Literature Studies and SEL

It’s an interesting question how you approach darker, more complex topics. And sometimes fantasy allows you to do it in a gentle way, in a way that doesn’t scare off readers, and allows you to touch on sometimes very dark topics, but I think in a way that makes it palatable and not too scary. So talking about childhood hunger and homelessness, for example, in Crenshaw using a giant, imaginary cat who eats purple jelly beans was a way to kind of ease kids into this story. And it’s also really fun to write. I mean, you’re just making stuff up. You’re creating entire worlds.

And I mentioned in my Newbery speech, there are always a handful of adults I meet who say, “I will never read an animal fantasy. I just can’t do it.” They find them nauseating or simplistic, and I say, “Man, you haven’t read Charlotte’s Web.” You can go back to that book when you’re 50 and when you’re 80, and there are different things there to read. So it takes some work. It took some research. And you’re always going to be playing a little bit with the facts.

I think that it’s necessary and important — actually crucial — to include joy when writing, especially when writing for young people. And I don’t equate joy with happy endings or everything works out just fine because that’s not life. And I write mostly realistic fiction. So I do have the responsibility to be honest and to keep it real, but I think that joy is a part of our lives and that even on the worst day, even the worst week you’re having, there is a moment of grace. There are moments of calm and of peace. And so I try to make sure that my work is balanced with that one because I just believe it’s true. And I think it’s important to help young people find the joy. It might not be the obvious thing right away of what you could be grateful for or where the grace is in a moment, but if you look for, you will find it. 

And I think that’s important, especially if young people are dealing with trauma or something really hard, then it’s important to say, you are not what happened to you. You can move past this moment. And that there is a way forward. And so I think often I say this quote so many times, one of my favorite quotes that keeps me anchored and keeps me going by Maya Angelou that says, my greatest hope is to laugh as much as I cry. So she does not hope that there will be no tears. In fact, it sounds like she knows there’s like this guaranteed resolution in her that I know that there will be tears. I just also hope I get to laugh along the way too. And so that’s something I think about a lot in my books is how can I help young people see the balance of their lives, find the things to be grateful for, and also how joy can be resistance, how you can say, yeah, life is hard. 

And I’ve been through a lot. I’m going through a lot, and the fact that I still get up and choose to laugh and smile and choose to do something kind for someone else, that is my way of resisting and saying, I’m still here. This will not destroy me. This will not take me down. And I think that that is a great strength, and I think young people need that skill to practice the muscle of using joy as a weapon, also against hate and against sadness, against despair. I come from a people who sang in the fields while they were picking cotton, and yes, they sang to give messages about where to meet up and things like that, but they were also singing, I think, to keep themselves from despair. And so I think that helping young people tap into that kind of strength and that kind of joy is a powerful thing to give them. 

I think one of the most profound and powerful writing prompt for a young person is to just ask them, what do you see and how does that make you feel? Those are powerful questions to actually allow time for reflection. Just what do you see? What is happening in your neighborhood, what’s happening in your home, what do you notice about this world? And then asking how does that make you feel? And you could even push it further and what do you want to do about it? Or what do you want to do about those feelings? As young people share their findings, I think you realize I’m not the only one who sees this. I’m not the only one who feels this. And I am learning how to articulate and put into words this feeling that sometimes feels overwhelming. And I think that that’s important to help young people find the tools to name what is happening in their world, and then to realize that is not just happening to them. 

And that is not just something that’s happening now, but most of what’s happening now has already happened and that people survived that. So we allow young people to tell their stories and then connect them to other stories that have been told. It’s a strengthening that happens that if those folks could survive, if our ancestors and former activists and poets and musicians could survive it all and put their stories down, then they have left an inheritance for us. And so I think that that can be powerful for a young person to first just name what’s happening, articulate their truth, and then connect with someone else living or not living in their classroom, in their neighborhood or not. I say to young people, often, you might not have someone up close and personal that you feel can be a mentor to you that you feel like you could look up to. 

I hope you do. I hope that there’s someone in your family, someone in your school, someone in your local community. But if there’s not, there are so many activists and artists who’ve come before you who loved you and were praying for you, and they didn’t even know your name. They were seeing the future and thinking about what the future was going to be, and they were trying to leave the world a better place for me, for you. And I want to connect them to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and [Lucille] Clifton and all these folks who came and used their voices and used their art to speak up, to speak out, to put on record. I think that that’s important. And I also think that in asking young people to name what they see, sometimes that question can maybe lean into things you want to change about your community. What are the negative things that are happening? How are you going to make change young people? But I also think it’s worth asking, what do you see that brings you joy? What do you see that makes you smile? Because again, it’s important that there’s both yes and yes, there’s a lot to change, and yes, there’s things we want more of. So what do you want more of? What is already working that we can talk about, write about, sing about, and praise. 

