About this episode
In this episode, Shannon shares about growing up in a deeply conservative culture and how writing unearthed her true voice from where it had been simmering beneath the surface. We discuss everything from anxiety to the family cat to boys’ relationship with the color pink. Oh, and we have a special visitor, Shannon’s husband and co-creator, Dean Hale, to discuss their combined writing journeys!
"I feel like it was this little miracle that in some areas of my life, I'm shutting myself up and shutting myself down. But with my writing, I was always really connecting with that inner voice." - Shannon Hale
Flaws. We do everything to hide them away and pretend they don’t exist. But what if these flaws that we try so desperately to mask are exactly what we need to access our power, our story? How does one tap into it? How does one express the very things they tried so hard to hide? For Shannon Hale, it was writing. By picking up the pen, Shannon discovered her voice, purpose, and true, messy, loveable self.
As Shannon puts it, “If my gravestone simply said ‘Author of The Princess in Black,’ I would be happy.” Caregivers for young kids likely know Shannon and her husband, Dean Hale, as the authors of the beloved bestselling “Princess in Black” series featuring a princess with a secret superhero identity. The books have turned countless kids into avid readers, and Shannon has an endless list of anecdotes to show it. But her career spans far beyond the series. Shannon is an acclaimed author who is celebrated for her children's and young adult novels, such as the Newbery Honor-winning "Princess Academy" and her memoir graphic novel “Real Friends” series.
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Taking inspiration from her series, “The Princess in Black,” for Shannon's reading challenge, Early Chapter Books, she’s put together a list of thoughtful and engaging early chapter books for all readers. Take a look at the list below!
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This episode's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Ady Huerta, the Program Manager of Youth, Family, & Equity Services at San Diego Public Library, who serves on the presidential advisory committee for incoming president Cindy Holt. She tells us what to expect for the upcoming ALA Conference.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - ‘Squeetus’ the Highly Sensitive
- Chapter 2 - A Loophole to the Inner Voice
- Chapter 3 - Anne of Green Gables
- Chapter 4 - The Family in Black
- Chapter 5 - Boys Like Pink Too
- Chapter 6 - The Key to Friendship
- Chapter 7 - Reading Challenge
- Chapter 8 - Beanstack Featured Librarian
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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Shannon Hale:
I feel like it was this little miracle that in some areas of my life I'm shutting myself up and shutting myself down, but with my writing, I was always really connecting with that inner voice.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Words are to us what ones and zeros are to computers. They're the language of processing, processing that which we may or may not always be aware of.
Shannon Hale:
It does feel like a little miracle that I had that stabilizing force in throughout my whole life.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shannon Hale spent a lot of her childhood anxiously trying to be perfect, even when that meant hiding her true feelings and personality, but she eventually discovered that when she wrote, she was free to be honest with herself. Shannon is an acclaimed author, celebrated for her children's and young adult novels such as the Newberry Honor-wining Princess Academy and her memoir graphic novel, Real Friends series, and of course, many of you will know Shannon for her bestselling, The Princess in Black series, which features a princess with a secret superhero identity. By the way, LeUyen Pham, a guest on this podcast and Shannon's bestie, illustrated both of those series.
In this episode, Shannon will tell us about growing up in a deeply conservative culture and how writing unearthed her true voice, her authentic self from where it had been simmering just beneath the surface. As you'll hear, we'll get into some very telling revelations.
Shannon Hale:
[inaudible 00:01:32]
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, and we have a wee surprise for you.
Dean Hale:
If it's good and funny, I claim it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shannon's coauthor and collaborator on The Princess in Black and in life, Dean Hale, will join us to talk about how they started work on the series and why it's been such a family affair. Yes, Dean, her husband.
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 at The Reading Culture Pod, and you can also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right. Onto the show.
My first question is, I tried to look around and find it, maybe it's on your website and I missed it, but what's up with squeetus?
Shannon Hale:
It was just a random word that my husband made up, and it was because it was a nonsense word, like domain names and email names were always available, and so we just kind of grabbed them. Also, he used to call me, a nickname he used to call me was Squeeter Pig. He felt like squeetus was the formal version of Squeeter Pig.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay.
Shannon Hale:
But too formal and royal for everyday use.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. Well, that heavy hitter's out of the way. All right. I just want to start off with your growing up life, which you really share a lot about, and if people really want to know the details, they just go read your graphic novels. You gave up a lot there, and I've heard you say that those are pretty much true. There's no made up saved for a few things parts, so that's an accurate reflection, but yeah, just talking about your younger childhood, what life was like for little Shannon Hale.
Shannon Hale:
So mom and a dad, stay at home mom, working dad, five kids. I was the middle kid, and my two older sisters were a year and a half apart, and my younger brother and sister were a year and a half apart, but I was separated by three and four years, so I was in this gap in the middle. Partly because of that, I did feel like a bit of a loner in my home, and big imagination lived a lot in my head, but was really the only avid reader in my family. Eventually started doing theater and I was the only person really interested in that.
Just from birth, I had a different kind of ... I was just tuned into stories in a really big way, and that didn't come from my family, necessarily. It was almost like a coping mechanism, like how to survive in a place where you don't quite feel like you belong, which is probably how most kids feel. I had a stable home, I had loving parents, but they were so different than me. They just couldn't understand what was going on with this bizarre little child.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And you felt like that even when you were really young.
Shannon Hale:
I did. So much of my life, and I talk about in my books, I had an anxiety disorder and OCD, and I think so much of that was trying to cope with what I thought I was supposed to be like. There's this designation, highly sensitive person. Some research has shown that 15, 20% of human and animal populations are just wired this way. In evolution terms, it would be beneficial to have some people who notice the sounds and smells more and can alert everyone else, but what it means is I just take everything in so much of a bigger way.
It's not good or bad, it's a neutral thing. I can get so much my joy up so fast listening to a song or noticing a sunset, and when something negative happens, it plummets so fast. Everybody else in my family is more even keeled and I'm just this dialed up to 11 kid who's taking in all this sensory information so much.
So I notice every twitch of my parents' lip of disapproval, and the fear of rejection is so heavy in me that I'm like, "I have to be perfect. I have to be the kid that they need me to be," without consciously thinking that, but that's absolutely what was going on. So much of my anxiety is not anyone's fault, it's just me reacting to an environment where I didn't quite fit and trying, putting so much pressure on myself to fit and be perfect.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was your release? Did you write?
Shannon Hale:
Yeah. My mom says that I was making up stories before I could talk because I'd be sitting in the high chair and I would be going [inaudible 00:06:26] She's like, "It wasn't normal baby babble." It was like-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were talking.
Shannon Hale:
It was like a three-act structure in the baby babble, and I was always making up games. I made up little plays to have my younger brother and sister, anybody I could rope in to perform with me. I made up games for my friends to play. I didn't know I was storytelling, but that's clearly what it was. I read a lot and I had stories in my head. It was fourth grade when I had a teacher that had to start writing short stories, and that was the first time I was like, "Oh, I could actually do this."
That was something I'm so grateful for with my teachers is that they did allow me some expression because I would make up these plays and I would practice them with friends on the playground, and then they would let me perform them for of the class. These little, they were probably a minute and a half long, but still, that was very indulgent of them. That was something I really appreciate.
Then my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Pacman, read something I wrote at parent-teacher conference to the parents because I never had a lot of, "You got it, kid," kind of stuff. So you cling to those little positive feedbacks of, "Maybe this is something I could do." I really didn't think I could be a professional writer, like I could make a living at it. That was not something in ... We never met authors, like authors didn't come-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, they never really came to the schools like now.
Shannon Hale:
No, not until after Harry Potter did publishing, see children's books as a big enough industry that they would tour children's authors. So we never met any authors. Also, I was raised in a very conservative culture where the only women I knew were stay-at-home moms or occasionally they're teachers or nurses. So there was very limited options. I never saw modeled for me women having careers at all.
So in my mind, I thought, "Maybe I could write books someday," but it was always in a hobby way. I'm going to be a mom. In fact, there's this song. There's this culture I grew up in. I mean, obviously, the '80s were different for women in every way, but I was in an especially conservative culture. The media that we had, one of the songs I grew up ... I do not sing. I cannot carry a tune, but I'm going to sing for you right now, Jordan.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay.
