Oge Mora

Oge Mora:
It's not like I haven't experienced pain or tragedy or grief in my life, and it's not like I want to deny that, but I don't think that that's the entirety of my song. When I want to look back on my life, I want to look at all the amazing things and experiences I had, because that's what makes the time we have in this world so incredibly special is that we have these connections. We have these experiences as people.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oge Mora makes books about what we might call the simple pleasures. A Saturday walk, a simmering bowl of soup. Except, in her hands, those ordinary moments aren't actually so simple. They're layered with the connections of community and the magic of memories. Like the collage artwork she makes out of torn newsprint and scrap fabric, Oge's picture books are often about re-examining our everyday items and relationships and finding them infused with deeper color and feeling than we might expect.

Oge Mora:
Even though sometimes it can feel... You look on the news that those connections feel non-existent, but they're there. Or at least I'm going to keep fighting and reminding myself that they are there, because that's what makes this world so special. That's why we're here, to connect.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oge is a star clearly on the rise. Her debut picture book, which she wrote and illustrated, Thank You, Omu, earned her a Caldecott Honor, as well as the Coretta Scott King, John Steptoe New Talent Award, and a host of other accolades. She made the list for the Arts and Style section of the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30, and among her other notable works are Saturday and I'm From.

In this episode, Oge tells us about the doodle that got her discovered, her art school breakthrough that led her from shame to pride, and why she wants her books to be like a cozy cup of hot cocoa. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookie, 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 at The Reading Culture Pod, and please also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, on to the show.

What's happening behind you in your background? Can you just describe... Are you in your studio?

Oge Mora:
Oh, I'm in my studio, so I have a bunch of posters and stuff, and then some books on my shelf if I'm doing a book, and I have a couple of stuff that I have an inspiration as I'm working on it, I like to be able to have them nearby to pull them out. I'm working on a book right now. What you're seeing behind here is all my tracing paper and blotted paper towels with paint on it. Right now I'm just surrounded by paper scraps. It's from magazines and the inside of envelopes and old books and knickknacks and some painted stuff. If I zoomed out, and you truly saw my studio, people would be like, "Why does it look like a bomb went off?"

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Hey, it's me. And for all of you who obviously can't see Oge in video right now, I'll just note here that her description is very accurate. She's beaming at me from a scene of beautiful chaos.

Oge Mora:
I'm glad it looks nice from here.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I just think it looks like what I would think that your space would look like based on your books. I think everything about this looks like it should look. So there you go.

Oge Mora:
Great.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So let's first talk about your family and growing up. You grew up in Columbus, Ohio, so maybe you could just paint a picture of what life was like as little Oge.

Oge Mora:
Awesome. Yeah. So I grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the Mount Vernon Long Street area, and before me it was a historically black neighborhood. I was right across the street from a school and right across the street from the library, and there's this lawn that was down there with the corner store and the church that we went to. And every day after school, rather than actually just going straight home, we'd go immediately to the library. There wasn't another spot for kids to hang out when I was growing up, and so we would all just hang out in the library, and so it was me and then all the other kids that were in my neighborhood, we were all hanging out at the library. And of course we would read the books, but the library for me, growing up, was more than just a place for books.

All the librarians knew my name, knew my family, had known me since I was a baby. People would be playing games on the computer, doing their homework, passing notes. There were all the first crushes and all that stuff going down at the library. And then more so before we got to read all the amazing books that the library has to offer. And so I would do my homework and things like that, and then I would read comic books, I would read books for my age, and most importantly, I would read picture books.

Picture books were my favorite section of the library, and even after I was old enough to not read picture books, I would keep on reading them. And for me, what just really took me in was the imagery. I've always been a very visual image-forward person. It's always interesting talking to students and stuff like that, and they're like, "Oh, I really like comic books," or "I really like these chapter books that have a lot of images in them," because I was definitely this very same way. It kind of lit up stories for me. So that was just a place that was just always really special to my heart.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you remember when you were younger, some of the books that lit up your world when you were little, or ones that were like your repeat renewals?

