Margie Palatini

ReadKiddoRead: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Margie Palatini: Thank you!

ReadKiddoRead: You are definitely one of our favorite authors; books like The Cheese, Geek Chic and The Web Files are absolutely hilarious and we at the site really love your tone and how your books are able to reach out to children and grab them and get them to pick up a book. I’m not sure if you’ve checked out the site.

Margie Palatini: I have. I’ve seen it.

ReadKiddoRead: Oh, great. So, yes, James Patterson’s mission is to get kids reading by picking up the best, coolest books out there and having those available easily to parents and educators. So we also like checking in with our favorite authors, to hear about your background and a behind-the-scenes insight on your books. Or any other further insight about getting kids excited about reading. I heard you’re from Edison, New Jersey, is that right?

Margie Palatini: Edison, New Jersey.

ReadKiddoRead: And your father… chief of police?

Margie Palatini: Yeah, my dad was a police chief so, naturally, we played police and we had to watch all the police programs. I always say that I knew how to imitate James Cagney when I was about four years old, after watching old movies. Those were the days when you only had one set, one television in the house, and so in this case, whatever my father wanted to watch, that’s what we watched.

So we watched Dragnet and we watched every other police show and every old film noir. Not that we really knew what was going on or actually watching it but hearing it because you’re playing -- the living room was the place that we lived really. We didn’t have a den or a family room or a great room like houses have today, so everything was centered in that living room and whatever he watched is what we’re watching while we were playing Candy Land.

ReadKiddoRead: I’m sure that was a big source of inspiration for The Web Files, is that right?

Margie Palatini: Totally.

ReadKiddoRead: And did your dad do anything to get you into books or reading, or your mom? How did you start loving books?

Margie Palatini: When I was really little, my grandma called me the artist in the family; I was always drawing books. I was always making books, always making stories or making plays or making puppet shows or having a play. It was every summer—we had a house that had a covered porch that to me looked like a stage because it had these two pillars on either side, and so I would find old bedspreads, chenille bedspreads and that would be the curtain. Every year, I would make some sort of play and would sing and dance and we would have kids from the neighborhood come to watch us on the lawn.

So I was always writing and creating but through art, I didn’t really think of myself as a writer until really later; much, much later - I was out of college actually.

ReadKiddoRead: And did the fairy tale adaptation theme come into play early or was that later?

Margie Palatini: Well, I don’t want to say that they’re adaptations. The people who do those, they really are quite literal with the adaptation, but I think what I do is probably take something that is familiar, a familiar fairy tale character, and then place him, her or whatever in a very odd situation, odd environment, so it is the contrast; it is the absurdity of it. Definitely, I loved fairy tales, I loved fairy tale characters but I think that probably more of my books are not like that than are like that, but they’re certainly fun. I love doing them and I usually have some sort of reference to something somewhere in there.

ReadKiddoRead: And is there anything coming up that you’re excited about that is coming out soon?

Margie Palatini: I’m really excited because I just have signed on to illustrate one of my own books.

ReadKiddoRead: Awesome. That’s what I have heard.

Margie Palatini: Yeah. And so I’m very, very excited. It’s with my editor at Simon & Schuster, and I’m just really, really excited about that for 2011. I’m getting to work on the art work right now. The dummy is all done and it’s called Swine, Swine & Hog.

ReadKiddoRead: And what’s this new process like for you? Is it much different from just writing? Do you like working on your own?

Margie Palatini: Yeah. It’s very exciting. It’s really different than writing. I think the writing is a little exhausting but very quick; it stays in my brain. The idea might stay in brain for a really, really long time and then all of a sudden it’s ready to burst, I like to say, and it’s just like today’s the day you’ve got to sit down, you got to do it. It just forces me. It has a force of its own. And the illustration work, obviously it’s slower but it’s exhilarating because a lot of it is experimentation and it’s a different kind of exhaustion at the end of the day kind of thing, but it’s addicting. My background is art. I went to college as an art major. I went to Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and I was a design major and I was an art director for a really long time, but I never really illustrated my own books. A couple of really young books called Good as Goldie and Goldie Is Mad which were not exactly my style of drawing.

And then I like to say I channeled Zoey with the Geek Chic so that those are really her drawings but this is really my -- the new Swine, Swine & Hog is really my style. It’s all digital but something that’s very close to what I used to do when you didn’t have a computer to help you do all the things. I would do all of the collage elements myself. Should I get all technical about it?

ReadKiddoRead: Yes, please.