Shannon Hale:
This is one of the songs that we used to listen to over and over again on a tape of children's music.
When I grow up, I want to be a mother and have a family.
One little two little three little babies that I love.
And you will say each sister and each brother will look a lot like me.
Four little five little six little blessings from above.
And it just keeps counting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. They're like 12.
Shannon Hale:
The job is to have many babies as you can get, and that is what makes-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were singing along to that?
Shannon Hale:
I was. I was singing along, not questioning that that was going to be my lot. I had mom who had five kids and they always said, "Oh, we wish we could have had more." My dad was one of eight kids and that was just what you did.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you remember a particular moment in which you were like, "Hey, wait, I don't necessarily want this. I want something else for myself"?
Shannon Hale:
I wish I had one big epiphany, but what it was was constant cognitive dissonance of moments of like, "Wait a minute," and then stuffing it down like I did everything else. It was dangerous for me to question.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Was it? Yes.
Shannon Hale:
It felt dangerous to disagree. I didn't feel like I had an option to say, "Can I choose for myself? Can I see what feels right to me and make that choice?" That didn't feel possible.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. That's a lot to unpack growing up like that, and that's the Mormon church, right? But I understand that you distanced yourself from that more officially.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah. So I grew up in the Mormon church my whole life and was active for 45 years. It was my community, it's my family. There's so much good in it, and everybody's different. Everybody's experience is different. My experience, what I took out of it, what I learned, what I believed isn't the same as what everybody else did. So the experience of a really anxious, highly sensitive girl in growing up in the '80s is going to be completely different than anybody else as well.
There was so much great about it and there was so much that was really hard for me about it. Ultimately, I did step away a few years ago. I'm still officially a member, and I'm not interested in badmouthing the organization or anybody in it. Everybody's got to find their own path, but for me, with my kids it was like, "I think actually it's best not to be here anymore."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I imagine that's probably liberating and painful all at once.
Shannon Hale:
I mean, it's a 10-year journey that continues, and I don't regret a moment of it. Having gone through something that wrote itself on every cell of my body and then deconstructing from that and figuring out as an adult what do I actually believe and how do I actually see the world in myself, that's an amazing experience. You can't go on any kind of meditation retreat that's going to give you that kind of experience. There's no therapist in the world that can give you that. So I feel really lucky. I feel like I got this chance to go through myself tiny piece by piece and really work through everything. Man, I feel amazing now.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really?
Shannon Hale:
I mean, I had anxiety, OCD for my entire life for decades. They're gone. It's gone.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Shannon Hale:
I didn't know you could cure that. After that being constant shout in my head 24 hours a day every waking moment and now it's gone. It's really a cool experience and, of course, not everybody who goes through that also has the same experience, but for me, it's been amazing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Before this interview, Shannon shared a quote with my producer Jackie. It's from E. M. Forster and goes like this. "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" The act of writing is as much for the writer as it is for the reader, and even when she didn't realize it, Shannon was discovering more about herself and her place in the world through the words and stories that came out of her.
Shannon Hale:
It definitely has. Looking back now, so I was that kid who didn't allow myself to listen to my own inner voice because I was wrong. Everything I did and felt was wrong, so I'm stuffing everything down, but it turned out that when I was writing, I was in this meditative state where I'm just me in the story, but I think you can't be in that state without being really connected to your inner self. So I think writing was always when I actually could hear my own voice.
Even looking back now at things I wrote 20 years ago, they still so much represent who I am, and I have no regrets, and they feel like, "Ah, yes, yes. I'm so happy I wrote this," and still, I would write it today with joy." So I feel like it was this little miracle that in some areas of my life, I'm shutting myself up and shutting myself down, but with my writing, I was always really connecting with that inner voice. It does feel like a little miracle that I had that stabilizing force in throughout my whole life.
I did notice throughout the years of like, "Ooh, I haven't had a chance to write in a week." I would feel not good. I'd feel more anxious than normal. I used to explain it to myself of like, "I need to feel productive and I wasn't being productive. I wasn't producing things in the good little cog of the machine of this world," and maybe that was part of it, but part of it was, for sure, that was my meditation time when I was allowing the anxiety and everything to go away and I was connecting with that little bright spot inside me.
Writing was my sneaky loophole way to access my inner voice without going through all of the snaggy barbed wire fences that I had built because I thought that I had to shut that off in order to be a good and worthy person.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, my god, the things we tell ourselves. Okay. When you weren't writing, what were some of the things that you loved to read?
Shannon Hale:
I did love fantasy, and it was amazing to find fantasy that had female leads. I really felt like I lived in a world where women were not the heroes, and certainly the movies, there just was not a lot of value for women's stories. So I have here Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword, which was given to me by my school librarian.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, wow.
Shannon Hale:
And I devoured it, and then she gave me the sequel when it came out, and I devoured that one too, and I reread those over and over again. I love those. I love the Narnia books, and Lloyd Alexander. Patricia McKillip wrote a series called The Riddle Master of Head. Oh, I loved those and read them over and over again. I also loved Homecoming and Dicey's Song, Cynthia Voigt. Those were ones I reread a lot. I mean, I read almost all the books in my library, but the ones that would reread were the Cynthia Voigt. I felt like she was really honest. She wasn't pulling punches, and for me, it was a relief to have an adult see you that way.
You asked me earlier, "Were there any adults who validated how you were feeling and saw you where you were?" and I couldn't think of any, but now I'm saying I think Cynthia Voigt did.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.
Shannon Hale:
So I think that's one reason why I was yearning for books is because in some ways, it was escapism like the fantasy writing far away, and in some ways, the realistic fiction was like, "Yeah." It's really hard.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
She definitely had a lot of unflinching looks at kids that you didn't really get from other that I can think of.
Shannon Hale:
She was so raw, and the characters were not perfect and there were no tidy endings, but just living through that point of view was incredibly validating for me, and I just felt like maybe I was not so broken, maybe. Hey, this Dicey deserves a story and she got a shiny sticker on it even for this story, that's how good a story it is, maybe I deserve a story, which is really like maybe I deserve to live because, certainly, I had dark thoughts, scary thoughts from a very young age about not wanting to be alive. So hearing that someone values a messy kid, Ramona, that's a messy kid who deserves a story, a book, and even a shiny sticker, that gives you hope.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I'm sorry that you had that too when you were younger.
Shannon Hale:
With my Real Friends books, which are about my elementary through middle school years, I have had a lot of adults tell me, "It's too much. These are too dark," and I pull back a lot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I'm sure.
Shannon Hale:
I'm not shoving everything. You don't want to tell all the worst moments, and you don't want to dwell there too long.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I read that you wrote that you held back a lot on the bullying, which feels intense anyway, but you actually didn't include a lot of the worst parts of things that were happening.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, it just was too much. You want kids to know this happens, but you don't want to shove their head underwater with it. So it is a balance trying to figure out what to do because the point of the book for me was not I'm an important historical figure and I need to tell all the details of my life. That would be like an autobiography, I suppose, but a memoir. The point of it is here's some experiences I have that tie together in some way and I'm going to share them with you so you can understand other kids like me, and so you could feel less alone in your own struggles.
I kept that as my guiding stars as I wrote it, but it was interesting how many adults said, "It's too much. It's too hard for kids," and then kids were rereading it over and over again. It wasn't too much or too hard for the kids. It was a relief, "Finally, somebody saying what I'm going through, putting it down," not only in words, but in LeUyen Pham's visuals, the pictures, it's really powerful for a kid to be able to say, "This is how I'm feeling," and point to a picture.
I went to a high school reunion, 30 years, and there was a guy, a great guy who I went to elementary through college with, and he told me that he had a 10-year-old who reread Real Friends so often that it fell apart and they went and had to bind it, rebound it like at a Kinko's. I said, "Oh, she's having our time, is she? She's struggling," and he said, "How did you know?" I said, "Well, because there's something in that book that she's needing, and so she's reading it over and over again because she's needing something from it," and I said, "Did you read it?" He said, "No," and I said, "Dude, you need to read it. If your child is reading a book over and over again, there's something in there."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You need to see it what's in-
Shannon Hale:
"You need to see it, and guess what else? You're in it." He's like, "What?" I was like, "You're literally in the book," and he had no idea what it was about. He didn't even know it was a memoir.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, that's amazing. Okay. God. Okay. We have to do better, parents. All right. I want to go back for a moment to your love of fantasy and just talk a bit about how you got into writing it for young readers, if you can go into that a bit.
