to do is I reread books that I read as a kid. It almost acts like a marker for you to see how much you've changed over time because your relationship to that text changes. So, books that I read when I was a kid, I reread in high school or college or now as a parent and your perspective on that text changes. It's a really fun thing to see that evolution that when you share that with your kids, it takes on a whole new meaning.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah. I mean, reading a book with your own kid, it's totally different, right? Okay. So, your love of picture books has unsurprisingly grown and evolved with you. Can you speak to what you view as so special about picture books now as an adult and as a parent?
Minh Lê:
Something that I find unique to children's books and picture books in particular for me in that you have to distill whatever you're trying to convey into something very essential. You don't have a lot of pages to tell the story. It feels like not every book is any for this, but these picture books can be a distillation of this wisdom into this one perfect contained work of art that you can hold in your hands, that you can share with a loved one. I think people are often dismissive of children's books or they don't see the potential of a children's book.
I think I've read so many picture books, I feel like you could build a world philosophy off of this one 32-page picture book. This picture book has everything. The meaning of life is right here. Whether that's to the artwork or the message or story, I think you could really find a lot of the answers that you're looking for in this world in the world of picture books if you look closely enough.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah, I love how you put that. Okay. I want to hear a little bit more about what you were like growing up. What was your personality like outside of your family? Can you go into that a bit?
Minh Lê:
I would describe myself as I'm debilitatingly shy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shy is not enough. Okay.
Minh Lê:
I was so shy, so quiet, and I don't want to say timid, but just cautious, just like the way that I moved through the world. I often think of it as a shy kid, reading and books were my escape from the world. So, it's really fun now as an author to have the opportunity to see so many people because books have become my way back into the world because it gives me the chance to talk to so many kids, talk to so many people, and travel internationally and within the US. So, that instinct to retreat from the world through books is ironically what led me back to a place where I am in the world more than I ever could have imagined or thought would be the case.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's really interesting. Yeah. Now it's like even if you are shy, you have to deal with talking to a bunch of kids.
Minh Lê:
I found this world that works for me because I'm going to talk to kids. I'm going to talk to educators. I'm going to talk to the librarians, people who love books. There's a comfort in that space where I feel like I can let down my guard a little bit. Then the more practice you get with that, the more comfortable I feel in those spaces. For me, the biggest thing was, and this is something that applies to all different facets of life, for so long, I just told myself, I had this running dialogue or monologue in my head saying, I hate public speaking. There's this core fact by myself that I knew. Then one day, a friend of mine, he had won a writing contest and he was out of town. He was supposed to present, read his piece, and he said, "Can you do it for me?" I was like, "I'm the last person you should be asking."
He's like, "No, I think it'd be great." So I did it just as a favor and actually enjoyed it. Just that little bit of daylight was like, "Oh, wait, maybe I don't hate this. Maybe I could give myself permission to enjoy it a little bit." Just that little bit of permission and breaking down that wall a little bit, you realize how many barriers you set up yourself in your life that you take as gospel, right? I hate public speaking, that's the end of it. I'm going to do everything I can to avoid it. Once you challenge that barrier a little bit, all of a sudden, that wall breaks down and you see this whole other world open up.
So, I've been trying to be better about recognizing those barriers that are just totally self-created and trying to figure out how that has shaped my personality or the way I move through the world and push back against those when I can.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Also, there are other factors that can create those mental barriers. So, thinking about what else was there, who even knows why you're telling yourself that story, right?
Minh Lê:
Right. I think for me too, a lot of it is I touch upon this in Drawn Together, the picture book that I did with Dan Santat about the language barrier, because I grew up with this very rich family and community life, but I didn't speak the language well. So, I always felt I didn't have the tools to express myself. I'd be with my family or be at the Buddhist Temple and felt like I was shying away from interacting with people because I didn't want people to know how much I couldn't speak, how much I couldn't.
When you can't communicate, you try to avoid communication. Then it wasn't until recently I realized that as a picture book author, I write books and I gravitate towards books with very few words. Then I realized maybe that my entire upbringing was preparation for being a picture book author because I was trying to communicate as much as I could without using many words. I was like, "That's actually a great training for being a picture book author." So yeah, maybe it was destiny in that way.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, shy kids, take heart. You have a future in picture book writing. In Minh's journey, overcoming self-imposed obstacles often required some external nudges. We've already heard the story of his friend pushing him to embrace public speaking, but his career in writing can be attributed to some loving encouragement from his wife.
Minh Lê:
When I graduated from college, I knew that I wanted to write children's books, picture books specifically, but my problem was that every time I would have that realization, I would almost instantaneously cut myself off at the knees and say, "Who are you to write a book? There's so many books out there," and all that self-doubt would automatically get triggered and come into play. So, then I just wouldn't do anything with it. It wasn't until my wife, who I was dating at the time, we were talking and she says, "I love you, but if you can't take your own dream seriously, how can you expect to anyone else to?" Just that kick in the pants of basically stop being your own worst enemy.
If you know this about yourself, then allow yourself to know that and give yourself permission to at least see what could happen. Then another point, very close to then, we were driving around and she says, "You act as if you failed at writing a children's book or failed at publishing a children's book, but you've never actually finished one and sense it out in the real world to even give yourself a chance to fail." That was the other kick in the pants I needed. I don't consider myself a particularly ambitious person, but I knew that if down the line on my deathbed, if I hadn't at least given a shot, I knew that I would feel regret.
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger, not the jaguar, that spotted tiger that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo. I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. I still remember those pictures, I, who cannot recall without error, a woman's brow or smile. My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they're still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep, I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream.
At those moments, I often think this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will. Since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger. Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up or it's flimsy looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or a bird than like a tiger.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This excerpt is from Dream Tigers, a collection of poems and stories by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. For Minh, this text was a perfect metaphor for a critical obstacle facing him as a creator. What do you do when your vision for what you want to create outstrips your ability to create it?
Minh Lê:
I was listening to another podcast recently and it's an interview with this comedian Mike Birbiglia and his friend Ira Glass. He was saying something like, "When you're starting out as a creator, all you have is your taste. There's always a gap between your taste and your ability to create. Most people die within that gap. They can't create what they want to create, and so they get frustrated and they give up." That was the danger zone for me because I love to draw and paint when I was a kid and all that. I let it slide, but when I wanted to write picture books, in my head, oh, I want to write and illustrate picture books. I hadn't developed my artistic skills to a point where I could put the ideas I had on my head onto the page. I'd always hit this wall.
So, when I read this story now, it's like the idea of you love tigers, so you have this passion for tigers and you want to conjure it forth, but you can't do it. Whatever you're putting out there, it looks flimsy, it looks like a dog. It's not the majestic tiger that you love, right? For me, that could have been the end of the story. I can't put this story out there, dream's over, move on. But the beauty of being in the world of picture books is I get to collaborate with these amazing illustrators who can bring forth the tiger. It's through that collaboration that I'm able to live this dream of being an author because I can put a story on the page, and it is vague.
