Mac Barnett

Mac Barnett: That is the job of the writer of fiction is to sort of create the conditions that are necessary for you to willingly suspend your disbelief.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Remember being a kid and everything was possible? A crack in the sidewalk was a portal to another world, or a small crevice between your bed and a dresser was the apt spot for an impenetrable fort? Kids spend so much of their time making up stories, making up games, and immersing themselves in the imaginary. And it's because of that that Mac Barnett thinks they make the best audience to write for.

Mac Barnett: I think kids are actually, generally, a better audience for literary fiction, for art, for ambitious storytelling that asks the reader to do work. And a lot of that is just based on how their brains work and and their place in the world. Right?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: He argues that kids come with an array of inherent skills crucial to not only enjoying fiction, but also understanding it on a deeper intellectual level. And that intellectual level is something he believes kids don't get enough credit for, especially when it comes to books.

Mac Barnett: I think literature, especially picture books, are a place where children and adults can meet as equals.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Mac Barnett is a best selling children's author known for his witty, imaginative storytelling and keen sense of humor. My kids adore his books. He was always one of their favorites growing up, and he's best known for books like Extra Yarn or Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, as well as the Terrible 2 series and the Mac B Spy Kids series. And he's earned numerous accolades, including 2 Caldecott Honors and the EB White Read Aloud Award. In this episode, Mac contends that most adults are bad judges of what makes decent kids' books.

He unpacks "Frog and Toad" as a unique work of experimental fiction and admits how much he is learning from his own 3 year old son. Oh, and he also tells us about that one time he was attacked by a panther and lived to tell the tale, the tall tale. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive deep into their personal experiences and inspirations. Our show is made possible by Beanstack, the leading solution for motivating students to read more.

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If you don't already know this, you will come to learn very quickly in this episode that Mack has an intense love of picture books, so much so that in 2011, he wrote a manifesto declaring the significance and magic of the format. He called it the Picture Book Proclamation, and this is how it came to be.

Mac Barnett: It was sparked by, first, an article that was front page of The New York Times in 2010. And children's books are never on the front page of The New York Times. Like, we made the front page, and I just remember, like, walking through the airport, looking at The Times, and seeing the word picture book in a headline. And I was like, this is incredible. Like, what are they saying about picture books?

And it was basically like, the picture book is dead, was the headline. And it was long. It was a long, well reported article with editors, educators, parents, all saying, like, Yeah, we're not into picture books. And the picture book is my favorite art form. I write picture books, middle grade novels, and graphic novels.

And I think that the picture book is the most exciting, the most flexible, the most ambitious. It's children's literature's great gift to literature as a whole. It was invented by children's writers and children's illustrators. It wouldn't exist without children's authors and without children, but it's an amazing art form. So I was really mad about that, but I was also sort of disappointed by some of the response in the children's book community, which was just sort of like felt like thoughtless cheerleading.

It was just this sort of like automatic defense that was like picture books are magic, all books are magic. And I was like, that's not it either. All books aren't magic, good books are magic, but picture books are like anything else. There are great ones and there are bad ones, but the sort of the cultural ecosystem around them, the discourse around them, it needs to be really sharp and smart. And what can we all do?

What can all adults do who are stakeholders in this? Writers and illustrators, but also publishers, librarians, booksellers, caregivers. What can we all do around this to make sure that the best children's books and the best picture books are being published? Because that's the best way to get kids excited about picture books, is to have good ones to do.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Make them good.

Mac Barnett: You can make them good. Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Sounds basic, but if you're a parent and you've read a lot of them, you know, if you just go get a hall at the library, it's like, it's hit or miss.

Mac Barnett: Yeah, that exact thing. And so, yeah, you'll just kind of pick out 10 or 15. And if you pick out 15 books and only 2 of them are good, you start thinking, like, well, anybody could write this stuff, right? Like, what is this? But if you just got 15 random pieces of fiction from the bookstore, if you just pick them up off the shelves, you might

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Have the same experience.

Mac Barnett: Yeah, exactly. And you wouldn't be like, the novel is dead. It's so easy to write these things. But adults are not experts in picture books, in children's books, or in childhood, but we are really involved in the selection of books for our kids. Right?

