About this episode
Jon is a Caldecott Medal winner author and illustrator known for his distinctive minimalistic art style and quirky but profound writing. His work includes his Hat Trilogy, starting with "I Want My Hat Back", along with newer works such as "The Rock from the Sky," "The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale" and many collaborations with his longtime friend and author Mac Barnett.
"That's still my trick too, never tell them how they're feeling. Never begin to even show how they're feeling. They'll get it anyway. You're describing negative space and the negative space you can't even get at.” - Jon Klassen
Where there is empty space, our brains will fill in the blanks, and often, how we fill those blank spaces is far more potent than anything that can be written in words or shown in an image. That’s why despite being gifted in both illustrating and writing, Jon Klassen always intentionally restrains himself from specificity.
In this episode, Jon tells us the story of how he learned to embrace the unspoken through a “gunshot moment” in his youth. He’ll talk about how he intentionally incorporates negative space into his work and why that is so impactful for young readers in particular, and we’ll hear about the SNL classics that inspired his coy sense of comedy.
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Keep up with Jordan and The Reading Culture @thereadingculturepod and subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. Join Jon on social @jonklassen.
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In his reading challenge, A Tale to Remember, Jon invites readers to follow a process that for him emerged unintentionally in the creation of his latest book, "The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale." You can find his list and all past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com.
This episode’s Beanstack Featured Librarian is Ellen Clark, the Children's Outreach Librarian for Kokomo Howard County Public Library in Indiana. Ellen shares an experience she recently had that highlights the emotional impact librarians have not just on a community writ large, but on each reader.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - Seventies University Guy Reads (2:25)
- Chapter 2 - Sketch Book Art Kids (not Jon) (7:51)
- Chapter 3 - Waiting For Godot (13:10)
- Chapter 4 - The Existential Gun Shot (19:40)
- Chapter 5 - No Sad Bears (21:47)
- Chapter 6 - Part 2 (28:34)
- Chapter 7 - A Girl and Her Skull (30:37)
- Chapter 8 - A Tale to Remember (34:51)
- Chapter 9 - Beanstack Featured Librarian (36:12)
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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Jon Klassen:
And that's still my trick too, is never tell them how they're feeling. Never begin to even show how they're feeling, they'll get it anyway or they'll get it more. You're doing the negative space, or you're describing negative space, and the negative space you can't even get at.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon Klassen is one of those magical author/illustrators who has mastered the art of profound storytelling through words and images. But there's a third secret weapon that he relies on, something he has been honing since he was a teenager, restraint.
Jon Klassen:
Removal and emission has become my stock in trade. I don't want to find the spot where I've gotten lazy with it. I just want to find the spot where it's the most interesting to me it can be with the least amount of stuff having been shown.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon, a Caldecott winner, is known for his Hat Trilogy, starting with I Want My Hat Back, and for newer works like The Rock From the Sky, and for many collaborations with his longtime friend and author, Mac Barnett. He's also a former animator, having worked on films such as Kung Fu Panda and Coraline. Jon's stories are central to some of my very favorite read aloud memories with our own kids. For the longest time, my son would put a tiny hat on his head and then I'd chase him around shouting and giggling, "I want my hat back." His books really have such appeal to kids and grownups alike. In this episode, Jon tells us about the gunshot moment from his youth that sparked his fascination with the unspoken. We discuss how he brings negative space into his work and why it holds such power for young readers. We'll also find out which '90s Saturday Night Live comedian provided Jon with the key trick to his sly humor.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways, @thereadingculturepod, and subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. Finally, please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast and give us a five star rating. It's a very small thing, but it really helps us. Thank you, and onto the show.
Well, let's first talk about your childhood and just what was your environment like?
Jon Klassen:
Early, early childhood, I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is a very distinct place in the middle of Canada, we moved when I was in preschool, just after preschool, between preschool and kindergarten. And so, my memories are really hazy, but I think they were really formative too. I remember going back years and years later after college and realizing I'd been trying to draw the same trees, they've got lots of elm trees in Winnipeg. It makes the city, I think. And they're all along the avenues of the houses and stuff, you just walk under these huge elms.
And every time I tried to draw a tree, I was like, "Why do I want it to go up and then spread this particular way?" And I'd been trying to do it, and I looked at the elms was like, "I've been trying to draw elm trees for 20 years." But anyway, that kind of thing, where it's way deep back in there. But then we moved to Toronto and it was me and my two brothers, two younger brothers. I had a great time. We really liked living there and my school was really great. I went to French school with a bunch of other kids. I have tons of warm memories from that time. Really great.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As the oldest, what was your experience of that? Were you really close to your younger brothers?
Jon Klassen:
The logistical thing that happened was that we lived in a small house, and so the two younger ones shared a room and I had a room by myself, and that leads to all sorts of things I think that are formative. I ended up reading and drawing a lot because you're just in your own room. You have that solitary activity at your disposal, where it might've been harder to get into either one of those things if I shared a room with a couple other boys. And my dad, because it was a small house too, my dad had a lot of books, but he didn't have anywhere to put them and so he kept them in my room. So my bed was on one side and then brick and board shelves full of Michener and paperbacks and stuff like that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, his books?
Jon Klassen:
His books, his own books. Yeah, all of his college and university and just casual reading books were in my room. And so I'd just lie on my bed and look at the spines and be like, "What is The Silmarillion? Am I even saying that right?" Just all of that stuff. And so eventually, I think earlier than I would've, I started picking out those books to read. Because he'd come, I'd be like, "Dad, who is Sidney Sheldon? What is this diamond with blood on it?" And he was like, "You should read that." And I'd be like, "All right, I'll read it." So I ended up reading just a lot of '70s university guy, I think that's how you'd classify it, and just all that stuff though that. Yeah, really fun.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Did you have a lot of picture books in your early life?
Jon Klassen:
Yeah, that's how that worked too, is that my dad's room in my grandparents' house, it was like an hour and a half away, they lived in Niagara and we lived in Toronto, we would go for the weekends and stuff to see them, and they still had his room basically set up because he was the only boy in a family of five kids. So when we would sleep there we had all these picture books, because they had book clubs and stuff back then. They didn't have any money, but they had these mail book clubs that you would get a book a month or whatever. And so all the Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman and all those '60s books were still in there in big long rows. And I just pulled piles of them off onto the bed because we didn't have those at home, we didn't have picture books a lot at home. We would go to the library a lot. I remember tons of temporary books coming through the house and moving through it, but I don't remember owning a ton of books, but I remember that shelf at my grandparents' place.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's funny, I'm thinking about in one of these articles I read, I think it's Mac Barnett who said that your work feels more remembered than created.
Jon Klassen:
Yeah. I think we both do that though. I think that we try and stop ourselves short of saying that we're throwing back because we don't want to just make throwback books. He had the same experience, I think. For some reason he only had access to books from around that time for a long time too, and so he's got a good affection for those things. And so when we talk about the speed of the books we're talking... You know what I mean? Just the general feel. We both are picturing the same kind of foggy thing and neither of us are surprised by what the other one is doing when they're trying for that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But it definitely makes you think that there's this callback, like, you're saying, to something-
Jon Klassen:
There's a callback, but then there's also the impulse to put an edge on it. And so what happened if P.D. Eastman wrote a murder story? And it's like that's kind of where we want to live. And it's not to disrupt anything consciously, but it's just sort of where our taste ended up. Both of us, we sort of like mixing it up too and when we started writing, I think we both started writing the same kind of joke stories, that kind of tone, and so whatever that turns into mixed with P.D. Eastman.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you think about books as something you really loved when you were younger or in a different way than now?
Jon Klassen:
I try and parse this because it was such a big deal later and how I worked and why I connected to that work so much. That particular tone of those books, how they felt in the '60s, those reader books, they didn't have a lot of the artsier ones, they didn't have any Sendak or any of those ones that would've opened up other picture book people. I really loved P.D. Eastman and those kind of nonsense reader books.
But I think it was also, I was very aware that I was in my dad's childhood room and we were in the house he grew up in and it hadn't changed as far as the pictures I saw. It was like time travel. And Niagara Falls still felt like that too. It changed a little bit later, but Niagara Falls as a whole place felt like it was stuck in the '50s and '60s, and I was fascinated with it. I was like, "It's like going back in time. It's seeing what everything felt like back then." And the books felt like that too. Just the way the drawings were somehow it just felt like this is what it was like. And I was so interested in going back there and doing that. And I can't tell whether that's just now my aesthetic that I like because I like the way it looks or whether it has to do with those time travel thoughts.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you artistic when you were younger? Were you always a drawer, a creative soul?