Shannon Hale:
I loved reading when I was younger. By the time I was in high school, everything that was assigned to us were the classics, which were mostly these books had been written by people who are now deceased, almost all men, almost all White men, and almost all of them were literary fiction, which was realism with a tragic bent. There was no more genre, there's no more comedy, there's no more fun, there's no romance, there's no mystery. It's just people who had potential, but the world is horrible and they end up sad and depressed or dead.
Then on the Christmas break, I went home and my brother struggled with reading and he had to read a book for a class, and so I got a book that I loved when I was a kid, which was The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander, and I read it to him aloud, the first several chapters to get him hooked, but I also got hooked. I was like, "I forgot how fun this was." So I started reading other fantasy books, and I found that my literary sensibilities had gotten so raised by the really fine literature I was reading that I couldn't enjoy a lot of them anymore and I couldn't let myself just get lost in them, and that's not true of all, but just the ones that I'd happened to read at that time.
So I made a goal for myself. I was like, "I wonder if I could write a book that was written at the sentence level knowing everything I know now, but was still the kind of story that I would've loved when I was 12." So I aimed for Goose Girl. I thought I was writing adult fiction that was fantasy, and I was amazed when it eventually, after many, many rejections in a long time and many years, I did find a publisher and she said, "This was a young adult," and then I discovered this whole new amazing world of young adult literature where so many people were writing exactly what I wanted, which was these really fun, tightly crafted, many different genres of story, but also with so much care for the structure and the sentences so that they were beautiful to read.
Marilla was out in the orchard picking a handful of summer apples when she saw Mr. Berry coming over the log bridge and up the slope with Mrs. Barry beside him in a whole procession of little girls trailing after him. In his arms, he carried Anne, whose head laid limply against his shoulder. At that moment, Marilla had a revelation. In the sudden stab of fear that pierced to her very heart, she realized what Anne had come to mean to her. She would've admitted that she liked Anne, knew that she was very fond of Anne, but now she knew as she hurried wildly down the slope that Anne was dear to her than anything on Earth.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Anne of Green Gables is a classic in the highest sense of the word. First released in 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery's timeless work follows the story of 11-year-old orphan Anne who finds herself in rural Prince Edward Island, Canada with a family that never intended to take her in. Like Dicey from Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt, Anne is flawed, she's imperfect, and yet she deserves love.
Shannon Hale:
They wanted a boy. They wanted a boy because they wanted someone who's going to be useful and strong and could do things boys did, and then she showed up and they were going to get rid of her, and then Marilla decides to keep her out of mercy. As time goes on, we get to this moment where Anne was dared to walk the ridge, pull the roof, and fell off. Mr. Barry is carrying her back because she's broken her ankle.
For me, coming to this moment after everything that came before, it's this pure moment where someone is loved for just being who they are, not for what they can do, not for how productive they are or helpful they are, and in fact, they're quite annoying often, and yet they still have value. The hope of that really moves me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that she's so precious still to them. Okay. When someone cries then I'm going to cry.
Shannon Hale:
It's why I resist crying because it's like a virus, and I don't want to make anyone else cry, but I can't help it. I loved that as a kid. It felt hopeful to me as a kid. As a parent, that brings me to tears.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, my god, yeah, just thinking about that.
Shannon Hale:
As a parent to be like, "I love my kids for being who they are," and the relief of that because I think when I was younger, a younger mom even, I felt like I had to tell them how to be in order to be safe, in order to be good, all of those things I had to tell them how to be. The beauty of letting go of that and realizing, "No, I'm just supporting them in becoming who they actually are and whatever they are is beautiful," and the metaphor I use with my kids that they understand is we have this wonderful, very fat, asthmatic rescue cat who does nothing. He just sits there and occasionally moves to get some treats and otherwise just sits, and we love him so much. That is how I feel, I feel about them and I hope that they feel about themselves and each other that we don't have to earn our worthiness and love. We just are. If we can love this cat, why can't we just love ourselves and each other?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. That's very beautiful. What's your cat's name?
Shannon Hale:
His name is Michael Hat, last name Hat, so his nickname is Mike Hat.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Since 2014, Shannon and Dean Hale have been writing The Princess in Black series. Truly beloved by kids everywhere, and definitely by my own kids growing up and now my younger nieces and nephews, they're modern day classics because this is truly a family affair. We asked Shannon to bring Dean into the interview to join us for a bit. The first thing he told us is that Shannon is the reason he realized he could have his own career in writing.
Dean Hale:
Shannon had written and sold things. She had made it a career, and I was still like, "Eh, is it really possible?"
Shannon Hale:
You still are like that?
Dean Hale:
And I'm still like that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really?
Dean Hale:
Yeah.
Shannon Hale:
True.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, living in that. What was the impetus, I guess, for you to work together?
Shannon Hale:
That was the comic. So I had published several novels and I was meeting these kids who a sibling loved my 380-page fantasy novel, and then another sibling was in the back and the mom would whisper, "They're not really a reader," and I was like, "Oh, but they are. They just don't have the right book. This isn't the right book for them." I wanted to do a comic with Dean. It was not easier to work together. It didn't save time. It cost more time, but there was also, we found it was a fun new part of our relationship that ... We'd known each other for so long and been through so much together already, and now we were pitching ideas back and forth and brainstorming together, and that was fun.
Dean Hale:
Yeah. It was like playing. Even though that we were trying to produce something, it was so much fun. It was like I distanced myself so much from having fun hanging out with friends or doing something like that. In our relationship, we had fun, but there's something next level about cooperating on something like this, especially as you're, like you said, pitching ideas back and forth and coming up with what would be cool.
Shannon Hale:
That's his favorite part. His not favorite part would be revising, which is why I do that.
Dean Hale:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Beyond the Shannon-Dean, husband-wife team writing The Princess in Black series, this was even more of a family affair. The whole series came about after their young daughter said something to Shannon that she couldn't shake.
Shannon Hale:
So one day, she was four years old, her name's Maggie, which is short for Magnolia, and she was wearing this butterfly skirt and she was pointing to the different colors on it, and she said, "Mama purple is a girl color and pink is a girl color but not black," and I was like, "What? I did not raise her this way. Where is this information coming from?" and I said, "Of course girls can wear black. I wear black," and she was kind of like, "Mm," because I'm not a girl, I'm a mama, and I said, "That girl wears black," and I thought that would solve the issue, and she said, "But mama, princesses don't wear black," and I realized her little four-year-old brain had been absorbing information that I never had.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
She's four.
Shannon Hale:
Yes, and she's like, "I'm a girl, and princesses are girl plus, and so they're the ideal and they never wear black, so that must not be a girl thing," and immediately I'm thinking about it like, "The Princess in Black, it sounds like a superhero," and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was thinking about it all day. I went to exercise and I usually play an audio book when I exercise to distract myself from the horror, and I couldn't even pay attention to the audiobook because my mind was just going, going, going with this idea. I was so excited about it. As soon as Dean got home from work, I said, "The princess in Black," and he's like, "Yes," and he immediately just got it.
Dean Hale:
She was a superhero immediately. I can't remember the origin of the monsters, but I was either like she fights monsters or I was completely on board with that idea.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, I don't remember who said what, but that's often how it happens when we're creating is nobody really remembers who did what. Plus, someone says one thing and they build on it and they build on it, and it becomes a joint effort.
Dean Hale:
And if it's good and funny, I claim it in the end.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, and so do everybody else because they're always like, "Oh, I love this part. That must've been Dean," because he's the man and so he's the funny one. I swear to you, I read multiple-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
People aren't saying that. I've read you write about people that be like, "Oh, he must've ..." I read a funny dinner conversation or something with you guys with one of your friends.
Shannon Hale:
It happens all the time, and I've really read comedic books on my own, but anytime there's anything funny, people are like, "It must've been Dean." I'm like, "Actually, women can write comedy, I swear," but anyway, we immediately were really excited about it. We could have really taken the premise and done many things with it, but I specifically wanted to do these early chapter books like Mercy Watson because I had these four young children, and it's a big leap from the early readers to Magic Treehouse in the early chapter books, and I was like, "We really need ones that are shorter word count, larger font, full color illustrations every page," and the only really ones I could find at the time were Nate the Great and Mercy Watson. It was a hard sell. There was not a big market for it. A lot of publishers rejected it.
