Jon Scieszka

James Patterson talks to Jon Scieszka

James Patterson: Hey, Jon. It’s Jim Patterson.

Jon Scieszka: Hey, Jim. How’re you doing?

JP: I’m good. How are you?

JS: Good. Great to connect with you, finally.

JP: It’s nice to hear from you! Are you in New York now?

JS: Yes. Brooklyn, where I live.

JP: Okay.

JS: Just hanging out.

JP: And you’re doing something with 826 NYC over there?

JS: Yes, yes. I’ve been on their board for a while. Do you know them?

JP: Yes. A little bit. We’ve done a couple of things with them, the PageTurner Award.

JS: That’s spectacular. Yes, yes.

JP: I try to help out a little bit.

JS: They’re a great program. I mean, they’re doing the same thing that you’re doing online—actually doing something.

JP: It’s just hard to get people to get out of their little habit ruts.

JS: That’s exactly right.

JP: People just sort of stick to saying, this is the way we do it here.

JS: We’ve always done it like this.

JP: It’s been that way forever. Anyway, we’re fans, and The Stinky Cheese Man, I think, was the first of yours I was involved in.

JS: See, I just love someone can say a sentence like that.

JP: In fact I’ve had Stinky Cheese Man in one or two of the Cross books, along the way. Alex would read it to the kids.

JS: Wow. I see that. Nice.

JP: And then Knucklehead, more recently.

JS: Yes, yes. That’s been fun. Actually, this fall I went around the country telling stories about growing up with five brothers and man, I got some great stories coming back at me. It’s amazing how many people are actually knuckleheads on their own.

JP: Yes, everybody is, up to a point, a knucklehead. Our backgrounds are probably a little similar—I grew up in kind of a river town, kind of rock and roll, about 30 percent African American.

JS: Where were you?

JP: Newburgh, New York.

JS: Yes, yes. I know Newburgh.

JP: I mean, Flint is bigger, more industrial. Newburgh is sort of failed industrial—

JS: Well, Flint’s definitely failed, so join the club!

JP: The whole Midwest is really suffering.

JS: Yes.

JP: So how old are your kids, Casey and Jake?

JS: Casey is 24.

JP: Okay, all right.

JS: She’s out of college. And then my son, Jake, is two years younger and is a senior at NYU this year.

JP: Were they readers at all growing up?

JS: Actually, they were one of each. Casey was this crazy reader. She would devour anything starting when she was a little kid. And then Jake—you know what? I think he had this whole experience of reading just being kind of, I don’t know, like a challenge, a school assignment more than anything and I think he decided early on like, “If this is reading, I don’t think I really want to be a reader. I think I’ll be a hockey player instead.”

JP: Yes. I think that sometimes people don’t understand—reasonably bright kids are very bright kids. A lot of them will think of school as stupid. And they’re not entirely wrong. Not necessarily about reading, though. They don’t recognize that as they read more, they’ll get better at it, it’ll get easier, and that there are a lot of cool books out there.

JS: I think that’s kind of the crux of the problem. The last couple of years I’ve been really involved trying to connect with boys and reading, just to kind of dig down and research into that problem. It came out of my experience of having a daughter who is a reader and a son who is not, growing up with five brothers and then teaching in elementary school for ten years. I saw this weird disconnect…. I know those boys are smart and I just knew they operated in a different way. They just weren’t getting jazzed to read.

JP: There’s a terrific book, I don’t know if you’ve read Raising Cain?

JS: Yes, yes.

JP: That’s I think a real valuable book for parents with boys.

JS: There’s another great one that just came out called The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre. JP: By Peg Tyre, right. I know her a little bit.

JS: That’s just spectacular. That kind of surveys the landscape. It takes a nice, no-moral-judgment look, saying let’s just see what’s going on. Like, we don’t have to point fingers or blame anybody, but let’s see what’s happening, because something’s not working. And that’s what I love about your situation, what you’ve really taken on to do, when you saw that your son was not getting jazzed. And you said, “let’s look at this and see what we can do.”

JP: Yes. We did two things. One was to go out and find books that I believed he would like. Then we offered just a little bit of discipline, saying, “During the summer, you’re going to read for twenty minutes or so, or as much as you want, but you’re going to do that and it’s not so much to ask. You don’t have to cut the grass, but you’re going to read for a little bit.”

