Learning Disabilities and Dyslexia Awareness Month

Having dyslexia was another isolating thing in my life. It was very, very tough being the only kid in class who couldn’t read as well as everyone else, especially if we had to read out loud. It was very, very difficult.  When it was my turn, the other kids would be like [sighs loudly], you know, because I’d be struggling to get through my books. But my mom was very, very helpful to me because she would take me to the library every week and she just wanted to make sure that I was always, always reading.

And so she let me pick out whatever books I wanted, and there was no judgment whatsoever. She just wanted to make sure that I was always reading. And I would pick out fun books and joke books and books that I’d read a thousand times, and she didn’t care. As long as I was reading, that was fine, and that’s what changed my life.  It really turned me into a reader.

I think reading is like a lot of other things in life; the more you do it, the better you get. And for me, having the focus beyond fun was so important to me. Everything I read — I would read things for homework and I would read things because we had to, but I loved to read for fun and because it was such an important part of my home life. My parents were always encouraging me to read for fun.  That was what really made the difference for me.

I had such a hard time as a kid growing up in school feeling like an outsider, feeling very alone and feeling like I had so many challenges and feeling like a failure. And I know that there are a lot of kids out there who are going through some of those feelings as well.  Even though there are so many more resources out there, it’s very — it’s very common for kids to feel alone with their challenges.

And I think — I don’t know. I think it would have been very helpful for me to know that you can have challenges and you can still turn out okay.  That was something I didn’t really hear too much of when I was a kid, and I wasn’t sure that things would work out for me, but there are so many resources out there. If you look online, people who had ADHD or have dyslexia and grew up and turned out okay became successful. I think it’s important to look at the success stories and to realize that there is hope for everyone.

I think if I could go back, I would have actually talked to myself and I would have said don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to work out okay.  Just stay true to yourself and try to focus on the positive and listen to your mother.

My experience in elementary school was not a very positive one. I was diagnosed very early with what they now call ADHD. Back in my day they called it extreme hyperactivity, but I was not fitting in very well in the classroom.  I was misbehaving a lot.  I was the class clown.  I was also diagnosed with dyslexia. So I had a lot of challenges growing up in school. I felt very alone in a lot of ways.

The experience of having all these challenges in the second grade was very isolating. In fact, literally isolating sometimes because my teacher would just, you know, point to the classroom door and say, “Mr. Pilkey, out,” and I’d have to go sit out in the hallway usually for several hours every day where I was separated from the classroom.

And so I didn’t want to be known as the kid who was always out in the hall, and I didn’t want to be known as the kid who couldn’t read very well.

So I focused on my drawing. That was one of the things I was very good at.  And I drew a lot of pictures and I eventually started making up my own stories and characters and pretty soon I was making comics.  And so I kind of became known as the storyteller in my classroom.

Socially in school I did pretty well.  I think most of the kids liked me, and I liked them as well.  I really — it was very difficult being sent out in the hallway, especially for me being isolated from my classmates so often. But I think being a friendly kid and being able to draw was kind of an icebreaker for me.

I think one of the reasons why graphic novels are so popular at least for me is because they’re a great way to take in a story. With my dyslexia, the type of dyslexia that I have, it’s very difficult for me sometimes to handle a large block of text and especially if you have page after page of large blocks of text, it can be overwhelming sometimes.

But with graphic novels they take those large blocks of text and they break them up into little panels that are very easy to digest. And when they include illustrations with the text, the illustrations tell part of the story and they give contextual clues to the meanings of the words. So not only is it a great way to read a story, but it’s also a great way to tell a story.

Well, my experience with schools nowadays is very, very different from when I was a child. I was just at a school doing a school visit a couple days ago and it was one of the best experiences of my life. The principal and the teachers were so involved with the kids.  There was so much heart in that school.  You could feel it in the walls and in the floors.  There was so much love in that school.  And there was also a lot of need in that school, in that community, but everyone came together in that school, and it was really changing the whole community.

And I see that so much nowadays. I think the world is really changing because of the love and the support of teachers and reading specialists and principals and administrators, people really coming together to — for the kids.

