The Child I Was As He Exists Now
Welcome back to the Kidlit Kitchen, friends! I’m so pleased to see you again.
It has been such a pleasure beginning to welcome creators I admire to the Kitchen to share about their process and their stories. Speaking of, I want to announce the winner of the awesome giveaway—a riso print of her charater, Mr. Fiorello on a motorcycle—offered by last week’s interviewee, Cecilia Ruiz.
And the winner is . . . Aradhita Kedia! In response to reading my interview with Cecilia, Aradhita wrote: “I really love how the silent spreads in the story convey such poignant emotional moments of self discovery. The three color palette suits the book so well, and really allows color to tell the story 😍”
More interviews—and maybe even more giveaways—coming really soon, I promise.
Today I’d like to chat about some books I’ve read and loved recently and also some thoughts I’ve had about, well, a variety of things. And rather than put these thoughts in any kind of order, or try to find some unifying theme, I’m just going to jump from one to the next. I kinda like this approach, so future posts are very likely to take a similar form–or similar lack of form.
So grab some coffee, or tea, or at least some water, and let’s talk about childhood, puppets, my first ARC of my first picture book, organizational psychologist Adam Grant, and news sobriety. Intrigued? LET’S GO!
Childhood
Where the Wild Things Are is a book that has been extraordinarily influential in my life. It’s one of the only picture books I remember from early childhood—clearly it made a lasting impression—and Maurice Sendak is one of several picture book creators who inspired me to write my own stories for children. I have always loved reading Sendak’s books and about Sendak himself. I recently read and LOVED the book Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze, and this stunning quotation from Sendak has been bouncing around in my head ever since:
But all I have to go on is what I know—not only about my childhood then but about the child I was as he exists now . . . You see, I don’t believe, in a way, that the kid I was grew up into me . . . He still exists somewhere, in the most graphic, plastic, physical way. It’s as if he moved somewhere. I have tremendous concern for him and interest in him. I communicate with him—or try to—all the time. One of my worst fears is losing contact with him . . . I don’t want this to to sound coy or schizophrenic, but at least once a day I feel I have to make contact.
I’m not sure exactly what I want to say about this other than it has resonated deeply with me, presumably because in some way this feels true for me too, that the boy I was is indeed separate—and distant—from me in some way. And for the adult Ryan that exists now, maybe writing stories for children is in large part a way to communicate with Ryan the boy. I suppose I could go on, or go deeper, but I think I’ll just let this percolate for a bit.
Puppets
I read so many great reviews of The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillio that I had to snatch it from our library to read it to our six-year-old. From what I could see online, the reading level (7-10yo) and subject matter (puppets! fairy tale!) seemed like it was appropriate for our son, who has really come to love having chapter books read to him. Looking at you, Dragon Masters and The Last Firehawk.
The cover didn’t excite him—at least partly because he has been against the idea of new/unfamiliar books lately for some unknown reason—but I convinced him to let me read the first few pages out loud. To at least give the book a fair chance. He acquiesced, and the first chapter held his attention. Then (SPOILER ALERT) at the end of Chapter 1, a character dies. After that, he was all in.
I read the first half of the book to him over an extended breakfast before school—he would not let me stop reading—and the second half the next morning over breakfast again.
It’s delightfully weird. We both loved it.
My First ARC of My First Picture Book
My office is the bonus room above the garage. I work up there on weekdays while the kids are at school and my wife is at her job. On this particular day, I was already pretty excited because that morning I had received some potentially promising publishing news. Nothing official, but as kidlit creators know, in this business, you have to enjoy even “potentially promising,” because victories are few and far between.
Anyway, when it was time to pick up our son from school, I walked down the staircase into the garage, and lying on the floor of the garage was a book-shaped package.
I glanced at who sent it.
Charlesbridge Publishing.
My editor hadn’t told me I should be expecting anything. Could be what I thought it was?
It was.
When I held my first ARC of my first picture book for the first time, my first thought was this: it looks and feels like a real book. I honestly couldn’t believe that it looked and felt like the very real picture books that I’ve been reading to students and my own kids for years and years.
My second thought was, “Wow, Fateme’s artwork looks even more incredible than it did on the computer screen.”
