Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators

One of the most important messages that I hope comes through in all my books is that there are many different ways to be strong and mighty. There are many different ways to be brave. I think when you’re a quiet kid, when you’re an average student, when you fall somewhere in the middle it’s easy to get lost.

And it’s important for us to lift those kids up. But it’s important for those kids themselves to know that they’re strong and you don’t have to be the loudest, the bravest, prettiest, the most handsome, you just have to be the best version of yourself.

Poetry is like the human soul entire distilled into very few words and they’re power packed. You can get a whole beginning, middle, and end in 10 lines. Poetry, because of the language we choose, because of the metaphors we use, we can make the reader feel something pretty powerful in those few words.

Maybe Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat, they do it I’m sure with their prose, but you take sort of the average prose and you look at a paragraph or a chapter, you don’t get that full emotional power-packed movement and energy and that complete beginning, middle, and end, not to say one is better than the other.

But I will say this, I took a poetry — I took a playwriting class back when I was in college and it was a master class and it was taught by Cicely Tyson, Douglas Turner Ward, and Charles Fuller. And Charles Fuller had written A Soldier’s Play that Denzel starred in, which that turned into this movie, A Soldier’s Story.

And so I remember Charles Fuller was teaching us about playwriting and he asked us did we know how to write poetry, and most of the students said no, we write plays, and he was like learn how to write a poem. It’s the basic building block of all forms of writing. And I believe that with my heart and soul.

Well when I talk to kids, I always tell them, in fact I opened my presentation today saying, “I have a secret.” I had all the adults cover their ears. They were quite, for the most part helped in that. Usually when I talk to teachers I get about a 50% compliance rate when I ask them to cover their ears. And I say, “I have a secret. And the secret is: I hated to read.” And I often get applause. I sometimes get gasps.

Sometimes I get boos, which is always encouraging. But it’s true. I just wasn’t much of a reader. Now I have a daughter who has dyslexia. And I always point out to kids that’s a whole different thing. And with good teachers and good help you can overcome it. But it my case I just didn’t get the point. I thought it was kinda boring. And for me, there was a book, and I always tell them, “There’s a book out there that’s like your best friend. And when you find it, your life will change.”

And for me that book was Charlotte’s Web. And, of course, that’s always met with lots of “oohs” and “ahhs”. And I tell them that in my opinion it was written just for me. I know that Kate DiCamillo happens to like it, too, but it was not written for her, it was written for me. And that was life-changing. But I was quite old, and even into college I was a slow reader. I still am a slow reader. I think that’s why I write short books.

The One and Only Ivan, for example, has a lot of white space. And when I show that to kids who are reluctant readers, and they see that first page, which is basically two or three lines: “Hello. My name is Ivan. I’m a gorilla. It’s not as easy as it looks.” And they go, “Wow, that’s the first chapter.” They’re hooked because it means they can read what a lot of kids call them “fat books”. They can read a fat book, and a book with sophisticated content, but they can get through it.

The story behind We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is — I mean, each book is its own distinct entity, of course, and it has its own journey. That book was the easiest to write. I sat down and I made a four-square grid with things that we do in each season. And as the book starts out it talks about the Cherokee people were taught to be grateful, not just for wonderful things, but also difficulties in our life.

And I wanted to have at least one thing in each season that might be difficult, whether that’s sending a family member off to military service. Whatever it is, I wanted something like that in there. And so the book really is like a poem because there’s an opening line in the stanza, then there’s the sub-parts of the stanza, and then each refrain is completed. And each season has its own stanza. And then there’s the ending.

And what, what breaks from that — of course — is that introductory paragraph on the first page. And I really just looked at, okay, now that I have this list of things that happened in each season, like gathering the honeysuckle to make baskets. It was like how do I make that as pleasing to the ear, as well as really tapping into also the five senses? 

I mean, in our daily lives we encounter and deal with all five senses, and we do that across all the seasons, and that needed to very much be an intentional part of what I was working on in the book. 

I wrote the text using ‘we’ meaning the Cherokee people as a collective, but if you look at the art you will see there is a family, a Cherokee family introduced on the first page whose members will appear throughout the book. You kind of follow them through the story.

It’s literally like the ancestors were right there helping me put everything on the page. The others I’ve had to work a little harder for. 

Books are entirely about empathy. They are a way of diving into someone else’s mind and heart, whether it’s the mind and heart of the author or the mind and heart of the characters or both. And I think that the more you experience the world through someone else’s perspective, the more you see that there are, you know, these beautiful diverse perspectives in our world and that they inform us and they enlighten and us and they educate us. 