Jon Klassen:
Not necessarily. My mom says she remembers me starting to draw in earnest in grade two, second grade, maybe first. But I didn't draw before that. I didn't have any impulse to do it. But I remembered pretty distinctly in third grade we had to do journals and the point of the journal was to like, "What did you do at recess? What did you have for lunch?" Just to get us in practice of using words on our own. And instead of that, I started writing a ghost story that I was thinking of as I was writing it, and it was about a ghost in a cave and it was scaring me so bad. I'd write it in class, but everyone else was like, "I had a sandwich and we ran around." And I was like, "The ghost is wearing a medallion, and the little boy has to get the medallion off the ghost somehow." And just walking up to the teacher and handing her the book and just being so scared of what I had just written.
But after a while, the story got so involved about where people were in a cave and the staging of that that I had to draw it. I was like, "I can't remember where everybody is and it's very important he's going to get killed by this ghost, so what if he's over here?" Because I didn't know how to write all of that. And then I started drawing because I was like, "Oh, you can use this. It's useful to draw." And that's still how I approach drawing is that I never really have an idea for a drawing. Very rarely do I have an idea for a drawing. It's more like I have an idea for how it could be used. I need an assignment. I need some sort of prompt that is outside the drawing before I start doing it, and then I really enjoy it.
I tried to be a sketchbook kid. I thought that's what you were supposed to be, and so I would carry a sketchbook around. But I would never draw anything in it, and I always felt bad. I had these empty sketchbooks I'd carry around. And everybody in college was the same way, I went to college for animation later, and everybody was just drawing like it was a muscular reaction. And I couldn't remember to do it. I was like, "Right, right. I should be drawing." And it just wasn't how my brain worked and it still kind of isn't. I have to have a book first before I start to draw.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So what's like, just for an example for people not minded like that, maybe you could just use an example from The Rock From the Sky or I don't know, something that...
Jon Klassen:
Well, that one, I mean certainly there are two characters who are standing in one spot at the beginning and they're like, "I don't want to move." The one character's like, "I'm not going anywhere." And then you turn the page and there's just a rock silently falling somewhere above him. I did that story because I wanted to draw a giant rock, and so that was actually an idea of reverse engineering. It was like, "I want to draw a big rock. How do I get that permission to do that?" But then in the story, of course it doesn't say anything about a rock. And then if it was written in prose, you'd be like, "But what he doesn't know is that there's a giant rock falling above him." That's not a funny way to tell that joke. And so you turn the page and just silently, you can hear this rock just whistling through the air. That's funny. And then you turn the page and he's still talking about whatever he is talking about underneath, no idea.
And so when they're leaning against each other, that's my favorite because I'm a nervous writer and I'm certainly a nervous illustrator, a little less now these days because I've been doing it, but still pretty nervous. But when you lean both nervous things against each other and they're taking attention off of each other and then the spotlight is off both of them and the spotlight converges in between them and you're putting it together, and so it relaxes me. I can do both those things now that I know that the focus is off of both of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's interesting because reading your books with kids, half of the experience is their reaction to the reading, which is true with a lot of picture books you could say, because they're always pointing to things, but it's very different I think with your books because they're like, "No, he is wearing a hat. He's wearing the hat." It's a different thing. They're filling in your words almost.
Jon Klassen:
There's something about making things, especially in those early books, I Want My Hat Back, where both sides, I needed to undermine them because I didn't trust myself yet I don't think, and I still kind of operate that way where it's like the text is being undermined by the picture. The text is saying something, but it's not saying everything. It can't. I haven't given myself the tool of narration to explain that there's a hat on that rabbit. But then the picture is undermining me as an author a little bit because they're looking at you like, "What are we doing here?" The whole tone of the illustrations of the... They're not even looking at each other and partly that's because they're just not very good actors, I don't think. But also the look on their face as far as I'm concerned is like, "This is the book? This is what you're going with?" And I need to be undermined at every stage of it by myself. I don't like being undermined by anybody else. But I think I operate from a place of just making fun of myself as a person who thinks he has any business making anything. If I can fit all that together and still get a story, that's sort of how I hold it all together.
For a while, I Want My Hat Back felt too sarcastic for that and I felt kind of bad about it later because I was like, "Am I making fun of picture books? I don't want to make fun of the reader here. I don't want to shoot and miss myself and hit them." And so I try to be more sincere and more direct and less sarcastic. And those books, the three hat books kind of run that progression and then The Rock From the Sky I think goes all the way back where I'm deeply making fun of myself again with those stupid stories and just being like the dumber it was the more I laughed and the better I liked it. But it was very much about, "We're going to spend 98 pages doing next to nothing." And I really went all the way back to just, "Let's see what we can get out of that."
Act one. A country road. A tree. Evening. Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir. Estragon, giving up again, "Nothing to be done." Vladimir, advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart, "I'm beginning to come around to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me saying, 'Vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything.' And I resumed the struggle." He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon, "So there you are again, Estragon." "Am I?" Vladimir, "I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever." Estragon, "Me too." Vladimir, "Together again at last. We'll have to celebrate this. But how?" He reflects, "Get up till I embrace you." Estragon, irritably, "Not now, not now." Vladimir, hurt, coldly, "May one inquire where His Highness spent the night? Estragon, "In a ditch." Vladimir, admiringly, "A ditch. Where?" Estragon, without gesture, "Over there." Vladimir, "And they didn't beat you?" Estragon, Beat me? Certainly they beat me." Vladimir, "The same lot as usual?" Estragon, "The same? I don't know."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Waiting for Godot is Samuel Beckett's renowned 1953 play, which was translated from his original French version entitled, En attendant Godot. Ironically, it was voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century in a 1999 poll by the British Royal National Theater. In it, two men, Estragon and Vladimir wait under a tree for a third enigmatic figure known as Godot. Very little happens. They talk and, spoiler alert, Godot himself never shows. Yet beneath the minimal stage setting and meandering dialogue lies a profound and unspoken narrative, as Beckett delves into the absurdity of life and the relentless passage of time. It's a powerful example of the potency of the unsaid. That realization was an early lesson that would stick with Jon and become a recurrent motif in his work.
Jon Klassen:
When I was in grade 11, we had a literature teacher who was gone the whole year. He'd gotten sick, he'd gone off to Costa Rica or something for the summer and gotten horribly ill, and so he wasn't around, but he left this amazing reading list and that was a huge year for me. I don't know why 11th grade really snapped it open, but what books and writing could be for. I remember coming out of that and my brain had grown five sizes or something. And one of the things he left us was Waiting for Godot. I don't know why those two things are connected, but I remember reading some Rolling Stone article on Bob Dylan. In the beginning of Like a Rolling Stone, there's a drum snap, and they said that was a gunshot that started the certain era of music or something like that. And this felt like a gunshot in my head. It felt like a starting of something and I'd never read anything like it.
And I remember reading it in class, I think we were reading it out loud or they'd assigned people to read it or something. And I remember just looking around being like, "Is anyone else hearing this? Does anyone else know? It's like an alien showed up." I was just like, "This is unbelievable." And it still seems unbelievable to me. And I didn't even know, and I still don't pretend to know everything that's going on in this play and what he's doing. But just how minimal it was obviously, and just what he's writing and what he's not writing. Then just also the way they're talking to each other and so grand and yet they're sitting in a ditch and it's all just so beautifully constructed for pathos and you're just engaged immediately and you know nothing, but very quickly you know more. And it's just what he's implying about the depths of the world within what we know already, that these guys just get beat all the time and they don't even care by who and just like... But he's done barely anything and you know so much, and you haven't had much to work with and you don't really want more. I was just blown away by that. And I'm still, I think, recovering from that first few pages.
That same year was another... That was the first time I ever read Hemingway. I reread For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then I remember writing a paper and he came in, the teacher came in, he was all pale and weighed like 10 pounds.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
"I'm here for Hemingway."
Jon Klassen:
But he came in, "I'm here for Hemingway." And I wrote a paper on it and the paper, I remember, just basically summarizing the story. I didn't really know what to make of it. I liked reading it but didn't know what it was. And he pulled me at the end and we were talking about it because I wanted to talk about Beckett, but he was like, "That Hemingway thing." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah." And he was like, "I want to talk about that book." I was like, "Okay. It was fine." And he's like, "What do you think Hemingway was doing in that book?" And I said, "Well, it's about a guy and there's a bridge and he dies." And he's like, "Yeah, no, no, no, no, I know what happens." He's like, "What do you think he was doing?"
