Cece Bell

Cece Bell:
It was almost like I was writing that ending for me as an adult. This is where I need to be now. Stop it already and be happy with this and be proud of who you are.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Cece Bell is a wild and hilarious illustrator and author, but it took her a long time to fully recognize and have confidence in her own talent. Growing up with deafness helped shape her sense of humor and her outsider perspective. She coupled that with a love of art and a fascination with picture book design to become an unusual and quirky voice in the kids book world.
Cece Bell:
The reason that a lot of my humor comes from that is because my whole life is trying to figure out what people are saying and all the communication difficulties and mishaps, which are often very funny. When I misunderstand somebody, it can be really, really funny.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Cece is best known for her expressive comic art style and her humorous writing. Her most famous works are El Deafo, which received a Newbery honor, her Chick and Brain series and her Sock Monkey trilogy. In this episode, she discusses the recipe for her zany, vibrant storytelling style, which she dubs absurdism for children, and draws a connection between her deafness and her love for puns. She also tells us the story about the gory job that convinced her to pursue a career as an artist.
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 subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right. On to the show.
I would love to learn about your family life and what life was like as a young child for you.
Cece Bell:
Well, I would call myself a very privileged young person. My parents were both in the medical fields. My father was a doctor and my mother was a nurse. Great parents. Definitely provided for us very much so. I have an older brother and an older sister who are ... Well at least then they felt significantly older than me. My brother is seven years older and my sister is five years older. It was a very funny household. At least my mom is very, very funny. I think the three of us were always trying to entertain her and who can make mom laugh the hardest and who can make each other laugh the hardest. When I think back to most of my childhood, most of it was just one of those idealized childhoods. I lived in a town that felt a lot like Mayberry. I could walk downtown starting at the age of eight and just walk downtown and go to the drug store and buy a drink and a candy bar and go to the library and all that stuff.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And so let's rewind. I think you were three and a half when you got meningitis. Four and a half.
Cece Bell:
I was four and a half.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Four and a half?
Cece Bell:
Mm-hmm.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And then that is what caused the deafness that you now have. That was when you're four and a half years old, so you had four and a half years-
Cece Bell:
Right. Of whatever. Of bliss. I can only imagine.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you have real memories of that time? I think that writers and creators have very good memories. That's something I've noticed. But do you have pretty strong memories of that period?
Cece Bell:
Very, very, very, very strong memories of that time. It was about two weeks of being in the hospital, which isn't really all that long compared to some illnesses, but it was long enough. I do think that anytime you experience a traumatic event that your brain goes through something and grabs hold of all the things that surround that trauma, even happier memories. So I definitely have this little bubble of memories surrounding that time that's not just the hospital, but maybe what happened right before, what happened after, that kind of thing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting. How do you think that that shaped some of the dynamics of your family and your life, your young life?
Cece Bell:
It made a huge impact. I can't really speak for my siblings, but it had a really profound impact on them. Probably number one was that I ended up getting more attention. And so I think they got shortchanged a little bit and I think it really changed the trajectory of their lives and not necessarily all good. One of the big things was that my dad was so busy with work. He was a good dad. He's still living. He's a good dad, but he was just checked out a little bit because he was a dad of the '70s and then he didn't really pay all that much attention to us. It was all mom and mom did everything. And then when I lost my hearing though, I think it changed his view of me. Maybe I could have lost her or, oh, here's a kid who really does need my help. And so he did give me attention and I became his favorite and that also messed up things for my brother and sister. But my brother and sister never really ... It never felt like they were angry with me. It was fascinating to me to think about it now, but they were great to me always and still are. There wasn't much resentment.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was then your elementary and middle school experiences like? Is El Deafo an accurate depiction for us?
Cece Bell:
Yes. Very much. El Deafo is very accurate. It was such a big change. For four and a half years I thought of myself ... My brain thought of me as a hearing person and then I wasn't hearing anymore, but with my hearing aids I could hear. So it was just a weird place to be. Kindergarten, like in the book, was a school that had a special program for kids who had also lost their hearing in some way, and that was 1975. The thinking then was to not teach us sign language. That was off of the curriculum. And it was just lip-reading and oral. And I was one of the kids who could do those things partly because of the timing of my hearing loss, but there were so many kids who can't do those things because of the timing and the severity and all of that. So they really should have been teaching us sign language, but they weren't.