I’ve written a lot of books now – and once I got started, I couldn’t stop, even though little kids write to me and say, “You’re pretty old now. When are you going to stop?” I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

Mostly, I write picture books, because that’s my favorite genre to write. I love to write picture books, and I love to write picture books for the older child, that can also be read and used by adults and teachers in classrooms. And that has happened for me. I’ve had university professors write to me and say, “I use your book in my classroom.” Some of my picture books are very serious, like The Wall, which is about a father and son going to the Vietnam wall to find the grandfather’s name. And it’s from the heart, and I can’t read it aloud myself without crying, so I don’t ever try to read that one on a podium.

Or, one about the homeless that I wrote called Fly Away Home, about a boy and his father living in the Chicago airport, existing there and nowhere else to go, nowhere to live, no job. At the end of my books, I always try to have not a happy ever after thing, but hope for the future. And in that book, the boy identifies with a bird that is trapped in the airport. The door opens, and the bird flies free, and the boy can identify with that bird and know that some day that will happen for him.

I had an interesting experience with that book in that a boy wrote to me, and he had read that book 30 times. He had been abused by his father, who was now in jail. He wrote to me and said that when they put him in jail, “You know what happened? Then I was free, free, free.” Now he still sends me pictures of himself. I know he’s okay now, because he’s got dyed, yellow, spiky hair, and he plays a trombone. So, I figure he’s made it through.

But children have voted that book their Heal the World Award in their classroom, and that’s a wonderful award to get, more meaningful than a lot of big, important awards that you might get.

Then I do for-fun books for kids, too, like The Mother’s Day Mice and The Valentine Bears and Happy Birthday, Dear Duck — just books for entertainment, because I think there needs to be a balance there for children — although I have to say that I get most of my letters from my serious books, because they seem to touch the children in the way that they’ve touched me when I began to write them.

So, yes, I use a lot of basketball rules in the book. Ultimately this is a book about basketball, but it’s really about so much more. It’s about family and brotherhood and friendship and crossing over from boyhood into manhood. Basketball was just sort of a — it was a frame. It was a way to sort of get boys to pick up this book. It was a way to get girls excited about this book. It was what I remembered liking when I was 12 years old and would have loved to have had a book that dealt with this subject.

So, growing up, my father used to say things to me like — my father was a basketball player in the Air Force and in college. He was a star. They called him the Big Al. I didn’t know him during that time. I wish I had because by the time I came along, my father was a PhD from Columbia. So he was an academic.

And so but my dad used to say things to me like you can’t know what you don’t know. Never hang — he used to say never hang around with people who have less to lose than you do. My dad used to drop these things on me nonstop going to school in the morning or when I made a mistake. Half of them I didn’t understand. The book, The Crossover, is sort of a song for my father, an ode to my father as it were.

I mean my father was nothing like Da Man. I guess in ways I wish my father was a little bit more funnier. I tried to write the character in a way that okay, well, maybe Da Man, Chuck “Da Man” Bell, the father in The Crossover, was the father that I didn’t know, you know, because again I got the academic, but prior to that this is who I imagine he would have been.

And so as it relates to the basketball rules, that was sort of his thing. I knew how the book was going to end and I needed there to be something that the boys would have to sort of hold onto to help guide them, sort of that fatherly advice, that same advice and guidance that I got and didn’t understand. And I think they kind of view it the same way, at least some of them. As they mature, they begin to understand what some of those things mean. And what did Larry Bird say?

You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. Is that not like the best metaphor for life? Yes. Some kid in a school just a couple weeks ago told me that well, your book could have been about baseball or football or soccer. And in a certain way, yeah, sports is a great metaphor for our lives and how we live them. So, for me for The Crossover, basketball was the best way for me to tell this particular story.

I feel like it’s important for young readers to see themselves in books, but also to see others in books. You know there’s a lot of talk about books being mirrors and windows and I definitely believe that. Our society is multicultural. There’s so many different backgrounds of every kind, different abilities, different thought processes.

The value in seeing yourself is understanding that there is not necessarily an ideal that you need to look toward, but to know that you’re already ideal as you are. But also whenever you read about people who are outside of your experience the ability to build empathy and understanding of where other people come from and what other people are experiencing, because we all live in these bubbles, right, and it’s important for us to be able to peek inside someone else’s bubble if we can, because that’s how we become a more compassionate society.

And you know there’s a lot of studies that show readers tend to be more empathetic and that books help build empathy. And I mean what’s more important than that.

I have a book called Martina the Beautiful Cockroach. And when I first say the name to children they all go, “Ewww!”, because they’re kids, and are like, “Tell us more.”

Because they love things that are disgusting. And the idea of a beautiful cockroach? Oh, please, how could that be? That’s what’s wonderful about that story. When I researched that story, as it was nearing publication, I wasn’t comfortable with what I’d found. Yes, it was a Cuban folktale because it was told in Cuba from the time even my grandmother’s time and before. But it was also Central American.

And then I find this fantastic little book of folklore. It’s out of print and it was Persian folktales. And inside there’s a story called Mistress Cockroach. And there’s Martina. Only in the Spanish version and Central and South American version she has a peine (a hair comb) and a mantilla, a lace shawl, and she sit on a balcon (a balcony).