I think I have seen a lot more acceptance for kids who don’t quite fit into the regular student role and maybe for kids who have challenges like I did. There seems to be a lot more resources now.  So teachers are better prepared to deal with kids who don’t quite fit in.  And there seems to be a much better experience all around.

I’m dyslexic and English is my second language. And I should not be writing books. Not by any metric. But I love words and I love stories. And what I tell children is I found dyslexia to be a strange gift. It’s always made me look at the world a little bit differently. It isn’t just about words, it’s about processing. It’s how you process the sounds you hear, language, mathematics, music. And sometimes things just take me longer but I learn them deep.

I go deep. There’s horizontal learning and there’s vertical learning. And I think one of the things that dyslexia can give you if you stick with it is the ability to learn something on a very profound level.

How do you tell stories? You listen.

I think every writer is influenced by the manner of their birth, the path their life takes, the people they’re exposed to. For me, I’m dyslexic. I’m an audio-dyslexic. I hear phonemes unclearly. Sometimes they’re like the visual equivalent of HD and sometimes they’re like the old zenith television, crrrr, so I read lips a lot. English is my second language. I’m not the kid you would have pegged as a writer, ever. And rightly so.

Why words? In part because I loved sounds. I loved stories. I grew up with Cuban storytellers and southern storytellers. It was a double whammy. How do you tell stories? You listen.

I love talking to kids about the process of writing and they want to know how I learned to write and how I learned English and you know especially children who perhaps they were born in the U.S. but they don’t have strong language facility. And I say first of all when I was a kid I talked like that, okay? And say jas … and they all do the jas, which is lots of fun. So we sort of loosen up.

And I begin by talking about language acquisition, how I learned to acquire English, but inevitably it leads to it was a more difficult process because I’m dyslexic. And I tell them that I see it as the most marvelous gift. That, yes, it is called a disability and changing the name doesn’t make it anything less than that. It is not the norm in other words. It is not the way many people learn. It is the way some people learn. And dyslexics have the strange advantage of seeing the world from the slightly different perspective.

And I sometimes explain to them you know some people go through the wood, A to B, it’s quick, and it’s very efficient. But some of us, dyslexics are among them, we take the scenic route. And the things we discover and the places we see, and the ways we get eventually to the other side, make us very often interesting people. It can also be excruciating. It can be tiring. It can take you longer. It takes me five times longer than anyone else to learn anything.

But when I learn it, I learn it forever. I learn it from the bottom up, from the inside out. I want to know every way it works. I want it to be on a hologram, so I can get it. And I tell kids if a second language dyslexic refugee can grow up to write books, you can do anything, simply anything. Sometimes it’s just one more step. The end of the woods, right there. One more step. Truly.

I remember one day he asked me to stay after to wash blackboards. Now this wasn’t a punishment. This was a pleasure, because we all adored him. And while I was washing the blackboard, I’ll never forget this, he put on My Fair Lady and he asked me to make numbers and letters with this wet sponge. And I did. And I think that is where the code showed up. That’s when he realized I couldn’t do it. And that I wasn’t translating and reading, that something was wrong.

I remember he came up to me. His hand went in the center of my back. And as I’m telling you this, I swear to God, I can still feel the warmth of his hands. And he slid down next to me and said, “Oh, honey! I think you have something that has a name.” He said, “You feel dumb, don’t you?”

And I remember just bursting into tears and wanting to run away, because of all people, I wanted him to like me, and I thought if he knew I was dumb, he wouldn’t like me anymore. And instead, he opened the world up. He paid out of his own pocket for a specialist to work with me — and this was before we had reading specialists like we do now.

And I can’t tell you what method worked. We did colored acetates. We did balance boards. We did literally physical exercise, M.C. Escher paintings. You name it, we did it. But I will never forget the day that I could look at something on a piece of paper or in a book, get a mental image and something would come out of my mouth that was the same thing. This was a miracle! So I said one word and it was right. Then pretty soon it was a sentence — it was right. Pretty soon a paragraph. And then finally, an entire page. So he changed everything for me.

