The interesting thing about the Rooster book, about The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet!, of course is that I see it really as a Rorschach test. People look into it and they see whatever they’re looking to see.
And it may be one political position, it might be another. It might be, you know, they might relate it to current events, they might relate it to history. To me it’s very fundamental. I got involved years and years and years ago with Amnesty International. And I’m a member of PEN, which is freedom to write. It’s an apolitical organization. Don’t care where you come from, you have the right to speak your mind or write your mind in this case.
And initially when I first worked on it many, many, many years ago, it was born of an incident. It was a graphic novel in my mind. That’s now I saw it. And it was a much harder story to read. When it was picked up by Scholastic a few years ago, two, three years ago and we sort of … we looked at it and reconfigured the story to make it a picture book.
I was concerned how we could make this work, because what you’re really reading is after many interviews with prisoners of conscience I started, because I’m more left brain than right, plotting where the points of commonality in these interviews, where do we, where am I hearing the same story again and again and again? Well, you were hearing first threats, then loss of your own freedom, then your family was kept from you, they couldn’t come to visit you, even in prison.
Then it goes to torture, which of course we weren’t going to be able to work into a picture book, and then death. And how can you tell this story and not frighten the children? But can how you bring up citizens that will guard the freedoms that are the foundation of any free society if you don’t remind them, that you don’t have to like someone else’s song, but they have the right to sing it?
And when you start shutting down that person and this person and this person, it is not going to be long before it comes to you. This isn’t an original thought, this has been said again and again and again. I love him because he’s kind of cheeky. And I saw him with a lot more personality but ultimately have come to see that what Eugene, how Eugene Yelkin , who’s wonderful, a Russian illustrator, drew him, came from his own experience. He wrote Breaking Stalin’s Nose, a Newbury Award Honor Book.
The way he drew the rooster, the rooster is stalwart. I love that word. He’s stalwart and true. And he’s not trying to make a point. He’s not trying to convince anybody. He’s just trying to sing a song. So what I love about it when I said it’s a Rorschach test, I’ll go to schools, I’ll read the book, I usually tell stories, but this one I read.
And I always wonder what are they going to get out of it? And at the end I ask them because I don’t believe in propaganda for children. That isn’t what this book is meant to be. I believe it’s meant to tell them they have a voice and they must guard it. They must keep it. They must be true to it.
Because if they lose it they can get it back, but it’s a hard row to hoe. So I asked this kid, after I read the book, it’s not that long ago, so what do you guys think it’s about, and I call on this one little boy, because the whole time you can just see him, the machinations and he has his own book in his lap and he’s looking and he’s flipping back and forth and he’s coming … and I said you, right there. Umm, I think he said, in that kind of inexorably honest voice that only a child can have, I think that whatever bad thing that happens to you, you can always find something to sing about.
Well, I’d never thought of that one. Which is why we don’t tell them what the book is about, we ask them what do you think this book is about?