The repetition of that question and the way he asked it, I suddenly lost my voice and suddenly the idea of abstraction, the idea of describing something outside of the literal events of the book, I'd never considered it before. I didn't think that's what was going on in books. I thought you wrote the story and that was what books were for. And then he was like, "Yeah, but what do you think he was after? What do you think he was doing?" And I couldn't believe suddenly that opened up too, where I was like, "This is talking to other books." And he was commenting all of a sudden just this idea of a conversation between authors and between other books that weren't even... All that stuff suddenly became much clearer.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, Beckett too-
Jon Klassen:
Beckett.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I mean that's a whole school of philosophical thought.
Jon Klassen:
And I didn't know any of that stuff. I didn't know that you could even do that. I just thought these were guys working on their own on stories and that was it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
"I'm going to make a play about these two guys who get beaten all the time and they're just waiting for another."
Jon Klassen:
I mean, that's fine by me too. I liked it anyway. But just the idea that even outside of whatever he was commenting on or what was going on in books at the time, just that he was describing something... And everything you read about Hemingway is about this too, where he's like, "Never describe the thing you're doing. Describe around it, talk around it, and you'll get the depth of the thing." And that's still my trick too, is never tell them how they're feeling. Never begin to even show how they're feeling. They'll get it anyway or they'll get it more. And yeah, that year of being like, "You're not writing or drawing the thing, you can't anyway." And so you're doing the negative space or you're describing negative space and the negative space you can't even get at, but it's there. It's valid. It's just don't have the tools for accurate description of it. And I don't know, all of that was still in there, yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. So your work is often described as existential. And going back to the play for a moment, you said it was like a gunshot for you. So do you think the depth of the play was fully apparent to you as a teenager or just what were you thinking at that time?
Jon Klassen:
Well, I didn't know what he was doing. I still don't really know. But I knew aesthetically, I knew aesthetically I was super interested in that. And then also I think what I was connecting to and what I still connect to is his discomfort with language, or at least that he isn't using it naturally. They're talking to each other, but there's something off about the language. There's a weird halting or a strange use of words.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes.
Jon Klassen:
It doesn't sound like someone who's comfy with words. He is very comfortable. Obviously he's a beautiful writer, but it's also, he's using it in this kind of limping way. And I really related to that too, where I was like, "Yeah, he doesn't think that talking is the best way to get something out." We're trying, but we're using this blunt tool of our language to get this thing across. And there was so much tension behind that. There was so much feeling to the fact the best we can do is still going to sound a little weird. And I remember reading later that he wrote in French mostly because he didn't know it as well, and that was on purpose. He was deliberately, and I feel like that too, where it's like if I begin to write prose or even a letter or an email, I'm notorious for going on forever. I can't stop. We were doing the TV show, Mac and I, last year where we were writing a lot of emails explaining ourselves as far as what we wanted-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For Shape Island?
Jon Klassen:
For Shape Island, yeah. And I was notorious for these five chapter emails trying to explain what I wanted visually because we weren't there, everyone was on Zoom and stuff. And everyone was like, "Oh God, here comes another tome from Jon." And I know that about myself. But as soon as I get a hard rule, as soon as I say with the Hat books, "No narration", I don't allow myself that spigot anymore. And they're animals, so they don't really know how to talk, then I'm extremely restrained and I'm the person I want to be. I don't have this super open channel anymore. That same feeling of, there's a bunch of stuff behind this, but all that's getting out are these five weird words that don't quite fit on together, there's something extra about that. There's a lot of thought in that approach that I really admire and still relate to a lot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon the writer is fascinated with negative space, the void between words that allows us to fill in the gaps and discover meaning beyond the boundaries of language. Jon the illustrator has a similar, less is more approach using stripped down repetitive images with very little extra information. For him, the right picture provides just enough context to spark the reader's imagination without overindulging.
Jon Klassen:
I don't like to draw emotion on characters. When I do, it's a tough one. And sometimes you run into stories or moments where you're just like, "I got to draw it this time. I have to draw him smiling or I have to draw him angry." Or something like... Ah, it almost feels like a failure. But you need it too as an audience. You got to give them something. But waiting until the last moment to give them something is part of my thing. And I think there's something in there about me thinking it's kind of crass to draw emotion. I don't know why that is. It just seems impolite.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Why?
Jon Klassen:
I don't know. I just feel like it's a double beat, especially if you're doing it with text too. If you're like, "The bear is having a horrible day. His favorite thing is gone." I don't want to draw a sad bear. Draw a bear that looks blank. I'm heartbroken by a blank bear, when you say that. I'm not as heartbroken by a sad looking bear. That's too much. And it's also like I'm embarrassed for him that he's looking sad in front of us, that he has to show that. I think that's a good word, is just sort of like as much as I'm embarrassed to show too much, I have to think that they would be too. And my belief in characters in my books isn't so much that I believe them on the ground in their situation as I believe them in people also trying to make something with me. And so I want to go easy on them.
I think about it almost like film directing where if you see a conversation on film and two actors are having it and the director has made them stand facing each other and it's just either alternating one-shots or just like a two-shot and they have to just say the words and figure out what to do with their hands or something, that's probably bad direction unless you're going for something really stiff. You could do them a favor and shoot them walking down the street or one of them is trying to light a cigarette or something and then you've done them a favor. They have something to do and something to chew on. And I think with my guys, I don't do them those favors, so they are just standing there most of the time. And that's me being kind of a bad director on purpose for them.
But also I don't want to be like, "You got to cry today. You have to figure out, get to a place where you can cry." I don't want to ever put them through that. I'll be like, "Don't worry, we'll take care of that in the edit. We'll just say you're sad. Don't worry. You don't have to do that for me." And I don't want to ask too much of them. My belief in them as actors is such an important part of the process. And I think I only need it for the first half of a book. I think I only need that weird conceit for the premise. And then eventually I get into it and the characters begin to act. Like halfway through the book, they start to break and they start to need to, either the story demands it or I just get comfortable with it. But the first part of most of my books, everyone's just like, "Okay, we're doing this? We're going to go and do a book?" And I need that. I just need it to get into the water. I don't know what it is.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So aside from the emotional impact, I wonder how that idea plays into the comedy of your work. So much of your work is funny. For example, I'm currently reading The Skull, which we'll talk about more shortly, but everything is just so hilarious, darkly hilarious, but still. Anyways, where does that come from? What would you say are your comedic influences?
Jon Klassen:
Things like The Far Side, and even just today I was looking through different passages to maybe bring on, I found Jack Handey again, the Saturday Night Live guy-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Deep Thoughts?
Jon Klassen:
And I was like, "Man..." Because we had Deep Thoughts and we had one called Fuzzy Memories around the house when I was a kid and just crying reading at the dinner table, the three of us, just my dad too, my mom too, just crying laughing so hard. And he's brilliant. Reading how he does that stuff and the flatness of it and the brilliance of the structure I think, because it was the timing like Bill Waterson too, certain comics guys who very often would do a thing that I do too where they build up a joke in the first three panels and then the fourth panel skips a forward in time and arrives at a place where the actual joke or event has happened and they're lying in the wreckage of it. And that mechanic, that's funny to me. Them lying on the ground in the crater of what has just been built up is much funnier than the explosion. And picture books suit that so well, and it's still how I construct a story.
I'm always looking to skip the event and if I can take as much as possible away from the thing and still make it funny, if it's funnier to remove or more emotionally effective to remove, we can talk... Like The Skull was sort of that way, the next one, where removal and emission has become sort of my stock in trade, and I don't want to find the spot where I've gotten lazy with it. I just want to find the spot where it's the most interesting to me it can be with the least amount of stuff having been shown.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So your books are really for kids and adults, but obviously we as adults come to them in a different way and there's a lot of depth and profoundness that feels really mature in them. And I wonder, what do you think kids are coming to your books with? Why do you think this level of existentialism is so attractive to young readers?
Jon Klassen:
I think that part of it is what you were talking about earlier where it's like because of the way I operate, because I have to lean the two things against each other, the pictures and the words, the pictures get a lot more important and the pictures are sort of a very young kid's territory. That's their spot. And if there's information there that the text doesn't have, they feel very excited and suddenly they're important. It's not just supplemental. They know something that the "adults", quote, with the words on the fancy other side don't know. And they're like, "Wait, go back. He was wearing the hat." And you're like, "I haven't read anything about that." And you just keep moving along.
