Books Featuring Learning Differences and Neurodiversity

Origami Yoda is a very different book without the pictures, because it’s really two narrators, there’s Tommy that tells the main story and then there’s Kellen who he tells his story through his doodles. He’s the guy that doodles in it. And Tommy is sort of this series kid in some ways and Kellen is just gonzo and, and nuts and very funny. And so he’s the guy that goes in and makes the book funny sometimes. If it was, if was just Tommy the books would be a little more serious. So, I’m not all that serious of a person as you can tell, so as for me the books to have that right balance they have to have Tommy and Kellen working together.

Dwight is the main character of my Origami Yoda books and he’s the guy who actually starts the whole thing by making Origami Yoda and bringing Origami Yoda to school. And even before he brings Origami Yoda he’s already like the weird kid at school and this book is not my autobiography, but a lot of stuff in the book really happened to me or to my friends or is inspired by the of disasters that was my middle school career.

But the thing is I didn’t have Origami Yoda. You know, I was like Dwight that doesn’t save the day. It just ended in disaster and I went home miserable. So my book is me telling my stories and my friends stories with Dwight, but Dwight was smarter than me. Dwight found this great positive way to deal with things and that way was Origami Yoda.

So when he brings Origami Yoda to school he saves the day so it, instead of being a disaster like it was in real life, often he and his buddies end up coming out on top. And so I didn’t have Origami Yoda, I didn’t have Jedi wisdom to help me get through middle school, so that’s, that’s the idea of the book. Can Dwight and Origami Yoda save the nerds and the weirdoes and the strange kids and get them through middle school alive.

Okay. Well, as you know I did not invent Yoda. Every once in a while I’ll run into a kid who says, “Are you the guy that invented Yoda?” And I have to be like, “No, I’m not the guy that invented Yoda. That was George Lucas.” But George Lucas is this great guy that lets other people play around with his characters and it’s like this giant sandbox he created and a lot of people they get sand boxes and they fill them with toys and they’re like, “No, stay out.”

And we thought that’s what was going to happen, we thought George Lucas would say, no we don’t want you messing around with Yoda. I don’t care if it’s origami; it’s none of your business. It’s been the opposite. When my publisher contacted Lucas Film and they’re the people that have to make all the decisions, Lucas Film was like, “Come on in and play, let’s go, do whatever you want!”

And so instead of me trying to sneak around and steal their idea, it’s like they’re sharing and I’m having a great time and they’re very, very supportive. It’s been, it’s been a terrific experience.

So I think that a lot of kids have been somehow left behind for a lot of years of their life. Either they weren’t a good reader, or they weren’t up to the level of their classmates, and you know. That means they didn’t get to experience the joy of like, sitting down with a good book. But graphic novels so often fill in those gaps, and then those kids become voracious readers, and they’re able to talk about the stories with their classmates and their friends. And so, you know, I was a kid who loved to read comics, and I only had access to comic strips, and a few really underground small published graphic novels that were floating around out there.

The manga boom hadn’t happened yet. The indie comics boom hadn’t really happened yet, so I didn’t know where I was going with it, I just knew I loved it. I wish that I could be a kid today, because they have access to so much good stuff.   

There totally is something called a reluctant reader and I totally understand where they’re coming from because some of the books, there are some books out there that just aren’t particularly interesting. And I think there are people that don’t get anything out reading descriptions and so there is a well meaning teacher who’s like — who’s read a book that’s full of beautiful descriptions and it really moves the teacher so they want this kid to read it. And the kid picks it up and he tries to read it and it’s like oh the — there’s a bunch of stuff in here — it was like a meadow full of — I don’t know — and it gets so boring.

Meanwhile, you can pick-up a cool graphic novel like, Smile by Raina Telgemeier or Fangbone, the novel I was excited about and instead of reading the description you just see a picture of it. And instead of reading three paragraphs about what this kid’s house is like, you just see a picture of the kid’s house and now you can dive right into the action. You can find out what the kids going to do.

And I think there are a lot of people that want to read a book about people doing stuff and there are other people that like to read books about people thinking stuff and oh this is what this kid thinks about their life and there are great books out there about them. There are some amazing authors that write stuff like that, but there are other kids that want to read about what’s this guy going to do.

So you pick up a book about Fangbone, what’s this guy going to do? He’s going to pull out a sword. Awesome! And I, I just think that — I’ve met a lot of great librarians in the last couple of years and there are librarians out there that understand this.

But I tell you if you go in the library and you maybe ask the librarian where the awesome shelf is, they’ve got an awesome shelf and they’ll, they’ll be so happy if you go over there and read the book.

Maybe I can make that my thing. Get an awesome shelf. Maybe put my books on it. No, I’m not sure I would make the cut on the awesome shelf. It would be chalked full of, of, of great stuff, with lots of pictures, lots of excitement. Sharks. That kind of stuff.