JS: Well, those are two brilliant things. I mean, those are things I recommend to people all the time now, let kids be a part of that choice. Let’s stop giving them assigned reading. That’s the thing, I think, that just turns kids off, in my experience both at home and as a teacher. You know how that works as a parent: if you offer a kid a choice between three different shirts he can wear, then he gets to pick one, and then there’s no fight about, “I don’t want to wear that shirt. It stinks. You picked it.”

JP: Yes. I also love the thing that a lot of schools do, the Drop Everything and Read program.

JS: I did that. Actually, the school where I was teaching here in New York did that, and I started doing exactly what you’ve done online, which is to collect a bunch of great books on my desk. Because inevitably—and it was almost always the boys. The girls would manage to keep track of their books and keep reading them, but every period for reading, the boys would come over and say, “I don’t have anything to read,” “I forgot my book,” “I don’t like any books.” And I could say, “Well, pick something off my desk. You’ve got twenty minutes.” And they would inevitably find something, ranging from some classic stuff I would have, Kidnapped or some title, and I would have some great nonfiction and some comic books.

JP: I started with comic books myself—which is fine.

JS: I think it is valid to realize that kids have a lot more stuff competing for their attention now.

JP: And first they have to get mildly competent at reading, and however that happens, it’s good. They’ll find their own level if they get good enough at it and that they’ve had some good experiences.

JS: You know what? I think that is the other brilliant part of your advice. That’s what I get coming from your books, and your site saying, “Let’s let kids read something that motivates them to want to be a reader.” That’s what a good author does. It’s that you want to engage the reader, give them a reason to want to turn the page because, man, if you see a kid learn how to read, that’s a tough skill. That’s like asking someone to learn how to build a car but never get to drive it or use it. They think, “Why am I doing this?”

JP: Well, what I really I think hit me right between the eyes was I would go out to bookstores and do readings and stuff and invariably people would come up and go, “You’ve got my kids reading.” In a lot of cases it was books for older people, but the kids were reading them anyway. And half the time there’d be tears in their eyes, which is stunning, and then you realize just how difficult it was, how hard it was for them to have kids that weren’t reading…

JS: I think you and Stephen King are probably in that group of guys where kids find you when they’re in high school or so, or later middle school. They’re almost out of desperation, where they’re going, “Oh, man, I can’t read another required book, but look at this! This guy is talking about some real stuff and here’s the book that I really want to read.”

JP: There needs to be more common sense used in terms of what kids are told to read. Especially during the summer. With Jack, Jack really did a great job last summer, he read twelve books. The one book that he thought was not so good was the one he had to read for school. That’s ridiculous.

JS: That’s terrible. What grade is he in this year?

JP: He’s in the fifth now. And he read To Kill a Mockingbird this year, so he’s capable of reading relatively difficult books for his age.

JS: Right. And some of those classic texts are still good. But that was my son’s experience in third grade, everybody had to read Little House on the Prairie. It was the one and only book, and it just killed him. We were reading it together and he was going, “Oh, my God, nothing’s happening.” I said, “Yes, I know.”

JP: Or you'll get some of these schools where sophomores are having to read Crime and Punishment, but they don’t really need to do that yet.

JS: Well, my son also waded through like the whole kind of politically correct canon of Toni Morrison and some books that he just had zero-interest in, which confirmed his notion of, “You know what? That reading stuff is for somebody else.”

JP: And sometimes some kids will get involved with books like that, and that’s great.

JS: I speak to a lot of groups of teachers and librarians. It’s nice that I come out of a teaching background because I can talk to them and say, “I’m not blaming you.” I’m just saying we’ve got to change this system, because this isn’t working.

JP: And a lot of teachers are great.

JS: Yes, and the librarians are unbelievably great.

JP: They’re just stocking the required deal here.

JS: And you know what’s been nice is that things have really started to change in a good way. People are realizing, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t let kids be reading things like graphic novels. Or when something like Hugo Cabret wins the Caldecott Award, which is just mindboggling, a great kind of graphic storytelling—

JP: I think that’s a particularly inspired book.

JS: Yes. I was talking to Jeff Kinney, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid guy who I know that you interviewed too, and what a sweet guy. He’s a born storyteller who tells half the story in pictures.

JP: He’s very funny.

JS: Yes, yes. And that fires up some readers who’ve seen it and say, “Yes!”

JP: They’re getting a good laugh and they’re getting a book under their belts. That’s so key that they get a book or two under their belts where they say, “Huh, I actually liked a book. That’s weird.”

JS: Yes, it’s the whole reason to want to be a reader. I don’t know how humor is sort of seen in a lesser genre.

JP: Well, everywhere.

JS: Yes, everywhere.

