ReadKiddoRead and David Macaulay

ReadKiddoRead: So first of all, David, thank you for doing this.

David Macaulay: Well, I’m glad I finally got my act together here.

ReadKiddoRead: The whole point of this site is to help parents, teachers, educators and librarians find books that are really good at getting kids hooked on books. It is the first impression theory of things. And certainly you are in there. I was raised on your books. My mom was a teacher and I was born ’69, so I got them right from the beginning.

David Macaulay: Exactly.

ReadKiddoRead: But thank you, first of all, for that.

David Macaulay: I'm happy to help.

ReadKiddoRead: I have been reading The Way We Work. It is really amazing; my six-year-old daughter actually seems as fascinated with it as my eight-year-old son.

David Macaulay: That is great.

ReadKiddoRead: And I’m sure she is appreciating it on a different level. She seems to like the breathing chapters a lot, for some reason.

David Macaulay: You bring to it what you know and what you feel comfortable with it and what gets you interested, and you come back to the rest later if you want.

ReadKiddoRead: Yup. Actually, I was going to get to that, but Jim has a very similar philosophy to reading in general. That it is people finding their own level. And what we could do best is to find comfortable entry points for them.

David Macaulay: Exactly.

ReadKiddoRead: I was listening online in some place to you describing how you embarked on The Way We Work and I really love the notion of tackling a problem that you literally had not come to terms with yet.

David Macaulay: Exactly.

ReadKiddoRead: How to describe the human body. I mean you were not a doctor or a med student, so of course, you did not know where to begin.

David Macaulay: Complete ignorance is a very powerful force. Especially about something that you really begin to realize first of all that you are ignorant of but also embarrassed by the fact. I mean you really should know about yourself. I should have known about myself earlier, for all kinds of reasons, but -- on that list of reasons, is just the joy of actually understanding what makes you tick. And having something of beyond the most rudimentary sense of anatomy. But a real awareness of physiology and your cellular makeup and the fact that you are this universe of living organisms that have somehow figured out how to work together… It is really exciting. It is extremely exciting to know that and I sort of denied myself this. As much as the practical advantages of knowing about what is going on.

ReadKiddoRead: There is that, too.

David Macaulay: It is the pleasure of it.

ReadKiddoRead: But it is one those things that we take for granted. It’s hard to get your head around realizing you need to tackle it, that there is something to figure out beyond just what I'm walking around on.

David Macaulay: That is right. There is a lot to figure out, there are a lot of pieces of information out there…one of the pleasures of doing a project like this for me is that I would go from place to place, person to person, book to book, and ask and read about all these different aspects of what makes us work and it is like a detective in a way, or an archaeologist. It is sort of pulling together the clues and gradually assembling them into something that makes sense and then trying to interpret that information visually in a way that is engaging and also helps clarify.

ReadKiddoRead: Right, clarification.

David Macaulay: I would much rather have the readers who are smiling even if the information is hard. I would like to have a smile on the face of my readers if I have sort of lured them into it or seduced them into letting down their guard with a little bit of humor or just an unusual drawing or an unusual point of view, whatever it is, as long as it is not a distortion or misrepresentation of the information.

ReadKiddoRead: Sure.

David Macaulay: Then, trying to convince people, no, this is really important, you should know about this and so on and so forth, because that’s less effective.

ReadKiddoRead: Oh, yeah. I think the self-motivated mind, the one that is proceeding with a smile on its face goes a little further, generally, than the one that is being made to do something.

David Macaulay: Absolutely. Certainly, when that was true for me, it is still is true for me.

ReadKiddoRead: Yup. I’ll tease out some other parallels here… Are there some sort of problem-solving parallels in terms of -- I mean you tackled the human body, this thing that is so vast and complicated and daunting to people. Where do you get, how do you clarify, where do you start? Can you think of any ways where reading is similar that way? It seems like we take books and reading for granted, those of us who have been doing it all our lives.

David Macaulay: No, I did not. I don’t take it for granted even now. I did not read much as a kid. I hated to read. It was too hard. Well, maybe it was not too hard, but there was too much other stuff out there I thought was more interesting. And it was not television because we did not have one. It was playing outside and it was making models of things. I would much rather have spent my time as a kid -- and which is how I spent my time -- playing around outside, running around through the woods and often on my own. I had a couple of friends but I was happier when I was just running around by myself pretending to be whoever I wanted to be, or if it was raining--this is in the north of England so we had a lot of that.

ReadKiddoRead: Yeah.

David Macaulay: I would be, maybe, drawing but also what I remember most was making models of things and setting up little scenarios with my plastic soldiers.

ReadKiddoRead: Is this about storytelling, on some level? I’m hearing echoes of Jim… I shouldn’t speak for him but I have heard him talk about storytelling as a kid.

David Macaulay: Being told stories, too, you mean?

ReadKiddoRead: Well, even constructing your own.