In the Persian one, she had a purple dress made from the skin of an eggplant used often in Persian cooking. It’s marvelous. But the story’s the same. It’s wonderful, wonderful. So why are these stories wonderful? I think they connect us, that’s one of the things. They remind us we’re part of one human family, with one narrative that changes clothes or eggplants from one place to the other.

It changes manner of dress. It travels now to, maybe to the U.S. And now the story becomes about a South Georgia farmer and he has a cockroach that keeps getting into the corn pen. And he sees he one day seated out there in her beautiful scarf and his fan and that, “How you doing this morning?”

Books are entirely about empathy. They are a way of diving into someone else’s mind and heart, whether it’s the mind and heart of the author or the mind and heart of the characters or both. And I think that the more you experience the world through someone else’s perspective, the more you see that there are, you know, these beautiful diverse perspectives in our world and that they inform us and they enlighten and us and they educate us. 

And I think that the more we read and the more widely we read, the more diverse authors we read, the more we understand the world. And to me that’s a really powerful aspect of literature that it can create empathy in us in a way that’s really safe where we’re not always able to go out in the world and meet people who are having wildly different experiences than we are, especially if those experiences have to do with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or ableism. Right?

Like we don’t necessarily want to experience those things in real life or want our children to experience those things in real life. But they’re so much a part of our world and so much the underpinning of so many structures in our society that reading about them and understanding them and seeing them on page is a safe way to experience some of the scary and dangerous and difficult things about the world around us.

I’m often speaking in schools that are in wealthy communities that can afford to bring authors, so there’s a limitation to the audience that I’m able to present to regularly. I don’t get to present to, you know, schools in low-income communities as often as I would like to or schools in Black communities as often as I would like to.

So I’m often speaking to an audience that is very different from the characters in my books. And so, you know, they often are experiencing the things that I write about, like contemporary struggles around civil rights, contemporary struggles around police brutality and social justice and equality and things like that feel like something they study in history class in relation to the Civil Rights movement not something that’s part of their world right now.

And so I find that young people respond in a lot of different ways to the work. They are excited about the story. I often am hearing questions about my characters much more often than I’m hearing questions about how we change the world at large. Right? The power of fiction is that you’re drawn into who these people are, you’re drawn into their experience. You’re drawn into the world that they operate in.

So in something like How it Went Down where there’s all these different perspectives, you know, it’s a way of seeing the world through all of these different eyes. And there are a lot of readers who find that really exciting. But, you know, for me as the author it’s just as exciting to hear them rush up and say, well, what happens to so and so after the book is over, you know, that they care about the characters and they’re excited about the story.

“Who is Judy Moody?” Good question.

I think most of all, Judy is just a real kid, and I think some of her characteristics — I mean even just having messy hair — she’s very real. She’s not good at everything. She’s terrible at spelling, and she’s always getting in trouble in class for talking out of turn. They send her to Antarctica in the back of the room, where she [has] to chill out. She’s just a very real kid, and I think a lot of kids read about Judy and recognize themselves, or feel like they can connect with her, because it’s something that a lotta — I get tons of letters from kids, and a lot of kids write to me and want to be Judy Moody’s best friend. They really recognize themselves in her and think that they would make, you know, a good pair, or good friends. I think that’s a lot of the popularity of Judy is that kids really make this connection with her.

A key thing to Judy Moody was hitting on the idea of moods, and I would go out and visit kids in libraries or classrooms, and around this age, about eight or nine, kids started to ask me if I was ever in a bad mood. They would go a little further and say, “Well…” I would say, “Yeah, of course.” We all have a bad mood sometime, and I in particular have a lot of them. They would say, “Well, can you write a book while you’re in a bad mood?” They were really thinking about moods and maybe hearing this from their parents and having it pointed out when they’re in a mood.

It got me thinking that right around this age, the idea of moods become really important to kids. I thought if this is something they’re really experiencing, wouldn’t that be great to show in literature and have somebody who isn’t always happy and isn’t always the best at everything? When she has disappointments and obstacles, sometimes she’s in a really bad mood. If they’re in the car, and Stink is really bugging her and won’t leave her alone, it puts her in a bad mood. I think that’s something that’s just so universal, that kids really started to see themselves in Judy.

I think ultimately Milo Imagines the World is a journey of a boy learning how to understand how others see him, and also how he sees himself. And so there are two things going on there.

He’s speculating about the people around him on very little information. So he imagines this scraggly-faced guy who’s doing a crossword looks a little disheveled. He imagines him going off to an apartment that maybe has a lot of cats and trash and maybe he’s a lonely man. So he makes that leap from this visual information, he’s slightly disheveled and he has a little bit of a scraggly beard, to a lonely existence.

Well, I think part of the journey on the subway to visit his mother, part of that journey in terms of his interior journey, is that he’s also beginning to connect the way he’s making these judgments based on very little information, and the way people might be judging him similarly with very little information.