I don't have the clear vision of it, but I know in my head, it's very clear. Then I hand over that manuscript to these amazing artists and they're able to conjure up these beautiful worlds that are better than even what I could have imagined. Because a lot of times people ask, "What is it like to have someone else illustrate your book?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
To bring your vision to life, right? Yeah.
Minh Lê:
I always tell them that that's the wrong framing of it, because for a picture book to work, it can't be my book. If I could draw and illustrate myself, then maybe it could be my book, but the book would not exist without the illustrator. So, it has to be our book. So, it's not them executing my vision. It's me putting a story on a page and then handing it off to the illustrator for them to bring it to life and bring their own storytelling, their own artistry to the story for it to become our book. I've been very lucky because I've worked with so many amazing illustrators. Every time without fail, it's more beautiful and more fantastical than I could have possibly imagined. But at the same time, it's exactly the book I had in mind.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah, it sounds like magic, right? But recently, not even so recently, you've expanded into prose and short stories without illustrations and so forth. So, I don't know. How does it feel to bring the proverbial tiger to life on your own without an illustrator?
Minh Lê:
It comes down to just getting the experience of doing it. It gives you more confidence. If you're dreaming and you try to conjure up a tiger one time and it doesn't work and then you give up, then that's where the story ends. But if you keep trying and maybe the tiger starts to come into focus, maybe fleshed out a little bit, maybe it might not ever get to that perfect majestic tiger that you have in your imagination, but you can get closer and closer and closer.
So, for me, I feel like with every book that I get to work on, I'm starting to expand into different kinds of writing. It's all different attempts to add conjuring up that tiger, different attempts to try to get something that's richer, more fleshed out and closer to what I had in mind. If I'm writing stuff that isn't illustrated, then it's a much different experience because now it's like I don't get to hand it off and then let someone else do the hard work.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Someone else take this. Who's taking this? Your editor, your editor.
Minh Lê:
Someone else make magic out of this. But it's a fun challenge and one that I don't want to shy away from. I don't want to write things just for the sake of writing them, but I don't want to cut myself up off from opportunities just because they weren't what I was originally thinking. So, I want to stay open to possibilities and open to where this road might take me and we'll see where that goes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Do you remember upon your first reading what you thought about that?
Minh Lê:
I think at that time, I was focused more on the dream aspect of it and that my roommate in college, one of those most brilliant people I've ever met, one of my great friends, he was really interested in lucid dreaming. So, the idea of if you're just asleep and you're awake and conscious within your dream, what could you do? He used to actively try to practice that. How can we get to a stage where we could intentionally lucid dream? So when I read this, it was that idea of you have that passion, you have that interest. How do you take control of that nebulous dream space? But I don't think at the time I was thinking of that in terms of writing. It was just like the potential of imagination, stuff like that. Now it feels more concretely, I was probably thinking of it in terms of writing in a way, but not as clearly as I am now.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Are you still into lucid dreaming and are you able to control your dreams?
Minh Lê:
I'm not able to control, but every now and then, I'll have a dream where you're aware what's going on, but then I often wake up right away. But the idea of dreams is always fascinating to me. That idea of dreams being informative to your everyday life and your reality is something that I do think is very real. I think when you're writing books that touch upon different fantastical elements, for me, it's always, as a kid, you're so open to possibilities. You have a very different understanding what the parameters of the world are, right?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Absolutely, yeah.
Minh Lê:
That's something that's very special to me. I think it's very powerful to not have such a defined map of what the world is. When that's not as defined, then possibilities are more open and more endless. So, that barrier between what is "real" and what is not, when that's more fluid, I think that's where the fun of fiction comes in, especially when you're writing for kids and trying to recapture and push against that boundary. My early fascination with dreams is operating in that same space of like, "Where is that boundary? How fluid is that? How can we play in that space?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, just that vacillation really between worlds, and that is such a special thing. As a parent, it's like this dagger to the heart. When they had that discovery of like, "Oh wait," you started the chipping away at all the things that they think are possible and whatever comes first if it's like the tooth fairy or "Oh, so wait magic." They start to just have you watch that happen, it's painful, but also, the flip of that is there's really nothing like seeing them when they're younger not have that boundary, right?
Minh Lê:
Right. When Real to Me came out, which is about imaginary friends, I was doing an interview and this woman asked me, "So what do you tell parents who are worried or concerned about their kids having imaginary friends? Should they discourage it?" I was like, "Enjoy it for as long as you can. For this kid, whether or not the friend is imaginary or not, those relationships, those emotions are real. There's nothing imaginary about those emotions, those dynamics, and they're sharing that with you. That's an invitation for you to come into that world, come into that space, and that's such a magical, fleeting period of time. Why would you try to cut that off? Why would you try to cut that short?"
You have your whole life to be in the "real" world. As an adult now, it's like I'm constantly trying to tap back into that magic and that sense of possibility that we felt when we were a kid. When you see it in kids, it's like the most wonderful thing. You can see that. You just want to recapture. You want to figure out how to touch that again. The last thing I would want to do is discourage a kid from playing in that space and living in that space.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Stirring those gray areas between fact and imagination, between the physical and the metaphysical, there's a recurrent theme in Minh's work. The example in particular that comes to my mind is his graphic novel Enlighten Me, which explores the journey of a young boy sent to a silent meditation retreat after confronting a bully. The boy eventually begins to imagine himself living out the mythic stories of the Buddha. This story also draws heavily from Minh's relationship to Buddhism.
Minh Lê:
Practicing would maybe be a bit of a stretch.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, no, I heard someone recently tell me, "No, no, no." It was like a comedian was like, "No, I perfected it."
Minh Lê:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Are you a practicing Jew? No, I perfected it.
Minh Lê:
So I have two meditation pills in my office. They are more often used for napping, for meditating. I would say I am a Buddhist at heart who aspires to be more of a practicing. What I try to do is, even though I don't practice in the way that my parents or grandparents practice, my practice comes in trying to weave in the concepts and ideas of mindfulness and all that into day-to-day life and then hopefully at some point continue to develop and go further. But I do think that Buddhism informs how I move through the world consciously or unconsciously.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The story of Enlighten Me is taken from a deeply personal and powerful experience in Minh's life. That same experience has now led to a new project, a biography of the late renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author, Thich Nhat Hanh.
Minh Lê:
He's such an important figure in bringing Buddhism to the world and making it accessible to such a broad audience. You see his books and his writings everywhere now. Yeah. But for me, he was someone that my family knew growing up. Enlighten Me is based on a time I went to a silent meditation retreat when I was a kid that was hosted by him. So, I got to meet him then. I was there with my grandparents and my parents and my sisters, and so he's always been such a special and important figure. To me, the equivalent I imagine is if you were Catholic and asked to do a biography of the Pope. That's how it feels to me.