Margie Palatini: Well, and if I wanted to use something, if I wanted to use a photograph of a chair, I would actually photograph the chair, then I would develop the film myself in the lab, then I would go and print the picture, and then I would maybe do something photographically with it, posterize it or play in the darkroom with something and try to get different kinds of exposures to get a different kind of look. And then I would spend three days in the photo lab to get one little piece that was going to be one little part of one big piece. So with the advent of computers and Photoshop, it’s just been like heaven. Also, I was a very sloppy artist. I mean I cannot tell you how many times I dropped or spilled or kicked bottles of ink or paint all over me, all over rugs, all over furniture…

ReadKiddoRead: That’s part of it. It’s part of the artistic experience.

Margie Palatini: Right. And so this has just been great for me because I’m able to do exactly what I’ve always done but through a different medium and it’s has been exciting and fun for me.

ReadKiddoRead: And are you good with the Photoshop tools?

Margie Palatini: I am. I’ve taken to it and I love it. I love the whole experimenting with it, and it gives me so much more freedom and I can do it so quickly now, too.

ReadKiddoRead: Right. So Swine, Swine & Hog - that’s 2011. And are we going to see more of you illustrating books?

Margie Palatini: I hope. I absolutely have just begun. I’m right on the little edge of starting because I didn’t really have a portfolio at all. I’ve been out of school for so long and a whole other existence has taken place. So I just had some free time and I have some very dear friends who are fabulous illustrators who’ve always encouraged me to do my own work and I thought, well, maybe I’ll just look at one my own manuscripts and play and I just totally got addicted.

I was working from like November until February. I would get up at four o’clock in the morning because I just loved it so much and I would just work all day long. All of a sudden, it will be two o’clock and I’m in my pajamas. I realize oh, my gosh, I never even got out of my pajamas yet. So I would just work all day long and then I had a couple of book dummies and I put it on sort of like a firewall site and showed my editor. I said, “Would you look at these?” And he just loved it, so that’s how it started.

ReadKiddoRead: And Jamie, how old is your son?

Margie Palatini: Well, Jamie is old now.

ReadKiddoRead: He’s old now, okay.

Margie Palatini: Jamie’s in college but he was really the catalyst for my career.

ReadKiddoRead: Oh, really?

Margie Palatini: Yeah, because my very first book, which was Piggie Pie!, I wrote when I was really pretty much out of college and I was part of a writers’ workshop. I joined a writers’ workshop thinking that I could illustrate for the writers that I would meet which, you know, that’s not the way it is done, but I didn’t know that. And I sort of was forced actually to write if I wanted to remain in the group and I didn’t know what I was doing but I did it. I just plunged in and eventually, I said, well, this is really fun. I had never really seriously written.

And so I had this manuscript of Piggie Pie! and everybody loved it in my workshop. We sent it off to a publisher and I got rejection letters that said it wasn’t funny, you’re not funny, the kids aren’t going to think it’s funny, you shouldn’t write picture books. So I said, oh, wow. So I just decided to write a chapter book, a novel and the first publisher I sent it to, the first editor I sent it to accepted it. And as a matter of fact, it was not Simon & Schuster; it was Atheneum and Jean Karl.

But nobody wanted Piggie Pie! so it just sat in an attic for almost a decade, over a decade. And by that time, I was married and this manuscript went from my parents’ house to my first house to another house. And when I had Jamie, he was about two-and-a-half or three and I was up in the attic looking for something and because I’m so disorganized. I do not label any boxes so I had to go through every single box to find what I wanted. And in one of the boxes that I wasn’t supposed to open, I found this old manuscript and as a joke, I came downstairs and I read it to Jamie and his reaction was just so fabulous. He just was giggling and laughing and rolling on the floor and, oh, wow. Everyday for a week, he would say to me, read me that story, and he remembered all the lines in it. And so I thought, hmm, maybe I should send this out again. So I did with a book dummy that was illustrated by my friend Howard Fine. And it did get accepted and it was a big hit and won all kinds of awards and that’s what started out my career, so I always say that it’s from Jamie.

ReadKiddoRead: Jamie has been your litmus test.

Margie Palatini: He has. He has definitely been the litmus. When he was younger, I would read him the manuscripts and he would tell me if he liked it, if he didn’t like it. So he’s always been my barometer, so to speak. Although one of the stories that had always been our favorite has not really struck the right chord with an editor yet, but it is my favorite and it’s his favorite and so I’m just thinking we just haven’t -- it’s going to come. It’s going to come eventually.

ReadKiddoRead: Is there a title for that one?