And there’s a young boy who he thinks dressed really nice, and he’s got a perfect part and shoes with no scuffs. And he thinks, “Well, this kid, this light-skinned boy, is probably living in a castle. He’s got a great life.” And there’s one moment I think that’s to me the most important moment in the book where they look at each other and in that strange moment of connecting visually, I think Milo’s heart sinks.

Because when he looks at this boy he sees all the possibilities that this boy has that he doesn’t have. And in that way he’s actually stereotyping himself, which we don’t often talk about with this book. And I think he’s building walls around himself in that moment, that he’s not fully aware of.

And I’ll tell you, this comes from my own childhood. I remember we never went to restaurants. And one time a friend’s family took me to a restaurant and I was so nervous because it had cloth napkins and the waitress was actually asking me what I wanted to order. And I had never experienced this, like, “What salad dressing do you want?” And I was so confused, and like, literally sweating.

And then I saw this other boy who was the same age as me at a couple tables away. And I remember he just seemed so confident. And two things ran through my mind at that moment. First I thought, “This kid, he just has different access to the world than I do and I’m never going to have the opportunities he has,” and it made me feel like my life was more limited. And then I also thought, “If I ever have any money, I’m going to go to restaurants every day so I know how to do this,” and I also thought it was fun.

But I think, in that moment, Milo’s feeling something similar. He’s actually building walls around his own possibilities by judging himself against somebody else. Now, when he sees that this same boy is going to the same destination that he is, that he also has an incarcerated mother, it pops something. And now he has to confront that, “Maybe these judgments that I have, that are based on stereotypes, lazy stereotypes, maybe they’re in need of revision, or maybe I need to be less confident about them.”

And so I think what I was really trying to challenge young people to do is, is understand that when you see somebody on the street and you sort of do lean on these lazy stereotypes that we all lean on, try to be more generous with people around you, because behind every face we see on the street there’s an entire story that we don’t have access to. And I think if we understand that, we will be more generous with people around us.

For older children, it starts with keeping books available everywhere: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bathroom is a great reading place, in the car. Just having reading material available, surrounding kids with books as much as possible. Trips, regular trips to bookstores and to libraries are hugely important in terms of exposing kids to the tactile pleasures of books and reading and all the opportunities that they provide. Then looking for these wonderful, creative opportunities to build on reading experiences.

If a child is reading The Little Engine That Could, for example, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory if it’s an older child or Harry Potter, looking for, perhaps, a train exhibit to take them to or train music or train art or going to see the Harry Potter films or exploring other books by Roald Dahl or other books in the same genre or cooking a recipe from a book together or creating a crafts project that might be inspired out of a story or a particular experience in a book.

Those kinds of activities are just wonderful ways to play and keep the spirit of joy alive around the reading experience. It’s also very important, I think, to demonstrate for kids how reading contributes to life skills. Things like reading recipes together, reading manuals as we build things together or models or household products that need to be assembled or whatever it may be, reading ingredients when we’re shopping on the backs of boxes.

Those are all wonderful ways to support reading skills without pressure in a way that is showing a child how important reading is to our lives and that makes them feel involved and included and gives them a good sense of the degree to which reading skills play a role. Taking our kids with us to vote those kinds of little activities send powerful messages to our kids about the value of reading in our lives and the need to have that as a part of our life skill base.

Many people ask me about my first picture book which is probably my bestselling book so far, which is Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, which came out in 1993. I got the idea for that story one morning as I was getting ready for work. I worked at the University of Hawaii, then at Honolulu, and there was an NPR story on the first black graduate of Williams College.

Elizabeth Scott, who was a quilter, was interviewed for that story. There was a quilt exhibition in honor of the first black graduate. I got interested in quilts and the Underground Railroad when I first wrote that book. That was my first picture book and it doesn’t have a note.

That book is historical fiction as is Under the Quilt of Night. There’s this association of quilts with the Underground Railroad, and I think it’s a point where teachers can use those books in various ways in the classroom, but also have children, again, do research and say, “Well, we have these myths and this folklore about this, but is it really true?” It may be that we find out that it’s not.

I also wrote another book about black history called A Band of Angels. I really had a wonderful experience doing that. I was able to interview Beth Howse, who is the special collections librarian at Fisk University.

This is the story of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. I asked Pat McKissack, because I was a little leery about doing this story because I had done two other ones on another culture than my own. I lived in Hawaii for 20 years, so I had a very good sense of what it’s like to live in a multicultural society that’s different than where I grew up.

Pat McKissack, when I was about to do Band of Angels, said, “You know, I did something on Ella Sheppard, who’s the Jubilee singer,” she said. “Go ahead. I think parents have been and teachers have been very welcoming of books if they’re well done and historically researched.”

Today I’m going to read from When Life Gives You O.J. When Life Gives You O.J. is the story of Zelly Fried who is about to turn 11 and she has a problem, she really wants a dog. Wants a dog so bad she’ll do anything or so she thinks. Enter her grandfather who goes by the nickname Ace. He has a plan, he thinks he’s found a way for how she can convince her parents that she’s ready for a dog. Unfortunately, well you’ll see.