That was a good experience at least, because I did learn how to lip-read and I was surrounded with kids who also wore hearing aids. But then after that, when we moved to the Roanoke Valley from Richmond, I just ended up being mainstreamed because I was doing well enough, and that's when I got all set up with my Phonic Ear and all that beautiful technology. The biggest issue for elementary school was just I was still adapting to my hearing loss, and then I was the only kid in the whole school who was deaf and had a hearing aid and had all that stuff. And so I felt very lonely and different and a little bit isolated because I missed out on so much of what was going on around me. It was really hard to figure out what the other kids were saying and doing and thinking and all of that stuff. So that was tough.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were kids kind? Was it difficult? Was it a lot of bullying?
Cece Bell:
If there was bullying, I didn't hear it. Yay for me. One of the benefits. But I really don't think there was much of that. My mom always claims that I radiated the don't mess with me, even though I don't think of myself as tough at all. And I think I probably used humor to make friends and to navigate a lot of it. That's a way to stay on top of ... People don't make fun of the funny kids, I don't think. I want to see what that funny thing-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I'm going to make fun of myself first. I think that's a defense mechanism in many ways, right?
Cece Bell:
Exactly. There was so much power in self-deprecating humor. So much power. But there was very little bullying. It was a great, great town to grow up in. Great group of kids.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you go to the library? You said you could walk to the library. Were you there a lot? Were you a big family of readers when you were growing up?
Cece Bell:
I was actually not much of a reader.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You could walk to the library.
Cece Bell:
I could walk to the library. No. No. I did go to the library a lot, but I was a very slow reader. And I think maybe because of my hearing loss, I didn't quite understand that you could check the books out if that makes sense. I would go to the library and look at the book and then not realize that I could take it home. And so I would just go back the next day over and over and over to see often the same books. And I became obsessed with a couple of books at the library around the time I was in the third grade when I got to walk to the library on my own, and they were A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I just had never seen anything quite so beautiful and beautifully designed. And the other book was this giant, giant book of Little Nemo comics by Winsor McCay. And they were the size of how they would be in the newspaper, so they were huge. And you couldn't check that book out even if you had a card.
So I was far more interested in the pictures than in too much text. I did read, and I was a good reader. I was fine at it. I was just very slow and maybe a little bit obsessive. I had to read the paragraph over and over. No, did I really understand that? Ooh, I better read it again. And that was exhausting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I listened or read somewhere that you loved Ed Emberley.
Cece Bell:
I do very much so.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love those books that show you ... Someone gave one to my daughter and they're so great. How you build piece by piece until you've built the thing.
Cece Bell:
Exactly. Exactly. Those were very important to me. And those books, by the time I did learn that you could check out a library book, they had those books in school, and so we were allowed to check out books over the weekend at the school library, and those were the books that I checked out from school. All the Ed Emberley books that I can get my hands on. And I was far more interested in those books and any kind of books that were about making things and doing things. Here's how to make your own donuts. I wanted information about how to make things and how to do things more than I wanted fiction.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. I think of him as before there were YouTube tutorials. That slow build. Yeah. Did you create a lot at home as a kid then?
Cece Bell:
Very much so. Yes. In elementary school when there was a lot more art projects that get incorporated into the lesson, and I loved those. Those were fantastic. But then at home I did a lot of drawing and I made a lot of paper puppets. When I learned to sew, that set off some new creations. I just remember my parents had this really big dining room, which means a really big dining room table, and the dining room table always had to be cleared off for any kind of holiday gathering because all of our stuff would be all over it and glue and glitter and all that stuff. So I love making things. And also anything that involved making things ... Not just drawing, but sewing and cooking and baking. I should have been a home ec major. I love all this stuff that goes with all the home ec classes. I don't know why I didn't. That was the dumbest thing I ever did was not make home ec.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I'm grateful that you went your direction. You did. Despite not feeling drawn to language arts class or reading in her younger grade school years, by the time Cece got to high school, she had discovered a love for the subject thanks to some inspiring high school teachers. She ended up pursuing an English degree in college. However, she later switched into fine arts. It was during this period of her life that she realized she wanted to create for children.
Cece Bell:
Maybe towards my senior year, I had a few faculty members say that my work was very ... It was very goofy and silly and whimsical and all those words. I think it came from professors, you might be good at children's books so you might consider that. But I had always loved children's books and picture books especially even after the normal age or whatever that age is. There isn't really one. But some kids abandon them and some kids keep looking at them, and I was one of the kids who kept looking at them.