It's a very weird thing about this art is that it's, like, adults writing them, illustrating them, accepting them for publication, editing them, designing them, printing them, reviewing them, making the decision whether or not to buy them. And then, finally, after passing through, like, scores of adult hands, we finally get to the kid that was supposed to be the reason these books were all being made in the first place. I think that what you hope is that the people who make these books have some sort of direct connection to childhood, whether that's a direct and accurate access, like a vivid connection to their own childhoods, or the ability to connect and really, like, care for and listen to real kids

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Mac Barnett: Around them.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. I mean, you clearly have that connection, you know, in your work. I can see that in your writing. Maybe let's just reverse it for a second. Go back to your own childhood.

And I know you grew up in Castro Valley, which is in California, but I don't know exactly where. It's near where you are now?

Mac Barnett: Yeah. It's in the Bay Area. Yeah. It'd be just Bay.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So you're like you're a cal you're

Mac Barnett: I am a California. California. I am.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That's it. You know?

Mac Barnett: I feel it too. Like, I do feel like I am, like, 100% Californian. Are you

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: sipping on an oat milk latte? Like a partisan one?

Mac Barnett: Right. I'm not gonna beat the oat milk allegations. But right now, it's just black coffee, you know? So very East Coast morning for me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: And you grew up, it was just you and your mom? Did you have

Mac Barnett: My parents divorced when I was 1, and so I saw my dad every other weekend. He lived in Oakland, which is also in the East Bay. But, yeah, it was, it was me and my mom in a house in Castro Valley most of the time.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. What was it like? What was the vibe of your household?

Mac Barnett: I lived very far always from where I went to school. I lived like 25, 30 minutes away from school. So I spent a lot of time in my house, and it was like a lot of time with just my mom. We were really close because of that, but also like if she was going to pay the bills or do anything, like, take care of yourself, right, like, figure out something to do. I think I had, like, a pretty vivid imagination, and I did love books and coming up with stories in my head.

I got good at not just like being alone, but really like enjoying being alone. And then I would just spend a lot of time in my room just sort of like playing with my toys, talking to my stuffed animals, making big plays, and going on adventures, pretend adventures with them. And, yeah, I think books were always they always were such a huge part of my childhood. I think my mom was really determined, like, as a single mom to do it right. And for her, one of those things, like, very high on the list of those things was to have a lot of picture books around for me.

So she got, like, reading lists of picture books to have, and then would just go to yard sales and get mostly older picture books because that's what was for sale.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Was she like a fun storyteller?

Mac Barnett: Yes. My mom was really good at reading books out loud. My mom is really funny, so she would read to me. And I think that reading stuff like James Marshall, I remember her just laughing so hard. She's got a wicked sense of humor, a little bit of a dark sense of humor.

And I think that seeing her laugh at picture books that I also thought were funny, it was really validating. And I was like, oh, this isn't just, like, something that she's doing for me. These aren't just, like, only for kids. Like, she's crying, laughing at this book, and that made it it just made it cool. Right?

It it was like, wow. This is real. Like, this actually is funny.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. I'm thinking that I wish my my kids thought that me thinking something funny would make it funny now they're older, but I I I hear that. And you said you spent a lot of time alone as a kid. Yeah. So did you eventually find, you know, your people in school?

Were you were you on your own there as well?

Mac Barnett: I think I was very much my own world. In middle school, I, like, I think I was so in my head that I maybe didn't realize that I should be angsty. Like like, everybody loves my French accent that I do. It's so funny.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Wait. Is that a real thing?

Mac Barnett: Yeah. I would just like I you know, like, I would just, like, learn all characters from Saturday Night Live. And Oh, yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I was gonna ask. I'm like, he must like Saturday Night Live.

Mac Barnett: Okay. I did. I loved it growing up, and I would you know, like, you just have all these, like, comedy bits.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Mac Barnett: My feeling at the time was that, like, everybody loves my comedy bits. But looking back, I'm not so sure that that was the case. High school was really hard, like 9th grade was-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, really?

Mac Barnett: Yeah, that's where it hit. I think I got there and I felt so young. I felt so much younger than everybody else there, including those people I had just graduated from 8th grade with and were at this high school. Things seemed to change a lot faster than I was ready for. For the first 3 months, I had literally no friends.

I was just so overwhelmed. And I remember just walking. We had an activity period, it was like 15 minutes long. I just remember I didn't have anybody to hang out with. I would just walk the halls, and, like, there would be 3 or 4 clocks that were just mounted in the wall.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Clock. Yeah.