So, when I got the invitation, it was hugely meaningful and it was even more special because I got the email and the invitation to write this story when I was on my way to Vietnam for the first time in 30 years. So, he was still alive, but he wasn't seeing people, but they're like, "Come to where he's living. We'll show you around. This is where he became a monk. So, you can see where he grew up." I went there and this Buddhist nun, who's one of the nicest people I've ever met, showed me around, told me his life story as we walked around the temple grounds. Then my family came back to pick me up, and my parents, my wife, and my two sons. The nun was taking me around and she said, "Let's go up to see his quarters, just so you can see where he lives now" to finish out the picture.
So, we went up to this little area and we're sitting in this courtyard. She goes into a room. It's Vietnam, it's hot. My kids, they're sitting there, they're playing around, but they're just sweaty, exhausted. Then the woman comes back out and she says, "This has never happened before. He would like to invite you and your family to come in." So we walk into this darkened room. He's sitting in this wooden wheelchair and he can't speak because of his stroke, but he has this huge, beautiful smile on his face. He just reaches out and calls my kids over, takes them by the hand. It was such a beautiful one because they were the age I was when I met him. My mom has been a follower of his for decades. He actually gave her her Buddhist name when she was coming up, and so she had thought she would never get to see him again.
So, she was in tears, paying her respect, bowing to him on the ground, and it was just such a wonderful moment for all of us. So, for me, writing the story, I feel the privilege and the honor and the weight of trying to share his life story and his teachings with the new generation. My kids still refer to that moment. They often say, "Do you remember the time we met the Buddha in Vietnam?" But that's what it felt, right? It's like you're in the presence of someone who has devoted himself to spreading a message of peace and mindfulness and sharing that message with as many people as possible and devote his life to that. To be a part of that has been so wonderful.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, my God. Okay. That really did me in. I just didn't realize that was such a personal story for you. That's amazing. I mean, that's a lot for you to have deliver on, but so how beautiful is that. Is your grandmother still living now?
Minh Lê:
She is and she just turned 100 last year.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, happy birthday.
Minh Lê:
Yeah. What was amazing is that, so on my birthday last year, I got an invitation to visit a school in Vietnam. The invitation lined up with my kid's spring break and my grandmother turning 100. So, we're like, "We have to make this into family trip."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The world is in alignment for you.
Minh Lê:
So we obviously said yes and made it into a family trip. So, we went to Vietnam and spent a week with my grandmother and then went down to the school in Saigon, spent a week in Saigon. It was such a beautiful thing for my kids to experience because that's now their second time being there. They feel so at home there and they love it there. That's something that is very meaningful to me for them to have that visceral memory of the country and to spend that time with my grandmother. Actually, since Drawn Together was written about my inability to speak Vietnamese and trying to connect despite that language barrier, two years ago, I was doing a virtual visit with a school in Vietnam.
They knew that I only presented in English, but there was a kindergarten class and all they wanted was for me to speak to them in Vietnamese. I choked. I couldn't get out of my head, and the presentation was fine, but I didn't meet the moment of being able to speak to them in Vietnamese. That was a moment I was like, "Okay, I need to do something about this." There's nothing like a room full of disappointed kindergartners to give you the motivation you need to get over yourself. So, I started taking Vietnamese lessons with this professor over Zoom. So, every week I'll meet with him and we'll practice Vietnamese. So, when I went back to Vietnam this last year, it was the first time I was able to speak enough and comfortably enough to be able to communicate.
My wife has files on her phone of pictures of me talking to people at the market and stuff like that, but I spent hours sitting there with my grandmother and she would just talk to me and I'd talk to her. At the end on our last day, we're there for two hours almost. Then she took me by the hand, she said, "Your Vietnamese is much better than it was last time, but I know that there's still a lot that you probably didn't understand because we're talking so much." So she took me by the hand and she said, "Just close your eyes." She held my hand. We both closed her eyes for two minutes, and then she patted me on the hand and said, "Whatever you didn't understand, I've now transmitted to you so you can live in peace."
It was such a powerful moment for me because when my other grandmother passed away, I remember going to see her in the hospital and I spent the night with her. I was holding her hand and she was talking to me. I was like, "I can't understand. I don't know." She's trying to tell me something and I don't have the language to understand it. I don't want to say failure, but my inability to process that moment the way I wanted to and to be able to accept her message was something that was lingering to me for forever. You're never going to get that back, but to be able to have that moment with my other grandmother was really powerful. This ties back into-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's just making me cry. I do cry, but straight up basket case right now. Okay.
Minh Lê:
This ties back into dream, our conversation about dreams. Something that I do sometimes to practice my Vietnamese is if I have trouble sleeping, which is often, I'll try to narrate my day in Vietnamese so that I'll get into the habit of doing that and then drift off while I do that. So, I was doing that a couple months ago, and then I was dreaming and I was walking down the street. My grandmother walks up, the one who passed away years ago, and she walks up. We go for a walk and we're talking in Vietnamese, just having a conversation for a couple blocks. Then at the end, she touched me on the shoulder and she says, "This is so nice. We weren't able to do this when I was alive."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Minh Lê:
It's so nice to be able to finally be able to do this. Then I woke up and it was as close to closure as you could get through that dream space. So, yeah. What's funny about a book like Drawn Together, it was written from a place of deficit, wanting to bridge that. I felt like there was something missing there. I'm trying to figure out how to process, how to close that gap through a story, but having that story out in the world has meant so much to me because it connects me to readers who have similar experiences. There's a teacher last year from Iowa who sent me an email and she said, "I teach second grade and we share Drawn Together. Right after I finished it, this little girl raised her hand. She's never raised her hand before, but she raised her hand and she said, 'I have three things to say about this book.'"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love kids. That's the best age. That's also the greatest age, second grade. Man, I love it.
Minh Lê:
I know. One, I'm Vietnamese too. Two, my grandfather also doesn't speak English. Three, this book is my life. I was in tears because I was like, the teacher went on to say, "This girl who never spoke up in class now only spoke up, but then she started sharing with her classmates about her life, about her family. That gave her an opening, an entry point into engaging with her classmates in a new way." That was so powerful for me because I was that kid, right? I was that shy kid who didn't want to speak up, didn't know how to connect to people.
So, the fact that this book, which is about a struggle to connect, is becoming and is a point for people to connect with people, whether it's their classmates or their family, means so much to me. A librarian pointed this out to me. I was at a school visit and this librarian said, "I've got you pinned. I know what all of your books are about." I was like, "Oh, really?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Please tell me.
Minh Lê:
I was like, "I'm a little bit afraid." She's like, "No, all of your books are about the importance and beauty of connection." As a kid who was, like I said, debilitatingly shy and always struggled to connect, I think that is maybe something that's baked into all these books because that's something that I'm inspiring to, trying to find a way to connect with people and the fact that as an author, I get to connect with people through the pages of a book is the most magical thing I could think of. You write a book in your office and then two years, five years, 10 years later, you connect with a reader across the world because they picked up this book and opened it up and found a connection to that story is so beautiful and something that I definitely don't take for granted.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Today, Minh Lê identity is that of a successful children's author, and we didn't even get to it, but he also daytimes as a federal early childhood policy expert, currently working on a program to expand access to childcare for low income working families. Could you love him more? Can you believe that he is basically moonlighting as a children's author? Looking back on his journey, Minh attributes his success to a willingness to embrace discomfort and challenge himself to grow.
