This is like my favorite topic. I think, you know, one thing that’s really interesting about picture books is there are so many people involved in the way that they get read and made, the way they were created, really. So, you know, it’s written by me, and then an illustrator takes my text and interprets it, and then a teacher, a librarian, a parent, a babysitter will take that text and that illustration and interpret it again.
Choose whether or not to use voices, maybe cut lines, put page turns in different places than we did. And then finally, it’s interpreted by the reader. A novel’s like very much one-to-one, right? Like it’ll just be – that conversation is just between me and the audience. But a picture book is more like play writing. I’m there writing the play at the start, but it’ll be interpreted again and again and again.
And I think each time you sort of reach across that interpretive gap, it can create energy, you know. If everybody is contributing in this – to this enterprise, like by the end, something really exciting has happened. Something really collaborative – it’s a collaboration between people whom I have never met and I never will meet. And I think that that’s really exciting and unique to this form, actually, in the way that it happens.
I think that a good picture book – and picture book flaps always really bug me, though. They’ll be be the age range, and they’ll be very specific – delineate a lower limit and an upper limit. And I think a good picture book, oftentime – it can have a floor, but it won’t have a ceiling, an age above which, you know, this picture book no longer has meaning.
I think a good picture book should not embarrass older kids or adults who are hearing this book or reading it. They can have something for everyone. I wish we treated picture books more like board games that, you know – it’ll say four and up. Five and up. Eight and up. You know, we wouldn’t look askance at college kids playing a game of Monopoly or Life.
But, you know, I think a – if they say that their favorite work is something by Maurice Sendak or Margaret Wise Brown, it would raise eyebrows, or you’d think they were being cute. Cute, adorable, all the things that we use to sort of, I think, relegate picture books to this realm when a lot of them are none of those things.
Yeah, I think that, to me, the picture book is the most exciting art form because of that, like I’ve said, that relationship between text and image working together. You don’t get that in quite the same way anywhere else. Graphic novels a little bit, comics a little bit, but picture books have their own way of working that are related but different.
And I think parents are so eager, a lot of times, to rush their kids out of picture books and brag that, like, oh, you know, my kindergartener has read all seven Harry Potters. And to be honest, I don’t really care about that. I think that, for me, I read novels and picture books together. When I started reading my first novels, I continued to read picture books.
My mom never put my picture books away. They were always on my bookshelf, and they were always part of my reading life. And by the time I was in high school, I was working with younger kids and was bringing out my picture books to share. But throughout middle school, as I was loving big, fat novels, I also loved picture books.
The kind of storytelling they make possible, you can’t get elsewhere, you know. It’s a form of – real dramatic irony is possible. Visual thinking is possible. It’s very complicated. Oftentimes the vocabulary – the reading level, because they’re so often read by adults or intended to be read by an adult to a small child, will be much higher than that of a novel.
So I think we kind of infantilize children’s literature in ways that are unhealthy and unhealthy in similar ways to the way we infantilize children in this society.