Mac Barnett: Mhmm. Those big wall clocks. Yeah. And I would just, like, check the minutes, like, from clock to clock to until activity period was over.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Ugh. Yeah. Yeah.

Mac Barnett: My first friend that I I I made that year was Sean, Sean Harris, who I now make books with.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, that is wild. Wait, was he in, he was just in school with you in high school when you were together?

Mac Barnett: Yeah, he went to the same high school as me, but also grew up in Castro Valley. And our high school was in Oakland. So it was like finals week of freshman year, 1st semester. And, like, my finals were over at 11, and my mom wasn't gonna be picking me up till 5. So I need to count minutes.

Yep. Ready to count it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I know that walk those walls. I walked those walls.

Mac Barnett: There's a lot of minutes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Should have been enough Fitbits or whatever back then. Or it rings. Okay.

Mac Barnett: Totally. So this girl, Kate, was like, oh, like, you live in Castro Valley. Right? My friend Sean lives in Castro Valley. Maybe he'll give you a ride home.

And I just, like, this guy in just bell bottoms and, like, some wild shirt. He was, like, wearing 4 articles of clothing and 9 patterns somehow. It was like, hey. I'll give you a ride home, and that was Sean, and Yeah. We've been friends ever since.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Even as Mac was navigating the high school years and meeting future collaborators, picture books stuck around in his life, and he got his first inkling of how powerful they could be at any age.

Mac Barnett: Like my mom is pretty sentimental and also kind of a pack rat too, so like, she doesn't like to get rid of things. So my she never like You

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: did become a famous author, so now when you have your archives, all of your it's gonna be there for people.

Mac Barnett: That's true.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: There will be it is all there. Yeah.

Mac Barnett: It's true. It's funny that you said that because my one of my mom's big project is she calls the archive, which is her collection of everything still ongoing. But, yeah, my picture books, she never gave away. So sort of like the bottom two shelves of this big bookcase were picture books. And then the earliest chapter books, the Beverly Cleary's and Judy Blooms that I was reading went above those, then Lord of the Rings and so it was sort of like as the shelves got higher, the books got you could say older, it's that I got older in terms of when I was reading them, but I never because the picture books were always there, I was always seeing their spines.

Sometimes I would pull one out. There was never this idea, like, okay, we've moved past picture books. In high school, I started I was a reading tutor, so I would go down to, just as a volunteer, to the elementary school down the hill from my high school and I would sit and work on reading with kids who were struggling to learn to read. And the books that they had on hand, the Easy Readers, they were so bad. They were so bad.

And it was really frustrating for kids and for me too to sit there and, like, to watch a kid sort of heroically struggle. Like, I have a very vivid memory of this happening. I was sitting next to this kid. He was working so hard to read the couple sentences on this page, and he got through it. And it was so exciting.

It was sort of a breakthrough in getting that many words decoded. And I felt, like, this rush of, like, yes. And he just looked up at me, and he was like

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That's it?

Mac Barnett: That's it. Yeah. This is boring.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That's the payoff?

Mac Barnett: Yeah. And I was like, you're right. Like, this story is terrible. And it felt like such a betrayal, and my elation immediately crashed, where I was like, Man, what a mess.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Like,

Mac Barnett: of course, we need to make readers accessible and work on phonics, and like all these things are, yeah, this is important to the acquisition of reading, but we can't forget the point, at least when it's It's the

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: exclusion of entertainment, right?

Mac Barnett: Yes, that's right. Because that's wrong too, that, like, the promise, if you acquire this, you're gonna get exciting knowledge, entertaining stories, there's joy and excitement and emotion and pleasure in this. And so at this time where we're saying to kids, like, learn this skill that's gonna be really hard, but it's worth it, And we put a text in front of them that is really hard and is not worth it. Like, what are we doing? So I just went back to my picture books, and I picked the ones that I felt like were easiest to read, but the kind of richest stories, the most exciting, complex, funniest, or or nuanced stuff.

And I brought those in, and it just worked so much better.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You heard Mac say earlier that picture books are an ambitious art form for a writer, one that offers a writer creative possibilities that standard novels don't. But he also believes that picture books are ambitious for the reader, that to read and to understand them at their full depth requires, to quote the renowned Irish scholar Liam Neeson, a particular set of skills. Those skills range, but some examples might include an unusually keen attention to visual detail, an ear especially tuned to new language and wordplay, an uncommon knack for immersing oneself in alternate world building. And while book critics and librarians and reading specialists can work to hone their own abilities, there's an often underestimated group of people that, as Mac points out, come to the table with the precise set of picture book specific skills already dialed to 10.