And I think that the more we read and the more widely we read, the more diverse authors we read, the more we understand the world. And to me that’s a really powerful aspect of literature that it can create empathy in us in a way that’s really safe where we’re not always able to go out in the world and meet people who are having wildly different experiences than we are, especially if those experiences have to do with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or ableism. Right?

Like we don’t necessarily want to experience those things in real life or want our children to experience those things in real life. But they’re so much a part of our world and so much the underpinning of so many structures in our society that reading about them and understanding them and seeing them on page is a safe way to experience some of the scary and dangerous and difficult things about the world around us.

I’m often speaking in schools that are in wealthy communities that can afford to bring authors, so there’s a limitation to the audience that I’m able to present to regularly. I don’t get to present to, you know, schools in low-income communities as often as I would like to or schools in Black communities as often as I would like to.

So I’m often speaking to an audience that is very different from the characters in my books. And so, you know, they often are experiencing the things that I write about, like contemporary struggles around civil rights, contemporary struggles around police brutality and social justice and equality and things like that feel like something they study in history class in relation to the Civil Rights movement not something that’s part of their world right now.

And so I find that young people respond in a lot of different ways to the work. They are excited about the story. I often am hearing questions about my characters much more often than I’m hearing questions about how we change the world at large. Right? The power of fiction is that you’re drawn into who these people are, you’re drawn into their experience. You’re drawn into the world that they operate in.

So in something like How it Went Down where there’s all these different perspectives, you know, it’s a way of seeing the world through all of these different eyes. And there are a lot of readers who find that really exciting. But, you know, for me as the author it’s just as exciting to hear them rush up and say, well, what happens to so and so after the book is over, you know, that they care about the characters and they’re excited about the story.

I think there’s a lot of power in sharing your own story because all of our stories are slightly different. They’re unique to us. They’re all real and true, but sometimes we don’t remember that. Sometimes we think, “Well, you’re so different than me, and you see the world differently than I do.”  But I always come back to this, that the more personal your stories are, the more universal they end up being. It’Figuris a total paradox, but I get so specific in my stories.

And then people come up to me and they say, “This is exactly like my life.” When I wrote Sisters, my mom expressed a little bit of concern that readers would think our family was strange and that we were weirdo’s. And I was like, “Mom, they’re not gonna see you. They’re not gonna see me. They’re not gonna see your siblings. All they’re gonna see is themselves.” And I’ve never heard any feedback to the contrary.

It’s just, “You understand. Somehow you captured my relationship with my sister on the page,” and, “I’m more like Amara, and this one’s more like Raina.” It’s incredible. So when kids share their stories with each other it just opens that conversation. It opens that door, and I encourage it, and I love seeing it, and I love those like, little private whispered conversations that I get to have with my readers. “Me too, you know. I am just like this.” It’s really touching when that happens.

Drawn Together is a very special book for, for me. And it came based on my experience with my own family. My family is originally from Vietnam, but I was born in the U.S. And growing up, my grandparents spoke mostly Vietnamese and I spoke mostly English, so I spent a lot of time at their house, in their home, and we loved each other so much, and yet we didn’t know how to talk to each other about that. 

So I grew up with this dissonance of both feeling very close to my grandparents, but also feeling very distant at the same time because we didn’t know how to communicate on a very basic level. I wanted to write a book that both captured that depth of love and connection while also recognizing some of the challenges that could come with it. 

What I didn’t know at the time is that Dan had the same experience with his grandmother because she lived in Thailand and spoke mostly Thai, or maybe exclusively Thai, and so he had that same language barrier, and had to find ways to try and connect with her over time. 

So that story is very personal to me. And it’s been wonderful to share with people because, as a writer, and all till – until this book came out pretty much, that inability to communicate felt like this personal failure and burden that I was carrying, but having the book out in the world has given me the opportunity to connect with other people who have had similar experiences because I’ll go to a reading and then inevitably afterwards someone will come up and say, ‘Oh you know, this reminds me so much of my childhood.’ Or, ‘I speak English with my grandparents, but we’re not able to connect just because we can’t find that common ground until we were able to find a mutual love of cooking or music or art.’ 

And so having a book out in the world like that has made me feel less alone. And what’s even more gratifying for me is this is a book about the inability to connect with someone in your life and then seeing classrooms and families use the book as a way of connecting with the people in their lives. 

I’ve had so many people reach out and say, you know, ‘We read this book and we immediately called our grandparents.’ Or ‘We immediately decided we needed to get together with our grandmother who we haven’t talked to in a long time.’ And I’ll get pictures of kids and their grandparents drawing together or painting together. And the fact that this book, which was born out of that distance, is being used to close that gap for other families means the world to me. And I can’t think of a better tribute to my grandparents than, than that.