I think one of the reasons why graphic novels are so popular at least for me is because they’re a great way to take in a story. With my dyslexia, the type of dyslexia that I have, it’s very difficult for me sometimes to handle a large block of text and especially if you have page after page of large blocks of text, it can be overwhelming sometimes.

But with graphic novels they take those large blocks of text and they break them up into little panels that are very easy to digest. And when they include illustrations with the text, the illustrations tell part of the story and they give contextual clues to the meanings of the words. So not only is it a great way to read a story, but it’s also a great way to tell a story.

For my daughter with dyslexia, the key was graphic novels. And Raina Telgemeier. Oh, bless that woman. If I ever meet her, I’m going to kiss her on the lips. She wrote Smile, and my daughter read Smile, and everything changed. It was just really a breakthrough moment. Just the other day she was asking me, “Has she written anything else? Why hasn’t she written anything else?” For her it was the perfect melding of art.

She’s very artistic anyway, so for her it was a great way for her to see a story unfold. It’s interesting because for me I have a hard time knowing how to read a graphic novel. I love them, but it doesn’t come as naturally to me as, say, parsing a sentence. So that was great. Some kids with dyslexia use audiobooks very successfully, and that can be a key to success. Picture books are great, too. They tend to be reluctant to read them, but if they’ve got adults and older kids who are comfortable or the content is a little more sophisticated, that’s a really good strategy.

One of the most important messages that I hope comes through in all my books is that there are many different ways to be strong and mighty. There are many different ways to be brave. I think when you’re a quiet kid, when you’re an average student, when you fall somewhere in the middle it’s easy to get lost.

And it’s important for us to lift those kids up. But it’s important for those kids themselves to know that they’re strong and you don’t have to be the loudest, the bravest, prettiest, the most handsome, you just have to be the best version of yourself.

So, there were a bunch of reasons for why the graphic novel format was just perfect for El Deafo. One of the less big reasons was the book is a superhero story. I mean it’s about me using this giant hearing aid to hear my teachers wherever they were in the entire school. I mean that’s a super power. So, comics have always been one of the main formats for superhero stories. So that just made sense.

But the main reason, the bigger reason was the speech balloons that are such a big part of graphic novels. So the speech balloons I was able to use to sort of show the experience of being deaf. In the very beginning of the story I actually do have hearing, and when I was about four and a half I got really sick and was in the hospital for a couple weeks and lost my hearing during that time in the hospital.

So in the book there are speech balloons that start out with text that is black, but it gradually fades away to gray and then to nothing. And so the reader sort of is wondering, just like I probably wondered as a kid, well, what’s going on? Suddenly I don’t understand anymore. That’s what the reader’s thinking, and that’s what I was thinking too probably.

Then later after it’s official that I’ve lost my hearing, a lot of the speech balloons are simply blank. And in that case the reader is also trying to be exactly — or was trying to do exactly what I was trying to do, which is figure out what was going on by looking around me for other clues, just like you’re looking around the panel trying to figure out what’s going on in the story. So, blank speech balloons when I couldn’t hear and then speech to me today and it’s very garbled.

I have to be able to see the person speak. If I can’t see them, then I have no idea what they’re saying. It’s sort of I can hear vowels but not consonants. And so the speech in those cases in certain panels where I’m not looking at the speaker, it’s all garbled. It’s nonsense and gibberish. And so once again kids reading the book are having to figure out what’s going on from the other clues in certain panels.

So it was just a perfect format and much more immediate. If I had tried to describe what I was hearing, I would have lost my readers, and they wouldn’t know what it felt like. But they’re right there in the moment, and they know — every time they know exactly what I’m hearing, what I’m not hearing. They know what I’m hearing just by reading those speech balloons and they are right there with me, and the experience becomes their experience, too, so it’s a great format for showing deafness I think.

I think for some readers, some kids really do have trouble. When they see all that text, their mind just closes. And I was kind of one of those kids. I mean I like to read, but I never loved to read. And I think I saw all that text. The closer together it was, the smaller it was, the less likely I wanted to read it. I love getting those large‑print books from the library that were for the older folks, you know. I love this, and I’m turning the page so quickly.

But there was like this sense of satisfaction for readers who maybe have a little bit of difficulty reading. Here are these pictures that help propel me through. It doesn’t take very long to get through a page. Suddenly you read a 220-page book, and you’ve never read a 220-page book in your life. It’s like this gateway to reading maybe things that are more difficult down the road, but I don’t think that that’s all they should be known as.

They are art on their own just like a prose book is art on its own. It is perfect for what it is, but it does help. it has this extra power of being super helpful for helping a lot of people read with more confidence I think.

Well first of all there are lots of pathways to learning, reading is one of them but not the only one. So to realize that there are different kinds of modalities in the way people learn and to accept all of them, it’s fine to learn online, it’s fine to listen to audio books, to watch television documentaries. There are lots of ways to process information, that’s first.