What I did get was I got to play around with things and the professors were not super strict or super critical, and so it felt good to just be able to make things without fearing a lot of criticism. But I knew at the end of it ... Well, I didn't know at the end of it. I didn't know what I was going to do next because I didn't feel like I had what I needed.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But even after earning a degree in fine arts, Cece was still unsure about what she wanted in a career.
Cece Bell:
So I actually took a year off from school or whatever you call it, and I worked for my own pediatric dentist.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really?
Cece Bell:
Cleaning up after all the surgeries and blood everywhere. But I actually liked the job, but I knew that I didn't want to do that forever.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's what you did for an entire year?
Cece Bell:
For a whole year. Yeah. I got the job because I was sitting in his chair, I was done with school and I had the vacuum hose in my mouth and all that. He said to me, do you have a job? And I said, ... And he said, would you like a job? And I said, yeah. And so he gave me a job. I started the next day. But while I was working in the dentist office, that's when I started to think, I really miss my art classes. I miss all that and I do need to do something. I decided to go to grad school and I ended up getting a master's in illustration and graphic design.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. So you started to formulate what you wanted then?
Cece Bell:
Yeah. And I got what I needed. All the play and the confidence. That's what I needed. I needed the confidence, and I got that in college. So I had my confidence, but I didn't really have the foundations. The actual how do you create a really good picture? And so graduate school was all about ... There was a much greater emphasis on the graphic design classes than on the illustration classes because the program was better known as a graphic design program, and those courses were required. And at first I was all grumpy about it. I don't want to be a designer, I want to be an illustrator. But what I found out was the best illustrations are the best designs. You have to have that foundation. You have to understand why is the design working and an illustration is a design. And children's books, they are designed picture books with that text and the way it's all laid out, all of that is designed. So I really, really, really needed that to get where I am.
Hi. I am Scott McCloud. When I was a little kid, I knew exactly what comics were. Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights. I read real books naturally. I was much too old for comics. But when I was in eighth grade, a friend of mine who was a lot smarter than I was, convinced me to give comics another look and lent me his collection. Soon I was hooked. In less than a year I became totally obsessed with comics. I decided to become a comics' artist in 10th grade and began to practice, practice, practice. I felt that there was something lurking in comics, something that had never been done, some kind of hidden power. But whenever I tried to explain my feelings, I failed miserably. Sure. I realized that comic books were usually crude, poorly drawn, semi-literate, cheap disposable kiddie fare, but they don't have to be. The problem was that for most people, that was what comic book meant. If people failed to understand comics, it was because they defined what comics could be too narrowly. A proper definition. If we could find, one might give lie to the stereotypes and show that the potential of comics is limitless and exciting and this is where our journey begins.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Scott McCloud's 1993. Understanding Comics is a comic book about understanding comics, if you understand what I mean. The full title of the book is Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, but I had to leave that out for the bit. It's a non-fiction work about the unique qualities and abilities presented to storytellers through the comic medium. And while it is written as more of an ode to comics, it quickly became a go-to resource for all aspiring comic book creators. One of those unique qualities Scott wrote about is not what you draw or how you draw or even what you write. It's what happens where you don't do those things. The space between the panels and what our brains do with those gaps, this is the part that stuck with Cece the most.
Cece Bell:
When I was just starting to work on El Deafo I had already read it once a long time ago, and then before I started working on El Deafo, I thought I'm reading that book again because I do not know what I'm doing. And sure enough, it is the best book to read if you need help.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Are there any pieces of that book that you really took to heart when creating El Deafo?
Cece Bell:
Yes. In a lot of ways, even though it's called Understanding Comics and it analyzes how comics work, it really also feels like a manual for how to make your own, even though he doesn't come out and say, here's how. He's just telling you how it works. And so he has a lot of really amazing chapters about how panels work and how the space is in between the panels, the way the reader's mind is filling in the blanks in between those panels. And as a lip-reader, that's what I do. I fill in the blanks. I'm trying to piece together what that person says. So comics really makes sense to me. But a lot of the things about pacing and how panel size matters, there's so much profound analysis going on. It is an absolutely genius book. The only book anybody needs to read, in my opinion, if they're about to start working on comics for the first time.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you think that because of your personal experience living a real life panels when you're communicating with people, do you think that that makes you particularly adept at that form?
