Nonfiction for Kids

Research is an important, I mean, the most important part of writing non-fiction and you have to be very careful with what you choose to include. I only work or I try only to work with primary sources. That’s those very original documents, the things that were written at the time.

If I’m gonna do a biography of Abraham Lincoln, my favorite sources are those that come from the actual time — some speeches from Lincoln, things that he’s written, letters, things that friends have written about Abraham Lincoln, or enemies, which are always more interesting.

Enemies, things people wrote about Lincoln who may not have liked him. There were a lot of people that didn’t. Newspaper articles from the time. Those are the things that I look at first. If I find it in a secondary source, that means that some other author wrote and said it was true.

My rule of thumb is that I need to find it three other places before I can assume that what that particular author told me is absolutely true, which is a shame because sometimes we find really great anecdotes — a great story, and you realize that you’ve only found it once. If you can’t verify it, you can’t use it.

For me, I love it. Research really is an adventure. It’s a discovery process. I’m always digging in. I never known what great little nugget, little gem I’m gonna uncover. It can be sometimes frustrating.

I like to actually go to the library, so when I was working on Eleanor Roosevelt, I went to the FDR library in Hyde Park. When I was working on The Lincolns, I spent a lot of time at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and other small archives.

There’s the Library of Congress that has all of the Lincoln papers. They’ve digitized them now and this is a beautiful source for students and young readers, young writers because you can see the primary source. You can see that primary document right online now.

You no longer have to take another author’s word for it or read a book about it. You can actually go right to the source on the Library of Congress and read it in Lincoln’s hand. If you’re having trouble reading that faded document, you can always read the transcribed version, as well. It’s just a fabulous resource.

That said, when you use resources on the internet, you have to be very careful about which ones you’re using. It’s hard. Even I have a hard time telling the difference between what’s accurate and true and what is not.

I had 60 books by my desk for years, and I had so much that I decided to also try to do non-fiction for the first time. Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York was that book. It follows the immigrant experience from 1880 to 1924 of when people came over from Eastern Europe and Italy. Then it talks about what life was like on the Lower East Side.

It’s been very interesting for me to use that book in classrooms with children and also to have them look critically at the photographs. That’s one of the things that I’ve been doing with kids a lot is have them get a sense of history by looking at the photographs and seeing what they might be able to tell.

I was recently in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I was born and grew up, and my second non-fiction longer book is called Up Before Daybreak: Cotton and People in America. There, you can actually see in the Lowell Historical National Park what a mill was like.

Those books tie together in a way of looking at aspects of our history that were very much important to children. Children were involved in the fields as enslaved workers, as sharecropping kids after the Civil War, and mill workers. I think that’s a way into history for kids is to see what their lives might be like if they lived in a different time.

So I had had my third child. I’d been a stay-at-home mom, and, like, I had gotten an invitation to a high school reunion, and, you know, you get those things and it kinda makes you stop and think, and for that one, I thought, “You know, what have I not done that I always wanted to do?” And I realized I always wanted to write — try to write a children’s book, and so I called up a friend of mine who had an MFA, and I said, “Well, you know, what should I do?” And she said, “Go to the Writers Center in Maryland. They have, you know, great programs,” and so I took my first class with Mary Quattlebaum, who’s a really awesome teacher, and it just kinda took off from there.

I think, you know, the hard part about being a mom when you’re a writer is you kind of sometimes have this instinct to protect your characters, and that’s really the last thing you wanna do. You really kind of wanna make their lives as difficult as you reasonably can for the sake of the story. I think having kids has been helpful in that you kind of have a sense of, you know, what a kid’s life is like now, which is different from, you know, what my life was when I was growing up.

But at the same time, I try to respect their space. Like, I don’t want them to feel like, “Oh, this happened, and it’s gonna end up in Mom’s book.” So there’s always kinda that line, or at least, you know, you have to ask permission. Like, is it okay if I put this, you know, fill in embarrassing incident in this book?

I do try to humanize the famous people from history, especially in my Lives of books, which are all about famous people — these icons from history — and what the neighbors thought of these famous people. Which is just sort of a way of saying these are the very nosiest things that I could find out about each person, that they weren’t marble busts that you see on a piano somewhere, or in a library on the top shelf, all dead and moldy. These were real human beings with quirks and faults and interesting habits and different girlfriends and boyfriends and ways to spend their money and clothes and hair and underwear and little personality quirks and how they related to their children and their parents and just whatever I can find that makes them seem like real human beings. That’s my goal.

Hi, I’m Marc Aronson, I’m an author of nonfiction books for middle grade and high school, and I teach at Rutgers in the School of Library and Information Science, and I have a doctorate in American History.

When I was growing up, I was always interested in history, I think partially because both of my parents were immigrants. My father came here in 1922, and my mother came in ‘39, just barely, barely escaping from Hitler. And so if your parents are immigrants, you know there’s another story that’s different from the story that’s all around you. You know there’s a past that’s different from the present, but in some way connects to the present.