“ ‘Kid,’ said Ace. ‘Meet your new dog.’

I stood there holding the jug and staring at it. I knew crazy people sometimes heard people in their heads or saw things that other people couldn’t see. Did Ace think there was a dog in the room with us?

‘Um, where?’ I asked. Ace reached out and thumped the orange juice jug with his hand.
‘Right there! You’re holding him!’
‘I… This?’ I held out the jug with both hands to make sure that I understood what he was saying. ‘You think that this is a dog?’
‘No, for crying out loud! What kind of a meshuggener do you think I am?’

Meshuggener is the Yiddish word for a ‘crazy person.’ Ace says it a lot when he reads the New York Times. Also when he watches the news on TV. According to him most politicians are meshuggeners. He also thinks Captain Kirk acts like a meshuggener, especially when he gets himself beamed onto other planets without checking them out first.

‘No, Grandpa, I just… I’m sorry I don’t understand.’

‘Enough with the sorry. Vey iz mir, kid.’

Ace shook his head. Clearly he was disappointed in me. Ace lapses into extra Yiddish when he wants to make a point which is often. He’ll say Oy vey! or Vey iz mir!, which is sort of like an Oy vey! and then some. He pointed to the jug and spoke slowly.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is not a dog. Okay?’Okay I said.
‘It’s not a dog, so what is it he demanded?’
‘Um, it’s an orange juice jug.’
‘Wrong!’ yelled Ace. ‘This is not an orange juice jug. This is your new practice dog. This is what you use to show your parents that you are responsible enough to get a real dog.’
‘Practice dog?’ I asked.
‘Right! Everything you do for a real dog, you do for the practice dog.’
‘Yeah, but Grandpa, you can’t do dog things with an orange juice jug.’
‘It’s not an orange juice jug. Don’t call it an orange juice jug. I told you, it’s a practice.’
‘Okay, well, how do you walk a practice dog? It doesn’t have any legs.’

Ace smiled like he had been waiting for this question. He went over to his bedside table and opened the drawer. Out of it he brought a long nylon leash with a metal ring on one end. He threaded it through the handle of the jug and put the nylon hand loop at one end through the ring out the other. He then pulled the leash tight and let go.

‘What do you do with a dog that has no legs?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I told you kid, enough with the sorry! What you do with a dog that has no legs is, you take him out for a drag.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s a joke, but with your practice dog, that’s what you do. Two, maybe three times a day, you put on his leash and take him for a walk.’
‘Outside?’
‘Of course outside. Unless you want him to do his business in the house.’
‘His business? An orange juice jug can’t—’
‘Look, kid. This is not going to work if you keep saying orange juice jug. Practice. Dog.’
‘A practice dog can’t go to the bathroom.’

Ace smiled again, he went back to his bedside table and opened a drawer. He returned carrying a dog of bag food.

‘Wanna bet?’ He said.”

To find out more about Zelly and Ace, read the book.

I was rejected so many times. I remember a book that I did called ’Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving and it was rejected 23 different times before a publisher finally took a chance on it. And it was very difficult with the rejections, especially so early in my career. I started to feel like maybe this wasn’t the right path for me. But one of the things that you really have to do is stick with it, you know.  Not everything comes easy and you have to keep putting yourself out there and keep trying.

I think the thing that made me continue is having earlier success. I had already had one book published, and I was still doing the visiting author thing and doing a lot of school visits and meeting a lot of children. And I think for me back then and still now that was my favorite part of the job is meeting so many wonderful teachers and wonderful students and connecting with so many people through my artwork. So that was one of the things that encouraged me to not give up, to keep putting myself out there, keep trying.

Most of the time I am trying to write while thinking about the emotional life of a child. So, in Toys Go Out those toys have a lot of the same feelings that kids do. They are not grownup toys; they are kid toys.  And they want to play with their friends and be the boss of the game. They want to be beloved by their little girl who, you know, they belong to, and they worry when she leaves them alone and they worry when she takes them out. And they are jealous of one another sometimes and they quarrel and have to make up and they’re very curious.

So, I’m always writing thinking about them as coming from my own emotional life as I remember it as a child. And I think that’s true even in my animal stories like Skunkdog. The protagonist of Skunkdog is a dog, and she has no dog friends because she can’t smell and you know how dogs like to sniff around each other.

Well, she can’t sniff around because she can’t smell and so she doesn’t really know how to talk to other dogs and she’s lonely and she ends up befriending a skunk when her family moves to the country. And she is so excited to have an animal to be friends with, but the skunk keeps spraying her when it gets cranky and she becomes this very, very disgustingly smelly dog. So, a lot of it — there’s a lot of gross-out humor. It’s my smelliest book and, you know, there’s a lot of doggy antics in it.

