Julie Chavez, ASK A LIBRARIAN WITH JULIE CHAVEZ: A Zcast Production

[0:49]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called moms don't have time to have kids. Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about all sorts of things moms don't have time to do. All the authors have been on this podcast. Also, check out my TikTok at withzivyandtracey, my other podcast, sex talk withzivyandtracey. Check out moms don't have time to write on Medium, and, of course, my new publishing company called Zibby Books. And now back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids. Hi. Hi. Hello. Enjoy the show. Julie Chavez is the host of Ask a Librarian. She is an upcoming Zippy Books author, I am so excited to release this episode of her podcast so that all of you can get to know her better. Julie is a curious elementary school librarian and a graduate of the University of Colorado with a degree in Spanish language and literature. She writes a lot for moms don't have time to write, and also real women write living on COVID time. Her forthcoming memoir, The Anxiety Library, will be published by Zippy Books. She currently lives in California with her husband and two tall teenage sons. So please enjoy Julie's episode, listen to it every week, subscribe, and follow her on Instagram and do all the things because Julie is amazing.

[2:17]Julie Chavez: Hi. Can I help you find something? Librarians specialize in helping you find what you were looking for and sometimes what you didn't know you were looking for. Thank you for joining me as I talk to my guests about all things library, including the books inside them. I'm Julie Chavez, and this is Ask a Librarian. Mac Barnett is a New York Times bestselling author of stories for children. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 2,000,000 copies worldwide. Mac's books have won a truckload of prizes, including two Caldecott honors and also three E. B. White Read Aloud Awards. Mac lives in Oakland, California. And on a personal note, I think we're going to be best friends. And without further ado, here's my conversation with Mac.

[3:12]Guest: Hi, Mac. Thanks for being here today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I am so happy to talk to you. I am such a Mac Barnett fan. You should know that this morning I said to Nolan, my older son, Hey, did I tell you who I'm talking to today? And he said, Yeah, you told me five times and I'm still really happy for you. And I've been reading extra yarn to them since they were little and then adding all your other books. But so many of them I love. You do such a good job of writing for children,

[3:47]Julie Chavez: but not to children. I love it. Thank you. That is a really that's a really nice compliment that I think that sums up in two prepositions

[3:57]Guest: kind of my whole project. So thanks so much. I love it. Well, good. Because that's what I see when I read them. Just and I love reading them aloud to the kids at school.

[4:07]Julie Chavez: And a lot of times extra yarn will make multiple appearances because I see them from kindergarten to fifth grade. And they'll say, well, we already read this. And I said, yeah, and we're reading it again. I think that's one of the cool things about the library is that you do you get to see these kids through their whole journey through elementary school and middle school or high school, wherever wherever in a school library you're working, you get to see them

[4:28]Guest: watch their taste in books change, and then also watch the way that they interact with the same book change as they get older. It's such a cool vantage point in a school. It really is. I'm really lucky. And I enjoy exactly what you're saying. It's and I tell the kids that a lot, right? The book may be the same, but you're different. So that's why adults read picture books, right? So I love it. Okay, so first of all, I wanted to discuss something very ridiculous, but unrelated. What was your first job like as a kid?

[5:01]Julie Chavez: Oh, so let's see. Like, as a kid, like like Or like middle school, high school, like, what would first job was? Yeah. I was so I went and I like to an when I was in high school in the summer, did like, I was on like the maintenance crew for an elementary school and it was shut down. So I went and like was repainting classrooms and, and, and like re landscaping the playground and stuff. I was terrible at it, too. I'm I'm a terrible painter.

[5:31]Guest: So some poor kids came back in after that and they were like, What happened here? I can

[5:36]Julie Chavez: see drips.

[5:38]Guest: Oh, what are these drips?

[5:40]Julie Chavez: So you went from sort of mediocre painting and then you don't you don't you don't have to. Mediocre is that's better. Yeah, you don't have to. You don't have to spare my ego.

[5:54]Guest: Well, I don't even attempt it because I can't. I'm too much of a perfectionist, and I would just end up in a ragey ball. So, hey, I salute you for trying. No. And honestly, that was probably my problem, too. It was just too much of a perfectionist.

[6:09]Julie Chavez: And somewhere that's that's what translated into yeah.

[6:13]Guest: Yep. Maybe if I just do it quickly, then I don't have to notice it. Yeah. I love it. Okay. So painter, I love hearing what people did early on. And then so from there,