So I was always interested in figuring out those connections, linking those dots. I’m also an only child, and I think a very great author once said that only children are spies. And you’re spies because you’re in the world of adults, and you’re always sort of half-overhearing things you’re not supposed to hear. But then you have to try to make sense of them, you have to try to make sense of the clues. And I think in some way history to me always meant figuring out those clues, connecting those dots, connecting me to some world beyond me, the world of adults, the world of my parents’ past, the world of Europe, the world of other times and places.

That always felt like a treasure to me, to make that connection. So I initially hoped to be an archaeologist. I was very, very influenced by a book called Gods, Graves and Scholars, by C. W. Ceram, which was an adult book about the great archaeologists, Schliemann discovering Troy, Sir Arthur Evans discovering the palace of Knossos in Crete. And that always seemed wonderful to me, it’s what I wanted to do.

But there were maybe two issues. One was the issue that it sort of seemed like everything had already been found. All the good stuff was already known, I can’t find Troy, it’s been found! And so it was a little bit discouraging on that front. And then the other issue was that at my Bar Mitzvah, when I turned 13 and the rabbi was going to talk about my interest in archaeology, happened to be the week John Kennedy was assassinated. And so in a certain way, history interrupted my interested in the deeper past.

When I was an undergraduate, and actually when I returned years later to graduate school, I thought I would study medieval history. And I think that was because my grandfather was a rabbi, as were many, many, many, many, many, many prior parents and men. And so I was always very interested in how a religious world, a defined religious world meets the modern. Because that’s what happened in my family, my father was an artist who left that world, defined religious world.

And so medieval history seemed like that same story, where you had a Europe defined by religion that started to break out in the Renaissance and started to move out of that. So I was always interested in those borderlines. But I think I was also interested in another borderline, and that’s the borderline between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It’s the same thing. It’s leaving a closed-in community of shared beliefs and moving out into a wider world and a time of challenging beliefs and ideas.

I like to think that my books are unique. I have tried writing different kinds of books, but I’ve found that the field of biography has been really good to me. I love it because I am so nosy. I love writing about other people, digging up all of this information, like a detective, at the library. I try to make my books as fresh and as current, that real kids today would want to read them. I try to avoid the dated feel of the past, like making up dialogue - things like that. Everything that I write is very true, very accurate. I take old stories of famous people and try to put a fresh spin on them and make them new for kids today.

I like to think that my books do help kids remember famous people from history that they should remember. For example, in my book A Woman for President, which is the story of Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president back in 1872 — this is somebody that most kids have never heard of, and yet she’s really an interesting figure from American history. That’s the kind of thing that I go after, stories from the past that I think kids should know about today.

Also the thing I love about writing for young people is that it demands that we are clear.

And very often, because we have a responsibility, you know when you write for adults you can assume prior knowledge. I say well I don’t really have to explain that, they know it, they should know it or they could look it up. But when you’re writing for young people, it’s twofold. When you’re writing for young people you have to, when I write for young people I assume they have little or no prior knowledge, but at the same time I try to write as if they’re almost geniuses.

So explaining things in a way that doesn’t say and let me explain this to you. Also I think when you write for young people you have to think about the difference between what you put on paper and what they read. One example I recall vividly when I working on Maritcha: A Nineteenth Century American Girl, I moved to the scene of the New York City Draft Riots where New York, it’s the worst riot I think in the history of the nation.

And most of the rioters were Irish because they were among the poorest white people and when it came to the draft they were, they were among the people who suffered most from the draft because wealthy people could pay $300 and get out of the draft. So I thought oh my goodness, I don’t want Black kids, white kids, anybody to think that Irish people are like monsters.

I wrote in the book that most of the firefighters and the police officers who tried to stop the riot were also Irish. Thankfully Maritcha recalled in her memoir that at one point when her parents who had sent the kids out of town before the riot began, were in their home an officer named Kelly came to them to try to stop people, said “I heard that you were attacked, I’m so sorry.”

So you know you think about those things like what will kids pick up on and what will they kind of assume.

I write books for middle grade and for high school ages, and they are quite, quite different. And sometimes people ask me, “how come you write about archaeology, you write…” I’m working on a book on paleoanthropology, but I also write about J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy and Sir Walter Raleigh, and “why do you write about such widely varied topics,” and I think, really, behind everything I do, I just love nonfiction.

It’s actually a love affair. I get to be in love with what I am doing, because it’s just so interesting. Why wouldn’t you want to have a career which involves finding out questions you want answered, getting to answer them in interesting ways, trying to write about them beautifully and share them with young people? What isn’t perfect about that, and so I guess to me, life is interesting.

What is nonfiction? I was just talking to 7th graders in Houston, and I was talking about history. And many times kids think “I’m not into history,” and I say, “what is history? History is everything that human beings have ever done, as understood in every possible way by other human beings. How can you not find something in that that appeals to you?” I often begin discussions with young people when we talk abut what is history, I say, “Every single thing in your life is the beginning of a historical question.