But people who discourage you, and you never forget that. And it can really derail a kid, you know? I remember any comment a teacher made like that. To this day you remember it. You know who’s great with that? Dav Pilkey, who does Captain Underpants. I’ve done a lot of signings with him.

Dav is — if a kid comes up to him — so Dav had every malady known to people as a kid, ADD, all the diagnoses, that was him. So kids come up to him saying I’ve been diagnosed with that too and Dav takes so much time with that kid to tell him you’re great, keep doing what you’re doing, draw, don’t listen to them. He really takes time. It slows the signing line down tremendously, but it’s great and that kid leaves feeling really great, you know?

You got to be really positive with those kids. You really have to — to me, they’ve got to leave the room thinking they can be anything they want to be because if you do anything to discourage that, who knows who you’re pushing out the room that one day might have been something great. You know, because you remember those comments. You remember any teacher who did that to you and you also remember any who really praised you.

So give them a chance to draw, give them a chance to create, give them the freedom to do it the way they want to do it I mean within some structure, I suppose. And talk to them when they’ve completed it as you would to an adult. I don’t know why we don’t do that. It’s really a strange thing. They’re way more brilliant than we give them credit for. Their instincts on people are as on as yours, if not more on and they’ll say it.

I talk to kids all the time. And inevitably, somebody will say, “Did you ever suffer from writer’s block?” I don’t know why everyone knows about writer’s block, but they do. Do they ever ask an actor, “Do you have actor’s block?” Or do they speak to their mailman and say, “Do you have mailman block today?” But writer’s block is a common question. And I say to them, “Well, what do you mean by that?” Because it apparently means different things to different people.

They say, “Well, you know, you don’t know quite what to say next.” I say, “That happens a hundred times a day,” because you don’t [know] – as opposed to sort of a state of depression, which is a much more complex thing: when a writer truly cannot write at all. But not knowing what to put down for the next sentence is what my life is all about in the sense that you’re always struggling to make sure it’s right, it’s well written, and what comes next. And that’s not writer’s block; that’s writing.

I didn’t realize I was dyslexic until college. You know I went back to school for my graduate work and studying special education. That’s when I realize that when I was reading dyslexively, but that’s me, you know. I went through a whole experience of my childhood, never knowing what that was.

I think that back then they were not talking about dyslexia and I had no idea what was going on. I just thought that I didn’t figure out the trick. It was a thing that all the kids in my classroom figured out and there were a few that I could see were struggling as well. But I didn’t know what it was, I just figured that we didn’t figure out the trick yet. You know, we were going to get it.

So as a result, it affected my grades, it affected my attitude about you know, there’s something that I’m struggling with, and I’m not complete.

And so, as a result of not being able to read aloud or things like that when we had read-around. What I would do is, I would go home and call the book to memory. So when I would come back in to school, I was not reading, I was actually reciting because to this day, if I get to read aloud, I’m going to stumble because the words do this, they get back and forth, and it’s quite frustrating.

Not reading as fast I would like, but figuring out it, you kind of compensate. That’s what I did. Now have the filters and all kinds of things to aid that. But if you look at a lot of creative people and a lot of them have, are dyslexic. I look at it as something that allows me to create or for example, able to recite my books. I can actually recite a book because I’ve been able to develop that ability to hold large information, pieces of information in my head, and then recite.

I don’t know if I would have been able to do that or found it valuable to do it, if not for the dyslexia.

So I think that a lot of kids have been somehow left behind for a lot of years of their life. Either they weren’t a good reader, or they weren’t up to the level of their classmates, and you know. That means they didn’t get to experience the joy of like, sitting down with a good book. But graphic novels so often fill in those gaps, and then those kids become voracious readers, and they’re able to talk about the stories with their classmates and their friends. And so, you know, I was a kid who loved to read comics, and I only had access to comic strips, and a few really underground small published graphic novels that were floating around out there.

The manga boom hadn’t happened yet. The indie comics boom hadn’t really happened yet, so I didn’t know where I was going with it, I just knew I loved it. I wish that I could be a kid today, because they have access to so much good stuff.   