Oge Mora:
Oh, my repeat renewals. I was really into Storytime books as a kid. I liked books that if they're doing the storytime, they were kind of performed, or like We're Going on a Bear Hunt, the Froggy books, Abiyoyo, anything where I could also participate in it was always what I could really get into. The images are great, but I could kind of take part and it becomes this big kind of [inaudible 00:06:32] affair was always something that was really magical for me, and just made books really exciting like a TV show. Even now when I'm writing my own books, that storytime element is always really important to me. I'm like, is this a great place to do voices? Is this something that can be repeated or parroted back? I'm always looking for ways that you can engage with that young reader who can't partake in the words just yet, but can partake in the experience of the book and the story of the book, and how can the form of the book help emphasize that fact.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, it makes sense that you're thinking that way. Knowing your work, that makes complete sense to me. Okay, so growing up, were you always an artistic person? Were you the person that people thought of as okay, the creative one?

Oge Mora:
I think I was deemed one of the art kids definitely growing up ever since I was a kid. I just really liked drawing. I was just always drawing and stuff like that and people would be like, "Oh, you should be an artist," or "You should take classes." There were these Saturday morning art classes that were really well-known and stuff, but I didn't have any money or means to take any of those classes, so I was just kind doodling ahead and things like that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How did you teach yourself the skills that you do have before going to art school, and what was your method?

Oge Mora:
Well, actually what happened is a friend of my mom's was a retired school teacher. I call her Mrs. Willis, but she also known as Sister Catherine, and she ran this nonprofit in my neighborhood called FACE. It was called Friends for Community Enrichment. They ran events that were just supposed to connect the kids in my neighborhood, or you could think of the library kids to art. She would take us to art museums. They had a choreographer from Dr. Gloria Van Scott come from New York and teach dance over the summertime. They had chess classes at the library. So they were always just trying to expose us to different things that maybe we just wouldn't have been exposed to where we were growing up. And one time, she was taking me back home from an event, and she had given us a flyer or something to give to our parents.

I was already starting to doodle on the flyer that she was having sent back, and so she looked at me and she was like... and saw me doodling. Up until that point, whenever people had seen me doodle on something, especially if it was something important, it was an irritable thing where they're like, "Oh my gosh, okay, you need to get this together." Like, "Ugh, stop. Can't she keep the paper clean" or things like that. She was like, "Okay, do you like to draw?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I love drawing." And she's like, "Are you sure?" And I was like, "Yeah, I'm sure." And she was like, "Okay, because if you're sure, I think that I might be able to get you a scholarship to go to Saturday morning art classes. The only thing is I've done this a couple of times before, and the kids will go to one or two classes, and they'll stop going. And so if I do this, I need you to promise me you're going to attend every single class."

And I had heard, people had mentioned it to me to that point of these Saturday morning art classes, I just, how was I supposed to get to these Saturday morning art classes? So I knew immediately what she was talking about and I was like, "This is my shot." And so I was like, "Yes, I'm going to go to these classes and I won't miss the class," and I did it. So I started taking those classes. I think I was in seventh grade, and the cool thing about that class is they give you sketchbooks as a part of the class that you get to take home and keep. So that was the shift around that time between me just doodling over everything, and then finally actually having a specific place in order to keep my sketches. I liked that class so much. I ended up taking some other art courses also on CCAD campus after my Saturday morning art classes.

So I was basically spending all day Saturday on campus, taking some sort of course. One of the courses I was taking, there were other kids from all over in the Columbus area who are also really interested in trying to get a portfolio together, considering art school, or just wanted to do art, whether it was fashion design or comic book art or video games, whatever it really was. But because of Sister Catherine, I had already taken all those courses, and I already had a lot of that portfolio ready to go, and it was those courses and art I made in that I was able to go to RISD free college on a full scholarship, and get some more information from there. Sister Catherine, she gets a signed copy of every book-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love it.

Oge Mora:
... that comes out. I think of that ending note in my book, Thank You, Omu, and just the gratitude I've had for the people in my community who have folded me and shaped me, and been there for me in ways that my parents couldn't have at any particular time. That book is definitely for them because it really was a community. It was Sister Catherine. There was the librarians that looked after me after school. There was an awesome curator from the King Arts complex that ran a docent program that wasn't too far from my neighborhood, and that was also a big kind of moment for me, because in this docent program, you're learning about all the art, you're learning how to show people through the exhibitions, through the King Arts complex, but it's also rooted in my neighborhood, and that was the first time I had realized that the area I grew up in was a creative hub for black creatives. That was really big for me, because I definitely felt growing up, as I started to really get in more into art and I was learning about the Monets and the Matisse and all these well-established masters of the craft, I got into my head that the art that I was often seeing, like the Mina Robinson, the Elijah Pierce, all this stuff that my neighborhood was adorned in was not-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Fine art?