“Why did you have cereal for breakfast? Why do you wear those shoes?” There’s a great academic book on who invented the jump shot. If you think about it, basketball was invented in 1896 by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts. Everything that happened on that court had to be invented. Therefore it has a history. So history is just, think of life as an advent calendar, where you open the door and behind each thing is a treasure, is a mystery.

Well, I get to open those doors and investigate those treasures, so I do think that beating behind everything I do is this love affair that I get to play out on the pages.

Oh, I’ve gotten to have all kinds of great experiences doing these books. I’ve made four trips to the Amazon. I swam in a tributary of the Amazon with pink dolphins, who came to know me every day. That was amazing. Amazing. I’ve also swum in the Black Water River tributary of the Amazon, in which you can’t see anything. It’s like you’re swimming in space. You can’t see anything around you. And one day I’d had some minor surgery on my foot, and I had a bandage on it, and someone came along and took that bandage right off. I have no idea who it was. Could’ve been an electric eel as long as a limousine, because I know there were a lot of electric eels there. We would see them. I know I washed my hair in a place that had a resident electric eel. My hair used to be straight. No, I’m just kidding. I’ve gotten to hike in the Alpine Mountains of the great Gobi in Mongolia. Pretty amazing. To research Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, I met with Nick Bishop and a scientist, Dr. Lisa Dabek, and our whole team to the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea. We were surely the only non-native people ever to set foot in that cloud forest at 10,000 feet.

That was amazing. And I’ve traveled in southeast Asia to all kinds of wondrous places. Sometimes you feel like you’re in some kind of a dream. I remember the first night I woke up in a tent in the Gobi. And I got up and I was wandering around under the stars, and in the distance I saw some horses that were grazing. And I thought, oh how lovely. Those are really big horses.

And then I thought, they’re really lumpy horses. They were camels! And they were just kind of sharing the desert with us. That was just great. So many wonders you get to see, and to see them, all you have to do is just go there. You know? And be ready. And the teachers will come out of the woodwork.

When Nick and I created “Scientists in the Field,” what we were looking for was to be writing, not just about some animal, a bunch of facts about it, we wanted to provide some real drama. We wanted to take kids on a real, exciting, real-life expedition. And our books have narrative. And there wasn’t a whole lot out there. Not only do we have a narrative, but we have these great heroes and heroines in our narratives, who I think are great role models for kids. Scientists— a lot of people who are working in science in the field today— didn’t even like science when they were growing up because they thought it was a big book of answers you had to memorize, and not a process, and not an adventure, not exploring. But that’s what it is. And in the field, as a scientist, you’re really using so much more than science too, aren’t you?

I mean, you’re MacGyvering in the field. You’re using everything you ever learned. And for me, to do these books, I’ve had to use my physical fitness skills. I’ve had to swim for hours. I’ve had to ride camels, ride horses, and elephants. I’ve had to learn foreign languages. And it really helps to know one foreign language. And boy, even if you don’t learn the whole language, just being able to say hello in Bengali or Mongolian or talk pidgin, really makes people happy to see you.

All the stuff I learned as a Girl Scout, I’ve used in researching these books. And scientists need that. I think that field science or writing about field science is just one of the most fun and exciting and demanding and thrilling jobs you could ever have. I feel like I’m the luckiest person on Earth.

I always go to the library first thing, and of course I read all that I can about Mongolia if I’m going to write about the snow leopards, or New Guinea if I’m writing about tree kangaroos, or Bengali culture if I’m going to go to West Bengal. So, the research really does start in the library. And I try to see any films about my subject. But a lot of what we do, and scientists and field theory, is the science is unfolding in front of you. You couldn’t get it in a book. So the story is really happening in front of you, and what you want to do is go to the field with your heart full of all the background you can get. But you also want to be very receptive to this very stuff that is gonna happen in front of you. Maybe for the first time ever, anywhere.

And it invariably does, because the universe is just so full of gifts for us. And the teachers are going to come out of the woodwork and show us the way.

My objective, and I’ve said from the very first, is to write across the curriculum, and to write across the age spectrum. Occasionally I’ll write a “I can read” book for the very young. I’d also like to think that I’m helping to create another genre which is adult picture books.

I happen to agree with you, I think some of my books really are intended for adults or at least can be appreciated by adults as well as YA or the YA high school audience. And you know, I’m trying to write about every subject under the sun, math teachers and sciences teachers come up to me and say, I’m sorry math and science it’s, they’re like oil and water to poetry. I said not to me, I’ve written a book called Arithmetickle, I’ve written a book called Edgar Allen Poe’s Pie where I put classic poems into math puzzlers.

There’s nothing under the sun you can’t write a poem about, nothing. And it really bugs me. I heard this today at the school I spoke at, one of the teachers said this and he said it with almost a certain amount of pride, it was too bad because he used the term, and this is to me it’s unfortunate, two words that I think are the worst words in the English language when put together: Poetry and unit.