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.

I’ve actually talked to a lot of people who study dyslexia, and they say, “Sure, the pictures help, because, you know, the context, you can look at the picture, and look at the words. But, also, just the fact that they’re in a spherical bubble, in little bite sizes, and I write in all caps.” So they look at these little bubbles that are in all caps and it makes the dyslexia just a little easier, I can read that little bubble. It’s nice and uniform in size, and I can read it.

And then they’re looking at the stuff, and they’re starting to feel smart because they’re like, look at this, I’m reading this, I now know the causes of World War I, and the major players, and the big battles that happened. And as they’re going along, they’re feeling better and better about the learning experience, which hopefully propels them into other graphic novels. Propels them into other history, nonfiction, I really hope, I think a really good book is always a springboard into other books. And I really hope that they when they read the Hazardous Tales books and my other comics that it makes them want to go back to the shelf and find some more stuff, and find other, other takes on it, and other things.

One of the wonderful things about the Judy Moody series is that it’s been so well received by struggling readers. Parents and teachers are very happy to have something that — I think the humor really engages kids, so the character and the subject matter, they really want to read the book. The design of the book that Candlewick Press has come up with is so inviting for reluctant readers, because there’s a lot of white space. There’re wide margins. The print is large, but not too large, so I think kids really get the satisfaction of reading a chapter book for the first time.

I’ve had kids come up to me and say, “I read a book like my mom and dad read.” For them, it’s their first experience with a real book.

Now that Stink has come along, Stink is actually a little bit shorter and easier than the Judy Moody books, probably around a second-grade reading level. That’s been equally as satisfying and rewarding, because a lot of kids that age are looking for something. They’ve practiced reading a lot of easy-to-read books, but go through them really quickly. They’re looking for what is that next thing, and I’ve had so many parents write to me or come up to me and say, “I could not get my child to stay interested in reading, and the Stink books really did that for him.” That, to an author is, he highest compliment we could be given.

And so these books, one thing that’s great about them is they’re illustrated so that makes it more – full page illustrations so that makes it more appropriate for younger kids to read and what’s really significant is that they’re printed – I’m going to show you a page here – in a special type.  I don’t know if you can see that.

And the type is called dyslexie.  And it’s a type font that was created by a typesetter in the Netherlands who has dyslexic kids and so the type font is specifically for kids who have reading challenges.  So if you notice, the ascending strokes in the letters go up higher and the descending strokes like Gs and Ys go down lower.

And there’s more leading in between the letters so that they don’t run together and so it makes it easy on the eyes because part of a learning challenge is just the physical part of actually looking at the page and decoding the words.  And what we found in these books is it certainly makes it easier for kids with specific reading or processing issues but it makes it easier for all kids.

It’s a really pleasant page to look at. 

One of the things you want is for reading to be a pleasure, so we try and make it a pleasure in creating funny stories, in creating lovable characters and then this completes the goal by having it physically pleasurable to read, to hold in your hands and to read so that you don’t – once I was talking to a school and one of the boys said he hated to read.

And I said why do you hate to read and he said it gives me a headache and I thought well it probably does.  He’s probably, you know, maybe he needed glasses or maybe just the squinting and the tracking was hard for him, so these books are created for – to be easy on the eyes, easy to process it.   

This one – the Hank Zipzer books, Here’s Hank were the first to use the dyslexie font in America.  It’s one of those things like how can this be, why wouldn’t we have thought of that before, but it hadn’t been done, so we’re thrilled.  It’s expensive.  You know, thanks to our publisher who had to pay – this isn’t a typical font so they have to invest in this, but it’s – so we’re very grateful and it’s so worth it from the feedback we hear that kids don’t even know why they like reading.

They just feel good when they’re reading.

Well, the feedback we get on the Hank Zipzer books, we get two primary responses.  We get hundreds of letters a month, hundreds of letters because – we get letters from parents who say things like I was walking down the hall on the way to my bedroom and I heard my child laughing and I opened up the door and they were reading a book.  I mean their parents are just, you know, so many parents say this is the first book my child has ever read.