Minh Lê:
I feel like my identity and sense of self for so long was determined by those barriers that I set up for myself. So, to be able to continue to push against those boundaries is what we're always trying to do. Thematically, that comes back to the idea of that fictional space where we're playing with, pushing against those boundaries of what's possible and what's not.
That's both more broadly speaking about that imaginative space and how you move through the world, but also on a personal level, what you think is possible for yourself and what you think is not. I think pushing against those boundaries, or at least not taking those boundaries for granted and being able to examine those and maybe hopefully realize that those boundaries are not as hard and fast as you thought. That's hopefully where you can continue to grow.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For a man who created so many barriers around his own abilities, at his core, Minh's true literary love is the boundless nature of picture books. So, for his reading challenge, meditative picture books, he's created a reading list that encourages young people and their grownups to truly be in the moment.
Minh Lê:
I have a soft spot for picture books that invite readers to immerse themselves in the moment and appreciate the world around them in a different way. So, the list of 10 books that I pulled together are books that for me do that. They draw you in. They give you the time and space to set everything else aside and really appreciate the people you're with, the world you're inhabiting and look at the world with fresher, clearer eyes. That is such a powerful tool or powerful role that picture books can play. We live in a world of distraction, and some of them are very worthy distractions and things that require your attention, but a lot of it is also superfluous that distraction as a habit. It's just like a way of being.
So, anything that gives you a chance to set that aside, slow down, push out any other external forces, especially I love reading these books with my kids and just being together and really appreciating that moment because it is all precious and it's all fleeting, but if you're mindful about it, you can experience eternity in that moment. You can have it all in this one moment. There's nothing more valuable than that. So, the fewer moments we can just let fly by, the better. So, these are books that I think give you a chance to do that and experience and just really marinate in the moment that we're in.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Minh's Reading Challenge and all past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Erin Baker, media specialist at Durham Middle School in Georgia. She shares her advice for parents and caregivers about how to model good reading behaviors for their kids, even if they aren't typically readers themselves.
Erin Baker:
I think really super important is that you model the behavior that you want your kids to exhibit. So, if you want readers, I think you have to read, you're a person who talks about books, even if it's something that the kid's not going to be interested in reading, that you tell them about what you're learning or what's interesting to you and that you have those important conversations with your kids. Listening to audiobooks has been really powerful for myself and my kids, and we don't do that all the time, but typically in the summer as we're traveling, we'll pick out at least a couple.
I think being able to pause and have a conversation about whatever's taking place in the book, that books of course mirror our lives or they open up windows and doors to worlds that we aren't exposed to. So, you can have really powerful conversations with your kids, but you have to, as a parent, be willing to do that work, even just visiting the library or visiting bookstores. Anybody can find something at a bookstore, even if you don't want to buy a book. All of those conversations help you support your kid in becoming the best person that they could be. You got to talk to them, which is really hard when they're teenagers. My 10th grader doesn't want to talk to me anymore.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Minh Lê. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently, I'm reading Happy Place by Emily Henry and Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale. If you enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and it really helps.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content.
Speaking of bonus content, if you are still here, thanks for sticking it out. Remember that little bit earlier in the episode when Minh said this?
Minh Lê:
I hand over that manuscript to these amazing artists, and they're able to conjure up these beautiful worlds that are better than even what I could have imagined.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
One of these amazing artists he's referring to is his frequent collaborator and past guest on this podcast, Dan Santat. In one of their collaborations, Minh says, "Dan's interpretation had him and his wife in tears of laughter." Of course, it's Dan Santat. He told us about that while sharing details on their new book that just came out titled Built To Last. I love this little anecdote about it.
Minh Lê:
So Dan Santat, who I keep thinking myself, I'm so lucky to get to work with him.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You guys are a dynamic duo.
Minh Lê:
Yeah, I love that Dan coined the phrase Minhstat for the books that we do together.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I did not know that. Okay.
Minh Lê:
But we've done three books together so far. So, we've done Drawn Together, we've done Lift, and we've done the Blur, and each of those touches upon a different relationship dynamic. So, Drawn Together is about kids and their grandparents. Lift is about siblings, and The Blur is about kids and their parents or the adults in their lives. So, when it was time to write another book, I was thinking about, "Okay, what would be the natural next book to do with him?" So I wrote this story about two friends, and it's called Built to Last. They bond over building things together and imagining different worlds, and no matter what they build, eventually it comes tumbling down. It's just a really fun story. In the manuscript, I never specify who these two are. I try to keep it very-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I wondered about that. Okay.
Minh Lê:
There's two friends, but Dan interpreted it as a baby Minh and a baby Dan becoming friends over time. When my wife and I opened up the PDF for the first time, we were just on the floor in a mixture of tears and laughing. It's such a sweet thing. So, it's a book about while their friendship is built on building things together, what they realize at the end is that even when everything's falling apart, it's like the thing that was really built to last was their friendship. The relationships that you make through these moments is ultimately what's more important than the thing that you may be making at the time. It ties into that elemental message of connection.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
All right, you all. That's really it. Thanks for listening and keep reading.
That barrier between what is "real" and what is not, when that's more fluid, that's where the fun of fiction comes in, especially when you're writing for kids.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Minh Lê spends his life looking beyond boundaries, whether they're the ones we adults insist on placing between fiction and nonfiction, or waking and dreaming, or the bounds between our physical reality and spiritualism influenced by his Buddhist beliefs. His books transcend those bounds and result in both profound and silly stories that kids and adults alike love, but the most challenging barriers Minh has broken down are the ones he created himself.
Minh Lê:
We are driving around and she says, "You act as if you failed at writing a children's book or failed at publishing a children's book, but you've never actually finished one and sense it out in the real world to even give yourself a chance to fail."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Minh is a children's book author, best known for Drawn Together, winner of the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the Eisner-nominated Lift, and the Blur. He's also the author of the Green Lantern graphic novel series and a contributor to many short story anthologies. In this episode, he tells us about how he pushed beyond his insecurities to fulfill his dream of becoming a picture book author. He also shares about the life-changing experience he had while writing the biography of beloved Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, and he shares his foolproof hack for getting to sleep each night. Although full disclosure, listeners, it's not one that most of us will be able to copy. Oh, and stick around until the very end for a little bonus story time.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways, @thereadingculturepod, and you can also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, onto the show.
So, let's start with your growing up life. Were you born in the United States or were you born in Vietnam?