When I hear a teacher talk about a poetry unit, I know that he or she is going to spend maybe 3 or four days at poetry and then thank the lord it’s over, we can move onto something really important. But to me, poetry ought to be an everyday experience for every child, and you can do it with DEAR, Drop Everything and Read, take five minutes, you can.

I try to encourage principals at elementary schools, you should be reading a poem every day on morning announcements. It would take fifteen to thirty seconds, you would have no end to volunteers, teachers, students, custodial staff, secretaries, everybody would want to be on it.

Billy Collins actually came up with that idea it’s called, “Poetry 180” for 180 days in the school year, he came up with that as the US Poet Laureate, but I wrote to him in fact, I said, “Why didn’t you include elementary schools? That’s such a wonderful idea.” I think it should also be done for elementary schools.

I choose the photographs, or take the photographs for my books, even before I begin writing them. I know the kinds of images that I’m looking for. I choose the images either from a source such as NASA; or Jet Propulsion Laboratory, if it’s outer space; or scientists who have been studying wolves in the field for many years. And these photographs that I choose, I winnow through them – I go through them and choose the images which are the most striking, the most arresting to me, because I’m almost childlike in the sense that I know what interests me, and if it interests me, again, I think it might interest the kid.

And after I get the photographs, I do a thumbnail of the book, and I sort of design the book before I even begin writing it. I know that on this spread we’re going to be talking about a particular thing, and I have two or three photographs which I know will be used on that page. And all of this stuff goes into the editor – the photographs and my text – and what the designer does is decide whether to use the photograph on one page or another, or to spread it across the back of the text, but the pages stay together. And all of the books that I write are not written as individual pages. You can read any of my books from beginning to end without the pictures, because it tells a story. And I think that that’s very important, particularly in a book on photographs. I want the kids to be drawn into the book, and I want them to read it from beginning to end.

There are a few reasons that I wanted to tell Matthew Henson’s story in I, Matthew Henson. First of all, because he did a great thing. He accompanied Commander Perry to the North Pole in the 1909 expedition that was at that time viewed as the most successful expedition to the North Pole. Secondly, he’s African American and I do tend to focus on African Americans in my work. He’s a Marylander and I’m from Maryland. So those are three reasons that I wanted to focus on him.

Also, the centennial of the expedition is coming up in 2009 so I wanted to do a work that would mark the centennial of the 1909 North Pole Expedition. Matthew Henson, as I said, was born in Maryland and he was orphaned at an early age and wound up walking to Baltimore’s Harbor because he worked in a restaurant and had heard sailors talk about the ships coming and going, and he wanted to be a sailor.

He walked to the harbor and found work as a sailor, traveled around the world for several years before his captain died, and he wound up as a clerk at a story in Washington — grounded, so to speak. He was working as a clerk at this men’s haberdashery when Commander Perry came in, buying hats for this Nicaraguan expedition. It so happened that Perry also needed a manservant and he inquired of the owner, and the owner recommended Matthew Henson for the job.

Matthew Henson signed on right away. When he got to Nicaragua, he proved himself to be really helpful to Perry. He was really meant to just be cooking and laundering Perry’s shirts, but when the chain man fell ill on the expedition, Henson became the chain man. From that point on, he became indispensable to Perry and accompanied him later on the North Pole expedition.

I wanted to write the book, Birmingham, 1963 because, although the story of the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been covered in other children’s books about the Civil Rights movement, there had not been a book devoted entirely to that tragic event which claimed four young girls’ lives.

The girls were ages 11 to 14 who were killed in the bombing. Because the event itself was so jarring, I wanted the book to be illustrated with photographs. Photographs make documentary history more real to kids so the book is illustrated with photographs.

On the verso page, there’s a photograph from the Civil Rights Movement and on the recto page, there’s always a photograph of some commonplace item from a girl’s life in the 1960’s. On the recto page, there might be a pair of patent leather shoes, some records, 45’s as they were called, berets or jacks, things that a girl might have in her life at that time.

History is only relevant to the extent that it is made personal so I let the poem be in the voice of a ten-year-old girl — someone who happened to be experiencing what would be in the life of a ten-year-old, a pivotal event. She was experiencing her tenth birthday which I can remember for me was a big deal because I got into double digits.

On this day when she’s marking her tenth birthday and was also to present, perform in the Youth Day program at church, this tragic event happens which forever mars that day in her eyes. She sees her father cry for the first time. She sees the bomb claim the lives of four girls whom she looked up to — they were older than she.

She sees her city kind of torn apart by violence in the aftermath of the bombing, and can’t understand why. The girls’ story is what is really one poem in the book, but then the book itself ends with four poems it attributes to the girls who actually died in the bombing. I wanted to end by calling their names, recognizing them, paying tribute to them.

So now, what can parents do? I think one of the challenges for parents is that typically the parent most involved with the child in reading is the mother, and that mother may not think of herself as liking nonfiction.