For a lot of kids who have had reading issues, the Hank books introduce them to reading and there are 18 of them.  It’s a real series so we’re the gateway to reading.  So that’s the reaction we hear a lot from parents but from the kids we hear two things over and over and over.  One is how do you know me so well and that – that’s a thrill and I attribute so much of that to Henry Winkler because he had never written books before so when we came together as a writing partnership I came from the writing part of it and he came from not only acting but from the person who had dyslexia.

And he has been so insistent that we be true to those emotions and kids respond – they say it’s like you were inside of me, how did you know me and he says I know because that’s what I felt.  I know what it feels like to be the one who stands up at the spelling bee and know your words and then forget them the minute you stand up there and I know the humiliation of that.

I know what it’s like when your parents say you’re just lazy and you know that you’ve been working as hard as you can and you’re not lazy, you just can’t do it.  So how do you know me so well is the thing that we hear over and over and that’s really attributable to his unsparing honesty in remembering what the process is like.  And the other thing we hear is about the humor.

Kids say I laughed so hard my funny bone fell out of my elbow, you know?  Because it’s a – they’re funny and they’re very funny and they’re intentionally very funny because we want the sound of laughter because that’s how – first of all, that’s how you understand yourself and that’s how it makes reading a pleasure and if you’re going to go on to read other things, you start with looking at reading as an entertainment.

So what we hear is how did you know me and that this is unbelievably funny, hysterical.  Kids all say this is hysterical, your books are hysterical.  And then there are a lot of kids who write and say I’m not – I don’t have learning challenges but my brother does or my next door neighbor does or my best friend does and that’s really touching too because the statistics are that one in five kids in America has some kind of learning issue, one in five.

That means if it’s not you, it’s the person two doors down from you, so one of the things we’re trying to encourage is for people to understand that this is – that everybody learns differently and this doesn’t affect your future.  This doesn’t limit your future.  It just means that you have to be taught differently and you have to figure out ways to learn that —stimulate yourself and you have to figure out what you’re good at.

Well, the initial books that I wrote with Henry were Hank Zipzer: World’s Best Underachiever and those were inspired by his experiences or his primary experience in school of being very successful in so many areas of his life but not successful in school and they were funny.  They were funny stories.  This isn’t a woe-is-me tragic story.

This is a great kid, a popular kid who has everything but good grades.  And as those – we completed 18 of them and they sold almost 4 million copies, you know, they were really successful and we got so many letters from parents of younger kids who said is there anything like this for my kid who’s in the first grade or second grade because kids start to feel right away whether or not they’re diagnosed with a specific learning challenge it starts to make itself clear early on in kindergarten, first grade if they’re going to be the academically successful kids or not.

So we developed the series Here’s Hank.  Here’s one of them.  This is our newest one.  It’s called There’s a Zombie in my Bathtub.  And it finds Hank Zipzer when he’s in the second grade before he’s been diagnosed with any specific learning challenge but when he’s still suffering the effects of it so he’s kind of just goofy in school.

Reading is hard for him, spelling is hard for him, math is hard for him, handwriting is hard for him, recess is easy for him, social interactions are easy for him because he’s a great kid so we developed age appropriate stories for kids at the first and second grade about Hank before he’s diagnosed with a learning challenge but when school is still presenting challenges for him.

I think for some readers, some kids really do have trouble. When they see all that text, their mind just closes. And I was kind of one of those kids. I mean I like to read, but I never loved to read. And I think I saw all that text. The closer together it was, the smaller it was, the less likely I wanted to read it. I love getting those large‑print books from the library that were for the older folks, you know. I love this, and I’m turning the page so quickly.

But there was like this sense of satisfaction for readers who maybe have a little bit of difficulty reading. Here are these pictures that help propel me through. It doesn’t take very long to get through a page. Suddenly you read a 220-page book, and you’ve never read a 220-page book in your life. It’s like this gateway to reading maybe things that are more difficult down the road, but I don’t think that that’s all they should be known as.

They are art on their own just like a prose book is art on its own. It is perfect for what it is, but it does help. it has this extra power of being super helpful for helping a lot of people read with more confidence I think.