Dean Hale:
Or wanted to change it.
Shannon Hale:
Wanted us to make them longer and change it. I was like, "No, I swear there's a market for this. I just know it." So we really were very persistent in our view of it. At every stage, people pushed back, but we really knew what we wanted with this book, not only the premise and the way of telling the story, but the format and all of it, and Candlewick just got it. So we went with Candlewick. They also published Mercy Watson, so it just was a no brainer.
The response, again, was so immediate. I love these books so much. If all my gravestone said, I don't want a gravestone, just bury me somewhere, but if I had one, if all it said was, "Author of The Princess in Black", I would be happy. The joy of those books, the way we hear of kids learning to read for the first time on these books or kids who are older who didn't have strong reading skills but they still wanted to read a chapter book, but they were trying to read books that were too hard for them because they weren't there, and these were chapter books that they could cut their teeth on, and then they feel proud of themselves that they read them and their reading confidence goes up and they're able to tackle more books. I mean, at every stage it's been nothing but just joy, joy, joy.
Dean Hale:
It's the same sort of thrust as with the graphic novels. I mean, not exactly the same, but where you see someone who struggles with a traditional dense, thick book and defining themselves as a non-reader and then having them encounter a graphic novel or a book like this and having them be able to do it themselves, it switches.
Shannon Hale:
That negative voice in your head that says, "You're not a reader. You're not capable," it has evidence to the contrary. I was like, "I had very high standards for this," and I had advised that were like, "Okay, then you can't call it The Princess in Black. You can't have princess in the title, and you can't have her on the cover. You have to disguise that it's about a girl," and I said, "Absolutely not. I want it obvious. I want it on the title. I want it on the cover. I want it to be so clear that it's about a girl and about a princess, and they're still going to love it, and then people won't have a place to stand on anymore when they say that boys won't read about girls."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, yeah, I love that. My son, he definitely loved them, and do you get a lot of boys telling you that they love the series?
Shannon Hale:
Oh, yeah. Boys come with their parents and they're like, "They read all the books and they love them." We get pictures of little boys dressed up as The Prince in Black, The Princess in Black's handy sidekick, which he doesn't exist yet, but he's made it up. It's just beautiful. Older boys who grew up with them are like, "Oh, I love The Princess in Black."
I was recently at a high school. I was doing presentation at high school, and high school is a very different kind of a crowd, and they're onto you immediately and you cannot pander to them, and you have to be really honest, but there was this one kid who was making wise cracks of the audience, so I kind of zeroed in on him and I asked his name and he told me, and I pretended to mishear it, and I just kept calling him the wrong name throughout. Anytime I'd make a point, I'd refer to him by his name. I'd be like, "David knows what I'm talking about."
So we had this kind of thing going on, and then I showed Princess in Black and I said, "Raise your hand if you've grown up with this book," and a lot of people raised their hands, but David didn't. I said, "David, I know you did. I know you love this series." He said, "My little sister did." I was like, "Yeah, right, David. Yeah, right. It was your little sister that read Princess in Black. You didn't read every single book. I'm onto you, David, and I know." Then later during question and answer, he raised his hand. He said, "Yeah, I read Princess in Black. I really liked it." That's what's so cool about having a series like this. This has been for years.
Dean Hale:
Yeah. It's been going on long enough that they're teenagers now.
Shannon Hale:
I mean, we meet 18-year-olds that had grown up with this series and been a part of ... Those books you read as kids, they become part of your DNA in a really fabulous way.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I mean, you're making a joke about, "Grow up and believe in gender equality," and all that. You know what I mean? But I think that there's a lot of truth and there's-
Shannon Hale:
I'm not joking. That's how high my ideals are. That's how high my hope is. I really think that ... I'm not saying that Princess in Black is going to solve everything and create world peace, but absolutely, it is a very real influential piece of the puzzle. When kids read stories or see movies, engage in media about girls or anything that's beyond their personal experience, kids of different races, kids of different orientations, whatever, it just creates a space in their brain to say, "These are people who exist if they're not in my family and in my friend group." The brain still absorbs them through the story as being real people, and the brain makes space for these people living in the world.
I think that's one reason why the book bans, I mean, they're ridiculous in so many ways, of course, because there's the internet, so claiming the books are pornography when they're clearly not, and when there's actual pornography available on their smartphones 24/7-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right here in their phones.
Shannon Hale:
... it's very silly to be targeting books, but the truth about books is that they create empathy in a very real way. When we're reading a story, we're engaged, even more than when we're watching a movie, our brains are engaged so deeply, it's just like we're meeting these people and we're knowing them in a way that you can't because you can't get inside someone else's head.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You actually have to imagine that you have to put all those pieces together very personally. Nobody else can do it for you.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, and now you feel like you've got a friend, a best friend who's a girl, who is Black or-
Dean Hale:
Unapologetically feminine.
Shannon Hale:
Yes or is gay or whatever the character is that if you are not, and they're in your heart now and you care about them and you have empathy for them. That's going to create a space in you just to be more compassionate and accepting of everyone. For some people, that's dangerous. That idea is dangerous.
Dean Hale:
Scary, yeah.
Shannon Hale:
For me, it's like that's heaven on earth.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
At my company, Beanstack, my colleague, Megan's daughter Lauren is a diehard Princess in Black fan. She actually dressed up as the Princess in Black for Halloween, very adorable, and she was super excited about this interview. So of course, we had to make room for her to ask a question of her own.
Lauren:
Your stories are focused on the importance of friendship. What advice do you have for being a good friend?
Shannon Hale:
My advice for being a good friend is the same as my advice for everything. It's just be kind to yourself. If you can be compassionate with yourself, with where you are, it's the key to healthy friendship and selfhood and everything. I think whenever we start in that place of self-compassion, then we can be kind to ourselves for our mistakes and give ourselves room to make mistakes and then learn from them and then get better and grow, and that's going to make you a better friend and everything else, but also, when we have self-compassion, that compassion flows out of us towards other people, and when we can have compassion for our friends, things are just going to go better in that relationship.
So anytime we can just infuse that compassion, which is like, I would say, it's like a good feeling, a positive, hopeful, loving feeling and notice and acceptance, living in that energy is going to make everything go better.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Taking inspiration from her series, The Princess in Black, for Shannon's Reading Challenge, Favorite Early Chapter Books, she's put together a list of thoughtful and engaging early chapter books for all readers.
Shannon Hale:
Early Chapter Books I think are so hard to do well. I think there's a misconception that because they're shorter and for younger kids, that they're somehow easier. What I found is it's really hard. When I had kids that age, it was really hard for me to find really engaging, well-written, great, interesting books, and writing Princess in Black, we know it is not easy. It is really tough to do. So there are certain ones that I think I love these and I'm always excited to hand them out. I think they're so vital because we lose so many readers between the age when they're having picture books read to them and they're reading all the phonic books trying to learn how to read, and it stops being fun. They need books that are at their level that are fun. So I put together a list of books that I think are delightful and can reach kids where they are.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Shannon's Reading Challenge and all past author Reading Challenges at thereadingculturepod.com.
This week, we're featuring Ady Huertas, the Program Manager of Youth, Family and Equity Services at the San Diego Public Library, which is also a Beanstack partner, but in this case, the important part is that she serves on the Presidential Advisory Committee for the incoming American Libraries Association President Cindy Holt. ALA is having its annual conference in San Diego starting on June 27th, and Ady stopped by to share a bit about what to expect this year.
Ady Huertas:
ALA's 2024th theme is exploring issues that affect libraries and their communities. A lot of the programs will include topics that span from health and wellness, strategic partnerships, community engagement, justice involved services, and AI, and, of course, intellectual freedom. Some of the expected highlights include the opening session with Trevor Noah and the President's Program that will feature library workers and honor and celebrate library workers, and they work in engagement that they are doing across the country.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And even if you can't attend in real life this year, there are many ways that Ady says you can support ALA.