Or even if you're reading it by yourself, hopefully that's the feeling you're getting is that you're learning to read and so this is still authoritative and important, but you know how to read pictures. Everybody does. And so it's speaking a language that you're very familiar with and it's almost like a whisper of a secret where you're like, "He's wearing a hat." But the text, the very official text is not saying anything about that. It hasn't bothered to look.
I think the other stuff being about murder and revenge and all that kind of thing excites certain kids. It would've excited me, hopefully, because I think I would've found that funny. But even kids who that's not their thing hopefully get excited by just the fact that they're in on more information than normal. And again, I'd like to say that that's because I understand kids or something. But it's really just me trying to solve my own creative problems and get something out that I'm not embarrassed by. And so luckily those two things dovetail, but it wasn't me saying, "You know what, kids need to be empowered by pictures." It was me being like, "How do I do this without falling on my face?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So something else that is really intentional and you seem to be doing more of is writing your books in parts. You did this in The Skull and The Rock From the Sky, and I just wonder where that came from. What made you decide to do that?
Jon Klassen:
The third Hat book had that a little bit. We Found a Hat had breaks.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah.
Jon Klassen:
And I remember thinking, this is so much better because a picture book, they're hard because you have to do an arc that propels itself, whatever blasts that thing off from the first page has to have enough gunpowder in it to get you across like 45 pages. And getting a kid across 45 pages takes a lot of work. Two things, I think writing shorter arcs, so that part one has its own arc, part two has its own arc, part three has its own arc. But also there's a joke in the page turn of part two when you finished a part, James Marshall does this, I learned it from him I think, or at least it was clarified with him, his little stories with George and Martha, the funniest parts of those stories to me is when you turn the page and it's like, "Next story." And you're like, "That was it? That was the last page?" I think he was aware of that and writing to it being like, "Yeah, that's it. That was a joke. You passed the joke about a mile back." And you're like, "I did?" And then you laugh retroactively.
And I'm not sure mine do that exactly. I think The Rock From the Sky does it, but the third Hat book doesn't do it as much. But I remember loving, even when I'm reading it out loud, says, "That's the end of part one." And you turn the page, and that's a chuckle that you get even from adults. The story seems like weird and janky, but you're very formally in the middle of this kind of limping story putting, "Part Two", as if you're writing The Room with a View or something like that. But writing to chapter breaks or whatever you call them, that suits me very well. It's even shorter than a picture book.
More and more when I write these books, I write the page, you picture the page, and you picture the page turn and it becomes easier for me to write. The Skull was like that, where I couldn't figure out how to write it. And then as soon as I began to do pages and be like, "This is the paragraph on this page, now I can handle it. Now I can figure out what the book is." That's the same way the chapter breaks, where it's like, "All right, and then I only have to think about this little arc and how that cuts together and then I can do the next one."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon's newest book is The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale. In this story, his sense of humor persists, but he also leans into a new genre, horror. Of course, horror in a child-friendly way. The story is a retelling of a folktale from the Tyrol Region, which is an historical region in the European Alps encompassing modern day Italy and Austria. Jon's unique approach to storytelling coupled with his comforting and distinctive art style transforms this traditional tale into something almost entirely new. I asked him to explain the premise, or as I called it, can't take the entrepreneur out of the girl, the pitch, for our listeners.
Jon Klassen:
It was an existing story, but I feel like this was the easiest pitch I've ever had. Pitching The Rock From the Sky was the hardest thing. "What is that about?" I couldn't figure out. There's no elevator pitch for that. You're still in the elevator for 20 minutes. I couldn't figure out how to shorten it. But The Skull was a very easy pitch. You just say it's a little girl who's run away from home, finds an old house in the woods, and there's a skull living in it. I'm in. Anyone I think that I know would be like, "I want to hear the end of that." And that is how it starts, is that she runs away from home in the middle of the night and she finds an old house in the woods and she knocks on the door and the skull comes to the window and he is like, "Hi." And she says, "Hi." And he goes, "You can come in if you want, but you have to carry me around. I'm just a skull. And it's a pain in the butt to roll around all the time." So she says, "Okay."
And we don't know why she's run away from home, and that's very important. But whatever she's been through, she's very nonplussed by the appearance of a talking skull. But he gives her the tour of the house and they become... They're nice to each other right away. They sort of have a way of talking to each other. And after a tour of the house, including a dungeon with a bottomless pit and a tower very up high where you can see the whole forest, they have tea by the fire in the evening, and he's like, "Do you want to stay the night?" And she says, "Yeah, I'd love to stay the night. I don't have anywhere else to go." And he goes, "Well, if you stay the night something's up, there's a headless skeleton that chases me around the house at night and we're going to have to deal with that." And she goes "Every night?" And he goes, "Yeah, he comes every night." And she gets so mad at this, by now they're friends and she can't believe that this thing gets chased every night by this horrible thing. And she's like, "All right, I'll figure this out."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right. She's going to take care of business. How about the use of parts in this book? Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jon Klassen:
The parts were important just to break up because it was a longer story, and I was worried about losing them. And I feel like that's happening too, is with the parts, even young kids, they're like, "There's how many more pages?" Whereas if you're like, "No, no, no, it's part one, don't worry." And it breaks it up for them. But it's also in the middle of the sort of when it really gets going momentum wise, you're still going into parts. And I like that very much. We don't ever break the action, I don't think, too hard, but there's also words that break down what you're about to read, which I really like. That's a McCarthy trick. I think he did it in Blood Meridian, and he would just write. It doesn't spoil the story, it actually hypes you up for the story.
I think the second last one, the words are just, "The bones, the fire, the pit."And you're like, "What's going to happen?" And you've read those things and you kind of know what's going to happen, but you're like, "What? What?" And then the last one just gets to be, "What?" But just the formality of that, again, I don't know why I'm attracted to the formality of it. It's a nice way to organize your book. And if you are feeling a little bit... Because this was a lot of content for me anyway. And so in order to make it feel more organized and make your head kind of understand it better, it just felt good to do that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I also think as a parent, reading aloud to kids when you're like, "Please don't let this be 20 minutes."
Jon Klassen:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You're like, "No, this looks great. It's so small." And open up, you're like, "So much text on this page." But it's great I think also for parents, when your see what's coming, it's a really fun read aloud to do with your kids when I think when you have parts and you can preview it's coming with them. It's a fun thing to do.
Jon Klassen:
Yeah, in a perfect world, I hope you see a look exchange between the parent and the kid and be like, "The fire? The bones?" And they're like, "You want to go?" He's like, "Let's go. Let's keep going." And that kind of break to look at each other again, even to be like, "You ready?" And I love that idea.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For Jon's reading challenge, A Tale to Remember, he takes inspiration from the unplanned process behind the creation of The Skull.
Jon Klassen:
I read a folktale called The Skull, and I didn't have access to the story for a year almost, I think more. And then I got to read it again, and I'd realized that in the year my brain had completely changed it. I was so interested in what I'd done to it. I didn't know why I'd done that stuff. I still don't really know why I'd done what I'd done to it. But that was the book I made was like, "I want to make the one I remembered or I thought I remembered." And folktales are a lot like that. They sort of get broken telephoned as you tell them, and sometimes for the better because you're entertaining different audiences or whatever.
But I thought maybe if anybody wanted to is to pick a story you've never read, maybe even especially a short one, read it once and don't go back. And then a year later, if you have a year, if you can do it, or even months later, whatever you think, however long it would take to mostly forget it, go back and read it again and see what you think and see if it's changed, see if your brain and your life and your year has changed this thing. I don't think it's any of our business sometimes why we change those things. But it's interesting as a phenomenon, I think, to observe it happening because you're doing something, you're working on something when you do that. It's not just because you're a storyteller or because this is the craft or something. Your brain is helping you out.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In this episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Ellen Clark, the children's outreach librarian for Kokomo Howard County Public Library in Indiana. She's also a massive fan of Jon's.
Ellen Clark:
I was so tickled the first time I read This is Not My Hat. And I just remember flipping to that last page going... And just the facial expressions and everything. Oh, I bought that before I had a child, I bought that book. And then when my daughter was old enough when we were reading to her, I read that to my daughter and I showed it to my mom and my husband, "You have to read this book."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As an outreach librarian, Ellen has plenty of stories about getting kids into reading. But during a time when librarians are facing such unprecedented scrutiny, I think this story is a wonderful reminder about the magic of librarians and also their dedication to building a culture of reading sometimes one reader at a time.