Cece Bell:
I don't know. Not necessarily. I'd like to think so, but there are so many people out there who have perfectly good ears who are doing a much better job than I ever did. So I'm not sure. But I do think especially drawing faces and expressions, even though the way I drew the characters in El Deafo isn't highly detailed or anything like that, I do think being a lip-reader and always having to look at people's faces and always having to read their emotions to help me fill in those blanks, always having to really watch has made me pretty good at drawing those emotions. Even simply just a little twist of the eyebrow, and you get the expression. I like to think that it's helped. The silver lining of hearing loss.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Hearing you communicate it like that really seems like also a very big burden. So when you're a person who's already empathetic, you're literally trying to interpret at all times what are they thinking, what are they feeling? And that's how you're able to glean what they're saying right?
Cece Bell:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So the overload and then the load on you every time.
Cece Bell:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a good listener. I'm a very good listener. And just the emotions matter almost as much as the words when you're a lip-reader. Because there is so much meaning. You can say the same exact set of words in different ways with different emotions, and they mean something different. But those emotions help you understand the person if this is a happy statement or a sad statement or a happy word or whatever. So I have a really hard time lip-reading sarcasm because that doesn't match.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No. If you're not familiar, El Deafo is Cece's comic book memoir lite that details her own experiences growing up with hearing loss. The book features a young superhero named El Deafo, who harnesses the power of her hearing aids to navigate challenges in everyday life. It was released in 2014 and received a Newbery honor, and the Eisner Award for best publication for kids among other awards and a ton of fanfare. The book was praised by readers of all ages for raising awareness about hearing loss and promoting disability representation. I asked Cece what it felt like to get such an overwhelming response to her own story.
Cece Bell:
It was and remains mind-blowing. I feel at this point that the book isn't even mine anymore, if that makes sense. It just feels like it belongs to the people. I can't believe that it had that effect. It was surreal. And it still is mind-boggling to me to this day that it would become what it became.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Your personal life has also probably really changed since El Deafo. And do you generally feel like a weight is lifted or do you feel like a different person really before and after the book?
Cece Bell:
There definitely is a before and after feeling for sure. Just being able to own it and not feel shame. I've met a lot of fellow deaf people or wherever they are on the spectrum of deafness. It's a very welcoming group. One of the things that's been most inspiring for me is going and doing school visits and maybe a deaf student will come up to me, not necessarily ... Not a school for the deaf, but someone who was very much like me. One of the only or few deaf kids in that school system or school. And they will so happily show off their hearing aids to me. Mine are pink and aren't they beautiful? And that pride in the technology and pride in who they are has inspired me. Well, if they can be that proud of their hearing aids, why not me or proud of the whole thing? Once you get to a point where you can be proud of what you have achieved and how you have adapted, that's huge. That's everything.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. If you could go speak to yourself when you were younger, what would you tell your young self?
Cece Bell:
I think I would've just said, don't worry about it. Just tell people. You're not going to scare them away. I would remind myself as a kid that other kids are really fascinated by technology. You see kids today who love all this stuff that we're using, and think about being in 1976, meeting this kid with technology. Wouldn't you be interested? Wouldn't you want to know how it all works? Why not share that? And that's basically what El Deafo is about. Is about sharing not just the technology, but everything about you. But the technology was the gateway. Isn't this cool? El Deafo was definitely ... The way that it isn't true is that in the end of the book, there's this sense that I'm fully proud of who I am, and I felt like I had to do that for all the kids who were going to be reading it. But in real life, it took 40 years. It took maybe even 45 years. Not until the book came out. It was almost like I was writing that ending for me as an adult, this is where I need to be now. Stop it already and be happy with this and be proud of who you are.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Yeah. That's deep. Do you think that the release of El Deafo changed your confidence generally in navigating the world?
Cece Bell:
The biggest change is that this took El Deafo coming out for me to do ... Before El Deafo came out I could not tell people or ask people to repeat themselves or to just come right out and say, oh, I didn't understand you, I'm deaf, or I'm a lip-reader. I was not able to say any of that. I would just fake it 100%, and that could lead to some real problems and a lot of extra anxiety that was not necessary. So I've become much better at advocating for myself. A great example is the younger version of me would've gotten into a cab and the cab driver would start talking and I would have an awareness that he or she was talking, but I wouldn't be able to know what they were saying because they were facing away from me. And so I would just be filled with anxiety of like, what are they saying? What do I do? And I couldn't even say, I'm sorry, could you repeat that or I'm deaf or anything. I was just shut down. But now, knew me, older me is able to, before I even get into the cab practically, I say to the driver, I'm deaf. I'm a lip-reader. Don't talk to me. And the trip is beautiful.