Ady Huertas:
Folks can support ALA in many different ways. At any time, you can go online and donate at ala.org, also become an ALA member, attend annual conference, and give back in a way of getting involved with committees or running for office, and that support really helps with our advocacy efforts. We have an Office of Intellectual Freedom that really is working hard on behalf of libraries and library users and, of course, our efforts to promote literacy, community outreach, and strengthening libraries nationwide.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Finally, you know I had to ask Ady about a book that made an important impact on her life.
Ady Huertas:
Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto was a book that changed my life. As a middle schooler who had recently moved to this country and struggled to learn English and really struggled to read, I discovered that book through a read aloud, and I felt like it was the first time that I had seen a book with characters that look like me and families that look like mine. So that having that representation and a story that I could connect to with the lead character, Maria, really got me excited about reading in a way that I had not been excited before. Back then, there wasn't a lot of representation in those books, and to me, I could not put down Too Many Tamales, and I just read that book over and over and over again because it felt like it was telling my story.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Don't you just love that? All right, y'all. If you're at ALA, please stop by to say hi to us at the Beanstack booth.
This has been The Reading Culture and you've been listening to my conversation with Shannon and Dean Hale. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently, I'm reading Attack of the Black Rectangles by A. S. King and Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez. If you enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and 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 beansstack.com, and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening and keep reading.
I feel like it was this little miracle that in some areas of my life I'm shutting myself up and shutting myself down, but with my writing, I was always really connecting with that inner voice.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Words are to us what ones and zeros are to computers. They're the language of processing, processing that which we may or may not always be aware of.
Shannon Hale:
It does feel like a little miracle that I had that stabilizing force in throughout my whole life.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shannon Hale spent a lot of her childhood anxiously trying to be perfect, even when that meant hiding her true feelings and personality, but she eventually discovered that when she wrote, she was free to be honest with herself. Shannon is an acclaimed author, celebrated for her children's and young adult novels such as the Newberry Honor-wining Princess Academy and her memoir graphic novel, Real Friends series, and of course, many of you will know Shannon for her bestselling, The Princess in Black series, which features a princess with a secret superhero identity. By the way, LeUyen Pham, a guest on this podcast and Shannon's bestie, illustrated both of those series.
In this episode, Shannon will tell us about growing up in a deeply conservative culture and how writing unearthed her true voice, her authentic self from where it had been simmering just beneath the surface. As you'll hear, we'll get into some very telling revelations.
Shannon Hale:
[inaudible 00:01:32]
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, and we have a wee surprise for you.
Dean Hale:
If it's good and funny, I claim it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shannon's coauthor and collaborator on The Princess in Black and in life, Dean Hale, will join us to talk about how they started work on the series and why it's been such a family affair. Yes, Dean, her husband.
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 at The Reading Culture Pod, and you can also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right. Onto the show.
My first question is, I tried to look around and find it, maybe it's on your website and I missed it, but what's up with squeetus?
Shannon Hale:
It was just a random word that my husband made up, and it was because it was a nonsense word, like domain names and email names were always available, and so we just kind of grabbed them. Also, he used to call me, a nickname he used to call me was Squeeter Pig. He felt like squeetus was the formal version of Squeeter Pig.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay.
Shannon Hale:
But too formal and royal for everyday use.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. Well, that heavy hitter's out of the way. All right. I just want to start off with your growing up life, which you really share a lot about, and if people really want to know the details, they just go read your graphic novels. You gave up a lot there, and I've heard you say that those are pretty much true. There's no made up saved for a few things parts, so that's an accurate reflection, but yeah, just talking about your younger childhood, what life was like for little Shannon Hale.
Shannon Hale:
So mom and a dad, stay at home mom, working dad, five kids. I was the middle kid, and my two older sisters were a year and a half apart, and my younger brother and sister were a year and a half apart, but I was separated by three and four years, so I was in this gap in the middle. Partly because of that, I did feel like a bit of a loner in my home, and big imagination lived a lot in my head, but was really the only avid reader in my family. Eventually started doing theater and I was the only person really interested in that.
Just from birth, I had a different kind of ... I was just tuned into stories in a really big way, and that didn't come from my family, necessarily. It was almost like a coping mechanism, like how to survive in a place where you don't quite feel like you belong, which is probably how most kids feel. I had a stable home, I had loving parents, but they were so different than me. They just couldn't understand what was going on with this bizarre little child.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And you felt like that even when you were really young.
Shannon Hale:
I did. So much of my life, and I talk about in my books, I had an anxiety disorder and OCD, and I think so much of that was trying to cope with what I thought I was supposed to be like. There's this designation, highly sensitive person. Some research has shown that 15, 20% of human and animal populations are just wired this way. In evolution terms, it would be beneficial to have some people who notice the sounds and smells more and can alert everyone else, but what it means is I just take everything in so much of a bigger way.
It's not good or bad, it's a neutral thing. I can get so much my joy up so fast listening to a song or noticing a sunset, and when something negative happens, it plummets so fast. Everybody else in my family is more even keeled and I'm just this dialed up to 11 kid who's taking in all this sensory information so much.
So I notice every twitch of my parents' lip of disapproval, and the fear of rejection is so heavy in me that I'm like, "I have to be perfect. I have to be the kid that they need me to be," without consciously thinking that, but that's absolutely what was going on. So much of my anxiety is not anyone's fault, it's just me reacting to an environment where I didn't quite fit and trying, putting so much pressure on myself to fit and be perfect.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was your release? Did you write?
Shannon Hale:
Yeah. My mom says that I was making up stories before I could talk because I'd be sitting in the high chair and I would be going [inaudible 00:06:26] She's like, "It wasn't normal baby babble." It was like-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were talking.
Shannon Hale:
It was like a three-act structure in the baby babble, and I was always making up games. I made up little plays to have my younger brother and sister, anybody I could rope in to perform with me. I made up games for my friends to play. I didn't know I was storytelling, but that's clearly what it was. I read a lot and I had stories in my head. It was fourth grade when I had a teacher that had to start writing short stories, and that was the first time I was like, "Oh, I could actually do this."
That was something I'm so grateful for with my teachers is that they did allow me some expression because I would make up these plays and I would practice them with friends on the playground, and then they would let me perform them for of the class. These little, they were probably a minute and a half long, but still, that was very indulgent of them. That was something I really appreciate.
Then my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Pacman, read something I wrote at parent-teacher conference to the parents because I never had a lot of, "You got it, kid," kind of stuff. So you cling to those little positive feedbacks of, "Maybe this is something I could do." I really didn't think I could be a professional writer, like I could make a living at it. That was not something in ... We never met authors, like authors didn't come-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, they never really came to the schools like now.
Shannon Hale:
No, not until after Harry Potter did publishing, see children's books as a big enough industry that they would tour children's authors. So we never met any authors. Also, I was raised in a very conservative culture where the only women I knew were stay-at-home moms or occasionally they're teachers or nurses. So there was very limited options. I never saw modeled for me women having careers at all.
So in my mind, I thought, "Maybe I could write books someday," but it was always in a hobby way. I'm going to be a mom. In fact, there's this song. There's this culture I grew up in. I mean, obviously, the '80s were different for women in every way, but I was in an especially conservative culture. The media that we had, one of the songs I grew up ... I do not sing. I cannot carry a tune, but I'm going to sing for you right now, Jordan.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay.
Shannon Hale:
This is one of the songs that we used to listen to over and over again on a tape of children's music.
When I grow up, I want to be a mother and have a family.
One little two little three little babies that I love.
And you will say each sister and each brother will look a lot like me.
Four little five little six little blessings from above.
And it just keeps counting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. They're like 12.
Shannon Hale:
The job is to have many babies as you can get, and that is what makes-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were singing along to that?
Shannon Hale:
I was. I was singing along, not questioning that that was going to be my lot. I had mom who had five kids and they always said, "Oh, we wish we could have had more." My dad was one of eight kids and that was just what you did.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you remember a particular moment in which you were like, "Hey, wait, I don't necessarily want this. I want something else for myself"?
Shannon Hale:
I wish I had one big epiphany, but what it was was constant cognitive dissonance of moments of like, "Wait a minute," and then stuffing it down like I did everything else. It was dangerous for me to question.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Was it? Yes.