She may particularly recall books she loved as a child that she’s so eager to share with her children, or she may have a special feeling about what fiction offers, and it is absolutely, kids will continue to read many wonderful novels in school.

I think that mother may not recognize how much nonfiction she actually reads. I mean, if we add self-help and diet into the world of nonfiction, I actually think… we know adult males read more nonfiction than fiction, but I think if we add the full set of categories of nonfiction, I think adults in general read more nonfiction than fiction. But the second thing is, so much really good upper elementary, middle school, and now YA nonfiction is being written, I think those same parents will come to discover this is a literature they had never seen.

That they did not know that books like this existed, because their own memory, much as they have this treasured memory of Judy Blume or the book that spoke to them so, or Harriet the Spy or Wrinkle in Time that spoke so perfectly, may well have experienced nonfiction through those very textbooks that we’re moving away from or from a teacher whose dry recitation of facts killed whatever interest that parent may have had in nonfiction.

I think the books that parents will find are much richer than that, and there’s one wonderful, wonderful hidden truth about nonfiction for younger readers, and I mean K-12, the entire spectrum. I was on a listserv recently where we were talking about nonfiction for this age, and a British publisher came on the listserv and he said, “You know, you have something in America that exists nowhere else in the world,” and that is we have these handcrafted nonfiction books that are by single author that are not a series, in which the author picks the photos and the author works on design.

So that means that our books, from picture book to 12th grade, are made with the same care as a 32-page picture book, where we the author are working on where does the text go, where does the art go, how does the page turn work, how can we create an immersive experience so that the reader is taken into the world we’re discussing, rather than being lectured at about that world.

And this does not exist in any other country. In other countries, there is series nonfiction, which kind of takes a set of familiar topics and may be beautifully illustrated, but is not an individual creation, and I hope those parents, as they start to look at our books, will recognize that craft, which is the same kind of craft that goes into fiction, where one author has a story she wants to tell.

And moving further on that, adult nonfiction isn’t illustrated. Coffee table books are, or you have a biography which has a set of black-and-white photos in the middle of the book. So they as adult readers may not recognize this wealth of illustration, that… I always think illustration is the wrong word, because illustration means I say “sunrise,” I show a picture of a sunrise.

This is immersion. This is where we’re using real archival images to be like a diorama in a museum. And I’m very proud of us for doing that.

What’s the evidence, not in your feeling, but in the text? Show me where the text says that, that I can prove your argument, make an argument, and then this idea of point of view, and this gets to what’s so important and exciting about the Common Core, the Common Core from 5th grade on is having your people understand that all nonfiction has a point of view. That is not to say that it’s all relative, everyone has a point of view as in it’s all the same.

Maybe the Earth is flat. No, it’s not saying that. What it is saying, however, is when we look at any nonfiction, whether it’s an encyclopedia entry or a vitriolic op-ed, there is a person who wrote it, and that person wrote it from a particular stance. They had an objective, they had a voice, they had a reason for writing about it in that way. And so when you look at nonfiction, it’s not as if there is this perfect truth out there that we channel and absorb and regurgitate.

There are arguments. There are contentions. There are points of view that we come to recognize, that we juxtapose one against the other, that we compare and contrast, and that out of that process we begin to develop our own argument, our own contention. Well, where this is going to relate to parents, and I think this is so important. Under Common Core, in elementary school, 50% of the reading across all subjects is non-fiction. In middle school that becomes 55%, and by high school it’s 70%.

That means your English Language Arts class, or in elementary school your homeroom class, is reading nonfiction, but not nonfiction by topic, who were the pilgrims, who was Pocahontas, any of those kind of identify and define questions, but rather to read it with the same texture and complexity that you might have read a novel, that you might have read The Giver in one year or Maniac Magee in another year.

You’re going to try to look at voice, point of view, writing style, use of evidence with the same richness that you have also and will continue also to do with novels. That also means that you won’t be, quote, “covering” as much. You can’t possibly get from Plato to NATO if you’re going to stop, look, inquire, think. Now, there are many wonderful things about this if it’s done well, and if it’s done well of course is the question.

I think that like introducing all books in the classroom, the best thing you can do is read from it. Five minutes, a chapter, something that will hook, hook kids in. Hopefully the author will have done that for you in the introduction, that’s really, it’s either that way, you don’t have to think. But if they haven’t, to find that segment of the book that you can read, get them excited, and then put it down and see who you can get to pick up the book.

I think getting kids excited about any book has to do with introducing, doing good book talking, and then allowing their natural curiosity to take them into subject matters. There are so many children who prefer to read what is true, they really want to know, is this based on fact? I always say I came from a family where they never let truth get in the way of a good story.

Okay, they were just, they were outrageous liars actually, if truth be old. And even from childhood on, I really said, I was always sort of, is that true, do we, is there any evidence that fact’s true? It was never true with my family, I mean they were always just you know, stringing me along in some fabulous storytelling mode.