And the other thing that I think is the most important thing for teachers and parents of kids with learning challenges it to play to their strength. So we always say when we’re talking to people if your child has a reading challenge, don’t stress the reading tutor get them an art teacher, get them a music teacher. Go to, every person wants to be great at something and not everyone is going to be great at that standardized test route of reading, repeating, taking tests.

So the thing to do in raising children whether you’re a teacher or a grandparent, or an aunt or an uncle or a parent, is to see the child, to see what they love, to see where their talents and enthusiasm are and provide that for them in their environment, that’s crucial.

Well, the feedback we get on the Hank Zipzer books, we get two primary responses.  We get hundreds of letters a month, hundreds of letters because – we get letters from parents who say things like I was walking down the hall on the way to my bedroom and I heard my child laughing and I opened up the door and they were reading a book.  I mean their parents are just, you know, so many parents say this is the first book my child has ever read.

For a lot of kids who have had reading issues, the Hank books introduce them to reading and there are 18 of them.  It’s a real series so we’re the gateway to reading.  So that’s the reaction we hear a lot from parents but from the kids we hear two things over and over and over.  One is how do you know me so well and that – that’s a thrill and I attribute so much of that to Henry Winkler because he had never written books before so when we came together as a writing partnership I came from the writing part of it and he came from not only acting but from the person who had dyslexia.

And he has been so insistent that we be true to those emotions and kids respond – they say it’s like you were inside of me, how did you know me and he says I know because that’s what I felt.  I know what it feels like to be the one who stands up at the spelling bee and know your words and then forget them the minute you stand up there and I know the humiliation of that.

I know what it’s like when your parents say you’re just lazy and you know that you’ve been working as hard as you can and you’re not lazy, you just can’t do it.  So how do you know me so well is the thing that we hear over and over and that’s really attributable to his unsparing honesty in remembering what the process is like.  And the other thing we hear is about the humor.

Kids say I laughed so hard my funny bone fell out of my elbow, you know?  Because it’s a – they’re funny and they’re very funny and they’re intentionally very funny because we want the sound of laughter because that’s how – first of all, that’s how you understand yourself and that’s how it makes reading a pleasure and if you’re going to go on to read other things, you start with looking at reading as an entertainment.

So what we hear is how did you know me and that this is unbelievably funny, hysterical.  Kids all say this is hysterical, your books are hysterical.  And then there are a lot of kids who write and say I’m not – I don’t have learning challenges but my brother does or my next door neighbor does or my best friend does and that’s really touching too because the statistics are that one in five kids in America has some kind of learning issue, one in five.

That means if it’s not you, it’s the person two doors down from you, so one of the things we’re trying to encourage is for people to understand that this is – that everybody learns differently and this doesn’t affect your future.  This doesn’t limit your future.  It just means that you have to be taught differently and you have to figure out ways to learn that —stimulate yourself and you have to figure out what you’re good at.

When we go out to schools, we always ask the kids what are you good at and a lot of times we’re speaking at schools where there’s a high percentage of kids with learning differences and they all say well I stink at school, I’m a bad student, I’m terrible at school.  We say okay, yeah, we get that but what are you good at? 

And it’s amazing what they say.  One kid said well I’m a really good friend.  I said yeah, how about that?  Well I’m good at basketball, I’m good at drawing, you know, I’m good at talking to grown—ups, you know?  So you start to see the array of things that people are good at and to try and help them think of ways that that is their gift.  You know, everyone has destiny and your destiny will work out best if you use the gifts that you have and not focus on the gifts that you don’t have, you know?

There’s a very famous educational psychologist who wrote if your child has a reading disability, don’t get them a reading tutor, get them an art teacher.   So you go to your – you go to your strengths and you figure out what’s unique about you.  Whether or not you have a learning challenge, this is what we all do in life, right?  You say well, you know, I know my parents want me to be a physicist but I really want to make clothes.

And we all struggle with that, you know?  My parents did not want me to be a writer.  They wanted me to be a nurse because a nurse was a good profession for a young girl.  They thought that was secure.  And a writer, a writer lives in a garret and, you know, will starve and then when I refused to be a nurse they said all right, well then you have to be a teacher and I said all right, well I can live with that and I did.

I went to graduate school.  I got a teaching credential and I was a very bad teacher because I didn’t – it just wasn’t natural for me and so I tried it and in the end it was me having to rebel against my parent’s themes to say no, no, that isn’t – I’m never going to be really good at that, you know?  I so admire excellent teachers, but I wasn’t going to be one because I just didn’t have the gift for it.

So the trick is to find a supportive community, your family, adults, friends, teachers, counselors, gatekeepers of all kind who will help you see yourself for what you are and to run after that with all your heart and soul and passion and not try and fit into a mold that wasn’t designed for you.