Minh Lê:
So it's interesting. I was born in the States. I was born in Connecticut. My parents came over from Vietnam on college scholarships before everything got really bad. They stayed here and the rest of my family came over as refugees later. Then once they were there, the rest of the family, when they came over, they came to live with us. So, it's like we became this little pocket of Vietnamese community in Connecticut. The joke I always tell is that you could fit all the Vietnamese people in our town in a minivan, and that minivan belonged to my uncle. It was like we were the Vietnamese community there.
Actually, my grandparents, when they came over, my grandmother started a little Vietnamese grocery store and then they started the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in Connecticut. So, they became this hub of the Vietnamese community. So, I was around that a lot, but like a lot of kids in my generation, I grew up feeling caught between worlds. At school, I was one of the few Asian kids, and at home, I was the too American kid. Even though I had a super strong family life, super strong community, great friends at school, internally, I always felt like I was floating in between different identities that I think I had created in my own head. It was a great childhood, but because of my own personality and hang-ups, I created these barriers and structures that I felt like I was always bouncing against.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. I definitely want to explore that a little more later, the idea of those barriers. When you were younger, were you reading a lot, Minh? I know you have this deep love for picture books and I wonder if you were reading those growing up as well.
Minh Lê:
I've always loved picture books. My sister and I were very much library kids. Our parents would take us there, and I remember my mom taking us to the library. I have two sisters, and we would be those kids that you see two little legs and a pile of books coming up to the circulation desk. So, we always had books around and there's something about picture books to me that there's something elemental, very essential about a great picture book. One thing that I love about it is if you read a book when you're a kid and you fall in love with a book and you have a relationship with that book, that's a friendship that you take with you for the rest of your life. You can reread it over time.
What I love to do is I reread books that I read as a kid. It almost acts like a marker for you to see how much you've changed over time because your relationship to that text changes. So, books that I read when I was a kid, I reread in high school or college or now as a parent and your perspective on that text changes. It's a really fun thing to see that evolution that when you share that with your kids, it takes on a whole new meaning.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah. I mean, reading a book with your own kid, it's totally different, right? Okay. So, your love of picture books has unsurprisingly grown and evolved with you. Can you speak to what you view as so special about picture books now as an adult and as a parent?
Minh Lê:
Something that I find unique to children's books and picture books in particular for me in that you have to distill whatever you're trying to convey into something very essential. You don't have a lot of pages to tell the story. It feels like not every book is any for this, but these picture books can be a distillation of this wisdom into this one perfect contained work of art that you can hold in your hands, that you can share with a loved one. I think people are often dismissive of children's books or they don't see the potential of a children's book.
I think I've read so many picture books, I feel like you could build a world philosophy off of this one 32-page picture book. This picture book has everything. The meaning of life is right here. Whether that's to the artwork or the message or story, I think you could really find a lot of the answers that you're looking for in this world in the world of picture books if you look closely enough.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah, I love how you put that. Okay. I want to hear a little bit more about what you were like growing up. What was your personality like outside of your family? Can you go into that a bit?
Minh Lê:
I would describe myself as I'm debilitatingly shy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shy is not enough. Okay.
Minh Lê:
I was so shy, so quiet, and I don't want to say timid, but just cautious, just like the way that I moved through the world. I often think of it as a shy kid, reading and books were my escape from the world. So, it's really fun now as an author to have the opportunity to see so many people because books have become my way back into the world because it gives me the chance to talk to so many kids, talk to so many people, and travel internationally and within the US. So, that instinct to retreat from the world through books is ironically what led me back to a place where I am in the world more than I ever could have imagined or thought would be the case.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's really interesting. Yeah. Now it's like even if you are shy, you have to deal with talking to a bunch of kids.
Minh Lê:
I found this world that works for me because I'm going to talk to kids. I'm going to talk to educators. I'm going to talk to the librarians, people who love books. There's a comfort in that space where I feel like I can let down my guard a little bit. Then the more practice you get with that, the more comfortable I feel in those spaces. For me, the biggest thing was, and this is something that applies to all different facets of life, for so long, I just told myself, I had this running dialogue or monologue in my head saying, I hate public speaking. There's this core fact by myself that I knew. Then one day, a friend of mine, he had won a writing contest and he was out of town. He was supposed to present, read his piece, and he said, "Can you do it for me?" I was like, "I'm the last person you should be asking."
He's like, "No, I think it'd be great." So I did it just as a favor and actually enjoyed it. Just that little bit of daylight was like, "Oh, wait, maybe I don't hate this. Maybe I could give myself permission to enjoy it a little bit." Just that little bit of permission and breaking down that wall a little bit, you realize how many barriers you set up yourself in your life that you take as gospel, right? I hate public speaking, that's the end of it. I'm going to do everything I can to avoid it. Once you challenge that barrier a little bit, all of a sudden, that wall breaks down and you see this whole other world open up.
So, I've been trying to be better about recognizing those barriers that are just totally self-created and trying to figure out how that has shaped my personality or the way I move through the world and push back against those when I can.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Also, there are other factors that can create those mental barriers. So, thinking about what else was there, who even knows why you're telling yourself that story, right?
Minh Lê:
Right. I think for me too, a lot of it is I touch upon this in Drawn Together, the picture book that I did with Dan Santat about the language barrier, because I grew up with this very rich family and community life, but I didn't speak the language well. So, I always felt I didn't have the tools to express myself. I'd be with my family or be at the Buddhist Temple and felt like I was shying away from interacting with people because I didn't want people to know how much I couldn't speak, how much I couldn't.
When you can't communicate, you try to avoid communication. Then it wasn't until recently I realized that as a picture book author, I write books and I gravitate towards books with very few words. Then I realized maybe that my entire upbringing was preparation for being a picture book author because I was trying to communicate as much as I could without using many words. I was like, "That's actually a great training for being a picture book author." So yeah, maybe it was destiny in that way.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, shy kids, take heart. You have a future in picture book writing. In Minh's journey, overcoming self-imposed obstacles often required some external nudges. We've already heard the story of his friend pushing him to embrace public speaking, but his career in writing can be attributed to some loving encouragement from his wife.
Minh Lê:
When I graduated from college, I knew that I wanted to write children's books, picture books specifically, but my problem was that every time I would have that realization, I would almost instantaneously cut myself off at the knees and say, "Who are you to write a book? There's so many books out there," and all that self-doubt would automatically get triggered and come into play. So, then I just wouldn't do anything with it. It wasn't until my wife, who I was dating at the time, we were talking and she says, "I love you, but if you can't take your own dream seriously, how can you expect to anyone else to?" Just that kick in the pants of basically stop being your own worst enemy.
If you know this about yourself, then allow yourself to know that and give yourself permission to at least see what could happen. Then another point, very close to then, we were driving around and she says, "You act as if you failed at writing a children's book or failed at publishing a children's book, but you've never actually finished one and sense it out in the real world to even give yourself a chance to fail." That was the other kick in the pants I needed. I don't consider myself a particularly ambitious person, but I knew that if down the line on my deathbed, if I hadn't at least given a shot, I knew that I would feel regret.