Oge Mora:
... the art to celebrate, or it wasn't the high art. There's that term I hate, outsider art, is often what that stuff-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's folk art.

Oge Mora:
... that art was referred to. Yes, exactly that. And so it was supposed to be more of the lowbrow, not the stuff that you were supposed to aspire to kind of paint. And so I kind of got it into my head. Even when I look back at my portfolio that got me to the school I ended up at, it was definitely kind of replicating what I had thought was already established. I thought to myself, if I could just make myself into what I see as already being celebrated, then I'm going to be respected. People are going to think that I'm a real artist. And it was honestly, there was that moment there where I started to question that narrative. Once I got to school, I started to question that narrative even more.

I came to a point where I was like, why do I have to deny who I am to be an artist? Why is that fair? Why do we learn about these artists that have... they don't look like me, they don't make art that's like me. Well, why do I have to take an elective course to see artists to make art that I understand, that is the art that I grew up with, is the art that I relate to? I started just learning more about African-American art, aesthetics, African aesthetics artists who look like me, Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, Mark Bearden, Elijah Pierce, Amina Robinson, Ella Natsui. Like there's so many artists that maybe I didn't hear in my general art history courses or in some of the art classes that I had taken that I just decided I was going to learn on my own.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You're probably used to this being about the time in the show when our guest reads a passage that has left a lasting impression on them. However, the lasting impression for Oge was, unsurprisingly, more visual in nature. So when I asked her about her passage, Oge turned around to the colorfully busy area behind her and pulled out A Street Called Home by Amina Robinson, which was published in 1997. Oge unveiled what appeared to be a scrapbook-sized picture book, and upon opening the first page, it folded out into this long canvas full of vibrant colors and textures. Every square inch of it was full with lively images and these endless stories hidden in the smallest of details. For Oge, she felt she had to show a book rather than just read its text. Like Amina Robinson, Oge's primary medium is collage, and though her style isn't that similar to Robinson's, you can see the thread that runs from one artist to the other, and as it turns out, the two of them have a lot more than just their art in common.

Oge Mora:
Amina Robinson is very well known for making really large story quilts, if you could think of them. And in these story quilts, she would use old dresses and old pair of jeans and mismatched buttons, and she would stitch all these things together and she would tell the stories of living on Mount Vernon Avenue, living in my neighborhood in Columbus, and she would talk about the people that she knew. She was much older than me, so growing up in the 1940s with the Ice Man and the Brown Bag Man and things like that. She just had all these different characters of people that she would see in her life, and those were the stories she showed to tell in these illustrations. And so, growing up, I would see her work, I would see pieces just like the ones that you see in hear, and that, for me, showed me the wonder of my neighborhood, made me more curious about the people that I talked to, the buildings that I walked past.

And so it was one of those things where I've always been a really big fan of her and loved her, and then I went out of school and people just hadn't even heard of her, or were just like, "Oh, who's this random..." But she's so amazing. She's so talented. What I love about going back to Columbus is everybody knows her by name. I think about how she approached her murals and approached her quilts. I hope that I'm approaching my collages as I'm making them out of my own mismatched items is a very similar way, taking these mismatched and ordinary items and piecing them together to kind of display the magic of our everyday experiences.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So she was sort of sowing those, pun intended, sowing those seeds for you at a pretty young age, without even maybe realizing it, but that sort of foundation was there. Even though you're... said you were having to learn about Monet, whatever these so-called greats were this was here in your foundations?

Oge Mora:
Yeah. She always made me consider the space I was and see it as beautiful, and know that where I grew up, whatever anyone said, was a beautiful place to grow up. And I had always felt that, just by kind of leaving the boundaries of my neighborhood. There was a time in my life where I questioned that or I felt ashamed for that love, and so I was trying to hide it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When you were at college?

Oge Mora:
I was trying to dissociate it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like at the beginning of when you were first at college and surrounded by all these other people who had all this other fanciness.