Mac Barnett: We tend to think of kids as, in so many ways, inferior to adults, less sophisticated, more sort of emotionally unstable, needing guidance, and needing adult authority. And it is true that kids do need adults to take care of them. And in most circumstances that children and adults meet, the adult is an authority figure, and often teaching, giving wisdom, setting rules, setting boundaries, and enforcing them. And I do think children benefit from that system, but it also is one that is very comfortable for adults, very flattering to adults. And I think we get used to it.

I think that we think that that is the only way for adults and kids to interact. I think literature, especially picture books, are a place where children and adults can meet as equals. And I think that as a writer, I am not ever approaching this as like, I have wisdom that you don't have or access to rules that you need to know about, and so I will make them palatable by telling them in a story. I think, Oh, I love telling a story and I love telling a story to kids, especially. And the reason for that is that I think kids are actually generally a better audience for literary fiction, for art, for ambitious storytelling that asks the reader to do work.

And a lot of that is just based on how their brains work and their place in the world, right? They're more flexible thinkers. They are expert noticers. They notice such small details in the world around us.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Like try going for a walk with a 3 year old, you know, around the block. It can take you an hour.

Mac Barnett: Yes, and boy, it's humbling too, right, as they notice as they notice things that are are truly beautiful that you never would have seen. I have a 3 year old, and and it's like that every every day we go outside. He notices everything. Notices the moon the second it's in the sky as soon as we go out, notices every airplane, notices small bugs, drops of dew on a leaf. And questions kids ask are the same questions that artists and writers sit down and ponder, and they're the things that we've been wondering about for as long as we've been making art, and we've never answered them, because we won't, right?

What is love? What happens after we die? When you're really young, you're acquiring language. You're so attuned to the connections between them, right? Like this word, my 3 year old, at first, you were noticing sounds and words matching, Right?

It's like, that matches. And they'd be 2 very disparate words in terms of meaning, but he would find these little connections between them. Sometimes a rhyme is what he meant, but sometimes the connection would be totally like sonic or lexical, but much much smaller than rhyme. And it's like this is the tool of of poetry and any Bellatristic prose. Right?

Like finding these little playful connections between language. So, yeah, that art of noticing, the attention to the beauty and sort of possibility of language, the openness to lots of kinds of story structures, and just that ability that kids have to kind of figure out a set of rules quickly, not the rules of of, like, how to be at a dinner table, but, like, how this story works.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: We're just gonna be okay with these animals talking, these animals living in another animal's stomach or whatever, you know, like, these are our rules.

Mac Barnett: Right. Where it's like, can animals talk? If they can talk, can people hear them? Do they wear clothes? Do they wear full clothes?

Or do they wear just some clothes? What happens when an animal is naked socially? Right? That's a big part of frog

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: and toad. Yes. We

Mac Barnett: do. There's a huge story about toad going swimming that, like, revolves around these very complex rules around, like, swimming fashion versus skinny dipping if you're an animal. And it's brilliant, but it's specific only to that story. Do they have furniture? Do they cook?

Do they eat each other? Like, in this animal story, would a bear eat a deer or would they hang out and be friends? We have to learn all that stuff specific to each story. Kids learn that stuff instantly. It's amazing to see.

You know, I talked about, like, picture books being a place where adults and kids can meet as equals, but, you know, really the truth is, it's a place where often the kids are doing a better job than we are. When a child reaches the age of 5, he is the sum total of all his younger experiences and discoveries in a brand new world. He carries with him the 2 year old's delight in sheer sound and pounding rhythms, and the glamour of the 2 year old's own small self. The 3 year old's humor and love of pattern, and his pleasure in the familiar sights of his own world. The 4 year old's further joining of sound and pattern with rhythm and content.

And 4 year old's first playful flights into the humor of the incongruous things that he just knows enough to know are not true. And finally, the 5 year old's own keen humor and penetrating observation of the world around him. The careful watching of his own eyes and ears, the keenness of his nose, and the sensitiveness of his touch, and the fine and vivid imagery of his own language. Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. It is certainly true that a 5 year old has a keenness and awareness that will probably be displaced or blunted later.