JP: The Academy Awards.

JS: But I thought we had a group now though, because I feel like we’re part of that club with Dave Barry writing stuff for kids now with Carl Hiaasen.

JP: Hiaasen, right.

JS: Good stuff.

JP: Do you give any—now, I would say advice, but—what do you have to say to parents about their responsibility in terms of helping to do the job? I think a lot of parents think, well, it’s going to happen at school.

JS: Yes. Now, that’s huge. And especially with the boys’ reading, that is a gigantic piece, to have a male role model. Just being a teacher in school, I realized for years and years I was the only guy in those elementary school faculty meetings and the only guy in the boys’ lives.

JP: That’s something that people need to recognize.

JS: Yes. The school had me, the principal, the food service guy and sometimes the gym coach. We were the only guys. And we tell them reading is important, reading is for everybody and my second graders would look around and think, “But it’s a bunch of ladies reading to us and picking our books and my mom reads at home. My dad’s too busy. I don’t see him reading.” I think, just to be reading in the classroom, and they could see me playing basketball and reading and writing and doing some science and eating lunch. I think it’s a huge relief for them to see that.

JP: What we were talking before, about this Drop Everything and Read, would the teachers also have to read?

JS: Yes.

JP: And were they watching the teachers read?

JS: Yes, yes. You know what, well, having been a teacher, I just realized that was just so much more valuable. It’s what we show kids, it’s not what we tell them. In fact, it’s much better if we just kind of shut up and show them, and show them a great book. There’s that whole variety. That’s another thing I recommend to people, too, is I tell them to really expand their notion of what they think of as reading, let that include nonfiction, let it include graphic novels, science fiction, online reading, wordless books. There’s some incredible stuff out there. And that’s really a different generation.

JP: They can want visualization.

JS: Yes.

JP: And the thing about Jeff Kinney, and Hugo Cabret, in particular, is there is some bit of sameness in a lot of the graphic novels, but Hugo Cabret really busts out of that.

JS: Yes. I think so, absolutely.

JP: It really is its own unique creation.

JS: Yes. And you know, somebody else is really starting to push things out is TOON books. I am not sure if you’ve seen those. It’s Art Spiegelman, who wrote Maus and his wife, Françoise Mouly; they started an imprint which is all graphic novels, starting for little guys. I guess it would even be too much to call them graphic novels. I think it’s just visual narratives where they’re just cool, they’re great design. Françoise is the editor who picks the cover images for The New Yorker. Yes, so they bring that sensibility to five and six year olds.

JP: I think the hard thing is having an illustrator who, for whatever reason, can work relatively quickly, because some of the illustrations just take forever.

JS: Yes. Like Jeff, he worked on Diary of a Wimpy Kid for like nine years, just slaving away in his basement, it’s unbelievable.

JP: Yes, just developing the style. People look at that style and think it’s so simple.

JS: Well, you know what’s another difficult thing? I don’t think teachers know what to do with that. And I can sympathize with it, having been raised as a print kind of guy. You can’t really skim a graphic novel. You have to really get into it and read it.

JP: Right.

JS: And so we’re not that comfortable with them, and it’s hard to discuss also in the same ways…

JP: And a lot of times those books don’t get on the “read this book for points” kind of stuff.

JS: Yes, exactly, because they can’t be quizzed, is the thing.

JP: That’s usually right.

JS: In fact, I’m using my office as Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, which I just got awarded last year, which is kind of hysterical, by the Librarian of Congress, but now I get to wear my medal and tell people, “Let kids read comic books and stop testing them for God’s sake!”

JP: What are your hopes for, or what do you feel you can do, having that nice platform?

JS: It’s really been a great change just to give some legitimacy to things, like humor, like graphic novels, and tell people what teachers and libraries are thinking. Like this testing stuff, No Child Left Behind, is killing teachers. They don’t want to be test monitors. They're artists. Teaching is an art. You can’t just read from a book or from some kind of steps handbook and…

JP: The whole idea of school as a place to learn trivia is—I don’t think that’s really the best idea. I mean, really what I’d love to see in terms of kids coming out of grade schools, middle schools, is that they have some basics in math, they know how to read, they’re beginning to learn how to write, excellent.

JS: Excellent, that’s exactly right. And the world has changed.

JP: I’d love to see kids taking Biology every year, because it’s so useful for them in life, in terms of taking care of themselves, in terms of understanding about your body…

JS: Real science.