Margie Palatini: Well, it’s gone through a couple of different versions. Right now, it’s called “Rat Shack,” and I would like it to be -- I’m not really sure of the format. I don’t know whether it’s a picture book or whether it’s an illustrated novel or a graphic novel. ReadKiddoRead: Sounds great. And were you very active in getting Jamie reading other books as well?

Margie Palatini: Jamie was reading when he was 18 months old, but the phonebook is what he liked to read. He’s fascinated by the phonebook and he used to love the Yellow Pages… he would walk around with this huge Yellow Pages. For Christmas, we gave him like ten Yellow Pages. He just thought it was fabulous. He was like two years old. He goes, “Oh my, gosh, big books.” He just thought it was fabulous.

ReadKiddoRead: Boys do like non-fiction.

Margie Palatini: He absolutely likes that. He totally loves non-fiction. I was thinking about children reading and encouraging children to read, and I think what you really want is a curious child, because that is what gets them to read. And in order for you to have a curious child, parents need to expose their children to a lot of things, whether it’s taking them to museums, taking them to the theater, taking them to things that they ordinarily wouldn’t be doing -- it’s not an everyday occurrence but children need that exposure to that sort of culture.

ReadKiddoRead: Sure.

Margie Palatini: I remember we took Jamie -- well, of course, he’s an only child so we took him everywhere. But when he was very young, I’m going to say seven or eight, one day we took him to The Modern, and it was interesting because two of my favorite artists are Motherwell and Rothko. And when we walked around the corner in the gallery and he came and there was this huge canvas in front of him, a Rothko or a Motherwell, he just went, “Wow! That is like so cool.” And he was only eight years old.

ReadKiddoRead: To a Rothko, wow.

Margie Palatini: Yeah. And so for him to feel that power, feel that strength that the artist brings to the canvas and how it relates to him. He loved seeing Mondrian but when he saw this Rothko, he was like, “Whoa.” And this is without preparation, so I don’t think necessarily you always have to prep your kids. Just expose them and let them drink it in.

ReadKiddoRead: Sure, that is a great tip. Cool. Do you feel that you have been able to reach more kids with humor as an avenue to reach them?

Margie Palatini: I think humor is a great avenue because it’s not threatening. Humor is very accessible; however, for children to really appreciate humor, they do need reference, because humor is based on context, so they need a good vocabulary and they need cultural reference. Besides the usual funny line of slipping on the banana peel, the more sophisticated humor is drawn from language, is drawn from your reference, your knowledge, so you do need to, as a parent, as the teachers or librarians, they do need to -- and this goes back to my reference before of exposing children to all different sorts of culture, because that is how they acquire a sense of humor.

Kids aren’t born with a sense of humor. Other than making a funny face for your little baby and making sounds like coo sounds which are the audible funny, or the visual funny. But the intellectual funny, which is the next step to a sense of humor, is derived through language and through context, and so you need to have a broad knowledge of life.

There are many times where I’ll see a review of a book of mine and they’ll say, “Oh, you know, I thought it was funny but it went over my child’s head or it went over the -- I don’t know if they understand it.” Well, of course, it probably did go over their head because they’re not -- at five years old, they’re not supposed to know. They’re not going to know it instinctively. They have to be introduced.

ReadKiddoRead: Right. And you can use that as an introduction if they’re not already there.

Margie Palatini: Absolutely. It should not be looked on as a negative. That’s the opportunity to broaden. We want our children to have the broadest exposure possible and so often, we just think, “Oh, it’s funny. Kids will just automatically think so” -- we assume that because they are children, children know funny. Children only know a certain area of funny or can appreciate only a certain area of funny.

All kids go through this. They go through the knock-knock stage and the riddle stage and parents groan because we’ve all heard that before, but to the child it’s the first time. It’s like a new world, like oh my gosh. They think it’s so funny and they have such power with that humor because they understand it is the words that are making the humor. It’s not just making the silly face but now they have this newfound empowerment-- it’s very empowering to make someone laugh because you’re clever. But again, that comes with that kind of exposure of what is…

ReadKiddoRead: Opening doors -- yeah.

Margie Palatini: Opening doors, exactly.

ReadKiddoRead: Well, awesome. It was great to talk. I mean your books, they’re great at this, at mixing pop culture and they really work with kids. Especially they provide a lot of these types of firsthand experiences, which is so important when parents read to their kids. So I can’t thank you enough for writing and the upcoming illustrations that you’re doing.

Margie Palatini: Well, thank you. And I wish you continued success. I think it’s a great site, anything that promotes children’s literacy and love of reading—applause, applause.

ReadKiddoRead: Sure. We hope it works for the parents out there.

Margie Palatini: Yes, definitely.