For the first time, he has the power of words, to use them and to hear them, to describe the things that his 5 year old senses perceive. He has his feet firmly enough on the ground now to go bouncing off on the most hilarious flights of imagination, and to sympathize with, and be curious about situations not his own. Here then is a challenging age to write for.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That passage is from an essay by beloved Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown called Writing for 5 Year Olds. The essay, as you heard from that excerpt, stresses the importance of respecting kids' intelligence and curiosity when writing for young readers. And if you think kids are a less perceptive audience than adults, she says, you've got it exactly backwards, and Mac wholeheartedly agrees.

Mac Barnett: I've always loved Margaret Wise Brown. She grew up wanting to be a poet. That was her plan when she graduated college. She moved to New York City, was not making money as a poet, as many poets in New York City don't. And so, thought, Okay, I'm gonna become a teacher, and that's what I'll do to make money while I'm working on poetry.

So she went to the Bank Street School of Education, but basically they were like, she's gonna be a terrible teacher, but she also will just sort of hold the attention of the entire class for 30, 45 minutes, an hour, telling them stories, creating little plays with them, and everybody marveled at this. It was coming into contact with actual kids, seeing what they were capable of, and actually seeing that the things that they were so good at were, 1, the things that we sort of think about cultivating in ourselves in order to appreciate art. Like the connoisseur model of the art appreciator is somebody who, over years of study, attains the ability to understand these things. And she says, no, like, look at this, these things that I watch 2 year olds, 3 year olds, 4 year olds, 5 year olds do, these are the skills that you need to appreciate a poem. These are the skills you need to appreciate a story.

Here, they have rhyme and reason, both. Then that line is so heartbreaking about the keenness that is going to be displaced or blunted later.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I know. Yeah.

Mac Barnett: This is temporary that kids have this, that for these kids, as they get older, they're going to lose them, and that's gonna be adulthood, that we're gonna lose these things. And so maybe what the connoisseur does is not attain these things for the first time, but reawaken a certain set of skills and combine it, of course, with adult experience, which will, you know, change the art that they like and the way they think about it. But some of the skills, some of those most important skills that we think we need to develop in order to understand art or literature are skills that are, if not innate, they're available to us very early, but then we lose them.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: This is like a different version of everything I learned. Everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten or something. You know? It's actually, like, everything I need, I learned before I got to kindergarten is

Mac Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. And then her last line that I read there of just, like, here's a challenging age to write for to say that, like, the obligations of the children's writer are are huge, and in fact, maybe higher than they are for writing for adults. That it's really tough. They're tough critics, and they also, their lives are different from us.

And so the adult must be good at all these things that makes good writing because children pay attention to them, and those things are things they enjoy about writing too. And then you also need to talk about children's lives and experiences in a way that is recognizable and authentic to them. If what you wanna do is make children's literature stories for children and not missives handed down from the world of adults and delivered to the world of children, then it's tough. Okay.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. I'm starting to feel a little sad for us adults with our blunted set of skills and our tendency to get bogged down and imparting lessons. The problem, of course, is that we've got too many years anchored in the rules of the real world. We've lost the habit of imagining other realities. And the willingness to suspend our disbelief is a harder intellectual battle than when we were kids, and things like Santa and monsters were still a part of our landscape.

Because of this, Mack believes that kids are better recipients for a complex literary form that uses imagination and immersion as 2 of its essential elements.

Mac Barnett: That phrase comes from Coleridge from an essay that he he talked about, like, the reader having the willing suspension of disbelief and that making a poem or a story or an artwork, you need to do that as a reader in order to truly experience it. Right? To say like, alright, I would give myself over to the world of this story, and I'm gonna, like, live inside it and feel these things. It's a beautiful phrase, but also like something that feels like the same phrase that kids say all the time is make believe, right? Willing suspension of disbelief.

The way that Coleridge frames it, we are not being duped. The artwork isn't tricking you into doing it. You willingly suspend this. Same thing for make believe. Like, we make ourselves believe.

We're gonna make believe that we're a family. We're gonna make believe this is a fort. And that is just so fundamental to the way kids operate in the world. Right? They will just go into make believe just while you're making dinner.

They will go into make believe in the car. They will go into make believe when you're at a fancy restaurant. And all of these conditions that, like, the adult author is, like, trying to, like, coax the reader into the willing suspension of disbelief, kids are like, let's make believe.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Let's do it. They're ready.