Shannon Hale:
It felt dangerous to disagree. I didn't feel like I had an option to say, "Can I choose for myself? Can I see what feels right to me and make that choice?" That didn't feel possible.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. That's a lot to unpack growing up like that, and that's the Mormon church, right? But I understand that you distanced yourself from that more officially.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah. So I grew up in the Mormon church my whole life and was active for 45 years. It was my community, it's my family. There's so much good in it, and everybody's different. Everybody's experience is different. My experience, what I took out of it, what I learned, what I believed isn't the same as what everybody else did. So the experience of a really anxious, highly sensitive girl in growing up in the '80s is going to be completely different than anybody else as well.
There was so much great about it and there was so much that was really hard for me about it. Ultimately, I did step away a few years ago. I'm still officially a member, and I'm not interested in badmouthing the organization or anybody in it. Everybody's got to find their own path, but for me, with my kids it was like, "I think actually it's best not to be here anymore."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I imagine that's probably liberating and painful all at once.
Shannon Hale:
I mean, it's a 10-year journey that continues, and I don't regret a moment of it. Having gone through something that wrote itself on every cell of my body and then deconstructing from that and figuring out as an adult what do I actually believe and how do I actually see the world in myself, that's an amazing experience. You can't go on any kind of meditation retreat that's going to give you that kind of experience. There's no therapist in the world that can give you that. So I feel really lucky. I feel like I got this chance to go through myself tiny piece by piece and really work through everything. Man, I feel amazing now.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really?
Shannon Hale:
I mean, I had anxiety, OCD for my entire life for decades. They're gone. It's gone.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Shannon Hale:
I didn't know you could cure that. After that being constant shout in my head 24 hours a day every waking moment and now it's gone. It's really a cool experience and, of course, not everybody who goes through that also has the same experience, but for me, it's been amazing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Before this interview, Shannon shared a quote with my producer Jackie. It's from E. M. Forster and goes like this. "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" The act of writing is as much for the writer as it is for the reader, and even when she didn't realize it, Shannon was discovering more about herself and her place in the world through the words and stories that came out of her.
Shannon Hale:
It definitely has. Looking back now, so I was that kid who didn't allow myself to listen to my own inner voice because I was wrong. Everything I did and felt was wrong, so I'm stuffing everything down, but it turned out that when I was writing, I was in this meditative state where I'm just me in the story, but I think you can't be in that state without being really connected to your inner self. So I think writing was always when I actually could hear my own voice.
Even looking back now at things I wrote 20 years ago, they still so much represent who I am, and I have no regrets, and they feel like, "Ah, yes, yes. I'm so happy I wrote this," and still, I would write it today with joy." So I feel like it was this little miracle that in some areas of my life, I'm shutting myself up and shutting myself down, but with my writing, I was always really connecting with that inner voice. It does feel like a little miracle that I had that stabilizing force in throughout my whole life.
I did notice throughout the years of like, "Ooh, I haven't had a chance to write in a week." I would feel not good. I'd feel more anxious than normal. I used to explain it to myself of like, "I need to feel productive and I wasn't being productive. I wasn't producing things in the good little cog of the machine of this world," and maybe that was part of it, but part of it was, for sure, that was my meditation time when I was allowing the anxiety and everything to go away and I was connecting with that little bright spot inside me.
Writing was my sneaky loophole way to access my inner voice without going through all of the snaggy barbed wire fences that I had built because I thought that I had to shut that off in order to be a good and worthy person.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, my god, the things we tell ourselves. Okay. When you weren't writing, what were some of the things that you loved to read?
Shannon Hale:
I did love fantasy, and it was amazing to find fantasy that had female leads. I really felt like I lived in a world where women were not the heroes, and certainly the movies, there just was not a lot of value for women's stories. So I have here Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword, which was given to me by my school librarian.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, wow.
Shannon Hale:
And I devoured it, and then she gave me the sequel when it came out, and I devoured that one too, and I reread those over and over again. I love those. I love the Narnia books, and Lloyd Alexander. Patricia McKillip wrote a series called The Riddle Master of Head. Oh, I loved those and read them over and over again. I also loved Homecoming and Dicey's Song, Cynthia Voigt. Those were ones I reread a lot. I mean, I read almost all the books in my library, but the ones that would reread were the Cynthia Voigt. I felt like she was really honest. She wasn't pulling punches, and for me, it was a relief to have an adult see you that way.
You asked me earlier, "Were there any adults who validated how you were feeling and saw you where you were?" and I couldn't think of any, but now I'm saying I think Cynthia Voigt did.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.
Shannon Hale:
So I think that's one reason why I was yearning for books is because in some ways, it was escapism like the fantasy writing far away, and in some ways, the realistic fiction was like, "Yeah." It's really hard.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
She definitely had a lot of unflinching looks at kids that you didn't really get from other that I can think of.
Shannon Hale:
She was so raw, and the characters were not perfect and there were no tidy endings, but just living through that point of view was incredibly validating for me, and I just felt like maybe I was not so broken, maybe. Hey, this Dicey deserves a story and she got a shiny sticker on it even for this story, that's how good a story it is, maybe I deserve a story, which is really like maybe I deserve to live because, certainly, I had dark thoughts, scary thoughts from a very young age about not wanting to be alive. So hearing that someone values a messy kid, Ramona, that's a messy kid who deserves a story, a book, and even a shiny sticker, that gives you hope.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I'm sorry that you had that too when you were younger.
Shannon Hale:
With my Real Friends books, which are about my elementary through middle school years, I have had a lot of adults tell me, "It's too much. These are too dark," and I pull back a lot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I'm sure.
Shannon Hale:
I'm not shoving everything. You don't want to tell all the worst moments, and you don't want to dwell there too long.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I read that you wrote that you held back a lot on the bullying, which feels intense anyway, but you actually didn't include a lot of the worst parts of things that were happening.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, it just was too much. You want kids to know this happens, but you don't want to shove their head underwater with it. So it is a balance trying to figure out what to do because the point of the book for me was not I'm an important historical figure and I need to tell all the details of my life. That would be like an autobiography, I suppose, but a memoir. The point of it is here's some experiences I have that tie together in some way and I'm going to share them with you so you can understand other kids like me, and so you could feel less alone in your own struggles.
I kept that as my guiding stars as I wrote it, but it was interesting how many adults said, "It's too much. It's too hard for kids," and then kids were rereading it over and over again. It wasn't too much or too hard for the kids. It was a relief, "Finally, somebody saying what I'm going through, putting it down," not only in words, but in LeUyen Pham's visuals, the pictures, it's really powerful for a kid to be able to say, "This is how I'm feeling," and point to a picture.
I went to a high school reunion, 30 years, and there was a guy, a great guy who I went to elementary through college with, and he told me that he had a 10-year-old who reread Real Friends so often that it fell apart and they went and had to bind it, rebound it like at a Kinko's. I said, "Oh, she's having our time, is she? She's struggling," and he said, "How did you know?" I said, "Well, because there's something in that book that she's needing, and so she's reading it over and over again because she's needing something from it," and I said, "Did you read it?" He said, "No," and I said, "Dude, you need to read it. If your child is reading a book over and over again, there's something in there."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You need to see it what's in-
Shannon Hale:
"You need to see it, and guess what else? You're in it." He's like, "What?" I was like, "You're literally in the book," and he had no idea what it was about. He didn't even know it was a memoir.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, that's amazing. Okay. God. Okay. We have to do better, parents. All right. I want to go back for a moment to your love of fantasy and just talk a bit about how you got into writing it for young readers, if you can go into that a bit.
Shannon Hale:
I loved reading when I was younger. By the time I was in high school, everything that was assigned to us were the classics, which were mostly these books had been written by people who are now deceased, almost all men, almost all White men, and almost all of them were literary fiction, which was realism with a tragic bent. There was no more genre, there's no more comedy, there's no more fun, there's no romance, there's no mystery. It's just people who had potential, but the world is horrible and they end up sad and depressed or dead.
Then on the Christmas break, I went home and my brother struggled with reading and he had to read a book for a class, and so I got a book that I loved when I was a kid, which was The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander, and I read it to him aloud, the first several chapters to get him hooked, but I also got hooked. I was like, "I forgot how fun this was." So I started reading other fantasy books, and I found that my literary sensibilities had gotten so raised by the really fine literature I was reading that I couldn't enjoy a lot of them anymore and I couldn't let myself just get lost in them, and that's not true of all, but just the ones that I'd happened to read at that time.