It took me a long, long, long, long time to get to that point, and that has made my life far easier to navigate. But there probably are fewer mishaps because I preempt them. I'm ahead of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But you wrote El Deafo when you were 40?
Cece Bell:
Yes. I started it when I was 40.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's a lot of years.
Cece Bell:
Yes. It was years and years and years and years. And I wrote the book because when I turned 40, I had a series of mishaps, big and little, and I was just tired and angry with myself for not just being able to say the words, I'm deaf. I use hearing aids to hear. I'm a lip-reader. All of that. I needed to be able to say that. And so I just poured myself into this book thinking, well, if and when the book comes out, I will be able to hand people the book and say, this is me. This is my calling card. This is who I am. And sure enough, it worked.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
El Deafo was such a popular success that fans might think of Cece primarily as a graphic novelist yet most of the books she writes and illustrates are picture books for early readers. They're notable for their vibrant, cartoonish realism drawings and hilarious offbeat storytelling. A combination that she calls absurdism for children. She told us how that style came to be.
Cece Bell:
The Sock Monkey books started mostly, I had tried to get into picture book illustration earlier, and I never even saw myself as a writer. I just wanted to be the illustrator. I'm going to illustrate. I was having a lot of trouble making the connections and finding the person who wanted me to illustrate their book or getting the jobs. I had read somewhere ... And this was just right around the time that we were starting to use the internet more. I was still using those books that you can get from the library, how to get published. So I was thumbing through that. And the book said it was more likely to get published if you were the illustrator and the writer of a book, if you were both. At least that's what this one book said. So I took that at its word, okay, I need to write a story, but I don't have a story. The first sock monkey story just came about because I have one sock monkey. I don't have many. Some people think I'm like this crazy sock monkey lady. But no. I have one sock monkey that I made during a really, really difficult summer. And I made this sock monkey, and he instantly made me feel better. It was just like, oh, I found my baby. And this is my true love.
And my husband liked him as much as I did, and so he would go on trips with us and he just became this big part of our lives, and it was natural that he would be the star of my first book. I just happened to have a good idea at the right time in the right place, wrote it down. And I was one of those lucky people who submitted it. I didn't have an agent, but at the time, Candlewick Press was accepting unsolicited manuscripts, and I found that out online. Thanks internet. And then I actually sold it that way.
That was a rare thing. But anytime I tried to write a more serious book, this happens every time. Every now and then, I think, okay, this time I'll write a really meaningful, thoughtful, serious book. Yeah. Every time it just sounds so dumb and inauthentic. I'm not good at this. It happens all the time. A great example is I read Peter Brown's book, The Wild Robot. And I thought, oh, this book, I'm going to do this. I can do it. I can do it. And I tried for months, and I worked on this one book for months and months, and every time I would go back to it and reread it, I would think this is just the worst possible piece of garbage I've ever read. So I just go back to my sweet spot, which is humor.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I think what's interesting is even in Chick and Brain or certainly in El Deafo, the humor is also ... It's communicating a bigger message. It's not just absurd. You are giving these different messages, positive, very positive learnings for kids reading them too.
Cece Bell:
Right. Almost all of the humor in my books is about language. It's about communication in some way. Like the Chick and Brain books are that persnickety chick ... Ridiculous character. Making everybody say, please and thank you, and not being able to let that go. That's all communication. If you've seen the I Yam a Donkey. It's I yam ... So fixating on how the donkey is talking instead of-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Saving himself.
Cece Bell:
Yeah. And I'm almost sure that the reason that a lot of my humor comes from that is because my whole life is trying to figure out what people are saying and all the communication difficulties and mishaps, which are often very funny. When I misunderstand somebody, it can be really, really funny.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Well, El Deafo is her most personal work. The book Cece believes best represents her is actually the second installment to the Chick and Brain series titled Egg or Eyeball.
Cece Bell:
To Me, the pinnacle has been achieved. If there's any book that is me, that is me. That book. That one. And that came out during the pandemic, and not as many people are aware of it or know it, but that's the book they need to be reading.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Why is that book so you?