Ellen Clark:
There was a mother that came in with her kids and her middle daughter was starting to learn how to read and, "Oh, we don't know what to read. She doesn't know what she wants." And it's that struggle of how to get your child interested. So I asked the questions of, "Well, does she have a favorite animal? Does she have favorite character? Does she want humorous?" Or all those questions. And she said, "Oh, definitely funny. And she likes dogs." So I pointed her to the Pig the Pug books, and they checked out one. And about a week later, the mom came in and said, "We've read Pig the Star probably 10 times this week." And then they checked out the entire stack and she said that this is her daughter's favorite literary character. All they're reading is Pig the Pug. And I was like, "Yay, I did it." Now she's a happy reader and I haven't seen them come back to that. But they've been going around reading other things now, so I'm glad that that got her started.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture and you've been listening to our conversation with Jon Klassen. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, and King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender.
If you enjoyed today's show, please show some love and give us a five star review. It takes just a second and really helps, especially on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources beanstack.com, and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and insights. Also, be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. Thanks for joining. And keep reading.
And that's still my trick too, is never tell them how they're feeling. Never begin to even show how they're feeling, they'll get it anyway or they'll get it more. You're doing the negative space, or you're describing negative space, and the negative space you can't even get at.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon Klassen is one of those magical author/illustrators who has mastered the art of profound storytelling through words and images. But there's a third secret weapon that he relies on, something he has been honing since he was a teenager, restraint.
Jon Klassen:
Removal and emission has become my stock in trade. I don't want to find the spot where I've gotten lazy with it. I just want to find the spot where it's the most interesting to me it can be with the least amount of stuff having been shown.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon, a Caldecott winner, is known for his Hat Trilogy, starting with I Want My Hat Back, and for newer works like The Rock From the Sky, and for many collaborations with his longtime friend and author, Mac Barnett. He's also a former animator, having worked on films such as Kung Fu Panda and Coraline. Jon's stories are central to some of my very favorite read aloud memories with our own kids. For the longest time, my son would put a tiny hat on his head and then I'd chase him around shouting and giggling, "I want my hat back." His books really have such appeal to kids and grownups alike. In this episode, Jon tells us about the gunshot moment from his youth that sparked his fascination with the unspoken. We discuss how he brings negative space into his work and why it holds such power for young readers. We'll also find out which '90s Saturday Night Live comedian provided Jon with the key trick to his sly humor.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways, @thereadingculturepod, and subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. Finally, please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast and give us a five star rating. It's a very small thing, but it really helps us. Thank you, and onto the show.
Well, let's first talk about your childhood and just what was your environment like?
Jon Klassen:
Early, early childhood, I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is a very distinct place in the middle of Canada, we moved when I was in preschool, just after preschool, between preschool and kindergarten. And so, my memories are really hazy, but I think they were really formative too. I remember going back years and years later after college and realizing I'd been trying to draw the same trees, they've got lots of elm trees in Winnipeg. It makes the city, I think. And they're all along the avenues of the houses and stuff, you just walk under these huge elms.
And every time I tried to draw a tree, I was like, "Why do I want it to go up and then spread this particular way?" And I'd been trying to do it, and I looked at the elms was like, "I've been trying to draw elm trees for 20 years." But anyway, that kind of thing, where it's way deep back in there. But then we moved to Toronto and it was me and my two brothers, two younger brothers. I had a great time. We really liked living there and my school was really great. I went to French school with a bunch of other kids. I have tons of warm memories from that time. Really great.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As the oldest, what was your experience of that? Were you really close to your younger brothers?
Jon Klassen:
The logistical thing that happened was that we lived in a small house, and so the two younger ones shared a room and I had a room by myself, and that leads to all sorts of things I think that are formative. I ended up reading and drawing a lot because you're just in your own room. You have that solitary activity at your disposal, where it might've been harder to get into either one of those things if I shared a room with a couple other boys. And my dad, because it was a small house too, my dad had a lot of books, but he didn't have anywhere to put them and so he kept them in my room. So my bed was on one side and then brick and board shelves full of Michener and paperbacks and stuff like that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, his books?
Jon Klassen:
His books, his own books. Yeah, all of his college and university and just casual reading books were in my room. And so I'd just lie on my bed and look at the spines and be like, "What is The Silmarillion? Am I even saying that right?" Just all of that stuff. And so eventually, I think earlier than I would've, I started picking out those books to read. Because he'd come, I'd be like, "Dad, who is Sidney Sheldon? What is this diamond with blood on it?" And he was like, "You should read that." And I'd be like, "All right, I'll read it." So I ended up reading just a lot of '70s university guy, I think that's how you'd classify it, and just all that stuff though that. Yeah, really fun.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Did you have a lot of picture books in your early life?
Jon Klassen:
Yeah, that's how that worked too, is that my dad's room in my grandparents' house, it was like an hour and a half away, they lived in Niagara and we lived in Toronto, we would go for the weekends and stuff to see them, and they still had his room basically set up because he was the only boy in a family of five kids. So when we would sleep there we had all these picture books, because they had book clubs and stuff back then. They didn't have any money, but they had these mail book clubs that you would get a book a month or whatever. And so all the Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman and all those '60s books were still in there in big long rows. And I just pulled piles of them off onto the bed because we didn't have those at home, we didn't have picture books a lot at home. We would go to the library a lot. I remember tons of temporary books coming through the house and moving through it, but I don't remember owning a ton of books, but I remember that shelf at my grandparents' place.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's funny, I'm thinking about in one of these articles I read, I think it's Mac Barnett who said that your work feels more remembered than created.
Jon Klassen:
Yeah. I think we both do that though. I think that we try and stop ourselves short of saying that we're throwing back because we don't want to just make throwback books. He had the same experience, I think. For some reason he only had access to books from around that time for a long time too, and so he's got a good affection for those things. And so when we talk about the speed of the books we're talking... You know what I mean? Just the general feel. We both are picturing the same kind of foggy thing and neither of us are surprised by what the other one is doing when they're trying for that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But it definitely makes you think that there's this callback, like, you're saying, to something-
Jon Klassen:
There's a callback, but then there's also the impulse to put an edge on it. And so what happened if P.D. Eastman wrote a murder story? And it's like that's kind of where we want to live. And it's not to disrupt anything consciously, but it's just sort of where our taste ended up. Both of us, we sort of like mixing it up too and when we started writing, I think we both started writing the same kind of joke stories, that kind of tone, and so whatever that turns into mixed with P.D. Eastman.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you think about books as something you really loved when you were younger or in a different way than now?
Jon Klassen:
I try and parse this because it was such a big deal later and how I worked and why I connected to that work so much. That particular tone of those books, how they felt in the '60s, those reader books, they didn't have a lot of the artsier ones, they didn't have any Sendak or any of those ones that would've opened up other picture book people. I really loved P.D. Eastman and those kind of nonsense reader books.
But I think it was also, I was very aware that I was in my dad's childhood room and we were in the house he grew up in and it hadn't changed as far as the pictures I saw. It was like time travel. And Niagara Falls still felt like that too. It changed a little bit later, but Niagara Falls as a whole place felt like it was stuck in the '50s and '60s, and I was fascinated with it. I was like, "It's like going back in time. It's seeing what everything felt like back then." And the books felt like that too. Just the way the drawings were somehow it just felt like this is what it was like. And I was so interested in going back there and doing that. And I can't tell whether that's just now my aesthetic that I like because I like the way it looks or whether it has to do with those time travel thoughts.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you artistic when you were younger? Were you always a drawer, a creative soul?
Jon Klassen:
Not necessarily. My mom says she remembers me starting to draw in earnest in grade two, second grade, maybe first. But I didn't draw before that. I didn't have any impulse to do it. But I remembered pretty distinctly in third grade we had to do journals and the point of the journal was to like, "What did you do at recess? What did you have for lunch?" Just to get us in practice of using words on our own. And instead of that, I started writing a ghost story that I was thinking of as I was writing it, and it was about a ghost in a cave and it was scaring me so bad. I'd write it in class, but everyone else was like, "I had a sandwich and we ran around." And I was like, "The ghost is wearing a medallion, and the little boy has to get the medallion off the ghost somehow." And just walking up to the teacher and handing her the book and just being so scared of what I had just written.