JP: But some of the trivia… I gave a speech a couple of weeks ago in a school and I was thinking that it would be interesting—I mean, I’d never do this. It’s one of these crazy fantasies about giving a test to all the teachers and parents, where I was sure nobody in the room would score more than about a 20, but it’s the same trivia that these kids are being forced to memorize.

JS: Yes, it’s true. And the world has changed, like that stuff is available to kids now in other places.

JP: And you never use it.

JS: Yes, yes. And if they need to use it, they can look it up online --

JP: Trigonometry --

JS: -- in like five seconds.

JP: Right. It was very useful in the middle ages.

JS: Yes, when you had to accumulate.

JP: You had no choice.

JS: No, I think we’re much better served with teaching kids tools, and reading is a great tool. JP: And in terms of the books, they don’t need read to Crime and Punishment as freshmen. It may be useful for them to read a couple of chapters and hear a little bit about what Dostoevsky is doing, et cetera, et cetera. Or, here’s what romantic poetry means, here’s an example and here’s… so they begin to get just little tastes of things.

JS: Boy, you are a heretic. You’re going to get hanged somewhere.

JP: Probably in my own house.

JS: Your own house, yes. But I think you’re right on the money about where we’re going. It’s kind of interesting to see the stuff that somebody like Scholastic is doing, with 39 Clues and Rick Riordan, and Gordon Korman, who wrote the second book, too. He’s another great one, a writer who inspires kids.

JP: I read the first one, I didn’t read the second one.

JS: Yes. Gordon’s is pretty fun too, and that notion of letting kids become participants, I think, is where we’re headed.

JP: And there’s big potential with online, too.

JS: Yes.

JP: In terms of kids writing and reading. The thing that I’m obsessive about in terms of the writing is to outline. Outline, outline. It won’t work for everybody, it’s not going to work for every book, but it can really work.

JS: That’s a valuable thing to see.

JP: Boy, is that going to save you time. Save you time, doesn’t that sound like a nice thing, kid? JS: Jeff and I were talking about that yesterday. I think the biggest value in authors and illustrators coming to schools is to show kids a process. I mean, they see the finished product and have no idea. And, well, most adults don’t either.

JP: I went to a school in Indiana, a middle school, and the whole school read one of the Maximum Ride books. I came in and, I mean, it was so fun for me. It was like I was a rock star. I came into the gym and they’re going nuts. Because they had all shared this book, a lot of them had started out thinking, “I don’t want to read this book.” Most of them had loved it, not all of them, but most of them, and it was great. There’s the potential for books in schools for the kids to get really turned on. And they can get turned on.

JS: Yes. That was one of the best events I’ve done in the last—I don’t know how many years. I was down in South Carolina reading Knucklehead, which was still kind of a manuscript like a year or two ago, and all the kids had been sort of dragged to the auditorium. They sort of knew it could be entertaining but it was more like a required book thing. After I had read some of the Knucklehead pieces and some Stinky Cheese and stuff, this little guy, like a third grader, came up to me and said, “Oh, man, I thought this was just going to be a boring thing.” He thought, school, required reading, assembly, equals boring.

JP: You’re so right about humor in terms of, one, how it’s underestimated by so many people and how hard it is to do. You don’t realize, it’s hard.

JS: Yes, it’s very hard.

JP: It’s hard to be funny. You know when I really got a dose of that? There was a documentary about Jerry Seinfeld, after he got off the show, he went back and tried to be a standup comedian again, but he didn’t want to use any of his old stuff.

JS: Yes, yes. I did see some of that.

JP: He was sloppy, and it just demonstrated how hard it is to create a body of funny work, not going back to what he’d done, not telling Seinfeld stories. It’s hard.

JS: Yes. And that’s very difficult to show people. That was one of my favorite stories about James Thurber, when his wife saw some story he was working on at a desk and she read it and said, “That’s terrible.”

JP: Wives will do that.

JS: He said he hadn’t really honed it yet… But you’re right, wives will do that, and your kids, too.

JP: I haven’t written the funny parts yet!

JS: Yes, I’m working on the funny parts! Like you had talked about getting kids involved right away is what motivated me to start writing for younger kids. The stuff I’m working on now is called Trucktown, and it just comes out for kids, the beginning readers, like three year olds, two year olds, four year olds. I kept thinking, where do we catch these little guys? It should be right away, like when they walk into some kind of book environment and go, “There’s a book for me. It’s got trucks who are characters.” And that has been so much fun. That’s a scary audience to read to though.

JP: I know.

JS: Two hundred four-year-olds.

JP: Little grasshoppers, right?

JS: Yes.