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger, not the jaguar, that spotted tiger that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo. I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. I still remember those pictures, I, who cannot recall without error, a woman's brow or smile. My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they're still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep, I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream.
At those moments, I often think this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will. Since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger. Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up or it's flimsy looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or a bird than like a tiger.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This excerpt is from Dream Tigers, a collection of poems and stories by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. For Minh, this text was a perfect metaphor for a critical obstacle facing him as a creator. What do you do when your vision for what you want to create outstrips your ability to create it?
Minh Lê:
I was listening to another podcast recently and it's an interview with this comedian Mike Birbiglia and his friend Ira Glass. He was saying something like, "When you're starting out as a creator, all you have is your taste. There's always a gap between your taste and your ability to create. Most people die within that gap. They can't create what they want to create, and so they get frustrated and they give up." That was the danger zone for me because I love to draw and paint when I was a kid and all that. I let it slide, but when I wanted to write picture books, in my head, oh, I want to write and illustrate picture books. I hadn't developed my artistic skills to a point where I could put the ideas I had on my head onto the page. I'd always hit this wall.
So, when I read this story now, it's like the idea of you love tigers, so you have this passion for tigers and you want to conjure it forth, but you can't do it. Whatever you're putting out there, it looks flimsy, it looks like a dog. It's not the majestic tiger that you love, right? For me, that could have been the end of the story. I can't put this story out there, dream's over, move on. But the beauty of being in the world of picture books is I get to collaborate with these amazing illustrators who can bring forth the tiger. It's through that collaboration that I'm able to live this dream of being an author because I can put a story on the page, and it is vague.
I don't have the clear vision of it, but I know in my head, it's very clear. Then I hand over that manuscript to these amazing artists and they're able to conjure up these beautiful worlds that are better than even what I could have imagined. Because a lot of times people ask, "What is it like to have someone else illustrate your book?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
To bring your vision to life, right? Yeah.
Minh Lê:
I always tell them that that's the wrong framing of it, because for a picture book to work, it can't be my book. If I could draw and illustrate myself, then maybe it could be my book, but the book would not exist without the illustrator. So, it has to be our book. So, it's not them executing my vision. It's me putting a story on a page and then handing it off to the illustrator for them to bring it to life and bring their own storytelling, their own artistry to the story for it to become our book. I've been very lucky because I've worked with so many amazing illustrators. Every time without fail, it's more beautiful and more fantastical than I could have possibly imagined. But at the same time, it's exactly the book I had in mind.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah, it sounds like magic, right? But recently, not even so recently, you've expanded into prose and short stories without illustrations and so forth. So, I don't know. How does it feel to bring the proverbial tiger to life on your own without an illustrator?
Minh Lê:
It comes down to just getting the experience of doing it. It gives you more confidence. If you're dreaming and you try to conjure up a tiger one time and it doesn't work and then you give up, then that's where the story ends. But if you keep trying and maybe the tiger starts to come into focus, maybe fleshed out a little bit, maybe it might not ever get to that perfect majestic tiger that you have in your imagination, but you can get closer and closer and closer.
So, for me, I feel like with every book that I get to work on, I'm starting to expand into different kinds of writing. It's all different attempts to add conjuring up that tiger, different attempts to try to get something that's richer, more fleshed out and closer to what I had in mind. If I'm writing stuff that isn't illustrated, then it's a much different experience because now it's like I don't get to hand it off and then let someone else do the hard work.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Someone else take this. Who's taking this? Your editor, your editor.
Minh Lê:
Someone else make magic out of this. But it's a fun challenge and one that I don't want to shy away from. I don't want to write things just for the sake of writing them, but I don't want to cut myself up off from opportunities just because they weren't what I was originally thinking. So, I want to stay open to possibilities and open to where this road might take me and we'll see where that goes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Do you remember upon your first reading what you thought about that?
Minh Lê:
I think at that time, I was focused more on the dream aspect of it and that my roommate in college, one of those most brilliant people I've ever met, one of my great friends, he was really interested in lucid dreaming. So, the idea of if you're just asleep and you're awake and conscious within your dream, what could you do? He used to actively try to practice that. How can we get to a stage where we could intentionally lucid dream? So when I read this, it was that idea of you have that passion, you have that interest. How do you take control of that nebulous dream space? But I don't think at the time I was thinking of that in terms of writing. It was just like the potential of imagination, stuff like that. Now it feels more concretely, I was probably thinking of it in terms of writing in a way, but not as clearly as I am now.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Are you still into lucid dreaming and are you able to control your dreams?
Minh Lê:
I'm not able to control, but every now and then, I'll have a dream where you're aware what's going on, but then I often wake up right away. But the idea of dreams is always fascinating to me. That idea of dreams being informative to your everyday life and your reality is something that I do think is very real. I think when you're writing books that touch upon different fantastical elements, for me, it's always, as a kid, you're so open to possibilities. You have a very different understanding what the parameters of the world are, right?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Absolutely, yeah.
Minh Lê:
That's something that's very special to me. I think it's very powerful to not have such a defined map of what the world is. When that's not as defined, then possibilities are more open and more endless. So, that barrier between what is "real" and what is not, when that's more fluid, I think that's where the fun of fiction comes in, especially when you're writing for kids and trying to recapture and push against that boundary. My early fascination with dreams is operating in that same space of like, "Where is that boundary? How fluid is that? How can we play in that space?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, just that vacillation really between worlds, and that is such a special thing. As a parent, it's like this dagger to the heart. When they had that discovery of like, "Oh wait," you started the chipping away at all the things that they think are possible and whatever comes first if it's like the tooth fairy or "Oh, so wait magic." They start to just have you watch that happen, it's painful, but also, the flip of that is there's really nothing like seeing them when they're younger not have that boundary, right?
Minh Lê:
Right. When Real to Me came out, which is about imaginary friends, I was doing an interview and this woman asked me, "So what do you tell parents who are worried or concerned about their kids having imaginary friends? Should they discourage it?" I was like, "Enjoy it for as long as you can. For this kid, whether or not the friend is imaginary or not, those relationships, those emotions are real. There's nothing imaginary about those emotions, those dynamics, and they're sharing that with you. That's an invitation for you to come into that world, come into that space, and that's such a magical, fleeting period of time. Why would you try to cut that off? Why would you try to cut that short?"
You have your whole life to be in the "real" world. As an adult now, it's like I'm constantly trying to tap back into that magic and that sense of possibility that we felt when we were a kid. When you see it in kids, it's like the most wonderful thing. You can see that. You just want to recapture. You want to figure out how to touch that again. The last thing I would want to do is discourage a kid from playing in that space and living in that space.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Stirring those gray areas between fact and imagination, between the physical and the metaphysical, there's a recurrent theme in Minh's work. The example in particular that comes to my mind is his graphic novel Enlighten Me, which explores the journey of a young boy sent to a silent meditation retreat after confronting a bully. The boy eventually begins to imagine himself living out the mythic stories of the Buddha. This story also draws heavily from Minh's relationship to Buddhism.