I think they should be part of every single classroom, picture books and graphic novels. They exercise a different part of your brain. That whole thing that I was saying about maybe somebody needing them to help — needing the pictures to help read, but they’re actually — they’re translating all these pictures. That’s visual stuff that’s really hard, and that’s actually hard for some other kids that need to practice that.

So I think — I really feel like graphic novels especially have been embraced by just about everybody across the board. There might be a few people who think that’s not reading, but, you know, reading is reading. And with a picture book and graphic novels both, they’re bringing art into the lives of everybody. It doesn’t matter what age; everybody needs to be able to enjoy and appreciate pictures. And I’m all over it. I’m all over it. I mean I’m kind of yapping, but I would love to see high schools with picture books and on the book shelves in the classroom.

You know, some of the nonfiction ones too. I don’t have — I don’t remember things very well, but — like about history because often it’s presented and it doesn’t have this human component to it, but the picture book versions of like the life of Rosa Parks, I’ll read that, and I’ll look at the pictures, and I’ll remember so much more about her because I looked at that book than if I had just looked her up in the encyclopedia and read a little passage. So they need to be everywhere. Everywhere.

There are a number of different ways to read that aren’t just limited to books on paper. My son, for instance, is an avid lover of audio books. There’s a bit of an argument about whether audio books is really reading. I say absolutely, it’s really reading. You are absorbing story and idea and character and all the things that reading entails. Just because you aren’t actually doing it with your eyes, one wouldn’t say reading brail isn’t really reading. Why is reading audio books not — why is that any different?

Audio books can be a wonderful tool for a reluctant reader. For my son, he has some vision issues. Reading is fatiguing for him. Audio books are a wonderful solution for him. Audio books are also a terrific way for the older child to experience the value of read aloud without necessarily feeling like they’re being read to by their parent or what have you.

All of the additional support in terms of comprehension and absorbing the story and meaning and nuance are all being gained subtly in that stealth mode I was talking about before by hearing the story told to them by somebody who is modeling tone and wonderful reading skills and so forth in a way that the child might not necessarily be able to do in reading it for themselves.

The other important piece is that we know that until about eighth grade, our listening skills and our reading skills haven’t converged, so it’s terribly important to keep reading to older kids because we can still absorb much more from hearing a story than we can from decoding it ourselves on the paper. Audio books are a wonderful way to continue to help kids do that, and they will always gain so much more from hearing it or being told a story or listening to the story than from fighting through reading it themselves.

There totally is something called a reluctant reader and I totally understand where they’re coming from because some of the books, there are some books out there that just aren’t particularly interesting. And I think there are people that don’t get anything out reading descriptions and so there is a well meaning teacher who’s like — who’s read a book that’s full of beautiful descriptions and it really moves the teacher so they want this kid to read it. And the kid picks it up and he tries to read it and it’s like oh the — there’s a bunch of stuff in here — it was like a meadow full of — I don’t know — and it gets so boring.

Meanwhile, you can pick-up a cool graphic novel like, Smile by Raina Telgemeier or Fangbone, the novel I was excited about and instead of reading the description you just see a picture of it. And instead of reading three paragraphs about what this kid’s house is like, you just see a picture of the kid’s house and now you can dive right into the action. You can find out what the kids going to do.

And I think there are a lot of people that want to read a book about people doing stuff and there are other people that like to read books about people thinking stuff and oh this is what this kid thinks about their life and there are great books out there about them. There are some amazing authors that write stuff like that, but there are other kids that want to read about what’s this guy going to do.

So you pick up a book about Fangbone, what’s this guy going to do? He’s going to pull out a sword. Awesome! And I, I just think that — I’ve met a lot of great librarians in the last couple of years and there are librarians out there that understand this.

But I tell you if you go in the library and you maybe ask the librarian where the awesome shelf is, they’ve got an awesome shelf and they’ll, they’ll be so happy if you go over there and read the book.

