社区黑料

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 社区黑料 Newsletter

The children鈥檚 author Mac Barnett does not pull punches when it comes to his chosen profession: 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 think children鈥檚 books are real books,鈥� he writes, 鈥渙n some level you don鈥檛 think children are real people.鈥�

The author of books, Barnett has become a key evangelist for high-quality children鈥檚 literature, particularly the picture book. As the Library of Congress鈥檚 ninth , his “Consider the Picture Book” initiative invites adult conversations about the form. And Barnett scored a rare feat for a children鈥檚 book author, this spring publishing , a best-selling book of essays about writing for children. 

Barnett marvels that two experimental children鈥檚 books from the last century, Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd鈥檚 Goodnight Moon (1947) and Maurice Sendak鈥檚 Where the Wild Things Are (1963) remain best-sellers. It鈥檚 as if James Joyce鈥檚 Ulysses and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson were among the books most widely read by American adults, he writes.

Yet when he looks out on the modern publishing landscape, Barnett most often sees books that simultaneously do too much and too little: books that seek to instruct and impose morals and manners on children, while others aren鈥檛 quite rich and strange enough for the 鈥渇lexible, unpredictable, sublime, and untamable鈥� imaginations of young people. 

Many readers likely learned of Make Believe due to the controversy surrounding Barnett鈥檚 tongue-in-cheek assertion about the overall quality of children鈥檚 literature. Amending science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon鈥檚 that 90% of sci-fi writing is 鈥渃rud,鈥� Barnett suggested that perhaps 94.7% of kids鈥� books are likewise crud 鈥� a higher percentage, he wrote, because they鈥檙e made by people 鈥渨ho are not members of their intended audience.鈥�

His fellow children鈥檚 authors were not amused, with hundreds signing an urging the Library of Congress to drop him as an ambassador.

---

 

“How do you measure the expansion of a child’s soul? We don’t have that ruler, but that is the stuff that we’re talking about.”

---

Barnett later apologized and now tells 社区黑料鈥檚 Greg Toppo that the point of the comparison wasn鈥檛 to paint children鈥檚 books as worse, statistically speaking, than other types of fiction. Rather, he was pointing out that it鈥檚 comparatively harder to write good children鈥檚 books 鈥渢han almost any other kind of art-making that we do.鈥� 

Toppo and Barnett recently sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about the controversy, children鈥檚 books and the importance of reading aloud, among other topics. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with Goodnight Moon. You call it this 鈥渕asterpiece of experimental literature鈥� and say its ubiquity obscures its strangeness. I reread it the other night, and you鈥檙e right: It is a very strange, very dark book. It didn’t have to be that way, and I wonder: Why is its strangeness so important?

It’s funny 鈥� it didn’t have to be that way. There’s a communication Margaret Wise Brown had with Clement Hurd: She sent a Goya painting, a very strange Goya painting, to Hurd, and said, “This is what the book should feel like.” She knew that that was in her manuscript, and nothing that Hurd had ever done or did afterward really looked like that. And I think that strangeness, that darkness, that eeriness, is because it has a strange and dark and eerie subject. It’s bedtime, right? Going to sleep is really one of the first hard things we ask children to do all by themselves. It’s mysterious. It’s a little scary, and ultimately, it’s this solitary thing. There is an old lady in a rocking chair next to that bed who sort of appears and disappears throughout the story. We can be there, but ultimately, you’re alone in the face of this huge mystery, and you have to surrender to sleep and a completely altered state of consciousness that no adult can really describe well. There’s mystery, the void. All of these things are part of that experience.

It can also be really cozy and warm, and I think that the book gets both of those things. There’s a warm fire. There are these comforting cadences, and I think it’s beautifully matched not just to its subject, but what its subject, going to sleep, means for kids. Great art for kids is like great art generally. It tells the truth about what it means to be a person in the world, but it means something different to be a kid. And I think that that book is so alive to bedtime for children. 

Let’s start with the pictures: Things disappear and reappear off the drying rack. That balloon, that famous red balloon, is sitting in the most aggravating, unnerving place possible on the page. There are all of these weird, uncomfortable, eerie things that happen that for me kind of culminate in maybe the most famous part of the book, deservedly 鈥� I think it’s one of the most exciting pages in the history of picture books. We’re bidding goodnight to everybody. “Goodnight, comb. Goodnight, brush.” There’s a picture of a comb. There’s a picture of a brush. “Goodnight, nobody.” And then there’s not a picture of anything. It’s an empty page. 