Minh Lê:
Practicing would maybe be a bit of a stretch.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, no, I heard someone recently tell me, "No, no, no." It was like a comedian was like, "No, I perfected it."
Minh Lê:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Are you a practicing Jew? No, I perfected it.
Minh Lê:
So I have two meditation pills in my office. They are more often used for napping, for meditating. I would say I am a Buddhist at heart who aspires to be more of a practicing. What I try to do is, even though I don't practice in the way that my parents or grandparents practice, my practice comes in trying to weave in the concepts and ideas of mindfulness and all that into day-to-day life and then hopefully at some point continue to develop and go further. But I do think that Buddhism informs how I move through the world consciously or unconsciously.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The story of Enlighten Me is taken from a deeply personal and powerful experience in Minh's life. That same experience has now led to a new project, a biography of the late renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author, Thich Nhat Hanh.
Minh Lê:
He's such an important figure in bringing Buddhism to the world and making it accessible to such a broad audience. You see his books and his writings everywhere now. Yeah. But for me, he was someone that my family knew growing up. Enlighten Me is based on a time I went to a silent meditation retreat when I was a kid that was hosted by him. So, I got to meet him then. I was there with my grandparents and my parents and my sisters, and so he's always been such a special and important figure. To me, the equivalent I imagine is if you were Catholic and asked to do a biography of the Pope. That's how it feels to me.
So, when I got the invitation, it was hugely meaningful and it was even more special because I got the email and the invitation to write this story when I was on my way to Vietnam for the first time in 30 years. So, he was still alive, but he wasn't seeing people, but they're like, "Come to where he's living. We'll show you around. This is where he became a monk. So, you can see where he grew up." I went there and this Buddhist nun, who's one of the nicest people I've ever met, showed me around, told me his life story as we walked around the temple grounds. Then my family came back to pick me up, and my parents, my wife, and my two sons. The nun was taking me around and she said, "Let's go up to see his quarters, just so you can see where he lives now" to finish out the picture.
So, we went up to this little area and we're sitting in this courtyard. She goes into a room. It's Vietnam, it's hot. My kids, they're sitting there, they're playing around, but they're just sweaty, exhausted. Then the woman comes back out and she says, "This has never happened before. He would like to invite you and your family to come in." So we walk into this darkened room. He's sitting in this wooden wheelchair and he can't speak because of his stroke, but he has this huge, beautiful smile on his face. He just reaches out and calls my kids over, takes them by the hand. It was such a beautiful one because they were the age I was when I met him. My mom has been a follower of his for decades. He actually gave her her Buddhist name when she was coming up, and so she had thought she would never get to see him again.
So, she was in tears, paying her respect, bowing to him on the ground, and it was just such a wonderful moment for all of us. So, for me, writing the story, I feel the privilege and the honor and the weight of trying to share his life story and his teachings with the new generation. My kids still refer to that moment. They often say, "Do you remember the time we met the Buddha in Vietnam?" But that's what it felt, right? It's like you're in the presence of someone who has devoted himself to spreading a message of peace and mindfulness and sharing that message with as many people as possible and devote his life to that. To be a part of that has been so wonderful.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, my God. Okay. That really did me in. I just didn't realize that was such a personal story for you. That's amazing. I mean, that's a lot for you to have deliver on, but so how beautiful is that. Is your grandmother still living now?
Minh Lê:
She is and she just turned 100 last year.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, happy birthday.
Minh Lê:
Yeah. What was amazing is that, so on my birthday last year, I got an invitation to visit a school in Vietnam. The invitation lined up with my kid's spring break and my grandmother turning 100. So, we're like, "We have to make this into family trip."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The world is in alignment for you.
Minh Lê:
So we obviously said yes and made it into a family trip. So, we went to Vietnam and spent a week with my grandmother and then went down to the school in Saigon, spent a week in Saigon. It was such a beautiful thing for my kids to experience because that's now their second time being there. They feel so at home there and they love it there. That's something that is very meaningful to me for them to have that visceral memory of the country and to spend that time with my grandmother. Actually, since Drawn Together was written about my inability to speak Vietnamese and trying to connect despite that language barrier, two years ago, I was doing a virtual visit with a school in Vietnam.
They knew that I only presented in English, but there was a kindergarten class and all they wanted was for me to speak to them in Vietnamese. I choked. I couldn't get out of my head, and the presentation was fine, but I didn't meet the moment of being able to speak to them in Vietnamese. That was a moment I was like, "Okay, I need to do something about this." There's nothing like a room full of disappointed kindergartners to give you the motivation you need to get over yourself. So, I started taking Vietnamese lessons with this professor over Zoom. So, every week I'll meet with him and we'll practice Vietnamese. So, when I went back to Vietnam this last year, it was the first time I was able to speak enough and comfortably enough to be able to communicate.
My wife has files on her phone of pictures of me talking to people at the market and stuff like that, but I spent hours sitting there with my grandmother and she would just talk to me and I'd talk to her. At the end on our last day, we're there for two hours almost. Then she took me by the hand, she said, "Your Vietnamese is much better than it was last time, but I know that there's still a lot that you probably didn't understand because we're talking so much." So she took me by the hand and she said, "Just close your eyes." She held my hand. We both closed her eyes for two minutes, and then she patted me on the hand and said, "Whatever you didn't understand, I've now transmitted to you so you can live in peace."
It was such a powerful moment for me because when my other grandmother passed away, I remember going to see her in the hospital and I spent the night with her. I was holding her hand and she was talking to me. I was like, "I can't understand. I don't know." She's trying to tell me something and I don't have the language to understand it. I don't want to say failure, but my inability to process that moment the way I wanted to and to be able to accept her message was something that was lingering to me for forever. You're never going to get that back, but to be able to have that moment with my other grandmother was really powerful. This ties back into-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's just making me cry. I do cry, but straight up basket case right now. Okay.
Minh Lê:
This ties back into dream, our conversation about dreams. Something that I do sometimes to practice my Vietnamese is if I have trouble sleeping, which is often, I'll try to narrate my day in Vietnamese so that I'll get into the habit of doing that and then drift off while I do that. So, I was doing that a couple months ago, and then I was dreaming and I was walking down the street. My grandmother walks up, the one who passed away years ago, and she walks up. We go for a walk and we're talking in Vietnamese, just having a conversation for a couple blocks. Then at the end, she touched me on the shoulder and she says, "This is so nice. We weren't able to do this when I was alive."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Minh Lê:
It's so nice to be able to finally be able to do this. Then I woke up and it was as close to closure as you could get through that dream space. So, yeah. What's funny about a book like Drawn Together, it was written from a place of deficit, wanting to bridge that. I felt like there was something missing there. I'm trying to figure out how to process, how to close that gap through a story, but having that story out in the world has meant so much to me because it connects me to readers who have similar experiences. There's a teacher last year from Iowa who sent me an email and she said, "I teach second grade and we share Drawn Together. Right after I finished it, this little girl raised her hand. She's never raised her hand before, but she raised her hand and she said, 'I have three things to say about this book.'"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love kids. That's the best age. That's also the greatest age, second grade. Man, I love it.