But after a while, the story got so involved about where people were in a cave and the staging of that that I had to draw it. I was like, "I can't remember where everybody is and it's very important he's going to get killed by this ghost, so what if he's over here?" Because I didn't know how to write all of that. And then I started drawing because I was like, "Oh, you can use this. It's useful to draw." And that's still how I approach drawing is that I never really have an idea for a drawing. Very rarely do I have an idea for a drawing. It's more like I have an idea for how it could be used. I need an assignment. I need some sort of prompt that is outside the drawing before I start doing it, and then I really enjoy it.
I tried to be a sketchbook kid. I thought that's what you were supposed to be, and so I would carry a sketchbook around. But I would never draw anything in it, and I always felt bad. I had these empty sketchbooks I'd carry around. And everybody in college was the same way, I went to college for animation later, and everybody was just drawing like it was a muscular reaction. And I couldn't remember to do it. I was like, "Right, right. I should be drawing." And it just wasn't how my brain worked and it still kind of isn't. I have to have a book first before I start to draw.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So what's like, just for an example for people not minded like that, maybe you could just use an example from The Rock From the Sky or I don't know, something that...
Jon Klassen:
Well, that one, I mean certainly there are two characters who are standing in one spot at the beginning and they're like, "I don't want to move." The one character's like, "I'm not going anywhere." And then you turn the page and there's just a rock silently falling somewhere above him. I did that story because I wanted to draw a giant rock, and so that was actually an idea of reverse engineering. It was like, "I want to draw a big rock. How do I get that permission to do that?" But then in the story, of course it doesn't say anything about a rock. And then if it was written in prose, you'd be like, "But what he doesn't know is that there's a giant rock falling above him." That's not a funny way to tell that joke. And so you turn the page and just silently, you can hear this rock just whistling through the air. That's funny. And then you turn the page and he's still talking about whatever he is talking about underneath, no idea.
And so when they're leaning against each other, that's my favorite because I'm a nervous writer and I'm certainly a nervous illustrator, a little less now these days because I've been doing it, but still pretty nervous. But when you lean both nervous things against each other and they're taking attention off of each other and then the spotlight is off both of them and the spotlight converges in between them and you're putting it together, and so it relaxes me. I can do both those things now that I know that the focus is off of both of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's interesting because reading your books with kids, half of the experience is their reaction to the reading, which is true with a lot of picture books you could say, because they're always pointing to things, but it's very different I think with your books because they're like, "No, he is wearing a hat. He's wearing the hat." It's a different thing. They're filling in your words almost.
Jon Klassen:
There's something about making things, especially in those early books, I Want My Hat Back, where both sides, I needed to undermine them because I didn't trust myself yet I don't think, and I still kind of operate that way where it's like the text is being undermined by the picture. The text is saying something, but it's not saying everything. It can't. I haven't given myself the tool of narration to explain that there's a hat on that rabbit. But then the picture is undermining me as an author a little bit because they're looking at you like, "What are we doing here?" The whole tone of the illustrations of the... They're not even looking at each other and partly that's because they're just not very good actors, I don't think. But also the look on their face as far as I'm concerned is like, "This is the book? This is what you're going with?" And I need to be undermined at every stage of it by myself. I don't like being undermined by anybody else. But I think I operate from a place of just making fun of myself as a person who thinks he has any business making anything. If I can fit all that together and still get a story, that's sort of how I hold it all together.
For a while, I Want My Hat Back felt too sarcastic for that and I felt kind of bad about it later because I was like, "Am I making fun of picture books? I don't want to make fun of the reader here. I don't want to shoot and miss myself and hit them." And so I try to be more sincere and more direct and less sarcastic. And those books, the three hat books kind of run that progression and then The Rock From the Sky I think goes all the way back where I'm deeply making fun of myself again with those stupid stories and just being like the dumber it was the more I laughed and the better I liked it. But it was very much about, "We're going to spend 98 pages doing next to nothing." And I really went all the way back to just, "Let's see what we can get out of that."
Act one. A country road. A tree. Evening. Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir. Estragon, giving up again, "Nothing to be done." Vladimir, advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart, "I'm beginning to come around to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me saying, 'Vladimir, be reasonable. You haven't yet tried everything.' And I resumed the struggle." He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon, "So there you are again, Estragon." "Am I?" Vladimir, "I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever." Estragon, "Me too." Vladimir, "Together again at last. We'll have to celebrate this. But how?" He reflects, "Get up till I embrace you." Estragon, irritably, "Not now, not now." Vladimir, hurt, coldly, "May one inquire where His Highness spent the night? Estragon, "In a ditch." Vladimir, admiringly, "A ditch. Where?" Estragon, without gesture, "Over there." Vladimir, "And they didn't beat you?" Estragon, Beat me? Certainly they beat me." Vladimir, "The same lot as usual?" Estragon, "The same? I don't know."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Waiting for Godot is Samuel Beckett's renowned 1953 play, which was translated from his original French version entitled, En attendant Godot. Ironically, it was voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century in a 1999 poll by the British Royal National Theater. In it, two men, Estragon and Vladimir wait under a tree for a third enigmatic figure known as Godot. Very little happens. They talk and, spoiler alert, Godot himself never shows. Yet beneath the minimal stage setting and meandering dialogue lies a profound and unspoken narrative, as Beckett delves into the absurdity of life and the relentless passage of time. It's a powerful example of the potency of the unsaid. That realization was an early lesson that would stick with Jon and become a recurrent motif in his work.
Jon Klassen:
When I was in grade 11, we had a literature teacher who was gone the whole year. He'd gotten sick, he'd gone off to Costa Rica or something for the summer and gotten horribly ill, and so he wasn't around, but he left this amazing reading list and that was a huge year for me. I don't know why 11th grade really snapped it open, but what books and writing could be for. I remember coming out of that and my brain had grown five sizes or something. And one of the things he left us was Waiting for Godot. I don't know why those two things are connected, but I remember reading some Rolling Stone article on Bob Dylan. In the beginning of Like a Rolling Stone, there's a drum snap, and they said that was a gunshot that started the certain era of music or something like that. And this felt like a gunshot in my head. It felt like a starting of something and I'd never read anything like it.
And I remember reading it in class, I think we were reading it out loud or they'd assigned people to read it or something. And I remember just looking around being like, "Is anyone else hearing this? Does anyone else know? It's like an alien showed up." I was just like, "This is unbelievable." And it still seems unbelievable to me. And I didn't even know, and I still don't pretend to know everything that's going on in this play and what he's doing. But just how minimal it was obviously, and just what he's writing and what he's not writing. Then just also the way they're talking to each other and so grand and yet they're sitting in a ditch and it's all just so beautifully constructed for pathos and you're just engaged immediately and you know nothing, but very quickly you know more. And it's just what he's implying about the depths of the world within what we know already, that these guys just get beat all the time and they don't even care by who and just like... But he's done barely anything and you know so much, and you haven't had much to work with and you don't really want more. I was just blown away by that. And I'm still, I think, recovering from that first few pages.
That same year was another... That was the first time I ever read Hemingway. I reread For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then I remember writing a paper and he came in, the teacher came in, he was all pale and weighed like 10 pounds.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
"I'm here for Hemingway."
Jon Klassen:
But he came in, "I'm here for Hemingway." And I wrote a paper on it and the paper, I remember, just basically summarizing the story. I didn't really know what to make of it. I liked reading it but didn't know what it was. And he pulled me at the end and we were talking about it because I wanted to talk about Beckett, but he was like, "That Hemingway thing." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah." And he was like, "I want to talk about that book." I was like, "Okay. It was fine." And he's like, "What do you think Hemingway was doing in that book?" And I said, "Well, it's about a guy and there's a bridge and he dies." And he's like, "Yeah, no, no, no, no, I know what happens." He's like, "What do you think he was doing?"
The repetition of that question and the way he asked it, I suddenly lost my voice and suddenly the idea of abstraction, the idea of describing something outside of the literal events of the book, I'd never considered it before. I didn't think that's what was going on in books. I thought you wrote the story and that was what books were for. And then he was like, "Yeah, but what do you think he was after? What do you think he was doing?" And I couldn't believe suddenly that opened up too, where I was like, "This is talking to other books." And he was commenting all of a sudden just this idea of a conversation between authors and between other books that weren't even... All that stuff suddenly became much clearer.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, Beckett too-
Jon Klassen:
Beckett.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I mean that's a whole school of philosophical thought.
Jon Klassen:
And I didn't know any of that stuff. I didn't know that you could even do that. I just thought these were guys working on their own on stories and that was it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
"I'm going to make a play about these two guys who get beaten all the time and they're just waiting for another."