But at the heart of that story is a story about navigating a new friendship, about feeling lonely among people that you’re supposed to be friends with and looking for somebody a little different to be friends with and, you know, how do you work out how to be together, you know, or about disappointing your family. The family is really not happy about this dog—skunk friendship, right. What do you do?

You know, if your family wants you to stop being friends with somebody, do you obey or do you not obey? How can you tell when you should be obedient and when you should not be obedient? This is a dog problem, but it’s also a young person problem.

So in the book, one of the ways the story concludes is by me learning about mindfulness techniques, and how to breathe, and how to ground myself, and how to sort of get my brain to a place where when I’m triggered by something that gives me anxiety I can tell my brain, “Nope, nope, nope, don’t go there. Don’t follow it down that dark path because, you know, nothing bad’s really gonna happen to you. You just have to learn kind of train your mind.”

So I’ve done cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve done something called EMDR. I’ve done talk therapy. I’ve done several different styles of therapy, where I have learned all of these techniques. And so in this story, the characters have to give these reports in their fifth-grade classroom, and that’s something we really did. We really did something called an LDI, which stands for Lecture Demonstration Instruction.

So just the thought that you have to get up in front of your class and like talk about something. You get to decide what it is, but you still have to do it. You still have to give the oral report, and then demonstrate how you do the thing. So, you know, it’s nice to share yourself with your class, and it was nice to be able to give them a piece of myself, and learn from your classmates in the process, like when they tell you something about themselves you learn about them. You learn about yourself.

And so the story ends in a way that is, I think, pretty cool. And I think that some of the techniques in the book are things that kids can actually use, which makes me feel really happy that I’ve been able to pass that gift along to them.

It’s been a wonderful experience to talk to children and have them talk about how they see themselves reflected in books that I’ve worked on. For me, as an author these books weren’t around when I was a kid. So, I didn’t see myself in a book truly until after I graduated from college. I read Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese and I had this like, everything clicked into place. I was like I didn’t know that this was what I was missing until I read this book, that this was even possible to see yourself in this way on the page. 

So, when I talk to children now and they’re seeing themselves through these books, and I’m so grateful that they don’t have to wait as long as I did. But even just this weekend I was at Comic Con and people would come up and say, they held up Green Lantern: Legacy and they were like, ‘You wrote about my grandmother. You wrote about my family.’ And that means so much. And with Drawn Together I’m always getting messages from families who see their experience reflected on the page in a way that they hadn’t before, and that means the world to me.

I would read Beverly Cleary and I enjoyed those books. Ramona’s having her adventures and I felt like I had adventures when I was a kid, and they weren’t anything exciting, but hers weren’t either, they were just kind of everyday things. 

And then I would read books like Judy Blume’s books about these kids in a high-rise apartment in New York City, and that was just bizarre to me because when I went up an elevator in a building with twenty-some floors my brother was getting an allergy shot at the doctor. It’s like nobody lived in that building, people worked there, but I couldn’t fathom that this child had no yard. You know, it was a completely different reality for me. 

I loved Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder: Hear My Cry, which of course was set long before I was born, but it was a very moving portrayal. But many books, like I say, would be entertaining like that, but again, nothing that related to my upbringing. Now, of course, Where the Red Fern Grows and The Summer of the Monkeys are written by a Cherokee author Wilson Rawls, those aren’t centered though in Cherokee culture. I mean, they are set in Northeastern Oklahoma, so it was like their geography kind of landscape was familiar. 

So, yeah, in terms of when I actually got to see myself in books, that didn’t happen until I was an adult, and it’s been much more recently. But the reason that I wrote We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is because there wasn’t a picture book about contemporary Cherokee life and that disturbed me, everything was historical. Or biographies about prominent Cherokee people. 

I was like, okay, what about our everyday lives? I’ve had lots of feedback from Cherokee families and Cherokee children about the book, and they love it, and it’s a well-read and well-loved book in their house, but one woman she said, ‘You know, I just love that it’s a book about us doing the things that we do.’ I was like, ‘Yes! Right?’ 

So Tracy Woo in Blubber was the first character that I really saw myself in when I was growing up because finally instead of Mr. Sulu or, you know, Bruce Lee, I actually saw a character who was my generation and who had very similar experiences to mine, and I think it filled a need I didn’t even know I had to see myself there.

My very first book, The Ugly Vegetables, is a story about a girl and her mother. Her mother grows Chinese vegetables in her garden while everybody else in the neighborhood grows flowers. And the little girl is very embarrassed because they’re obviously Chinese-American or Asian-American in the story. This is very much based on my childhood. I think one of the things when I wrote my first story was to write what you know. Following those old mantras, write what you know.

After I wrote this book, it was actually a relative success. I was really, really proud of it. But what happened was I started getting letters, or parents who say “Oh I’ve been looking so hard for a book just like this. An Asian-American character where there is somebody who looks just like my daughter. Or just like my son.” Then I started thinking about myself, and I started thinking about how I grew up. I remembered how I used to feel very much alone because I grew up in upstate New York where there was not a lot of Asians, the fact we were the only Asian family in our neighborhood, I was definitely the only Asian girl in my classroom. Most of the time I just forgot about it, most of the time I just pretended I wasn’t Asian. In fact I remember walking past a window and I would see my reflection in the window and I would go “Oh, there’s a Chinese girl.” I’d be like “Oh wait, that’s me.”