Minh Lê:
I know. One, I'm Vietnamese too. Two, my grandfather also doesn't speak English. Three, this book is my life. I was in tears because I was like, the teacher went on to say, "This girl who never spoke up in class now only spoke up, but then she started sharing with her classmates about her life, about her family. That gave her an opening, an entry point into engaging with her classmates in a new way." That was so powerful for me because I was that kid, right? I was that shy kid who didn't want to speak up, didn't know how to connect to people.
So, the fact that this book, which is about a struggle to connect, is becoming and is a point for people to connect with people, whether it's their classmates or their family, means so much to me. A librarian pointed this out to me. I was at a school visit and this librarian said, "I've got you pinned. I know what all of your books are about." I was like, "Oh, really?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Please tell me.
Minh Lê:
I was like, "I'm a little bit afraid." She's like, "No, all of your books are about the importance and beauty of connection." As a kid who was, like I said, debilitatingly shy and always struggled to connect, I think that is maybe something that's baked into all these books because that's something that I'm inspiring to, trying to find a way to connect with people and the fact that as an author, I get to connect with people through the pages of a book is the most magical thing I could think of. You write a book in your office and then two years, five years, 10 years later, you connect with a reader across the world because they picked up this book and opened it up and found a connection to that story is so beautiful and something that I definitely don't take for granted.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Today, Minh Lê identity is that of a successful children's author, and we didn't even get to it, but he also daytimes as a federal early childhood policy expert, currently working on a program to expand access to childcare for low income working families. Could you love him more? Can you believe that he is basically moonlighting as a children's author? Looking back on his journey, Minh attributes his success to a willingness to embrace discomfort and challenge himself to grow.
Minh Lê:
I feel like my identity and sense of self for so long was determined by those barriers that I set up for myself. So, to be able to continue to push against those boundaries is what we're always trying to do. Thematically, that comes back to the idea of that fictional space where we're playing with, pushing against those boundaries of what's possible and what's not.
That's both more broadly speaking about that imaginative space and how you move through the world, but also on a personal level, what you think is possible for yourself and what you think is not. I think pushing against those boundaries, or at least not taking those boundaries for granted and being able to examine those and maybe hopefully realize that those boundaries are not as hard and fast as you thought. That's hopefully where you can continue to grow.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For a man who created so many barriers around his own abilities, at his core, Minh's true literary love is the boundless nature of picture books. So, for his reading challenge, meditative picture books, he's created a reading list that encourages young people and their grownups to truly be in the moment.
Minh Lê:
I have a soft spot for picture books that invite readers to immerse themselves in the moment and appreciate the world around them in a different way. So, the list of 10 books that I pulled together are books that for me do that. They draw you in. They give you the time and space to set everything else aside and really appreciate the people you're with, the world you're inhabiting and look at the world with fresher, clearer eyes. That is such a powerful tool or powerful role that picture books can play. We live in a world of distraction, and some of them are very worthy distractions and things that require your attention, but a lot of it is also superfluous that distraction as a habit. It's just like a way of being.
So, anything that gives you a chance to set that aside, slow down, push out any other external forces, especially I love reading these books with my kids and just being together and really appreciating that moment because it is all precious and it's all fleeting, but if you're mindful about it, you can experience eternity in that moment. You can have it all in this one moment. There's nothing more valuable than that. So, the fewer moments we can just let fly by, the better. So, these are books that I think give you a chance to do that and experience and just really marinate in the moment that we're in.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Minh's Reading Challenge and all past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Erin Baker, media specialist at Durham Middle School in Georgia. She shares her advice for parents and caregivers about how to model good reading behaviors for their kids, even if they aren't typically readers themselves.
Erin Baker:
I think really super important is that you model the behavior that you want your kids to exhibit. So, if you want readers, I think you have to read, you're a person who talks about books, even if it's something that the kid's not going to be interested in reading, that you tell them about what you're learning or what's interesting to you and that you have those important conversations with your kids. Listening to audiobooks has been really powerful for myself and my kids, and we don't do that all the time, but typically in the summer as we're traveling, we'll pick out at least a couple.
I think being able to pause and have a conversation about whatever's taking place in the book, that books of course mirror our lives or they open up windows and doors to worlds that we aren't exposed to. So, you can have really powerful conversations with your kids, but you have to, as a parent, be willing to do that work, even just visiting the library or visiting bookstores. Anybody can find something at a bookstore, even if you don't want to buy a book. All of those conversations help you support your kid in becoming the best person that they could be. You got to talk to them, which is really hard when they're teenagers. My 10th grader doesn't want to talk to me anymore.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Minh Lê. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently, I'm reading Happy Place by Emily Henry and Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale. If you enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and it really helps.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content.
Speaking of bonus content, if you are still here, thanks for sticking it out. Remember that little bit earlier in the episode when Minh said this?
Minh Lê:
I hand over that manuscript to these amazing artists, and they're able to conjure up these beautiful worlds that are better than even what I could have imagined.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
One of these amazing artists he's referring to is his frequent collaborator and past guest on this podcast, Dan Santat. In one of their collaborations, Minh says, "Dan's interpretation had him and his wife in tears of laughter." Of course, it's Dan Santat. He told us about that while sharing details on their new book that just came out titled Built To Last. I love this little anecdote about it.
Minh Lê:
So Dan Santat, who I keep thinking myself, I'm so lucky to get to work with him.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You guys are a dynamic duo.
Minh Lê:
Yeah, I love that Dan coined the phrase Minhstat for the books that we do together.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I did not know that. Okay.
Minh Lê:
But we've done three books together so far. So, we've done Drawn Together, we've done Lift, and we've done the Blur, and each of those touches upon a different relationship dynamic. So, Drawn Together is about kids and their grandparents. Lift is about siblings, and The Blur is about kids and their parents or the adults in their lives. So, when it was time to write another book, I was thinking about, "Okay, what would be the natural next book to do with him?" So I wrote this story about two friends, and it's called Built to Last. They bond over building things together and imagining different worlds, and no matter what they build, eventually it comes tumbling down. It's just a really fun story. In the manuscript, I never specify who these two are. I try to keep it very-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I wondered about that. Okay.
Minh Lê:
There's two friends, but Dan interpreted it as a baby Minh and a baby Dan becoming friends over time. When my wife and I opened up the PDF for the first time, we were just on the floor in a mixture of tears and laughing. It's such a sweet thing. So, it's a book about while their friendship is built on building things together, what they realize at the end is that even when everything's falling apart, it's like the thing that was really built to last was their friendship. The relationships that you make through these moments is ultimately what's more important than the thing that you may be making at the time. It ties into that elemental message of connection.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
All right, you all. That's really it. Thanks for listening and keep reading.