David Macaulay: Well, I guess I was. I was Rob Roy or I was whoever sort of running through the woods and with a stick in my hand. I was lost in my own little world when I was out there.

But the other thing that was wonderful about the woods is that -- first of all, it was not a special trip to go to the woods. I walked along the stream everyday four times, to and from school, before and after lunch. And you become very -- you start to notice the things; the holes under trees where animals might live, frogs growing in the pond next to the stream and the whole development from frogspawn to tadpoles, et cetera, et cetera. These were kind of routine things that were obviously related to certain times of year and things of that nature, but that and my being made aware of The Wind in the Willows, which I did not read, but it was read to us by one of my teachers… I think she probably took the last 20 minutes of every day and read another chunk of The Wind in the Willows. For me there was no separation between a work of fiction, and apparently it is a work of fiction. It was the whole part of the same world to me and the fact I had no problem with the animals in little clothes because I could see where they lived as I walked to school. I could see their footprints, so…

ReadKiddoRead: The perfect book, in a way.

David Macaulay: It was absolutely the perfect book, and the other books I had as a kid were maybe just a handful, three or four books. None of which was particularly distinguished but they were my books and I looked at them many times. The only one that made, perhaps, a really long-lasting impression besides the The Wind in the Willows was The Big Book of Science which was a big golden book, oversized. And it was -- as a nine-year-old kid, a ten-year-old kid, I was convinced that it contained all the knowledge I would need for, certainly, the foreseeable future. You think you got things on sound and geology and space and so on and so forth, each in a double-page spread.

ReadKiddoRead: But so empowering, you feel like that is all right there for you.

David Macaulay: Exactly. I did not need more than that. So that is the other book that I think was profoundly influential on me. That and The Wind in the Willows but I'm only sort of bringing that up because even to sit down myself and read a book for the pleasure of reading a book, I did not do that until I was maybe fourteen. It was Jamaica Inn and it was a rainy summer holiday in Maine we ended up for a week and it rained a lot and I found this paperback edition and read it and thought, “Oh my god, this is really -- this is fun.” And that was huge. That was a huge breakthrough. I survived in a way…

ReadKiddoRead: I think you came out okay.

David Macaulay: My imagination grew. It was not dependent on reading but my mind was ready and my curiosity was developed enough so that when I did begin to feel comfortable with actually picking up a book and reading it, not because I was told to, but because it was something to do and then it took me. It sort of gripped me. I was ready.

ReadKiddoRead: That would -- in your experience, maybe with your own kids, maybe just out talking about your books, have you noticed any -- I guess I'm looking for tips here, for parents and teachers. How do you find those ready minds?

David Macaulay: It is almost easier to introduce them to as many different kinds of books or encourage them to sort of pull different kinds of books off the shelf to see what in fact seems to get them excited. What is it that pulls out that smile? What do they come back to a second or third time? Rather than -- I mean if you are an attentive parent, you are going to think you know something about your child and have some sense of what they might be interested in. I know that should not be too surprising and/or too difficult but the other thing is, of course, not to worry too much about trying to figure them out but to expose them to a range of things and see where their interests connect. See where they really do start to get excited. I think that is what libraries are for.

ReadKiddoRead: Sure, and taking an active role there. I was just thinking about the way you sort of introduced -- you started to talk about it, but introduced the topic of the human body with cells.

David Macaulay: Well, as I said, I started from complete ignorance. I thought it was time to know something about this thing I have been taking for granted for 55 years, as I was when I started the project.

It did not occur to me that I was going to talk about cells in any kind of detail. I thought I would be doing the basic stuff, the systems and all that sort of stuff and then I realized that without cells, there is no point in talking about these systems. First of all, there is no need for them, and secondly, there is nothing to build them with. So you have to talk about cells and the more I started reading about cells, the more fascinated I became and ultimately decided that it needed to be a major part of this project. Without it -- it sort of sets the stage. They know the characters who, in a way act, out the various roles, and it is the roles we are more familiar with, whether it is circulating blood or carrying messages or whatever it is.

But without the cells and their fundamental needs and their willingness to work together in those vast communities, none of this other stuff matters.

ReadKiddoRead: Yeah. I thought you did such a brilliant -- I mean I was in a PhD program as a biochemist for a while and your take on it… I have been through many textbooks. It is just so fresh and, I mean, I must say that I think I thought of bio-chem more for time-of-life issues than anything else but…

David Macaulay: I almost dropped out of this project a couple of times. I mean I tried to talk myself out of it because I really felt this is too much. I'm not ever going to be confident enough in what I have learned to be able to pass it on to someone else, but I just stayed with it.

ReadKiddoRead: And I’m glad you did. It is a marvelous job. And I heard you talking about diagrams and the usual sorts of informational texts we encounter in the world and I have heard you talk about humanizing information. What is that?