Mac Barnett: Yeah. And so you can go farther faster with them than you can with adults.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Mac happened to have a story handy, and it's a pretty funny one, about an experience he had with a kid when he was their camp counselor. It really exemplifies this willingness to suspend their disbelief.

Mac Barnett: I was telling a story. It was autobiographical, like, the story I was telling to my campers. It's like, oh, here's what happened to me last week. And I just gotten to this part where, like, I jumped off a pirate ship that was exploding, and then had been washed up on this island, and then a jaguar attacked me. And this one kid started shaking his head and he was like, Nope, Nope.

A jaguar did not attack you. And everything else he was in, like

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You were on a pirate ship, but this was for sure.

Mac Barnett: The pirate ship, the explosion, the tidal wave generated by the explosion, but a jaguar did not attack you.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: One bridge too far? Yeah. And I

Mac Barnett: was, like, yes. A jaguar attacked me. And he's, like, prove it. I was, like, alright. I'll prove it tomorrow.

And so I just I went home and I had an old t shirt and I just, like, ripped it up. And then I brought it in the next day, and I was like, this is the shirt that I was wearing when the jaguar attacked me. And he tore it up with his claws and teeth. And the kid was like, alright. Alright.

Alright. That seems legit. That checks out. And he just needed that little bit of extra to believe. Right?

We want to. And we Obviously, what yes. Yeah. That's right. And, like, that is the job of the writer of fiction is to sort of create the conditions that are necessary for you to willingly suspend your disbelief, to make believe.

And for whatever reason, he had to hang up on the jaguar thing. And so I needed, as a writer, to come up with, like, another way to support that so he could continue being invested in the story the way that he wanted to be too, the way that we were enjoying in this spirit of play. And I don't have a a ripped up t shirt when I'm making a picture book or but you do have this tools of a writer. Those are all the tools of a writer. Right?

That's humor, that's sentence construction, that's pacing, that's those are all the writer's tools are basically like that drawer of ripped up t shirts that you you parade out in order to create conditions for a reader to give themselves over to the story.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: All of those writer's tools, of course, work best when they're paired with great illustrations, and Mack has collaborated with a who's who of contemporary illustrators, from Christian Robinson to Carson Ellis to Adam Rex to Marla Frazee to his frequent partner and guest of this podcast, Jon Claassen. I wondered whether his audience tended to give more recognition to the artist rather than the writer.

Mac Barnett: I do think that there actually is something to that. It's funny. I think that invisibility that you have as a as a picture book writer, it's real. I think that your primary experience with a picture book is visual. And so when you have somebody like James Marshall or John Clawson, as a reader, you just recognize those characters, that art style.

And it's an emotional response. It's a world that you're gonna spend time in and the words, they're not like subsumed into that, but it is in primary. And I think that actually, like, it can be very liberating for a writer too.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. Yeah. I could see that actually. And do you feel like you have to kinda stay out of the artist's way? I guess, how do you find the balance of not writing too much?

Mac Barnett: It's weird. Like, the act of writing picture books is so much about leaving spaces because I'm also trying to leave space for the illustrator too. So it really does feel like you're like building this thing with lots of holes and gaps in it. It's just so fundamental to like the way my brain works when I'm in a picture book manuscript. You're supposed to be a shirker as a picture book writer.

You're always looking for things that you don't have to say. What don't I have to describe? What don't I want to tell you happen? And it's up to the storyteller how much goes in and how much is left out. But if you get the combination right, you can leave these places of ambiguity or these unsaid, unspoken, maybe undescribable things, and the reader will feel compelled or empowered or excited about figuring out what it means.

And to do that, they'll bring their own intelligence and their own experience to the story and make an interpretation specific to them. Kids are so good at putting themselves in those spaces, both mentally, even physically, like the way kids interact with the world. Like, small kids will crawl into, you know, underneath any couch or kind of go under the table at a restaurant. My son would find, like, the smallest little alleyway between the edge of a piece of furniture and the wall it was against, and he would squeeze himself into a shimmy in, and then he would call it, he still does it, but when he first started doing it, he would call all these little tiny things that he went into houses. He would say, I'm in a house.

This is a house. And I was like, this is it. Like, the fact that they find these small spaces and they make them capacious enough, they see them as a house that they can live in, that they can put their entire selves, their entire physical and emotional lives into. We do the same thing as writers. We create these little cracks, these little crevices, these little spaces in between the things that we say, and kids will put themselves into those little spaces and make a house there.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, I love that visual. It's so true. And, I mean, you can really sense that you you have not lost touch with that excitement about writing or just about, like, picture books. You know?