Oge Mora:
I felt ashamed of where I grew up. I felt ashamed of where I grew up. I felt ashamed of the things that I was gravitating towards. I wanted to be impressive, I wanted to be respected, and the only people I saw in these spaces that were getting respected were people who weren't making art that I was interested making or I didn't look like me at all. And so I thought I just had to be those people to be respected, and I think it just always rang false, because it just wasn't true. And so I just decided I wanted to be honest with myself and honest with what I loved and honest with who I was.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oge's self-expression, both her fearless voice and her bright collage work, is a natural fit for her positive, family-focused books. But I was surprised to hear that she initially dismissed illustration as a potential career, right up until the point where it's suddenly offered to pay her bills.

Oge Mora:
I decided I wanted to be an illustrator when I received a contract to be an illustrator. That was not my dream coming out of school. I knew going into school that the thing that made me the happiest in this world was making art, but I was under no understanding that that was actually what I was going to do. So coming out of school, my dream was I wanted health insurance and a 401k, and if a job could get me that, I was going to take job.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And to make your art? Come on, right? Yeah. Okay.

Oge Mora:
And I was like, I could do the art on the side if maybe I could work for a museum, or some sort of art-related nonprofit.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were open.

Oge Mora:
As long as I can get close.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So how did that come to be then?

Oge Mora:
At that point, I came into illustration, and I realized my sophomore year I was like, I'm good at painting. I'm good at drawing, but I get my worst scores in my illustration courses. I don't think I'm very good at this. I'm not a very good illustrator. I've never been the type of person to have these high-concept ideas. And I would try. Don't worry, I would try. We get the prompt for that week. I would think, "Oh, I really got this. This is going to be the project," and I'd come in and I would see what everyone else did, and I would feel very dumb. I just would feel very dumb. I really am grateful to one of my professors while I was in school, who is named Fred Lynch, and he kind of really helped me discover it. He was like, "Hey, Oge," and honestly kept me in illustration, because I was trying to leave illustration, and he was just like, "That's dumb. Don't do that." He was like, "Hey, maybe your ideas aren't out-of-the-box ideas." I was like, "Yeah, that's true. But they don't have to be. That's not what illustration is about, this high-concept idea."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Can you define what you would think as a high-concept idea, for example?

Oge Mora:
If you have a project and the prompt was, is the glass half full or the glass half empty? Somebody who would like, you would look at their answer to that question that would completely change your life. You're like, I never even thought of doing that. That's an amazing idea. I would see it as a high-concept idea. Now, if I actually had that prompt and I sort of learned to do that, if I had a prompt, was like, "Is a glass half full or the glass half empty?" I wouldn't be afraid to just draw the glass or collage the glass.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I think you collage it half full, based on your demeanor and your laughter. I think it's half full. Okay, but go ahead.

Oge Mora:
I think so. But big thing for him was, 'Hey, you don't have to change my life by how you've approached this project." He's like, "The way that you collage, making art or making illustration is all about taking the ordinary thing and just turning a little bit. Sometimes it's a dramatic shift, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a small shift, just a little, little thing, and that creates the interest that pulls your viewer in." He kind of gave me a voice or a language in which to kind of see my illustration. You can see it in my books. This might be spicy, but I don't think that Thank You, Omu was a high-concept idea. There's so many books that have something with stew or community as an element to them. People are like, stoned soup or this or... Think about it. You're thinking about the concept of Saturday, a mom and a daughter spend a Saturday together.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
They're just spending a Saturday.

Oge Mora:
Just spending a Saturday together. There aren't any dragons involved. There aren't any M. Night Shyamalan-like twist endings.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It would be funny though.

Oge Mora:
It's not like a meta picture book where I'm like, "What is the picture book space? I'm going to just break the fourth wall. I'm going to just talk to the reader." I'm like, nothing really high-concept like that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What would be one of the images from one of the books that you would say is that shifts the ordinary just a little?

Oge Mora:
I think the stories. You think about the stories themselves, where I'm taking this theme or this story from my life growing up and my grandmother making stew for my family, and the little shift is suddenly the stew scent can travel across the world or travel across that neighborhood, and so it becomes something slightly bigger, and you just kind of have that simple hook. The way I see my narrative, my storytelling is I'm not making you something that you've never seen anymore, but I'm more interested in taking the things that we have, the things that we all understand, the things that we share, and putting them in the spotlight. That little bit of shift to draw attention to the commonness of these narratives that make us consider our own narratives.