And my third thought was, “It feels like the universe is sending me a message here.”
In the weeks leading up to that day, I had been experiencing a heightened period of self-doubt about my own writing for children. It felt was like the universe was saying, “Here, I know you’ve been feeling down about your writing, and I’m going throw you a few bones today. Keep going.”
I drove to my son’s school, sat in carline and read the book that Fateme and I co-created—with the guidance of the expert team at Charlesbridge—and then handed the book to my son when he got in the car. I told him he was the first kid to ever hold the book. He was shocked and delighted.
And so, yeah . . . I am going to keep going.
Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant
For a while I had been somewhat aware that Spotify has amped up their audiobook selection for Premium subscribers. And given my desire to squeeze in more reading time, audiobooks seemed like a good option. This means fewer podcasts—I have several that I love and listen to regularly—but it seemed like an acceptable trade-off.
I’ve been doing a deep dive into productivity lately, and I was peripherally aware of organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s work/writing from his social media accounts, particularly Instagram. From what I could tell, his work isn’t centered around productivity per se, but I sensed that his latest book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, would offer some helpful insights.
It took me about a week to listen to the whole thing, and it was really good. Grant is a solid storyteller in addition to being super intelligent. His intelligence, by the way, comes at least in part from studying from lots of metastudies (studies of studies). That’s pretty meta right there. He studies studies that study studies.
Anyway, lots of positive, helpful takeaways for me, including:
Ask people whose opinions you trust and respect to rate your work (before you share it more broadly) on a scale from 1-10, and only being satisfied with your current draft when your average is at least an 8.
Put yourself in new and challenging situations regularly so that you’re forced to grow and gain new skills. And of course he shares how and why these kinds approaches work.
I told my wife that there was one aspect of the book that stirred up some unexpected emotions for me. Somewhere in the last 25% of the book, I realized that most—if not all—of the advice being shared with neurotypical people as the intended audience, and on top of that, neurotypical people were almost exclusively (one person mentioned was on the autism spectrum) the examples/models that were shared.
I’ve shared here that we have a neurodivergent kid, and given what I’ve learned about neurodivergence, it’s hard for me to see society, which is so clearly designed for neurotypical people, in the same way I did before. And given that society isn’t working so great for many neurotypical people, maybe it’s time to make space for more neurodivergent people to share their ideas for how we can uncover hidden potential and achieve greater things.
This isn’t a knock on Adam Grant or his book, and I didn’t mean for this part of this post to turn into a soapbox about making space for neurodivergence, but here we are.
“You can’t tell where people will land from where they begin. With the right opportunity and motivation to learn, anyone can build the skills to achieve greater things. Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. We need to focus less on starting points and more on distance traveled.”
News Sobriety
For years now, I’ve flirted with the idea of greatly decreasing my news consumption. My wife and I watched Stephen Colbert semi-regularly, which, even though his show is humorous, definitely counts as “the news” because he breaks down whatever the media determined to be “the news” for that day. But my primary news consumption was news websites like the Boston Globe.
The problem with consuming the news each day, of course, is that you absorb all sorts of distressing information with distressing regularity. For me, it’s not healthy. Maybe some people can read the news and keep some kind of emotional distance from it, but I doubt it. This is why I’ve wanted to scale back my news consumption.
Then, while listening to a podcast last month, I heard the term “news sobriety,” a term that perfectly described what I’ve known I’ve needed: to take a massive step away from the outrage-and-anxiety-factory that we call “the news.”
So that’s exactly what I’ve done.
I’ve stopped checking news websites entirely, and I’ve stopped watching Colbert’s news segments. I’ve disabled all news notifications on my phone. (In fact, I’ve disabled ALL notifications on my phone, but more about that another time.)
And, well, it feels right.
I’ll continue to learn about current events through conversations with friends and family, and through Twitter. Though, on Twitter, my feed is mostly people talking about books. And I like book news.
At some point I very well may transition to semi-regular news consumption in some (new) form. But I don’t think we’re meant to absorb the worst happenings in the world on a daily basis, much less multiple times a day.
For now, news sobriety feels right.
And at this point in my life, I’m committed to prioritizing what feels right.
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