Because most of the time I would just forget that I was Asian. So, I think one of the reasons I did that was because I loved books when I was younger. And all the books that I read never had anybody that looked like me in them. And I realized that if that had been maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to forget I was Asian so much. And so that’s something that is a mirror, these books are very much a mirror of my life when I was younger.

And as a window, I hope as a window, when I was younger, I tell this story quite often. As I said, I always tried to pretend that I wasn’t Asian, I’d always try to forget that I was Asian. Most of the time that worked. Most of the time, I just forget that I was. I thought I was just like everybody in my classroom. And then my fifth grade class decided to put on the play “The Wizard of Oz”. And everybody, all the girls in my class wanted to be Dorothy. And I really wanted to be Dorothy too. So, every day, out on the school-yard, we’d all sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” over and over and over practicing for the audition.

Finally on the day of the audition. We are standing in that circle, one last time, practicing. And I turned to the girl next to me and I said “Hey today’s the audition, do you think they might choose me to be Dorothy” And she looked at me and she said “But you can’t be Dorothy. Dorothy’s not Chinese.” And I remembered I felt so stupid. And I remember feeling like oh my gosh she’s right, I’m Asian, I’m Chinese. There’s no way I could ever be Dorothy. And when it was time for the audition and they called me name, I didn’t even try out. I just shook my head and said “No, no, no. Forget it. It would be so stupid for Dorothy to be Chinese.”

So my hope for my books is not only is it a mirror of my childhood so that kids who were like me could see themselves and not feel so alone. I also hope that it’s a window for those who are not Asian who are not of a minority race. And they can see other, other races and realize oh they are just like, just like, even though they might look different. So that’s kind of how I feel my books are both windows and mirrors.

Humor is an interesting topic because so many, I work with a lot of new writers through my work in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.  And everybody wants to write humor because there are things we know about kids, one is they like to be scared and two is they like to laugh. So if you can write funny, you have a very good, you have a much better chance at being published. And I actually have always had the opposite impulse, I always wanted to write tragic, deep, psychological stories and everything comes out funny.

So it’s, I think there’s, there is a way that you approach the world and the way that I learned to approach it was with humor. I had an older sister who was a very stern older sister and bossy, you know the real big bossy older sister. And I think the way that I learned to navigate was I could be the funny one, you know she could be the commanding one and I could have a wisecrack, I was like the sidekick so I think I kind of learned that early on.

Plus things strike me funny, you know writing humor isn’t just about creating something funny, it’s about appreciating what’s funny. So I see things all day long that I think are hilarious, that really make me laugh, so I try to incorporate that. So, so when I was in college and wanting to be a writer, I had the image that I was going to be a deep, dark, depressed, struggling writer who wore all black and no makeup and starving in France.

And instead I won a comedy writing prize, and worked on television shows writing comedy. So I think it’s kind of, part of it is in your nature and I’ve come to, I’ve come to embrace it now. But I think I write a very particular kind of humor because I think one thing that makes you an effective comedy writer is to know what makes you laugh and write that and not try and write what makes other people laugh.

So here’s an example.  I don’t particularly like physical humor, you know, I’m the only person in the world that I’m going to say this on camera, who does not like Charlie Chaplin, doesn’t, I find it annoying, you know I don’t think it’s funny to watch him eat shoe leather it does, I mean, good for him, but it doesn’t make me laugh. But I love Jerry Seinfeld because I like observational humor, I like humor that comes out of a real thing.

I love character humor, I love Monty Python because it’s character humor. So I don’t really write, and also I don’t like jokes, in fact I’m allergic to jokes, when someone says oh have you heard a new joke and they tell it I get squirmy because I’m always afraid I’m going to miss the punchline. I don’t like it when people do dialects around me and it makes me feel like I’m on trial, like is my sense of humor going to live up to this joke that they’re telling.

And it also is manipulative, it’s demanding, it’s like saying I’m going to tell you something and you’re going to laugh. So I don’t, I don’t write jokes. And I don’t write physical humor particularly, what I write is characters who are flawed and say funny things out of embarrassment or out of discomfort or awkwardness, because that’s what makes me laugh.

So the kind of humor that I write, for instance in the Hank books, Hank is a very funny kid but his humor comes out of a feeling of inadequacy because he’s bad in school. And every child who’s bad in school knows that that feels terrible, even if you say you don’t care, it feels terrible to be bad at the thing that you have to go to every day. So his humor is, is a defense against that.

So what I hope is that when I write something funny it also has a little tear in it, it also, it’s funny because everyone can empathize, everyone can say oh, I know what that feels like and so now it helps you laugh at yourself rather than feel bad about yourself.  So, the kind of humor I write is what makes me laugh, and I think the kind of humor each person should write is what makes them laugh.

