In-depth Written Interview

Jon Scieszka, interviewed in his Brooklyn, New York home, August 20, 2007.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You taught in an elementary school for many years before you started writing books for children. How does your teaching background play a role in your career as a writer?

JON SCIESZKA: I got into teaching mostly because of my dad. My dad was an elementary school principal for 30 years in Flint, Michigan. Seeing how he talked to kids made an impression on me. He treated kids like they were real people, and I always kept that with me. I think all the stuff that's in my books really came out of having been with kids and having been a teacher. There's no experience that's equivalent. You can have kids of your own or you can go to a classroom, but man, having lived with a class for a whole academic year...

TEACHINGBOOKS: What about working with children influenced your writing the most?

JON SCIESZKA: There's a kind of a natural storytelling that you do when you're in a classroom with kids. Students are so funny. They're so smart. I mean, they may not have all the same skills of language and be able to explain things like an adult, but what a passionate audience! I got the experience of knowing what an audience is like when reading a picture book text aloud. I learned by reading Frog & Toad and James Marshall's George & Martha and The Stupids to a group of kids and then improvising on my own. I was always looking for books that would really get kids jazzed to become readers. I found that was much easier than actually telling them reading was good for them. If I read the beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Hoboken Chicken Emergency or just part of George & Martha, they would say, "Oh, we've got to find out what happens next, we want to read some more of these!" That really inspired me. I took off a year from teaching to try to write stuff.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What was your inspiration for creating fractured fairy tales?

JON SCIESZKA: With my second-graders, I would do writing projects where we goofed around with stories that we knew and retold them. I always thought fractured fairy tales were so much fun, even as a kid when I discovered them in a roundabout kind of way. I was first exposed to them through Mad Magazine and Rocky & Bullwinkle. I sort of knew the "Three Little Pigs" and maybe "Cinderella." Then I came to find out that there was another story that went before this, and I think learning of these variations just twisted my brain around and I've remained that way ever since. That's really where my books like the True Story of the Three Little Pigs came from, and all the Stinky Cheese stories, which took me forever to get published because people were just too freaked out by them.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Can you share how your first book, The True Story of Three Little Pigs, came to be published?

JON SCIESZKA: Let's take it bit by bit. The True Story of Three Little Pigs was originally called A Wolf's Tale, which I thought was a really funny title. Thank goodness my editor talked me out of that, because The True Story of the Three Little Pigs is a much better kind of tabloid headline. I was working as a painter to make money. I painted this guy's law office down on Wall Street and noticed he had an extra office, so I asked him if I could use it for a quiet place to write. He said, "Yeah, sure, nobody's in there." I would commute to this office, which is pretty funny that The True Story of the Three Little Pigs was written in a Wall Street law office.

TEACHINGBOOKS: When did you begin working with illustrator Lane Smith, with whom you've collaborated now on more than a dozen books?

JON SCIESZKA: It's kind of unusual that I know my illustrator, Mr. Lane Smith, because more often in the kids' book world, you send in a manuscript and the publisher finds an illustrator for you. I met Lane through my wife, who had worked with Lane in the magazine business. Lane was very successful as a magazine illustrator, but he wanted to get into kids' books too. Lane had one Halloween book published when we met up, and I showed him The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and he just loved it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What was it like talking to publishers about your first manuscript, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs?

JON SCIESZKA: We had a difficult time finding a publisher who understood the humor and play in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Publishers thought the story was too sophisticated or the artwork was too sophisticated or that both things were just too weird and kids wouldn't understand it. I think that's what our editor at Penguin initially saw, too. Lane had come in just showing his artwork, and the editor said, "I really think your stuff is funny, kind of weird and quirky, but we don't have anything for you right now." Lane said, "By the way, I also have this story my friend Jon wrote," and I'm sure she probably thought, "Oh, great, I'm sure that's great." However, she read it right there and kept an open enough mind to say, "I've never seen anything like this; it's kind of funny." That was her reaction. I love that she just went with her gut feeling of "This is kind of funny... I think kids would think it was funny."

TEACHINGBOOKS: Following the success of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, how did you come to publish The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales?

JON SCIESZKA: The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales was similar in that those were stories I had written before I had published. Lane and I spoke at schools a little bit, and the only book we had was The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. After we had read it like 58 times, I decided to read the Stinky stories, too. Stinky was a book that got rejected a lot of places because people thought that it was too crazy. It got a violent reaction from people because they sincerely thought that it was too much for kids—to have, for example, the really ugly duckling grow up to be a really ugly duck. Fortunately, I had the benefit of having been a homeroom teacher to realize that kids are tough and funny. They're not just shrinking little violets. They don't have to have everything pre-digested for them. So with Stinky I tried to break every rule I possibly could.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Some of the rule-breaking in The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales involves play on words. How does this change of convention appeal to young readers?

JON SCIESZKA: Part of word play definitely comes from being around first-, second-, and third-graders. Those kids are just learning about the rules, and there's nothing they think is funnier than twisting the rules. In fact, that might be the prescription for all the stuff I do. It's like, "break the rules so you can see what they are." I think Frog Prince is another good example of messing around with fairy tales because it has four or five fairy tales that are interwoven, and kids can pick apart the different elements that they know from that tale.

