When I was kid, there were a lot of books I loved. I loved the The Stupids Step Out and basically anything James Marshall was involved in. I think maybe he’s the greatest comic voice in picture books. Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel I think rival basically anything written in English. They’re so simple and manage to be completely profound. Simple in language and profound emotionally and with their themes.
Margaret Wise Brown is a huge inspiration for me and was a favorite of mine as a kid, too. I think that she speaks to something really deep and sort of essential about the experience of childhood that I responded to almost intuitively as a kid and now, as somebody who makes picture books and looks at her work, I just continue to be in awe of it.
I think awe is sort of the experience of contact with Margaret Wise Brown both as a kid and as an adult, but for completely different reasons. Who else do I love? You know, one of my favorite books is a book – and it’s not really well known, but people who were a member of the same book club I was (Troll’s or Trumpet book clubs) who got this book – it looms large for them, too. It’s called But No Elephants by Jerry Smath.
And it’s a perfect little thing. It’s about an exotic pet salesman who’s trying to basically pawn off these animals on Grandma Tildy, and Grandma Tildy buys all of these pets except for the elephant. She says, “But no elephants. But no elephants. But no elephants.” And finally, the guy’s like, all right, well, I’m heading to Florida. I’ve sold every pet but this elephant.
So I’m just going to leave the elephant outside. And he drives off. And the snowstorm starts. And the elephant gets covered up. And eventually she feels so bad that she brings him inside, and he’s in the cellar where she’s storing all of her pickles and canned stuff for the winter and breaks through the ground because he’s so heavy.
And that’s the crisis. I’m not going to tell you how it ends. But I think it’s a perfect book. The most interesting kinds of stories that are so hard to make are ones where the characters are completely at odds with each other and both completely justified in their positions. And it very beautifully sets that up. But like your heart goes out to this elephant.
You absolutely understand why he wants to come inside. It’s freezing, and you want him to have a home. But Grandma Tildy’s not a tyrant. She is afraid of having an elephant in her home, and those fears are borne out. Within like a day, the elephant has ruined her foundation. So it’s a funny book, but it’s incredibly intense, too.
I lived inside the books that I read as a kid, and I lived inside the stories I would then make up, which were often linked to the books I read as a kid. I made up stories all the time. I went to school pretty far away from the house I grew up in, and all my friends were far away, too, so I spent a lot of time by myself talking to my toys, making up stories, just kind of living in my head.
It feels like my memories of being a kid have a lot to do with stories, the stories I read and the stories I made up. Yeah.