Mac Barnett: This is an art form that is less than a 100 years old. It's new. We're still figuring out what it can do, and that feels really exciting too. I sometimes feel just like the joy of running around a forest and finding new creeks and boulders and just like, I can't believe that. I didn't know that existed before.

Like, that's what it feels like to make picture books.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Well, listeners, I have a Mac in my life too. Well, a Malcolm who sometimes goes by Mac. It's my nephew who's 5 years old and the cutest, and he adores Mac's Circle Square and Triangle Books and the new, related TV show, Shape Island. So, of course, I had to let my Mac ask a question.

Mari Martinez: Are you really afraid of dodotic triangles?

Mac Barnett: Oh, good question. No. I'm not afraid of the dark, but I am afraid. And John Clawson is afraid of snakes, which is the other fear in the book. But, John and I are both really afraid of snakes.

I think I was afraid of the dark as a kid. I had a nightlight. I remember that. But I'm no longer afraid of the dark, but I am really afraid of snakes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: With Mac's lifelong love and dedication to picture books, it's no surprise that his reading challenge is all about them. He's curated a list of books designed to get you to appreciate them on a whole new level, just like his mom did for him.

Mac Barnett: One of the the first lines that I say in in that proclamation that we started on and went so far from, is is that picture books are a form, not a genre. Right? They're a way of telling stories, but they're unbound by any set of conventions. They don't have to work a certain way. And I think that we all can think of picture books kind of being all arrayed around, very specific bull's eye that we don't even need to be aiming for.

Right? We think about them. Maybe having animal characters teaching a lesson, being sweet, upbeat, and comforting. And they can be so many other things. And and reading widely in picture books, you will see this quickly, but I just put together a list of some that I think show some of quickly, but I just put together a list of some that I think show some of the possibilities of the picture book.

This is not an exhaustive list. And, again, we haven't even figured out all of the picture books possible. It's like a tasting, a flight.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: A taste. A sound. Yeah. That's

Mac Barnett: exactly right.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. Do you wanna how about just let's name the books on the list.

Mac Barnett: Perfect. Dead Bird by Margaret Weisbroyn, illustrated by Remy Charlotte. The Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Christian Robinson. Yeah. Okay.

And you'll see how much a story can change in its meaning and and even what the story is. The same manuscript and 2 different illustrators. The Skull by John Clawson. Do Is Talk by Carson Ellis. Shortcut by Donald Crews.

Kuma Kuma chan by Kazu Takahashi. Anno's Counting Book by Mitsumata Anno. Mirror by Susie Lee. The Stinky Cheese Man by John Scheska and Lane Smith, Rotten Island by William Steig, Votes for Papa by Jessica Bagley, and Guess Again by me and illustrated by Adam Rex.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You can find Mac's reading challenge and all past reading challenges at the reading culture pod dot com. This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Mari Martinez, an assistant manager and librarian at Broward County Library. She tells us why she sees the library as a secret buffet.

Mari Martinez: This is something that I help grown ups and other educators when they are also navigating the process of showing the kids the collection and how to find their perfect book. I always tell them the library's like a buffet. There's a lot of books, a lot of dishes, and you're going to be tasting. Some things will look appealing and and you're gonna try it, and maybe you don't like it. And that's okay.

Move on to the next dish. Maybe the family that's coming behind you will love it. Maybe the dish you liked, another family didn't like it. And so it's like a buffet, and you get to try and choose, and you know what's the best thing that's free.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: And it's all you can eat. It's a great a great metaphor.

Mari Martinez: And if we don't have it because another reader borrow it, we have other 37 branches that we can get you the book from. And we do inter interlibrary loans. So even if the county doesn't have a book, we're gonna get it for you. I just want I always tell them I want books in the handsome people rather than on the shelves. So I always make that connection of I am here to help you, and I'm gonna show you how we organize things because it could be overwhelming at first, but you'll see that the more you try it, the more you come, and the more you bring your child, the easier it's gonna be.

Then it will be a problem of too many books so little times.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Mac Barnett. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and currently I'm reading The Message by Ta Nehisi Coates and Furia by Chamile Saeed Mendez. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a 5 star review. It just takes a moment and it really, really helps. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan.

To learn more about how you can help grow your community's greeting culture, please check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at the reading culture pod.comforward/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening, and keep reading.