TEACHINGBOOKS: There are elements in the layout of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales that defy publishing norms. How did you come to make those decisions?

JON SCIESZKA: That was another unusual piece of how Lane and I got to collaborate and work. Since we are friends, we hang out all the time. I'd stop by his studio and see what he was doing. We would come up with things while we were putting all those little story pieces together. I very consciously plotted what would get messed up, like would it be the narrator is missing? Would it be that the book has no ending? Would it be that it has no beginning? Maybe Stinky would start from the back and go forward. To us, all of this was another opportunity to add something funny in the book. The other person collaborating with us was Lane's wife Molly, who is a book designer. In fact, it was Molly who decided on the back where the red hen is just going "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" because she didn't have any text to fill in what the red hen was going to say. When I saw that, I just said, "Oh, that's perfect." And the ISBN gag too &mdash that was Molly's idea. Then Lane and I latched onto the idea to alter the book format itself. The end papers are not at the end of the book. The title page is upside down. If we could have, I think we would have put the whole cover upside down, but our editor talked us out of that, which was probably a good idea.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Was it challenging to pattern Squids Will Be Squids, a book of fables, after your fairy tale books?

JON SCIESZKA: Squids Will Be Squids is goofing on Aesop's Fables. I think even when I was writing Squids Will Be Squids, I hadn't realized like how complicated that is. I just took the form of the fable and had animals or pieces of toast and Froot Loops be characters and then included a moral. But I've had kids try to write fables and they usually don't turn out very well because they're so hard to do. This process is unlike how a second-grader can get the idea of, "Oh, yeah, a fairy tale told by somebody else in the story, I can do that."

TEACHINGBOOKS: Squids Will Be Squids plays with a different kind of humor. How have readers responded to that humor?

JON SCIESZKA: It's a kind of particular, weird humor. Some of the jokes are almost non-sequiturs. Monica Edinger, a teacher in New York, wrote an article about children's perception of humor of the books Arlene Sardine (by Chris Raschka) and Squids Will Be Squids. She explored how some kids don't get certain humor. It was amazing because she had classes of kids who would just rave about Squids or Arlene, and then other whole classes who just didn't get it or didn't think it was funny. She came to this great conclusion that different stuff is funny to different people.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Twisting familiar forms of stories appears to be a talent of yours. How did you apply this technique to the subject of mathematics with Math Curse?

JON SCIESZKA: With Math Curse, I took all the elements of mathematics and goofed with each one. Because I taught math for the ten years I was a school teacher, I included a little of everything from first grade through eighth grade. The idea with Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales was to use all the different elements of fairy tales and book-making and kind of goof on that. I took Math Curse as a chance to play with fractions, word problems, you name it, division, pi, money problems...there's always got to be a money problem.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you incorporate humor into a book about math, a typically serious subject?

JON SCIESZKA: Math Curse is a book that took me a long time to write because I'd been trying to think of a funny way to write a math book for years. Every time I'd mention it, my editor would be very scared because she's a bit math-phobic. She just didn't see how it could be funny. But I really love math. I think a lot of people don't find math particularly funny, and most kids have been tortured by those awful word problems...they have 20% of the gross national product of...do they have enough money to buy a dress at 10% off. I thought, "What if a kid just ran into those word problems everywhere in a day?" I also used the bus problem &mdash there'd be kids already on the bus and how many more kids get on it the next stop, how many more kids get on at the next stop, etc. Then I just incorporated that with my favorite old jokes. That's the classic bus driver joke where you describe the thing in length and then ask the punch line, "What is the bus driver's name?"

TEACHINGBOOKS: What types of student responses have you seen to Math Curse?

JON SCIESZKA: Right after Math Curse was finished, kids started writing to me and asking, "Where's Science Curse?" because it ends with kind of a cliffhanger of the poor narrator going into science class and then the teacher saying the same thing that started the Math Curse. I always like to do something unexpected so it took another five years, six years or so, but then it hit me just one day. It was like, "Oh, it could be poems, science poems. How weird would that be?" So I just took that opportunity to put science and together.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you make the switch to chapter books with The Time Warp Trio series?

JON SCIESZKA: The Time Warp Trio books are decidedly different. With those, I was specifically trying to reach that younger audience who just started reading chapter books. I saw so many kids when I was teaching second and third grade who just couldn't find books that kept them interested in reading. Another big piece missing were the boys who were kind of looking for rowdy, funny stories. I've been interested in history since I was a kid, and I thought, "What if three random kids in my third, fourth grade class could go anywhere in time and then run into all these great historical characters? And what if they could do that in really skinny books with short chapters and cliffhanger endings that could then help early readers?" I wrote up the first two and Lane illustrated them. Then they just took on a life of their own, so I kept doing another one and another one. At the time even our publisher thought it was weird that somebody as good as Lane was working on the covers and the interior artwork. I said, "No, it's got to look cool, otherwise kids won't like it." I ended up talking Lane into about eight of them, and then we found together Adam McCauley, who's another great illustrator, to do the second eight.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Did your desire to reach beginning readers inspire your initiative with Guys Read?