Maybe I can make that my thing. Get an awesome shelf. Maybe put my books on it. No, I’m not sure I would make the cut on the awesome shelf. It would be chalked full of, of, of great stuff, with lots of pictures, lots of excitement. Sharks. That kind of stuff.

It’s funny because when I was working on the book, the only thing I was thinking about was figuring out how to make the story work. I didn’t know who was going to read it, I didn’t know who would be interested in it. A lot of people, when I told them I was working on a book for kids about French silent cinemas, said, “That doesn’t sound like a very good idea. Like what kid’s gonna be interested in French silent movies.” My editor at Scholastic had a really great bit of advice for me and she said, “You know, if the things in the story are important to the main character, then they’ll be important to the reader.” And movies are really important to the main character.

I just kept working and then the idea for the pictures grew and suddenly it’s this 550 page book. I didn’t know if kids were gonna like it, I didn’t know what age kid would like it. I think one of the things that’s been the most thrilling since the book came out is that I have heard many stories of teachers and parents who have given the book to kids who don’t read a lot or who haven’t read or who were struggling with their reading and it turns out because of the balance with the words and the pictures that it helps you get into the story in a sort of an easier way.

The book opens with a 44 pages of drawings, so by the time you get to the end of that you’re nearly 50 pages into the book. You already feel like you’ve accomplished something. You’ve already met all the characters. You’ve set up the situation for the story. You’ve been introduced to the location, to Paris, and the train station and the secret access into the walls of the train station.

So hopefully by the time you get to the first words you are already kind of hooked on what’s happening.

A lot of the pages have a lot of white space for the text. Not every page that has text is completely filled with words, because sometimes it’s just like two paragraphs. There’s that satisfaction of being able to read through it very fast and because it’s 550 pages and it’s heavy, it’s like nearly 3 pounds, you get to walk around with this thing that you kind of conquered, you know, that you are able to like master. That’s not something I had thought about when I was working on the book but I find it really wonderful that that’s something that kids and teachers and parents are finding.

I’m also finding that parents and teachers are telling me that their kids are asking them to rent French silent movies to watch, to see A Trip to the Moon, the full movie, which you can see on-line now. The whole 16 minute movie is on-line. I’ve had kids ask me about Harold Lloyd because throughout the book there are also film stills from actual silent movies along with all the drawings that I did. We see film stills from the movies of George Méliès and we see Harold Lloyd in the famous scene where he’s hanging from a clock after he scaled the side of a building.

There’s a scene from one of the very, very first movies by the Lumière Brothers where a train comes into the station, and the story behind that is that the audience screamed and fainted when they first saw that because they had never seen anything so vivid and real, and they really thought a train was coming at them. Might not be a true story but it’s certainly a good one. I really loved that all of these things that went into making the story have, in fact, sort of gotten through to the kids who are reading the book.

Yeah, I mean graphic novels are a great teaching tool. Not just as a way to, a sort of a direct way to get across information, because they’re great for that, and one of, Josh Elder who’s a great comics advocate, he has a great line he always does in his presentations, which I’m totally going to steal, which is that, “When you get onto an airplane, the most important information about what to do if the plane crashes, how do they present that to you? Not with a whole bunch of paragraphs, they give you a cartoon.” You know, that’s, it’s the best way to get across information.

It’s the fastest, the clearest, the most direct. And so, it’s a great teaching tool for things like history, for science, you look at the stuff that Nathan Hale is doing with his Hazardous Tales, or all of the adaptations of Beowulf, and Macbeth, and that sort of stuff. Like it’s great for getting that information across to people.

But it’s also just great for teaching kids how to read because it again, it helps them along, the pictures, and the words help them, and you learn, it breaks out certain things in text that are not so clear in prose, like for example, dialog in prose is kind of buried in the paragraph. You know, it’s inside those little quotes, but unless you’re looking real hard for them, you may not understand that concept.

Whereas dialog in a comic is up in a speech bubble, you can see. Again narration text in a paragraph is just sort of everything, it’s just a big mush. But narration in a comic is in a little box, and you can clearly see what’s going on with it. So, it really breaks out some concepts for early readers that are [unintelligible] struggle with these things.