The best thing in the world is to laugh out loud when you’re writing, you make yourself laugh. And that’s one reason why it’s great to have a collaborator too, when Henry Winkler and I write together we laugh all day long.

Because, and if we don’t laugh, it doesn’t go in the book.  So that’s, I think that’s, there’s no trick to writing humor except that one, that’s the only one I know which is write what’s funny to you. Not what you think is going to be funny to other people because everybody laughs at different things.

I think the primary skill of writing for children is to really be around kids, or be around yourself as a kid and know what you feel.  Not write to what you think is going to be entertaining for kids because every, every child, every person is different, every child is different. And there is no one thing that’s going to be funny to all kids.

Because there’s a notion that children require something different, they’re mysterious beings who have to be amused in a certain way or spoken to in a certain way.  And I’ve never found that to be true. 

Oh, I always wanted to write for children, always, because when I was a kid, books saved my life. But I felt that they were the most blessed audience. You couldn’t cheat them in any way. You couldn’t patronize them in any way. You had to be the best to give it to a child. And I had the opportunity of reading some of the very best stories written by children’s book authors.

So, I would write my adult novels practicing and I would speak to my agent and say, “I’m going to write a children’s book one day.” And they’d say, “Whenever you’re ready, Jewell. Whenever you’re ready.” And I didn’t get the call until the day that Hurricane Katrina hit. And that day I had an adult novel being published about New Orleans. And I went to New Orleans two weeks afterwards and I saw this beloved city that I had been writing about since I was 19 years old. And all of a sudden, it was then that I knew the call had come.

I can’t write not unless I get this call. I can’t write not unless I hear this voice. And when I heard Lanesha’s voice, it came out of a dream, I knew I was on my way. And I felt, “Wow, it took you 30 years to get here, girl, but you made it.”

So, me, I am having the best writing career of my life because I’m trying to write books that last and that children can appreciate and that can open up conversations with their parents and in the classrooms. And it seems as though my books are doing that and I’m so happy.

I thought I would like to write a story where the issue of the color of someone’s skin is truly an issue. And in Mr. Lincoln’s Way, that’s the issue. So they had to find something that was common between them. Mr. Lincoln is the black principal and the white child comes from a white supremacist family. That’s his point of view. And he really loves this principal, but he does not dare have any interaction with him. So what they find that is common between them is their love of birds. And it happens that their school has this atrium that is empty because they apparently didn’t have the right bushes and things to attract a population of birds. So that’s what they work on together.

And I guess what I’m trying to say is, it doesn’t matter how different we are. There is something we can find that we have in common. And that should be the place that we start from, our commonality. And then from there, we celebrate our difference instead of having difference be a cause for a feeling of isolation.

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.

I think the thing I try to do as a writer is to bring worlds to the page. What happens with readers is they step inside those worlds, and they experience them in a way that they might not in their real life, and it gives them a chance to think about a bigger society and the greater good.

I mean, the constant question kids ask themselves is if it was me, what would I do? How would I engage with it? How would I treat the Jesus Boy? How would I treat Sean? Who would I be? Would I be Frannie or would I be someone else in this.

By the time they get to the end of the book, the asking of what happens next, what happens next? My question always to young people is, well, what do you think happens next or what would happen if it was your story or if you were one of these characters?

Young people get mad at me all the time and write, say, well, why did you decide that that kid had to die or that that kid had to move away or that Lonnie is not reunited with his sister?

I think it’s a way of beginning a discussion. What’s the happily ever after? How often does the happily ever after happen? In the real world, what have you experienced, or what do you see, or what do you know from your family?

I think in terms of getting young people to talk about their lives, and then to talk about the lives of others, and to talk about events in the world. It’s such a social period from kindergarten to first grade in the picture book time.

They’re learning how to get along. They’re learning how to be in the world. They’re learning how to be human in the world. When they get to be adolescents, they’re learning who they are and their power in the world. They’re learning about identity politics, who names them, how they name themselves.

A lot of what Hush, the book about the witness protection program, the big question is, when someone takes your name away, who do you become? If I woke up tomorrow and I couldn’t be Jacqueline Woodson, what would that mean? How would I begin to re-identify myself?

I think a lot of that stuff is stuff kids are wondering and thinking about and talking about every day. For me to be able to sit down and create a world where they can exist in it. John Gardner who wrote a book called Becoming a Novelist talks about the fictive dream, the dream of fiction, and how when you’re reading a book, you’re in that dream.

That world is real to you, and you’re a part of it. No one can tell you those people don’t exist. I think that when I sit down and try to create that dream of fiction, first for myself and then for my readers, by the time I’m finished with a book, the readers really do believe and care about and love the characters.

When they love someone, they’ll do whatever they can to kind of protect them and hold on to them and change the world for them. I think that’s the big gift of fiction. It gives young people the courage to create change and to talk about change and to talk about different ways of being in the world, of themselves being the world, of adults being in the world, of what’s wrong with the world, what’s right with it.