Cece Bell:
Oh my gosh. Because to me, I think it's the funniest book I've ever written by a long shot, and it's just so weird. And it's everything that I think I am and the qualities of me that I love, which are not to be ... I sound like I'm bragging, but just the parts of me that I appreciate about me, me are just being funny and just being gonzo, just gonzo humor. And it's just so off the wall. And the drawings to me are, I finally hit it. I got it. But how will I top this?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I guess we'll have to. You'll have maybe with animal albums.
Cece Bell:
Yes. Fingers crossed.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about it?
Cece Bell:
It was a book that just sprang out of my love of music, which many people are surprised by and which is one of the reasons I did the book was to just inform people that deafness, once again is on a spectrum and there are lots of different ways to appreciate music. Of course, there's the visual way. Every album, when I was a kid at least came with an album cover, and that was part of the enjoyment of listening to music, was looking at cover while you were listening to the music. So every letter is an album cover, a different genre with different animals playing or performing that genre. And every album has lyrics to a song. So it's almost like a poetry book, alphabet book. And what was extra special and what was extra fun about the whole thing was in the end, I ended up making actual songs, all 26 songs to go.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You did?
Cece Bell:
Yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You made all ... I wondered about that. Okay.
Cece Bell:
Yeah. Yes. It ended up being about 62 or 63 musicians total.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my goodness.
Cece Bell:
And we put together, they wrote music to go with my lyrics, and there was a little QR code on the title page that kids can scan in and go to a website and listen to all the songs. It was so much fun.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That is so fun. Oh my goodness. So fun.
Cece Bell:
Yeah. It was the best time. And so I'm currently working on music videos and trying to create this whole world and in a way, trying to convince kids that these albums really do exist. And if they look hard enough, if they go to Goodwill or a thrift store or an antique store, they might find these albums too. They just have to look really hard. I'm just trying to make it feel like something that really did exist that at one point animals really were making music very similar to ours.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
While we didn't talk about it much Cece's older siblings are an incredibly important part of her life. So for her reading challenge, Sibling Stories, she wants us to read stories about the unique and powerful relationships between siblings.
Cece Bell:
I picked that because I have an older brother and older sister, and we have relationships. And our relationships, they are very much the same in many ways, but they've also changed as we've matured. My favorite books as a kid and as an adult are always about regular people in regular situations. How do they navigate things that come up? It doesn't have to be science fiction or fantasy. It's just real life and real relationship. And just all of the books that I chose. In some cases, the books are very much specifically about the sibling relationship. I think Sisters by Raina Telgemeier is on that, and that's specifically about her relationship with her sister. But other books, The Watsons go to Birmingham, Ramona and Beezus, you can't lose with those two.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Thank you so much, Cece.
Cece Bell:
You're welcome.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This was wonderful.
Cece Bell:
It's like a therapy session. I should pay you.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I'll take that as a compliment.
Cece Bell:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Cece's Reading Challenge and all past Reading Challenges at the readingculturepod.com.

This episode's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Amanda Maslonka, a 26-year veteran in education, and an elementary school librarian at Pasadena ISD in Texas. She tells us a funny and heartwarming story from her days working with first graders.

Amanda Maslonka:
I giggle about this every single time and share the story with people, and we laugh about it together. So, when I was in the classroom, teaching first graders, I had this sweet, sweet little baby named Jasmine. We were trying to explain to them that they were now big kids and not in kindergarten anymore. So, we were practicing how to check out our books: scanning our card, scanning our books, and pushing the star when we finished. We had been doing this for weeks and weeks. Then, one day, Jasmine comes up to me while I'm standing by the computer. She scans her book, and, of course, a horrible noise is made.

I say, "Oh, Jasmine, baby, you forgot to scan your card to tell the computer who you are." She looks at the computer screen very seriously and says, "Hi, I'm Jasmine." I couldn't help but laugh. She took it so literally, thinking she had to introduce herself to the computer. So now, when similar situations arise, I giggle and remind the kids, "Hey, don't forget to scan your card to tell the computer who you are." It just cracks me up because it reminds me of sweet little Jasmine, bless her heart.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been the reading culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Cece Bell. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton and Loot by Tania James. 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. To learn 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.comforward/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Josiah Lamberto Eakin. Thanks for joining and keep reading.