JP: Been there. That is the scariest audience I’ve ever had to deal with.

JS: Yes, I never taught that young. I taught first graders for a while.

JP: I have tremendous respect for people who can do that.

JS: Me, too.

JP: Because I could not do it.

JS: I visited a pre-K classroom here in Brooklyn for a year, as I was writing this stuff, just to research their world. I ended up hanging out with them, which was funny. They knew me, like, “Oh, it’s Jon Scieszka, that writer guy.” But I quickly became almost like the class pet. They’d say, “Could you help me with my clay here?” “Jon Scieszka, come here. I need some help building this.” They didn’t care.

JP: I just went to a school for the arts here in Palm Beach County and they have about half a dozen artists in residence, which is kind of cool because they have musical and visual arts…

JS: That is such a great thing. It’s like the Eric Carle Museum up in Massachusetts, which is both a library and a performing center, a work and a hang out place for kids, which shows them how the art is created and lets them be a part of it.

JP: What was amazing in this school, and what really stuck out, was I went into one of the groups and they were doing jazz and it was like it was a nightclub. These are sixth to eighth graders.

JS: That’s great.

JP: It was just amazing.

JS: Well, that is the art of it, too. You can give kids stuff that’s accessible and then challenge them on a real level, a real artistic level. The headmaster at the school where I worked was always big on musical education. He insisted that kids have great instruments, which just made great sense because he was a musician himself, and he said, “I’m not going to ask a kid to get a great sound out of a crappy instrument. It’s just going to make it all that much more difficult to him,” and I just thought, wow, that’s brilliant. I never would’ve thought of that. You would think just like, give the kid a cheap violin and if they’re lucky then they’ll get a good one.

JP: Yes, right.

JS: Kind of not unlike what we’re asking kids to with reading. Don’t give them the cheap stuff. Give them something really fun, engaging.

JP: As you know, there aren’t that many books that are incredibly readable.

JS: Yes, that’s a challenge.

JP: And you can’t start, in most cases, with the really hard stuff.

JS: When you think, it’s such a demanding activity, when you break it down.

JP: Sure it is.

JS: When I was teaching reading in second grade, it struck me one day that it’s not even possible… I’m making these symbols on the chalkboard that are supposed to make a sound and then when you combine them with some of the other symbols, you like stretch out and do some other sound that has a meaning...

JP: The whole process is enough to defeat people. It’s incredibly difficult at first, then what they’re asked to read is way below their intelligence level, and then they go on to things, a lot of times, which are just not very stimulating. And people wonder, “Well gee, I don’t know why kids don’t like to read.”

JS: Or why they’re not excited about it. And when I speak to mixed audiences of the teachers and librarians about the challenge of letting boys pick what they like to read, I ask them, because I’m usually speaking to audiences that are 90 to 95 percent women, I say, “Would you read that stack of books that’s on your husband’s side of the bed? Or what do you read?” And they realize, “Oh no, you know what, those are a lot different than the books I like to read, mine are completely different from what my husband reads.”

JP: I think girls are more tolerant of reading different stuff than the boys.

JS: That’s definitely true. That’s exactly what I found in the school, my girl readers would give it a try.

JP: They’ll read a Harry Potter even though it’s a boy book, whereas if it had been centered on a girl, I don’t know if boys would’ve been as likely to read it.

JS: No, I don’t think so.

JP: Which is unfortunate.

JS: And if the cover is weird. They definitely wouldn’t. But you have to deal with that. You have to roll with them.

JP: It is the real thing. All right, well, this has been great.

JS: It’s been great to talk.

JP: Good luck with your Ambassadorship.

JS: Yes. I’ve got a year more to go, I’m official. I have to get down there and wreak some havoc in Washington.

JP: You’re the only other official guy, with Billy Collins.

JS: I love that guy.

JP: He is. He’s fantastic. Probably at the high school level, a great introduction to poetry for an awful lot of people. He should be, he’s so good, he’s so deceptively good and so accessible. JS: My favorite poem of his is the one about teachers in a class tying a poem to a chair and beating the meaning out of it.

JP: Yes, yes.

JS: Which just kind of says it all.

JP: I’m sure you’ve seen some of the symbolism in your work that you didn’t know was there.

JS: Yes, that’s right.

JP: Oh, really.

JS: I found out about it later.

JP: I didn’t know I knew so much about Greek mythology.

JS: Yes.

JP: So anyway, all right, well, thank you very much.

JS: Yes, and let me know if you need any help in Washington, the Ambassador is on your side.