And I think that, you know, I really grew to love narrative, I love narrative non-fiction now. I read it as an adult because I really want to know what went on in our world and I think that’s a natural, just a natural part of childhood, you want to know what’s happened. So somebody just needs to kind of pull you in a little bit and not over-sell it and not make it an assignment, you know, not make it tedious and dull and boring. Because we have some of the best writing right now in narrative non-fiction that I think we have ever seen. It’s certainly in my time in 40 years, we’ve just got some fabulous writers who are doing great, great work.

I think one of the big necessities of the Common Core is that the librarian, whether school or public, and the teachers have to get back together. I think they’ve been out of touch, the teachers have been overwhelmed, they’ve been dealing with testing and NCLB, the librarians very often suffer from the stubbed-toe complex, like I tried, she didn’t listen, why bother? That can’t work.

Because the biggest problem we’re seeing in the teachers is not so much that they’re resistant or want the right answer, it’s they don’t know the books.

They know fiction, or they can know fiction or they know what’s around or they know the book they used last year or the teacher down the hall did. They do not know nonfiction. They don’t even know that it exists in these wonderful forms. The librarians do know those books, or at least they’re trained to know how to know. They know the Orbis Pictus Award comes from NCTE. They know there’s the NCSS-CBC list of notable trade books.

They know about the Sibert. They know about the Young Adult Nonfiction Award. So they can be the resource, to come to this, you should say, “let’s build a cluster.” For example, last year Candace Fleming came up with a new Amelia Earhart book, which had a very innovative structure, uncovered some new facts about Amelia Earhart. Put that next to two or three other Amelia Earhart books, not as one’s right and one’s wrong, how are they different? How could they be different? And think about this. Have the teacher work with the kids; how can nonfiction be different? How could it be that… it can be different…

In the old days it couldn’t be different, ‘cause there was a right answer. In the new days they can be different, ‘cause there’s a point of view. Just as, what I always say when I do school visits, or what I sometimes say is, if you hear a rumor in the school, X did Y, do you necessarily believe it? Maybe you do. Or maybe you ask your other friend “do you think that really happened?” You gather evidence. You hear stories around you all the time. You try to figure out which make sense, which don’t.

That’s the same thing we’re doing with our books and in our nonfiction.

Finding nonfiction right now is truly a challenge, because in B&N there is almost no nonfiction, and what’s there is either sort of Eyewitness, very kind of lavish color books, or a few very standard and crammed women’s history, African-American history in February, you know, some topics, holidays around the world, whatever. Biography series.

And the problem in libraries is while libraries do, in fact, buy award-winning books, good books, the shelves are so overstuffed, and so overstuffed very often with books that have been bought for curricular reasons, it’s hard to find. And I think a parent has to do a few things, or a teacher. One, talk to the librarian. Talk to someone who knows. Two, start to pay attention as you and a child you’re with makes their way through a stack, what kind of works for this child or this subject.

One thing I’ve often thought is kind of interesting: Young readers do author studies. It’s a very common thing that’s done from 6th grade on. They almost never do author studies on nonfiction authors. The assumption is almost as if, again, the topic defines the book, not the writer. Why? Writers have styles. Nonfiction writers choose to write… Kathleen Krull writes witty books. Her books are different for someone else who would do 50 inventors or painters or composers.

She has a style. And some authors, as I do, have more than one style. So I think that you should come to recognize, does your child like a Russell Freedman book? Does that work for your child? Well, there are a lot of Russell Freedman books. So you start, just as you would do with fiction. Does your child like Lois Lowry? Well, there’s other… The Giver isn’t the end of her writing.

And so I think you pay attention to what’s a kind of book. And think that something I’ve been talking about is, in fiction we have a very sophisticated sense of genre. There are many subgenres. In nonfiction we have three. Biography, memoir and everything else. And I think we have to start to develop, as librarians, as teachers and parents, what’s the subgenre my child likes? Does my child like historical mysteries?

Does my child like historical detective stories? Does my child like to read about scientists? Is my child fascinated with math? I think math is the area we publish, is the worst. We have math completely as a set of exercises, not as intellectual exploration. As far as I know, there’s one book, Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Number Devil, originally written in German, is the only kid/adult book that makes math exciting as an intellectual journey.

So I think we need to start to… you need — you teacher, you parent — need to start to figure out which of these kinds of nonfiction is working for your child, and then talking to the librarian. I would also add, as kids get into teen age, there’s a whole other subset of nonfiction they need which is the same as a how-to.

How to get a summer job, how to do well on the SATs. We already have the sort of “your body’s changing,” diet kind of stuff, and also sexuality, etc. But I think recognizing that that’s part of the nonfiction world your kid may be drawn to, because they need advice, just as we adults need advice. So it is daunting. It is daunting, but I think that sort of exploratory mode, and I would say begin exploring in the library.

My biggest concern with nonfiction for children is that I don’t write down to children. I don’t think I should use baby words. If they have any questions, they can ask their teachers or parents.