Jon Klassen:
I mean, that's fine by me too. I liked it anyway. But just the idea that even outside of whatever he was commenting on or what was going on in books at the time, just that he was describing something... And everything you read about Hemingway is about this too, where he's like, "Never describe the thing you're doing. Describe around it, talk around it, and you'll get the depth of the thing." And that's still my trick too, is never tell them how they're feeling. Never begin to even show how they're feeling. They'll get it anyway or they'll get it more. And yeah, that year of being like, "You're not writing or drawing the thing, you can't anyway." And so you're doing the negative space or you're describing negative space and the negative space you can't even get at, but it's there. It's valid. It's just don't have the tools for accurate description of it. And I don't know, all of that was still in there, yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. So your work is often described as existential. And going back to the play for a moment, you said it was like a gunshot for you. So do you think the depth of the play was fully apparent to you as a teenager or just what were you thinking at that time?
Jon Klassen:
Well, I didn't know what he was doing. I still don't really know. But I knew aesthetically, I knew aesthetically I was super interested in that. And then also I think what I was connecting to and what I still connect to is his discomfort with language, or at least that he isn't using it naturally. They're talking to each other, but there's something off about the language. There's a weird halting or a strange use of words.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes.
Jon Klassen:
It doesn't sound like someone who's comfy with words. He is very comfortable. Obviously he's a beautiful writer, but it's also, he's using it in this kind of limping way. And I really related to that too, where I was like, "Yeah, he doesn't think that talking is the best way to get something out." We're trying, but we're using this blunt tool of our language to get this thing across. And there was so much tension behind that. There was so much feeling to the fact the best we can do is still going to sound a little weird. And I remember reading later that he wrote in French mostly because he didn't know it as well, and that was on purpose. He was deliberately, and I feel like that too, where it's like if I begin to write prose or even a letter or an email, I'm notorious for going on forever. I can't stop. We were doing the TV show, Mac and I, last year where we were writing a lot of emails explaining ourselves as far as what we wanted-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For Shape Island?
Jon Klassen:
For Shape Island, yeah. And I was notorious for these five chapter emails trying to explain what I wanted visually because we weren't there, everyone was on Zoom and stuff. And everyone was like, "Oh God, here comes another tome from Jon." And I know that about myself. But as soon as I get a hard rule, as soon as I say with the Hat books, "No narration", I don't allow myself that spigot anymore. And they're animals, so they don't really know how to talk, then I'm extremely restrained and I'm the person I want to be. I don't have this super open channel anymore. That same feeling of, there's a bunch of stuff behind this, but all that's getting out are these five weird words that don't quite fit on together, there's something extra about that. There's a lot of thought in that approach that I really admire and still relate to a lot.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon the writer is fascinated with negative space, the void between words that allows us to fill in the gaps and discover meaning beyond the boundaries of language. Jon the illustrator has a similar, less is more approach using stripped down repetitive images with very little extra information. For him, the right picture provides just enough context to spark the reader's imagination without overindulging.
Jon Klassen:
I don't like to draw emotion on characters. When I do, it's a tough one. And sometimes you run into stories or moments where you're just like, "I got to draw it this time. I have to draw him smiling or I have to draw him angry." Or something like... Ah, it almost feels like a failure. But you need it too as an audience. You got to give them something. But waiting until the last moment to give them something is part of my thing. And I think there's something in there about me thinking it's kind of crass to draw emotion. I don't know why that is. It just seems impolite.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Why?
Jon Klassen:
I don't know. I just feel like it's a double beat, especially if you're doing it with text too. If you're like, "The bear is having a horrible day. His favorite thing is gone." I don't want to draw a sad bear. Draw a bear that looks blank. I'm heartbroken by a blank bear, when you say that. I'm not as heartbroken by a sad looking bear. That's too much. And it's also like I'm embarrassed for him that he's looking sad in front of us, that he has to show that. I think that's a good word, is just sort of like as much as I'm embarrassed to show too much, I have to think that they would be too. And my belief in characters in my books isn't so much that I believe them on the ground in their situation as I believe them in people also trying to make something with me. And so I want to go easy on them.
I think about it almost like film directing where if you see a conversation on film and two actors are having it and the director has made them stand facing each other and it's just either alternating one-shots or just like a two-shot and they have to just say the words and figure out what to do with their hands or something, that's probably bad direction unless you're going for something really stiff. You could do them a favor and shoot them walking down the street or one of them is trying to light a cigarette or something and then you've done them a favor. They have something to do and something to chew on. And I think with my guys, I don't do them those favors, so they are just standing there most of the time. And that's me being kind of a bad director on purpose for them.
But also I don't want to be like, "You got to cry today. You have to figure out, get to a place where you can cry." I don't want to ever put them through that. I'll be like, "Don't worry, we'll take care of that in the edit. We'll just say you're sad. Don't worry. You don't have to do that for me." And I don't want to ask too much of them. My belief in them as actors is such an important part of the process. And I think I only need it for the first half of a book. I think I only need that weird conceit for the premise. And then eventually I get into it and the characters begin to act. Like halfway through the book, they start to break and they start to need to, either the story demands it or I just get comfortable with it. But the first part of most of my books, everyone's just like, "Okay, we're doing this? We're going to go and do a book?" And I need that. I just need it to get into the water. I don't know what it is.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So aside from the emotional impact, I wonder how that idea plays into the comedy of your work. So much of your work is funny. For example, I'm currently reading The Skull, which we'll talk about more shortly, but everything is just so hilarious, darkly hilarious, but still. Anyways, where does that come from? What would you say are your comedic influences?
Jon Klassen:
Things like The Far Side, and even just today I was looking through different passages to maybe bring on, I found Jack Handey again, the Saturday Night Live guy-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Deep Thoughts?
Jon Klassen:
And I was like, "Man..." Because we had Deep Thoughts and we had one called Fuzzy Memories around the house when I was a kid and just crying reading at the dinner table, the three of us, just my dad too, my mom too, just crying laughing so hard. And he's brilliant. Reading how he does that stuff and the flatness of it and the brilliance of the structure I think, because it was the timing like Bill Waterson too, certain comics guys who very often would do a thing that I do too where they build up a joke in the first three panels and then the fourth panel skips a forward in time and arrives at a place where the actual joke or event has happened and they're lying in the wreckage of it. And that mechanic, that's funny to me. Them lying on the ground in the crater of what has just been built up is much funnier than the explosion. And picture books suit that so well, and it's still how I construct a story.
I'm always looking to skip the event and if I can take as much as possible away from the thing and still make it funny, if it's funnier to remove or more emotionally effective to remove, we can talk... Like The Skull was sort of that way, the next one, where removal and emission has become sort of my stock in trade, and I don't want to find the spot where I've gotten lazy with it. I just want to find the spot where it's the most interesting to me it can be with the least amount of stuff having been shown.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So your books are really for kids and adults, but obviously we as adults come to them in a different way and there's a lot of depth and profoundness that feels really mature in them. And I wonder, what do you think kids are coming to your books with? Why do you think this level of existentialism is so attractive to young readers?
Jon Klassen:
I think that part of it is what you were talking about earlier where it's like because of the way I operate, because I have to lean the two things against each other, the pictures and the words, the pictures get a lot more important and the pictures are sort of a very young kid's territory. That's their spot. And if there's information there that the text doesn't have, they feel very excited and suddenly they're important. It's not just supplemental. They know something that the "adults", quote, with the words on the fancy other side don't know. And they're like, "Wait, go back. He was wearing the hat." And you're like, "I haven't read anything about that." And you just keep moving along.
Or even if you're reading it by yourself, hopefully that's the feeling you're getting is that you're learning to read and so this is still authoritative and important, but you know how to read pictures. Everybody does. And so it's speaking a language that you're very familiar with and it's almost like a whisper of a secret where you're like, "He's wearing a hat." But the text, the very official text is not saying anything about that. It hasn't bothered to look.
I think the other stuff being about murder and revenge and all that kind of thing excites certain kids. It would've excited me, hopefully, because I think I would've found that funny. But even kids who that's not their thing hopefully get excited by just the fact that they're in on more information than normal. And again, I'd like to say that that's because I understand kids or something. But it's really just me trying to solve my own creative problems and get something out that I'm not embarrassed by. And so luckily those two things dovetail, but it wasn't me saying, "You know what, kids need to be empowered by pictures." It was me being like, "How do I do this without falling on my face?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So something else that is really intentional and you seem to be doing more of is writing your books in parts. You did this in The Skull and The Rock From the Sky, and I just wonder where that came from. What made you decide to do that?