The greatest compliment somebody can give me after reading Thank You, Omu, is to share their story with me, and that's what happened through the years is people will come up to me, people will send me emails, will show up in person and they'll tell me about their grandmother, what they made, the foods that this reminds them of and their culture. My dad would make pizza from scratch every Friday with us, and it was just this really magical thing. I think the thing with Thank You, Omu is while I was making the book, my teachers were like, "You need a stew recipe," and the agent was like, "You need a stew recipe." My editor was like, "Have you considered a stew recipe?"

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's what's going at the back of this book is the stew recipe.

Oge Mora:
Yes, and I've had so many readers come up to me and they'd be like... or send me emails and be like, "Where's the stew recipe? I wanted the stew."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's not the point though, huh?

Oge Mora:
It's not the point. So that was a very deliberate decision not to include that stew recipe, because I didn't want it to be a book where it was like, oh, this is how you make Nigerian stew for this Nigerian family and have a little dip into Nigeria while reading this kind of book. I hope you would be less interested about what's going on on my family table and more interested in what goes on your own family tables. It was the same thing with Saturday, where it's like, I hope that my relationship with my mom could be a window into your own relationships with your mom. Again, one of the biggest compliments I've received for that book was having someone come up and say, "You've told my story." My hope as an artist and as a writer is that by telling my own individual stories, I might empower people to tell their own stories or to see their stories played out in a picture book, and it's the same thing with my art.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I think, honestly, what I'm hearing you say, which is really lovely to think about it, because I've read your books, they feel like these homage to people, just to these characters in all of our lives, but in your life they become real for us too.

Oge Mora:
Oh, exactly. I like to tell these ordinary things, whether it's narratives or the papers that I select, and I try to tell the story about how these things are extraordinary or reveal that magic that already exists there. The thing that gets me about a book like I'm From is Gary could grow up in Nova Scotia in Canada, and he could have so much in common to me growing up in Columbus, Ohio. Even my fellow illustrators that I've met, that you cannot meet someone ever, you've never met them, you don't know them in person, but you do know them, because of that art, because of the words that connect you in that way. I had an illustrator friend that I met for the first time, and we immediately saw each other, came up to each other, and just hugged, and we're like, "I know this is weird, because I know this is the first time we've met. We've never even talked on social media," and I was like, "No, it's okay. I do know you, just like me, because you can see it on the page."

It's because I love people. I love the connections that we have, the community that we can all share. That is what motivates me in the story. I used to think that my lack of storytelling ability in terms of changing your life or changing the storytelling landscape was something that was a weakness, a handicap of mine that I was just going to have to aid with my collages or I was just going to have to fold you in some way, but I think the more and more I create, the more and more I come into my own voice and consider myself as a writer, as a creator, as a illustrator, is that what I saw as my handicap is really my strength.

I'm glad I'm rooted in the things that we know, because I want us to consider those things, and these are just as large or just as brilliant as those other brilliant things. I want people to look at me and see that I'm sharing my voice, and I'm being my whole self, and it's okay to do that, and I hope if I can try, and I have to try, to be as fearless as I can in my own self-expression, that that can be a statement for self-expression in itself.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You just bring tears to my eyes. It's just so beautifully said. I want to talk a little bit now about some of the things you've referenced, about people sending you emails or coming up to you to tell you how much your book resonated with them. I've heard you share about that, and I'd just love to know if you have any other really specific experiences with these readers that have stuck out to you.

Oge Mora:
There was a little boy who came to one of my book signings, and his favorite book was Thank You, Omu. He loved it so much, he asked his parents to read it for him every single night. And so I signed it for him, and then I saw him and his mom. He immediately, after he got the book signed, he pulled it out and started reading it again, because heard it so many times that he could just kind of go ahead and read it again. That's the magic. That's why I do everything that I do. If I can go to a school and a kid might be excited to make their own book at home or tell their own stories or... I met a little girl just earlier this year who is like, "I'm also Nigerian. It's so nice to see you and you have this experience." It felt kind of... I guess there had been some sort of issue at that particular school, and that had happened just that week or a week before, and so it was really resonating for her to see me and meet me and also see so much of her life reflected on that page. That's everything for me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What do you think the role of joy is in your writing? I really you feel like you've actually... I was making the joke about the glass being half full with you, but the colors, the laughter, the smile, and I know that obviously you can't view the whole, especially right now, it's hard to view the whole world positive lens, but I think there's just something about this. And it's also the way you described your neighborhood, but it's just like there's some contentment or joy or something that really just emanates from you, and I'm wondering what you view as the role of that in your creation.