JON SCIESZKA: Guys Read came out of my experience of being a teacher and being a parent. I have a daughter and a son &mdash a daughter who's a crazy reader and a son who is not. Growing up with five brothers, I saw all different kinds of readers who were guys. In school, I saw boys falling out of reading, or not getting engaged in reading. It was probably the year 2000 when I first started the program. I started to look around for any kind of research that was being done on reading and gender and if there was a connection. Teachers and parents would say, "Oh, yeah, the boys struggle. They're just not doing as well." As I looked into the research, I found out that boys were doing worse than the girls and realized that this had been going on for 25 years.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How have you been able to spread this message to help support Guys Read?

JON SCIESZKA: The other piece that really made Guys Read possible was the computer world and the technology that's available now online. I realized I couldn't go to every school and talk about this. I realized I could make a website and have the information there for people to get a conversation started about what's going on with boys and reading. Second, I wanted to give people some practical ways to really help boys read &mdash most of which is just let them read stuff they like to read. The website collected a bunch of recommendations from boys about books they like. Now it's much easier because boys can say, "Here's a book some more guys like, I might like that too." I was just thrilled to see the recommendations because they're everything. They range from the kind of goofy, almost predictable, books like Captain Underpants to some really sophisticated stuff, like Philip Pullman or a Garth Nix. I recommend that people think of reading as a much broader activity and include things like non-fiction, humor, and science fiction.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Guys Write for Guys Read, the anthology you published with the help of a few dozen fantastic male writers and illustrators of books for children and teens, features recommendations for male readers. What was it like to compile these entries?

JON SCIESZKA: I enjoyed asking a hundred different guys to contribute to the anthology. I asked people I knew, and authors whose books had been recommended, to write about what it's like being a guy. I also asked illustrators to provide an illustration from when he had been a guy. It was cool to have entries from Stephen King and Matt Groening of "The Simpsons."

TEACHINGBOOKS: What was your motivation for creating the multi-format book program Trucktown?

JON SCIESZKA: Trucktown was an idea that came to me through the Guys Read stuff that was I doing &mdash trying to get boys motivated to be readers. I started working with younger and younger kids and I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if just as kids start reading, just as they come into looking at books, to have something that would really motivate them?" Trucks were the thing that naturally came to mind because I come from a family of five brothers. We were six boys all together, no girls, and we were all truck crazy. My dad used to take us out to look at construction sites, and we'd stand there for hours watching trucks work. I thought, "Trucks &mdash it could be a whole world of trucks I've seen how kids are nuts about something like the Thomas the Tank Engine stories, so I became inspired to create great stories with really spectacular artwork.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did examining things from a child's perspective influence your collaboration with Lane Smith on Seen Art?

JON SCIESZKA: Seen Art? was a book that started in a very funny way. I got a call from the Museum of Modern Art. It was from a woman who said, "I don't know if you remember me, Mr. Scieszka, but I used to be in your second grade." It was one of my original second grade students! She was working in the educational arm of the Museum of Modern Art and had been in a meeting where they were talking about how they would love to have more real kids' book writers and illustrators do something at the museum. The director was saying, "I especially that like Lane Smith and Jon Scieszka ... I can't even say his name, whoever that guy is." And this girl said, "That's Jon Scieszka, he used to be my second grade teacher." Lane and I got to walk through the building, look through their collections, and try to imagine how we would connect this world with kids. I had the best time and Lane and I goofed around with everything and thought, "Wow, we have all these paintings and sculptures to play with, how would a kid see these?"

TEACHINGBOOKS: Can you please share a bit about your writing process?

JON SCIESZKA: My writing process is to first actually make myself sit down and think. The other piece is to not sweat it so much. It doesn't come out perfectly right the first time. I think everyone sort of thinks deep down that you want the thing to be just spectacular right away. But in writing, it hardly ever is. When I go to schools, I like to show kids all the different drafts of any one given story, which might be as many as 10 or 12.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?

JON SCIESZKA: I'm usually working on so many different projects that I've got things all over the place. If I run into a bit of a problem with one project, I'll just go do something else for awhile or work on a different project.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell students when you speak with them?

JON SCIESZKA: Brush your teeth and do what your mom says. I tell them that writing is mostly about the real hard work of sitting down and writing your ideas on paper. That's probably even good for adults to know. The hardest piece about writing is actually sitting down and doing it. If you can do that, you're more than halfway there.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell teachers?

JON SCIESZKA: I like to tell teachers to be quiet. The best day I ever had teaching was a day I had laryngitis. I slowly lost my voice in the morning and by the time I was teaching afternoon math classes, it was mostly in pantomime. It was mostly about me getting out of the way and letting kids do the learning. It wasn't me lecturing and telling them what to do. I was just there helping out. When they needed me they would come up and look at me, but more often they'd just say, "Ah, he can't say anything, we'll just do it on our own." I think every teacher has had that great moment where the class just took off and was just flying without them. That's what you like to see. It's like that moment you let go of your kids on the bike without training wheels, and the class just takes off.

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