Somehow the two of them figured out a way to depict nothingness, depict absence, conjure the void, and not just to conjure it, but to acknowledge it, to bid it goodnight, to treat it as maybe not a friend, but as as something that you can be polite to. You can use language, and say goodnight to it. And after that moment, Margaret Wise Brown’s language becomes very regular, very metered. You get these repeating “Shhs.” It’s a book that acknowledges that this is very scary, very strange, very weird, but that also it’s going to be O.K., and both of those things are true. That’s a paradox. Bedtime, going to sleep 鈥� it’s scary. It’s also restorative. It’s mysterious. It’s also quotidian, and that book, without saying it explicitly, just by arranging words and pictures in the right way, captures that complicated truth. That is why it endures. That is why that goodnight book is still the goodnight book. It’s probably the most widely read, commercially successful experimental poem ever published in America.

The weirdest goodnight book is also the best-selling one.

Yes.

I’ve been writing a lot about the crisis in young people’s reading for pleasure, and I’ve taken it as a given that we’re in this golden age of children’s books. You’re making me think that perhaps there’s a bigger problem, that maybe the books themselves aren’t as rich as they need to be, or that a lot of them aren’t rich enough for the task.

This is a super-rich time for children’s books generally, for the picture book especially. But I also think that there is never a time in which there aren’t many adults who see a children’s book as merely a tool, either an educational or a behavioral tool, or both.

So you don’t see the problem as much about the books themselves as about our approach?

Children’s literature is not monolithic, just like adult literature is not monolithic. I think that sometimes the book is an expression of an adult’s desire to teach or even control a kid. But in general, for me the problem starts before you even get to the book: How do adults conceive of their relationship to children? And so often when we encounter kids, we are in a position of authority 鈥� and understandably so. I have a five-year-old. As a father, it is my job to sometimes create order, make a set of rules, be an authority. Keep him safe. Teach him things. It’s not the only aspect of it. It’s a multifaceted role.

I was a substitute teacher and then I taught writing at a nonprofit that I ran for a while. Being a teacher, that is a position of authority mostly, but there are shades to it too. It’s all multifaceted. But basically, we’re used to being in charge, and we’re used to thinking of kids as people merely to be taught, to be improved, to really be more like us. And I think that there are other ways to be around kids. Literature, poetry, story for story’s sake 鈥� that vein of children’s books, which is just one thing that a book can do, is something very exciting that I think only a book can do. It鈥檚 liberating. It’s a chance for adults and kids to set aside this hierarchy that normally governs our interactions, especially in the school day, and to just have a group art experience and to talk about it. 

The story rug, to me, is this space in school that is unlike any other. It’s in school. It’s part of school. Your teacher is there reading to you, and then you are having a discussion. But the discussion is open. It can get personal in ways that you’re not really at liberty to be in other parts of the school day. Sometimes your teacher cries. Sometimes your teacher laughs really hard. Sometimes your teacher messes up and mispronounces a word or gets a rhyme wrong. That’s thrilling too! And then also you’re talking about taste and preference and interpretation, which you don’t always get to do at school. But really pretty quickly, we’re doing civics too, because let’s say I loved the book that you just read, and the kid next to me, she hated it. Well, how do she and I talk about it with each other without making each other feel lesser? I watch kids do that. I watch kids do that so often in ways that I’m like, “Adults don’t know how to do this.” Book clubs will end up looking like a fight scene on Bravo, whereas these kids are having just the most beautiful discussion of their distinct viewpoints.

At one point in Make Believe, you imagine an adult talking to a kid about reading, saying: “You know, this thing that we’ve been doing together, now you must do it alone and enjoy it.” There are lots of people thinking about different ways to make reading more social. Do you have a vision of a better way?