So I made a goal for myself. I was like, "I wonder if I could write a book that was written at the sentence level knowing everything I know now, but was still the kind of story that I would've loved when I was 12." So I aimed for Goose Girl. I thought I was writing adult fiction that was fantasy, and I was amazed when it eventually, after many, many rejections in a long time and many years, I did find a publisher and she said, "This was a young adult," and then I discovered this whole new amazing world of young adult literature where so many people were writing exactly what I wanted, which was these really fun, tightly crafted, many different genres of story, but also with so much care for the structure and the sentences so that they were beautiful to read.
Marilla was out in the orchard picking a handful of summer apples when she saw Mr. Berry coming over the log bridge and up the slope with Mrs. Barry beside him in a whole procession of little girls trailing after him. In his arms, he carried Anne, whose head laid limply against his shoulder. At that moment, Marilla had a revelation. In the sudden stab of fear that pierced to her very heart, she realized what Anne had come to mean to her. She would've admitted that she liked Anne, knew that she was very fond of Anne, but now she knew as she hurried wildly down the slope that Anne was dear to her than anything on Earth.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Anne of Green Gables is a classic in the highest sense of the word. First released in 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery's timeless work follows the story of 11-year-old orphan Anne who finds herself in rural Prince Edward Island, Canada with a family that never intended to take her in. Like Dicey from Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt, Anne is flawed, she's imperfect, and yet she deserves love.
Shannon Hale:
They wanted a boy. They wanted a boy because they wanted someone who's going to be useful and strong and could do things boys did, and then she showed up and they were going to get rid of her, and then Marilla decides to keep her out of mercy. As time goes on, we get to this moment where Anne was dared to walk the ridge, pull the roof, and fell off. Mr. Barry is carrying her back because she's broken her ankle.
For me, coming to this moment after everything that came before, it's this pure moment where someone is loved for just being who they are, not for what they can do, not for how productive they are or helpful they are, and in fact, they're quite annoying often, and yet they still have value. The hope of that really moves me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that she's so precious still to them. Okay. When someone cries then I'm going to cry.
Shannon Hale:
It's why I resist crying because it's like a virus, and I don't want to make anyone else cry, but I can't help it. I loved that as a kid. It felt hopeful to me as a kid. As a parent, that brings me to tears.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, my god, yeah, just thinking about that.
Shannon Hale:
As a parent to be like, "I love my kids for being who they are," and the relief of that because I think when I was younger, a younger mom even, I felt like I had to tell them how to be in order to be safe, in order to be good, all of those things I had to tell them how to be. The beauty of letting go of that and realizing, "No, I'm just supporting them in becoming who they actually are and whatever they are is beautiful," and the metaphor I use with my kids that they understand is we have this wonderful, very fat, asthmatic rescue cat who does nothing. He just sits there and occasionally moves to get some treats and otherwise just sits, and we love him so much. That is how I feel, I feel about them and I hope that they feel about themselves and each other that we don't have to earn our worthiness and love. We just are. If we can love this cat, why can't we just love ourselves and each other?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. That's very beautiful. What's your cat's name?
Shannon Hale:
His name is Michael Hat, last name Hat, so his nickname is Mike Hat.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Since 2014, Shannon and Dean Hale have been writing The Princess in Black series. Truly beloved by kids everywhere, and definitely by my own kids growing up and now my younger nieces and nephews, they're modern day classics because this is truly a family affair. We asked Shannon to bring Dean into the interview to join us for a bit. The first thing he told us is that Shannon is the reason he realized he could have his own career in writing.
Dean Hale:
Shannon had written and sold things. She had made it a career, and I was still like, "Eh, is it really possible?"
Shannon Hale:
You still are like that?
Dean Hale:
And I'm still like that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really?
Dean Hale:
Yeah.
Shannon Hale:
True.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, living in that. What was the impetus, I guess, for you to work together?
Shannon Hale:
That was the comic. So I had published several novels and I was meeting these kids who a sibling loved my 380-page fantasy novel, and then another sibling was in the back and the mom would whisper, "They're not really a reader," and I was like, "Oh, but they are. They just don't have the right book. This isn't the right book for them." I wanted to do a comic with Dean. It was not easier to work together. It didn't save time. It cost more time, but there was also, we found it was a fun new part of our relationship that ... We'd known each other for so long and been through so much together already, and now we were pitching ideas back and forth and brainstorming together, and that was fun.
Dean Hale:
Yeah. It was like playing. Even though that we were trying to produce something, it was so much fun. It was like I distanced myself so much from having fun hanging out with friends or doing something like that. In our relationship, we had fun, but there's something next level about cooperating on something like this, especially as you're, like you said, pitching ideas back and forth and coming up with what would be cool.
Shannon Hale:
That's his favorite part. His not favorite part would be revising, which is why I do that.
Dean Hale:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Beyond the Shannon-Dean, husband-wife team writing The Princess in Black series, this was even more of a family affair. The whole series came about after their young daughter said something to Shannon that she couldn't shake.
Shannon Hale:
So one day, she was four years old, her name's Maggie, which is short for Magnolia, and she was wearing this butterfly skirt and she was pointing to the different colors on it, and she said, "Mama purple is a girl color and pink is a girl color but not black," and I was like, "What? I did not raise her this way. Where is this information coming from?" and I said, "Of course girls can wear black. I wear black," and she was kind of like, "Mm," because I'm not a girl, I'm a mama, and I said, "That girl wears black," and I thought that would solve the issue, and she said, "But mama, princesses don't wear black," and I realized her little four-year-old brain had been absorbing information that I never had.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
She's four.
Shannon Hale:
Yes, and she's like, "I'm a girl, and princesses are girl plus, and so they're the ideal and they never wear black, so that must not be a girl thing," and immediately I'm thinking about it like, "The Princess in Black, it sounds like a superhero," and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was thinking about it all day. I went to exercise and I usually play an audio book when I exercise to distract myself from the horror, and I couldn't even pay attention to the audiobook because my mind was just going, going, going with this idea. I was so excited about it. As soon as Dean got home from work, I said, "The princess in Black," and he's like, "Yes," and he immediately just got it.
Dean Hale:
She was a superhero immediately. I can't remember the origin of the monsters, but I was either like she fights monsters or I was completely on board with that idea.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, I don't remember who said what, but that's often how it happens when we're creating is nobody really remembers who did what. Plus, someone says one thing and they build on it and they build on it, and it becomes a joint effort.
Dean Hale:
And if it's good and funny, I claim it in the end.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, and so do everybody else because they're always like, "Oh, I love this part. That must've been Dean," because he's the man and so he's the funny one. I swear to you, I read multiple-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
People aren't saying that. I've read you write about people that be like, "Oh, he must've ..." I read a funny dinner conversation or something with you guys with one of your friends.
Shannon Hale:
It happens all the time, and I've really read comedic books on my own, but anytime there's anything funny, people are like, "It must've been Dean." I'm like, "Actually, women can write comedy, I swear," but anyway, we immediately were really excited about it. We could have really taken the premise and done many things with it, but I specifically wanted to do these early chapter books like Mercy Watson because I had these four young children, and it's a big leap from the early readers to Magic Treehouse in the early chapter books, and I was like, "We really need ones that are shorter word count, larger font, full color illustrations every page," and the only really ones I could find at the time were Nate the Great and Mercy Watson. It was a hard sell. There was not a big market for it. A lot of publishers rejected it.
Dean Hale:
Or wanted to change it.
Shannon Hale:
Wanted us to make them longer and change it. I was like, "No, I swear there's a market for this. I just know it." So we really were very persistent in our view of it. At every stage, people pushed back, but we really knew what we wanted with this book, not only the premise and the way of telling the story, but the format and all of it, and Candlewick just got it. So we went with Candlewick. They also published Mercy Watson, so it just was a no brainer.
The response, again, was so immediate. I love these books so much. If all my gravestone said, I don't want a gravestone, just bury me somewhere, but if I had one, if all it said was, "Author of The Princess in Black", I would be happy. The joy of those books, the way we hear of kids learning to read for the first time on these books or kids who are older who didn't have strong reading skills but they still wanted to read a chapter book, but they were trying to read books that were too hard for them because they weren't there, and these were chapter books that they could cut their teeth on, and then they feel proud of themselves that they read them and their reading confidence goes up and they're able to tackle more books. I mean, at every stage it's been nothing but just joy, joy, joy.