Oge Mora:
I would sometimes get the kind of feedback that is like, "Oh, your stories are just so fanciful, these fairy tales that you're writing here, they're so overly positive or just unreal, this perfect this and perfect that." But I think what I would say is I don't think that I'm showcasing perfection in my books. It's so funny. People think of, "Oh, everything works out on Saturday." I was like, everything went wrong that day.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Does it though?

Oge Mora:
Yeah. It's not like I haven't experienced pain or tragedy or grief in my life, and it's not like I want to deny that, but I don't think that that's the entirety of my song. I think if I would want to look back on this world as long as I'm in it and when I want to look back on my life, I want to look at all the amazing things and experiences I had, because that's what makes the time we have in this world so incredibly special is that we have these connections, we have these experiences with people. And so I want to celebrate what makes life so beautiful in these ways, in whatever way I can. And I like to think of my books as a cozy cup of cocoa. That's most definitely what I'm attempting to make, and it's not because that's the entirety of the world, it's just that yes, it's in times like this when you look on the news or you have an experience in your life and you're just like, why? And it feels like-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
A blanket.

Oge Mora:
... you want rest, you want comfort. And I hope my books can give that comfort. I hope those books can remind us of the things that are truly important, those connections that we have with each other, even though sometimes it can feel, you look on the news, that those connections feel nonexistent, but they're there, or at least I'm going to keep fighting and reminding myself that they are there, because what makes this world so special. That's why we're here, to connect.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Thinking about your work, maybe you want to tell us about what projects you have, if there's any particular work that you have, something forthcoming, something you're working on that you're excited about.

Oge Mora:
I recently had a book come out that's called I'm From, that's written by the fabulous Gary Gray Jr from HarperCollins. The book that I'm working on behind me is this amazing book called More or Less. That is a book that's about recycling, repurposing, sustainability, so that's why I have so many plastic bags over here, collaging those into the work. And then I am also looking forward to my third written and illustrated book, called Mr. Parker's Garden.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oge reexamines the familiar in all of her works through her signature medium of collage. Even the smallest and most quotidian elements of our lives take center stage in her vibrant illustrations. For her reading challenge, Oge wanted to honor other picture books that feature her favorite art form.

Oge Mora:
I think the thing that I love so much about being a collage artist is that there are no rules. I love how broad the medium is, that there are so many different approaches that you can take, that for someone who's all about individual expression, I think that collage parallels that love, and so I've always enjoyed seeing so many other picture book artists who are also collage artists, but seeing that they have a completely different and unique perspective to the craft, and seeing how varied it can be, and how there's such a variety of different ways that you can use, cut paper and materials, to illustrate words.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Oge's Reading Challenge Story Collage at thereadingculturepod.com, along with reading challenges from all of our past guests, including Jacqueline Woodson, Erin Entrada Kelly, John Claussen, and many, many more.

Today's featured Beanstack Librarian is once again Alli Buffington, library media specialist at Holly Navarre Intermediate School in Florida. Alli had so many nuggets of wisdom to share that we had to share another segment, so this time she tells us about the most successful reading challenge that she's run at her school, and whether you have Beanstack or not, I think that the underlying philosophy she has will really resonate.

Alli Buffington:
My most successful Beanstack reading challenges, it's kind of hard to pinpoint. Last year, my most successful one was the symbols, secret codes, and emojis, but it was the first bingo-style challenge that my kids had done. Since then, I have been spinning a new bingo challenge every single month with my kids. And I feel like the reason that that was so successful is because it really celebrated student choice. There was a way to go into the challenge and kind of review everything and see which pieces drew them in, and then they were easily celebrated for being able to participate in it. The bingo challenges are a perfect way to celebrate the student choice and reading and show them that all reading matters. When we tell the kids that all reading matters, which is really what Beanstack does, we're telling them that their interests matter as well. We are telling them that they have a way they can connect with books and they can model that for the rest of their lives, and I feel like that's really important.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Oge Mora. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently, I'm reading Louder than Hunger by John Schu, and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. 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. 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. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script-edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. Thanks for joining, and keep reading.