I want to make nonfiction visually exciting, but it’s sort of natural for me to do that. I mean I love bright colors, and I love doing my artwork. But when I’m plotting out a book, because of my graphic background and because of the television background, I can sort of visualize while I’m writing what is going to be on each page. Mentally, I can sort of see an image in my head of what is going to be on each page. And I don’t want it to be boring. I want it to be visually exciting. I will never do a topic that I think is dull or uninteresting. It has to really be something that I want to dig into and be curious about.

Sometimes publishers will call up with ideas, and I say, “Are you crazy? I don’t want to do that.” And then I’ll talk at schools, and some of the kids will come up with great ideas. So, my ideas come from a lot of different places – from publishers, from my husband, from my kids, from school kids. And sometimes I actually come up with an idea myself. So, my ideas come from a lot of different places, and it has to be something that is exciting to me. And if it’s exciting to me, it comes out in the book. It just merges into the book.

I think there are many needs nonfiction meets. For example, for some readers, and at some times, they actually do just want the facts. When my sons and I look at the box score of a basketball game or a baseball game, we don’t necessarily want flowing prose, we want to know who got how many hits, what’s the final score, what does this do to so-and-so’s batting average or their place in the rankings, and I think there are readers who really, their favorite thing about nonfiction is accumulating facts.

It’s a form of collection, just like other people like to collect Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards or other things that they collect. And so I think we have to recognize that there is a kind of excellence in nonfiction that’s pure facts. We also know, and it’s no secret to any parent or teacher, that there’s a whole subset of kids who love books of records. And it is interesting to know fastest, longest, oldest, quickest, most expensive, all that. It’s fun.

My work for Capstone I think is what built me into a children’s author. Writing non-fiction for children, particularly that type of nonfiction, is incredibly difficult work, because first of all you have to research the heck out of it because they have to be correct.

You also have to, you have all kinds of limitations to how you can write the thing. You have all kinds limitations on your vocabulary choice. You have all kinds of limitations on how long your paragraphs can be. But then your books also have to be engaging, they have to be factual and they have to be funny.

So it’s like nonfiction haiku with jokes. It’s really hard. But boy, oh boy, did that hone a lot of skills for me.   

And it was great work for me, because I’m a curious person. I love calling scientists and finding out what they’re doing. I love learning about that guano that was cool for me. I love learning about the history of the sewer system, because the history of the sewer system by the way is amazing, because once a culture, and this knowledge has like come up independently of the other places and they would figure it out and as a result their civilization would flower and then eventually it would get lost.

But the thing is, the reason why their civilization would flower was because once they could figure out that if they had clean water to drink and they were able to get rid of all of the gross germs and everything else from our leavings, then suddenly their babies didn’t die of dysentery or diarrhea or disease. So their babies didn’t die. And then also their kids were not fighting diseases all their entire childhoods so their children were getting bigger and stronger. Their brains were more developed, because they were able to hold onto more of their own nutrition.

And so their brains were developed in a better way. And so suddenly they had better engineers. They had better philosophers. They had better soldiers and stronger soldiers. They had better laborers and stronger laborers. And suddenly they were Rome, right, and take over the world. And in fact, you know, when the barbarian hoards came in to Rome and sacked it, they did two things, they knocked out the sewer system and they knocked out the aqueducts and they brought Rome to its knees.

The sewer system was so important to Rome that they even had a goddess of the sewers, Cloacina. And there was like this two week festival in her honor every single year, because they knew that like this was important stuff. But also the Indis people in what is now Northern India, they had indoor flushing toilets and a modern sewer system back in 4000 BC. So this knowledge has sort of come up. It was so fascinating. I loved learning that. It was so cool.

I learned all about how to maintain water. I learned all about sweat that a human being can run down any animal on earth except for a horse, even a cheetah, because most animals will overheat and we don’t. We can run for days. We don’t like to, we would prefer not, but we can. We literally are built for it. Pretty nuts, huh?  I love that. I love learning stuff.

There are so many great ways to share nonfiction with kids, and I have a lot of ideas on my website. I would encourage people to go and visit it. It’s Melissa Stewart.com or you can also just Google Melissa Stewart author and it will pop right up. There are all kinds of ideas there, but you can also just try things like many schools do a mock Caldecott, but they could do a mock Sibert — the nonfiction award from the American Library Association. They could, many schools do March Madness fiction. You could do March Madness nonfiction. 

Pretty much anything that you’re doing with fiction, you can do with nonfiction too. You can also have specialized book displays. You can do book tastings, you can do book passes where you are introducing a variety of books, helping kids to understand what you have in your school library or in your classroom library. 

And you could do this with fiction and nonfiction. I think really the key is to treat fiction and nonfiction equally. And I think that’s starting to happen, but I think that there’s still work to be done. 

I think if teachers or parents are interested in learning more about this, the National Council for Teachers of English has written a position statement that was published in January, 2023. And it is a great place to go for all kinds of suggestions and ways of implementing it in your curriculum, but also it has all the research to support the idea that kids need to be exposed to more nonfiction. 