We have these two things, ideally, we do with reading, and they sit alongside each other and feed each other, but they’re really separate. How do we teach kids to read? How do we help them acquire this skill, which is very difficult? But also, this is our moment to show them the joys that a book can bring, to make them love this. And in fact, if we’ve only done the first thing, I think we’ve lost. But if we manage to do the second thing, that will underpin not just the acquisition of reading, but the rest of your life of curiosity, of learning things from books. Getting kids involved in that way 鈥� it is making sure that a story, a poem, an artwork is not just an avenue to a set of standards, but also is something that can be enjoyed in its own right. And giving kids the freedom both to say what a book means to them and even what they think about a book 鈥� also giving them the freedom to pick some of their reading at school 鈥� obviously this is tough, especially at a time where measurement and measurable outcomes are so important. 

The hard thing is that although you do learn from art, it can be hard to mount a defense of the value of art and literature in a system that only responds to data. How do you measure the expansion of a child’s soul? We don’t have that ruler, but that is the stuff that we’re talking about. It may sound lofty, but to me it is at the center of what education is in the first place. We’re trying to learn to be humans in the world.

You told The New York Times in an last spring, “I’m interested in launching a cultural reevaluation of the picture book as an art form.” I wonder if you could paint us a picture of what that would look like.

The picture book is one of the great literary forms, and it’s a unique literary form that belongs next to the novel, the short story, poetry, plays as one of the great ways that humans have come up with to tell stories, to share ideas, to capture feeling, to preserve histories, to explore the natural world, the interior world. It’s got everything. It can do all of those things. It’s a unique form. It is actually the only one of those forms that I mentioned right there that is native to children’s books. 

There are great children’s novels, great children’s comics, great children’s songs, poems. But we took all those forms and figured out how they would work for kids. Children’s literature came up with the picture book, and it is our great contribution to world literature. I think that we underestimated it, though. We underestimated it for two reasons, and one is we don’t talk a lot about how picture books work and why they work. And the other reason is because we underestimate kids, and we especially underestimate young kids 鈥� and that is the picture book’s audience. How do you change our view of children? That’s a huge project and a necessary project. But how do we change our understanding of how the picture book works? There’s work that we can do there. 

It’s now on pause, but for a while I had a newsletter with , the illustrator, that was called , and as soon as we launched it, it went onto the Top 10 art Substacks on the platform, and way bigger than just kids’ book people, because people were hungry for this. They did want to read about it. We were like, “Wow, there are a lot of people curious about how picture books work, and they’re not able to find the kind of coverage in mainstream organs.” And I think so much of that is because a lot of us remember picture books that we loved as kids. We still remember them. It’s also because a lot of adults, whether they’re in the classroom reading to kids or at bedtime, putting a kid to bed with one, two, three stories, you see how powerful this thing is, not just for the kid, but also you’ll be loading up the dishwasher an hour later, still thinking about that story too. You know that something profound is happening in these books, but what is happening and why? 

---

 

“That adult reading out loud is an equal collaborator with author and illustrator. They are deciding how quickly to read or how slowly to read. They are making cuts and adjustments to the story on the fly. They are choosing what the characters’ voices sound like.”

---

Reading aloud is this rare moment where all kinds of adults do it. And when they do it, they are part of the artwork. There’s the author, the illustrator, and the adult who reads these books out loud. And that adult reading out loud is an equal collaborator with author and illustrator. They are deciding how quickly to read or how slowly to read. They are making cuts and adjustments to the story on the fly. They are choosing what the characters’ voices sound like. They are showing you with their own face how to feel about this story. You’re an actor who has been cast in every part. You are like a musician who is handed this instrument that is also the score. You’re an artist. 

I want to ask you about this unpleasantness you had last spring with your amendment of Theodore Sturgeon鈥檚 “90% of everything is crud” law. A lot of people were upset and hurt, and I wonder: It鈥檚 a couple of months later. Do you have either a more accurate percentage or another way to think about it?

I’m really sorry that I hurt people with what I wrote there, and it wasn’t my intention. I would definitely write it differently now. The point of that passage was not the percentage. It was to say that it was harder to write and succeed at a book for kids than almost any other kind of art-making that we do. It’s always hard to make a work of art. There are so many things that can go wrong. I can tell you from this desk right here. But what making a book for kids asks us to do is to, as an adult, cross this experiential chasm and make something that ultimately is not about reflecting our own lives as adults or serving our own interests, but to really make something for kids that is authentic and relevant and recognizable to them as a truth about the world. It’s a really hard thing that we have to do, and it’s worth doing. But oh man, is it so hard.

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 社区黑料鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.