Dean Hale:
It's the same sort of thrust as with the graphic novels. I mean, not exactly the same, but where you see someone who struggles with a traditional dense, thick book and defining themselves as a non-reader and then having them encounter a graphic novel or a book like this and having them be able to do it themselves, it switches.
Shannon Hale:
That negative voice in your head that says, "You're not a reader. You're not capable," it has evidence to the contrary. I was like, "I had very high standards for this," and I had advised that were like, "Okay, then you can't call it The Princess in Black. You can't have princess in the title, and you can't have her on the cover. You have to disguise that it's about a girl," and I said, "Absolutely not. I want it obvious. I want it on the title. I want it on the cover. I want it to be so clear that it's about a girl and about a princess, and they're still going to love it, and then people won't have a place to stand on anymore when they say that boys won't read about girls."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, yeah, I love that. My son, he definitely loved them, and do you get a lot of boys telling you that they love the series?
Shannon Hale:
Oh, yeah. Boys come with their parents and they're like, "They read all the books and they love them." We get pictures of little boys dressed up as The Prince in Black, The Princess in Black's handy sidekick, which he doesn't exist yet, but he's made it up. It's just beautiful. Older boys who grew up with them are like, "Oh, I love The Princess in Black."
I was recently at a high school. I was doing presentation at high school, and high school is a very different kind of a crowd, and they're onto you immediately and you cannot pander to them, and you have to be really honest, but there was this one kid who was making wise cracks of the audience, so I kind of zeroed in on him and I asked his name and he told me, and I pretended to mishear it, and I just kept calling him the wrong name throughout. Anytime I'd make a point, I'd refer to him by his name. I'd be like, "David knows what I'm talking about."
So we had this kind of thing going on, and then I showed Princess in Black and I said, "Raise your hand if you've grown up with this book," and a lot of people raised their hands, but David didn't. I said, "David, I know you did. I know you love this series." He said, "My little sister did." I was like, "Yeah, right, David. Yeah, right. It was your little sister that read Princess in Black. You didn't read every single book. I'm onto you, David, and I know." Then later during question and answer, he raised his hand. He said, "Yeah, I read Princess in Black. I really liked it." That's what's so cool about having a series like this. This has been for years.
Dean Hale:
Yeah. It's been going on long enough that they're teenagers now.
Shannon Hale:
I mean, we meet 18-year-olds that had grown up with this series and been a part of ... Those books you read as kids, they become part of your DNA in a really fabulous way.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I mean, you're making a joke about, "Grow up and believe in gender equality," and all that. You know what I mean? But I think that there's a lot of truth and there's-
Shannon Hale:
I'm not joking. That's how high my ideals are. That's how high my hope is. I really think that ... I'm not saying that Princess in Black is going to solve everything and create world peace, but absolutely, it is a very real influential piece of the puzzle. When kids read stories or see movies, engage in media about girls or anything that's beyond their personal experience, kids of different races, kids of different orientations, whatever, it just creates a space in their brain to say, "These are people who exist if they're not in my family and in my friend group." The brain still absorbs them through the story as being real people, and the brain makes space for these people living in the world.
I think that's one reason why the book bans, I mean, they're ridiculous in so many ways, of course, because there's the internet, so claiming the books are pornography when they're clearly not, and when there's actual pornography available on their smartphones 24/7-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right here in their phones.
Shannon Hale:
... it's very silly to be targeting books, but the truth about books is that they create empathy in a very real way. When we're reading a story, we're engaged, even more than when we're watching a movie, our brains are engaged so deeply, it's just like we're meeting these people and we're knowing them in a way that you can't because you can't get inside someone else's head.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You actually have to imagine that you have to put all those pieces together very personally. Nobody else can do it for you.
Shannon Hale:
Yeah, and now you feel like you've got a friend, a best friend who's a girl, who is Black or-
Dean Hale:
Unapologetically feminine.
Shannon Hale:
Yes or is gay or whatever the character is that if you are not, and they're in your heart now and you care about them and you have empathy for them. That's going to create a space in you just to be more compassionate and accepting of everyone. For some people, that's dangerous. That idea is dangerous.
Dean Hale:
Scary, yeah.
Shannon Hale:
For me, it's like that's heaven on earth.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
At my company, Beanstack, my colleague, Megan's daughter Lauren is a diehard Princess in Black fan. She actually dressed up as the Princess in Black for Halloween, very adorable, and she was super excited about this interview. So of course, we had to make room for her to ask a question of her own.
Lauren:
Your stories are focused on the importance of friendship. What advice do you have for being a good friend?
Shannon Hale:
My advice for being a good friend is the same as my advice for everything. It's just be kind to yourself. If you can be compassionate with yourself, with where you are, it's the key to healthy friendship and selfhood and everything. I think whenever we start in that place of self-compassion, then we can be kind to ourselves for our mistakes and give ourselves room to make mistakes and then learn from them and then get better and grow, and that's going to make you a better friend and everything else, but also, when we have self-compassion, that compassion flows out of us towards other people, and when we can have compassion for our friends, things are just going to go better in that relationship.
So anytime we can just infuse that compassion, which is like, I would say, it's like a good feeling, a positive, hopeful, loving feeling and notice and acceptance, living in that energy is going to make everything go better.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Taking inspiration from her series, The Princess in Black, for Shannon's Reading Challenge, Favorite Early Chapter Books, she's put together a list of thoughtful and engaging early chapter books for all readers.
Shannon Hale:
Early Chapter Books I think are so hard to do well. I think there's a misconception that because they're shorter and for younger kids, that they're somehow easier. What I found is it's really hard. When I had kids that age, it was really hard for me to find really engaging, well-written, great, interesting books, and writing Princess in Black, we know it is not easy. It is really tough to do. So there are certain ones that I think I love these and I'm always excited to hand them out. I think they're so vital because we lose so many readers between the age when they're having picture books read to them and they're reading all the phonic books trying to learn how to read, and it stops being fun. They need books that are at their level that are fun. So I put together a list of books that I think are delightful and can reach kids where they are.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Shannon's Reading Challenge and all past author Reading Challenges at thereadingculturepod.com.
This week, we're featuring Ady Huertas, the Program Manager of Youth, Family and Equity Services at the San Diego Public Library, which is also a Beanstack partner, but in this case, the important part is that she serves on the Presidential Advisory Committee for the incoming American Libraries Association President Cindy Holt. ALA is having its annual conference in San Diego starting on June 27th, and Ady stopped by to share a bit about what to expect this year.
Ady Huertas:
ALA's 2024th theme is exploring issues that affect libraries and their communities. A lot of the programs will include topics that span from health and wellness, strategic partnerships, community engagement, justice involved services, and AI, and, of course, intellectual freedom. Some of the expected highlights include the opening session with Trevor Noah and the President's Program that will feature library workers and honor and celebrate library workers, and they work in engagement that they are doing across the country.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And even if you can't attend in real life this year, there are many ways that Ady says you can support ALA.
Ady Huertas:
Folks can support ALA in many different ways. At any time, you can go online and donate at ala.org, also become an ALA member, attend annual conference, and give back in a way of getting involved with committees or running for office, and that support really helps with our advocacy efforts. We have an Office of Intellectual Freedom that really is working hard on behalf of libraries and library users and, of course, our efforts to promote literacy, community outreach, and strengthening libraries nationwide.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Finally, you know I had to ask Ady about a book that made an important impact on her life.
Ady Huertas:
Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto was a book that changed my life. As a middle schooler who had recently moved to this country and struggled to learn English and really struggled to read, I discovered that book through a read aloud, and I felt like it was the first time that I had seen a book with characters that look like me and families that look like mine. So that having that representation and a story that I could connect to with the lead character, Maria, really got me excited about reading in a way that I had not been excited before. Back then, there wasn't a lot of representation in those books, and to me, I could not put down Too Many Tamales, and I just read that book over and over and over again because it felt like it was telling my story.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Don't you just love that? All right, y'all. If you're at ALA, please stop by to say hi to us at the Beanstack booth.
This has been The Reading Culture and you've been listening to my conversation with Shannon and Dean Hale. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently, I'm reading Attack of the Black Rectangles by A. S. King and Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez. If you enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and 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 beansstack.com, and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening and keep reading.