David Macaulay: It is that level of engagement. I mean it is what you are -- I mean diagrams do not engage people for the most part unless they already understand exactly what they are looking at. Or they understand the language which has become a jargon, which has become exclusive. I'm trying to get to people who have never been -- have never gotten into the jargon, who are not there yet, who do not even know what is interesting and what is not interesting and so on, and draw them into this information, hoping to get them to the starting gate if they are really interested in it so that they kind of -- they recognize that they are passionate about something that they may or may not have realized, or they are just curious.

More curious than I can deal with in 330 pages. But it is that whole idea of engaging them, of drawing the reader into a world that they might have some interest in but are not quite sure about. They do not know where to start.

ReadKiddoRead: Right. And doing it as I think you do at places, you were mentioning before, available for people at different levels, whether it is my six-year-old daughter or my eight-year-old son, or me or my wife…

David Macaulay: The universal nature of the illustration. If they are good illustrations and by that, I do not mean necessarily beautifully rendered, I just mean that they work as a communication tool. I mean I think it is important to look for pictures that go beyond superficial attractiveness that seem to convey some content. And, also, do it in a way that makes you care about the content. Not just learn it, not just memorize it but actually care about it.

ReadKiddoRead: Yeah. I think there are some definite parallels between the drawings, too, and the writing and I actually noticed this among the authors we have been talking to here. A lot of them will say they are not consciously writing for any particular age. That it is just sort of a by-product, that their book is accessible to kids as well as other people.

David Macaulay: I think most of us say we write for ourselves, and I certainly do, because I write in response to my own either ignorance in the case of the body book or an inherent curiosity or just a playful determination to tackle something that I have never thought about before, but it all comes down to curiosity. And that is what you want to touch in a reader. I mean in my readers when I’m talking about non-fiction, I want to sort of stir up their own curiosity. I think it is there, but you have to kind of pull it out and give it some nourishment every once in a while with something that makes them think about something in a way that they have never thought about it or see something in a way that they have never seen it before, and I think that is how you begin that process, of inviting people in.

ReadKiddoRead: Yeah. It is interesting; I work here at a publisher and do a lot of looking at these various lists and categories that they put down here for children’s books. I walked into a big New York bookstore to pick up The Way We Work and I did not know -- I frankly did not know what section to find it, and had to ask, and I think I ended up finding it under teen science. I do not think there is any malicious intent out there --

David Macaulay: No, there is not.

ReadKiddoRead: -- there are a lot of books out there. There had to be some system to organize. But sometimes I think we make it harder to find.

David Macaulay: We do not know what to do with it. What is funny is you go online and look at Amazon and look at the category of how-to science and so on and so forth. I'm usually two or three books behind Everyone Poops, which is a 34-page board book, or something like that. I mean, I'm not quite sure how we are all in the same category.

ReadKiddoRead: Same category, right.

David Macaulay: There you go. I suppose there is room for all of it.

ReadKiddoRead: Well, I heard you have been called a one-man genre, so there you go.

David Macaulay: Give me my own category, come on.

ReadKiddoRead: Exactly.

David Macaulay: Great. Well, what you are doing sounds terrific to me. So the more we get the word out and get people excited about this…

ReadKiddoRead: Yeah. I mean that is the driving mission here. It is really to get people excited and get a smile in their face coming into this and not make it seem like a chore. One question which is -- your kids, any favorite books of theirs that we can borrow your experience from theirs, in case we are missing them at the site.

David Macaulay: Well, it is interesting because my kids read all the time. I mean my younger ones, the 10- and 11-year-old. They read all the time. They have so many books. They have no idea what childhood was like for me in terms of books. And so they are always reading, but the good thing is -- and they also seem to mix it with a little bit of television and they mix it with a lot of playing, a lot playing outside and playing in their rooms and so on and so forth. I'm very happy with the mix of things but I'm also -- I recognize how lucky they are to have these range of options. I mean it is really terrific. But in terms of favorites…

ReadKiddoRead: Or any that really got them that you remember getting them energized?

David Macaulay: Well, you know what? One book that they really enjoyed and we all read it together was The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It is the first one where we -- not the first -- well, it is first one where all three of us sat down and every night, we would do another chapter or we would not be able to stop ourselves and we would have to read two. But I have done The Wind in the Willows with Julia, I think it was or with Sandra, I cannot remember now, but separately. So, you do not know whether they are responding to the stories or just to the fact that we are all sitting together huddled. And that is not such a bad thing either.

ReadKiddoRead: No, it is not. No.

David Macaulay: If you cannot separate your appreciation of a book from the material itself, at least in early on, and the experience of having shared it with somebody that you do not necessarily always get a chance to sit next to for an extended period of time like that every evening, there is a lot to be said for that.

ReadKiddoRead: Yup, absolutely. And it is a good thing to keep in mind when we are out there finding these books.

ReadKiddoRead: Good. Well, thank you, sir.

David Macaulay: My pleasure.