Jon Klassen:
The third Hat book had that a little bit. We Found a Hat had breaks.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah.
Jon Klassen:
And I remember thinking, this is so much better because a picture book, they're hard because you have to do an arc that propels itself, whatever blasts that thing off from the first page has to have enough gunpowder in it to get you across like 45 pages. And getting a kid across 45 pages takes a lot of work. Two things, I think writing shorter arcs, so that part one has its own arc, part two has its own arc, part three has its own arc. But also there's a joke in the page turn of part two when you finished a part, James Marshall does this, I learned it from him I think, or at least it was clarified with him, his little stories with George and Martha, the funniest parts of those stories to me is when you turn the page and it's like, "Next story." And you're like, "That was it? That was the last page?" I think he was aware of that and writing to it being like, "Yeah, that's it. That was a joke. You passed the joke about a mile back." And you're like, "I did?" And then you laugh retroactively.
And I'm not sure mine do that exactly. I think The Rock From the Sky does it, but the third Hat book doesn't do it as much. But I remember loving, even when I'm reading it out loud, says, "That's the end of part one." And you turn the page, and that's a chuckle that you get even from adults. The story seems like weird and janky, but you're very formally in the middle of this kind of limping story putting, "Part Two", as if you're writing The Room with a View or something like that. But writing to chapter breaks or whatever you call them, that suits me very well. It's even shorter than a picture book.
More and more when I write these books, I write the page, you picture the page, and you picture the page turn and it becomes easier for me to write. The Skull was like that, where I couldn't figure out how to write it. And then as soon as I began to do pages and be like, "This is the paragraph on this page, now I can handle it. Now I can figure out what the book is." That's the same way the chapter breaks, where it's like, "All right, and then I only have to think about this little arc and how that cuts together and then I can do the next one."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Jon's newest book is The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale. In this story, his sense of humor persists, but he also leans into a new genre, horror. Of course, horror in a child-friendly way. The story is a retelling of a folktale from the Tyrol Region, which is an historical region in the European Alps encompassing modern day Italy and Austria. Jon's unique approach to storytelling coupled with his comforting and distinctive art style transforms this traditional tale into something almost entirely new. I asked him to explain the premise, or as I called it, can't take the entrepreneur out of the girl, the pitch, for our listeners.
Jon Klassen:
It was an existing story, but I feel like this was the easiest pitch I've ever had. Pitching The Rock From the Sky was the hardest thing. "What is that about?" I couldn't figure out. There's no elevator pitch for that. You're still in the elevator for 20 minutes. I couldn't figure out how to shorten it. But The Skull was a very easy pitch. You just say it's a little girl who's run away from home, finds an old house in the woods, and there's a skull living in it. I'm in. Anyone I think that I know would be like, "I want to hear the end of that." And that is how it starts, is that she runs away from home in the middle of the night and she finds an old house in the woods and she knocks on the door and the skull comes to the window and he is like, "Hi." And she says, "Hi." And he goes, "You can come in if you want, but you have to carry me around. I'm just a skull. And it's a pain in the butt to roll around all the time." So she says, "Okay."
And we don't know why she's run away from home, and that's very important. But whatever she's been through, she's very nonplussed by the appearance of a talking skull. But he gives her the tour of the house and they become... They're nice to each other right away. They sort of have a way of talking to each other. And after a tour of the house, including a dungeon with a bottomless pit and a tower very up high where you can see the whole forest, they have tea by the fire in the evening, and he's like, "Do you want to stay the night?" And she says, "Yeah, I'd love to stay the night. I don't have anywhere else to go." And he goes, "Well, if you stay the night something's up, there's a headless skeleton that chases me around the house at night and we're going to have to deal with that." And she goes "Every night?" And he goes, "Yeah, he comes every night." And she gets so mad at this, by now they're friends and she can't believe that this thing gets chased every night by this horrible thing. And she's like, "All right, I'll figure this out."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right. She's going to take care of business. How about the use of parts in this book? Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jon Klassen:
The parts were important just to break up because it was a longer story, and I was worried about losing them. And I feel like that's happening too, is with the parts, even young kids, they're like, "There's how many more pages?" Whereas if you're like, "No, no, no, it's part one, don't worry." And it breaks it up for them. But it's also in the middle of the sort of when it really gets going momentum wise, you're still going into parts. And I like that very much. We don't ever break the action, I don't think, too hard, but there's also words that break down what you're about to read, which I really like. That's a McCarthy trick. I think he did it in Blood Meridian, and he would just write. It doesn't spoil the story, it actually hypes you up for the story.
I think the second last one, the words are just, "The bones, the fire, the pit."And you're like, "What's going to happen?" And you've read those things and you kind of know what's going to happen, but you're like, "What? What?" And then the last one just gets to be, "What?" But just the formality of that, again, I don't know why I'm attracted to the formality of it. It's a nice way to organize your book. And if you are feeling a little bit... Because this was a lot of content for me anyway. And so in order to make it feel more organized and make your head kind of understand it better, it just felt good to do that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I also think as a parent, reading aloud to kids when you're like, "Please don't let this be 20 minutes."
Jon Klassen:
Right.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You're like, "No, this looks great. It's so small." And open up, you're like, "So much text on this page." But it's great I think also for parents, when your see what's coming, it's a really fun read aloud to do with your kids when I think when you have parts and you can preview it's coming with them. It's a fun thing to do.
Jon Klassen:
Yeah, in a perfect world, I hope you see a look exchange between the parent and the kid and be like, "The fire? The bones?" And they're like, "You want to go?" He's like, "Let's go. Let's keep going." And that kind of break to look at each other again, even to be like, "You ready?" And I love that idea.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For Jon's reading challenge, A Tale to Remember, he takes inspiration from the unplanned process behind the creation of The Skull.
Jon Klassen:
I read a folktale called The Skull, and I didn't have access to the story for a year almost, I think more. And then I got to read it again, and I'd realized that in the year my brain had completely changed it. I was so interested in what I'd done to it. I didn't know why I'd done that stuff. I still don't really know why I'd done what I'd done to it. But that was the book I made was like, "I want to make the one I remembered or I thought I remembered." And folktales are a lot like that. They sort of get broken telephoned as you tell them, and sometimes for the better because you're entertaining different audiences or whatever.
But I thought maybe if anybody wanted to is to pick a story you've never read, maybe even especially a short one, read it once and don't go back. And then a year later, if you have a year, if you can do it, or even months later, whatever you think, however long it would take to mostly forget it, go back and read it again and see what you think and see if it's changed, see if your brain and your life and your year has changed this thing. I don't think it's any of our business sometimes why we change those things. But it's interesting as a phenomenon, I think, to observe it happening because you're doing something, you're working on something when you do that. It's not just because you're a storyteller or because this is the craft or something. Your brain is helping you out.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In this episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Ellen Clark, the children's outreach librarian for Kokomo Howard County Public Library in Indiana. She's also a massive fan of Jon's.
Ellen Clark:
I was so tickled the first time I read This is Not My Hat. And I just remember flipping to that last page going... And just the facial expressions and everything. Oh, I bought that before I had a child, I bought that book. And then when my daughter was old enough when we were reading to her, I read that to my daughter and I showed it to my mom and my husband, "You have to read this book."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As an outreach librarian, Ellen has plenty of stories about getting kids into reading. But during a time when librarians are facing such unprecedented scrutiny, I think this story is a wonderful reminder about the magic of librarians and also their dedication to building a culture of reading sometimes one reader at a time.
Ellen Clark:
There was a mother that came in with her kids and her middle daughter was starting to learn how to read and, "Oh, we don't know what to read. She doesn't know what she wants." And it's that struggle of how to get your child interested. So I asked the questions of, "Well, does she have a favorite animal? Does she have favorite character? Does she want humorous?" Or all those questions. And she said, "Oh, definitely funny. And she likes dogs." So I pointed her to the Pig the Pug books, and they checked out one. And about a week later, the mom came in and said, "We've read Pig the Star probably 10 times this week." And then they checked out the entire stack and she said that this is her daughter's favorite literary character. All they're reading is Pig the Pug. And I was like, "Yay, I did it." Now she's a happy reader and I haven't seen them come back to that. But they've been going around reading other things now, so I'm glad that that got her started.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture and you've been listening to our conversation with Jon Klassen. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, and King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender.
If you enjoyed today's show, please show some love and give us a five star review. It takes just a second and really helps, especially on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources beanstack.com, and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and insights. Also, be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. Thanks for joining. And keep reading.