It’s important for so many reasons. I think in the, sure, exposing kids to more nonfiction is critical because I think in the adult publishing world, we fully embrace the idea that nonfiction and fiction exist equally. But I think a lot of adults in the past and a little bit still currently feel like kids prefer and gravitate toward fiction. But the research shows that that is absolutely not true — most children enjoy both fiction and nonfiction equally. And many gravitate specifically toward nonfiction. And they are the gateway to literacy for those students. When they’re exposed, when they have access to a rich diversity of nonfiction, they’re more likely to be engaged in reading and to become strong readers themselves. It also helps nonfiction loving kids. Some people call them “info kids” to realize that nonfiction reading is real reading. A lot of times these “info kids” will say, oh, I’m not a reader. 

But the truth is they’re reading all this nonfiction, but they don’t see those books. The message that they’re getting from their community is that these books are not as vital or valid as fiction. And so if we want these children to see themselves as readers and to continue reading these books that we love, we need to send the message that these books are, that they’re great, they’re interesting, they’re fun to read, and they should be a really strong part of any book collection, any classroom library. Any school library. And also part of instruction and part of home libraries as well. 

I think if kids want to connect to ideas, a great thing to do is to pair a fiction and nonfiction book. That way kids can have exposure to both kinds of writing. But I think also just looking for the topics that kids are fascinated by. I think one of the best ways to turn a child into a reader is to feed them a steady supply of books on topics that they find fascinating. 

And if you’re in a school setting and you can do what’s called a reading ladder where you’re slowly increasing the complexity of the books that you’re handing to that child, that’s a great thing to do. I think also trying to give them stacks of books and just see how they react to them. Which topics do they seem interested? Which writing styles do they seem interested? Which of the five kinds of nonfiction do they seem most interested in? 

And that can help you get to know them as a reader, but also get them to know themselves better as a reader. And just immersing them in nonfiction, giving them an opportunity to sort the books into different categories for themselves and to see what the wide world of nonfiction has to offer. They may not realize themselves, teachers may not realize themselves. A great thing to do in a professional development setting is to go to the school library and see what’s on a particular shelf in the nonfiction collection and what are the different kinds of books there. And to discuss ways that different kinds of books can be used in the classroom setting and in the library setting. 

I think that studies show that there’s very little nonfiction read aloud happening at school and probably not at home either, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t. I think the strategies might be a little bit different in some cases. I think if you’re working with a large group of kids, there’s often a lot of things happening on the page of a nonfiction book. And so something like a document camera might be helpful. 

It might also help to have some props that are helping to build background information before you read and introducing some of those vocabulary words that we were talking about before, if necessary. 

Also, I think one really important thing to realize is that you don’t need to read the entire book. So for example, if you’re reading a browsable book, there’s no reason that you can’t just read one page or two pages. 

You can also sort of sneak in nonfiction, read alouds. Let’s say you have a few extra minutes as the class is lining up for recess or lunch. You can read one spread there, and it’s an opportunity to show that you honor nonfiction, that you want to bring it in to your classroom, but you’re not taking away from any instruction time. And also you can read books that are related to whatever you might be discussing in science or in social studies. And there are so many different great topics that you can find in nonfiction. So I really hope that people will start doing that more. 

Because my books are expository nonfiction rather than narrative nonfiction. Text structure is a critical factor. There is no built-in story. If you were writing a biography about a person’s life or if you’re writing about a historical event or a historical period, there’s a built-in story and narrative nonfiction works really well, but when you’re just sharing facts, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. And a narrative writing style really doesn’t work. So expository nonfiction is really the way to go. 

And with narrative nonfiction, you have a sequence text structure, you’re following the events or the person’s life. But with expository nonfiction, you can have any tech structure that you can think of. And so there are five main text structures that students are learning in schools. But the truth is that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more they can be book specific and there are also some that are common, but don’t happen to be in those five text structures that kids are learning. 

So for my book, Thank You, Moon, this has a compare and contrast text structure. And then within the compare and contrast text structure, it’s important to understand how the information is going to be arranged, how it’s going to be organized. So this is what’s called a list book, which is basically talking about an animal behavior or a phenomenon, and then how it affects various different animals. And then so we’re comparing the way that the different animals respond to moonlight. For some it helps them to find food, some it helps them avoid enemies, some it helps them migrate, some it helps them with their reproductive cycle. And within that, I’m pairing different animals by the kinds of things that they do under the moon. I’ll just read you a little tiny snippet.

Thank you, moon, for being Earth’s constant companion in space and making life on our planet possible. And you can see this stunning art here by Jessica Lannan, who is just so talented. Thank you for guiding tiny turtles to the sea, and dung beetles to their burrows. Thank you, moon, for giving lions a chance to feed their families, and gazelles a chance to eat in peace. And then there’s one plant in the book. This is a joint pine. It’s when it releases its pollen so that the moss can come and pollinate it. 

And so you can see how those pairs actually help with the flow of the text within this compare and contrast text structure.