[6:23]Julie Chavez: how did you get into writing children's books? Well, so sort of at the same time when I was in high school, the the first volunteer work that that I did, that was an elementary school down the Hill from my high school. And I just went down there to work with kids who were struggling with reading to just do, like, one on one reading tutoring. Yes. And I'd grown up I I loved picture books so much when I was a kid. And it was it was like the one thing that that it was really important to my mom that we have just a lot of books in the house. We didn't have a lot of money, so she would go around to yard sales and buy picture books for me. And so I grew up in the in the late eighties and early nineties, but I grew up with picture books from the generation before that or before that just just because of how my mom was finding her books. So I grew up with books from sort of the forties to the seventies, which was there's so I mean, there's part of that is just this great golden age in American picture book making. And I think those books really informed the yeah. They just informed my my my approach to literature. They they're they're so Frog and Toad, I think, is as wonderful as anything written in the English language. You know? They're they're just Yeah. I I really sunk my teeth into these books, and my mom never put my picture books away. So when I started reading novels, they just sort of went on the shelf above my picture books. And my picture books were always there. So in middle school, it was really normal for me to to just revisit a picture book that I loved. In high school, when I went down to tutor these kids, I I was like, I'm gonna bring my books that I care about. If if I have something that I'm really into, then maybe they'll get into it too rather than just the materials that we're being assigned that that, frankly, were kind of lackluster. And I think that, like, I'm sure the students were picking up on the fact that I was like, this is boring. This is bad. I'm not having a good time either. Exactly. Both of us are sitting there not having a good time. And that's not what what reading a book should be. No. It's the opposite of what reading a book should be. So I sort of I went back to my picture bookshelf, pulled those off. And and as a high schooler, came back in touch with these books. Was like, these are so great. And in college, I worked at a summer camp for kids, and and that's where I started started telling my first stories that I was making up to to kids. And I feel like that's sort of the journey from like reading these things to sharing them with kids to then making up my own stories. But always came from direct work that I was doing with kids.

[9:02]Guest: Do you So what were some of your other favorites? So Frog and Toad?

[9:06]Julie Chavez: Love Frog and Toad. The work of Margaret Wise Brown, who's most famous for Goodnight Moon, wrote so many books, so many strange books. And in fact, Goodnight Moon, I think, is a is a deeply strange experimental book itself. It's so ubiquitous that I I think we're sort of inured to its strangeness, but it's it's weird. It is a weird book. Yes. In the Night Kitchen by Maury Sendak, and just all the Sendak stuff. James Marshall, Donald Cruz, who's very famous for Freight Train, which is, you know, just a it's a board book about the colors of a train car that that somehow can, like, make you cry at the end. It's

[9:46]Guest: Yeah. I need to look that one up. I don't know that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's great. I love it. Okay. Those are all It's true. There's such rich Literature and some of those were so experimental, even when I read Where the Wild Things Are Now, I feel like I get new things from it every time, which is bizarre. It's not a long book.

[10:07]Julie Chavez: No, but just that same idea, right? I'm different when I go to it. It's an incredible book. It is. It is such a again, it's one of these books that we all we've shared and read so many times that you can see it as and it is a classic, but but the tradition of children's literature, what is traditional children's literature? It's a tradition of experimentation. And that book, starting with a kid who behaves really badly. Right? Yes. And is is just creating mayhem and then says, I'll eat you up to to his mom. And he gets sent to his room, and the camera stays on him. And and, you know, when you talk about writing two kids or writing four kids Yeah. There are other books that would that would need to have an intervention with with Max, and we would need to see an apology, and he would need to see and explain exactly how he was wrong. That book doesn't do that. Maybe yeah. Exactly. He goes on this adventure in some ways processing whatever went on, and we have a story that sits alongside the story of of what happened in that house. The connection between that adventure and and what he did earlier is is is loose and literary, and you have to you have to interpret the book to figure out how. When he returns without apologizing, without saying I've learned my lesson, There's some supper there waiting for him. His mother's love was constant. He still deserves to be loved even if he made a mistake, even if he didn't. Then at the end comb his hair and become a good boy, he's still loved. And that's that is a radical position. And I I think actually feels more radical or just as radical now in 2020 as it did in the sixties. It it's it's the Sendak model didn't win the day. It's still a fight to make real literature for kids that way. Yeah, that makes sense. You're

[12:10]Guest: exactly right. This idea that there are messages, but the experimentation of it, that this is a it's almost the books are a conversation right with kids and where they are. And so that should be evolving and have some space in it. And so to see that model in those books that were ahead of their time, but we consider them classics. It's Yeah, I love that. Speaking of that, so part of the thing I love about extra yarn is when I read it to the kids, I'll read. My favorite part is reading to multiple grades because the kindergarteners are so literal. And then you have their kind of development. And my favorite is when we revisit a book when they're older and they finally get it or they get a part of it that they didn't see before. So I love the ending of Extra Yard. I mean, and also, have to say, I think you have a real gift for last lines. The way you finish your books is just perfect.

[13:10]Julie Chavez: I want to sit with those words. So that's another thing that I think you do really well. Tell me about the story for Extra Yarn, if you don't mind. Sure. So Extra Yarn is it's about a girl who finds a box full of yarn in the snow, and she lives in in a town that's just sort of every it says everything is either the white of snow or the black of soot from chimneys. And and she finds this box full of yarn, and her first impulse is to make herself a sweater. She has some extra yarn, so she makes a sweater for her dog, and she still has extra yarn. And she begins to knit sweaters for people, for animals, for things, covers this whole town in yarn. And there's sort of a false ending to the book where where you see the entire town covered in this beautiful yarn in this two page spread, but the book's not over yet. Archduke arrives out of nowhere, tries to buy the box off of her. She won't sell it. So the archduke steals the box, takes it across the sea back to his castle, and opens the box, and it's empty. He's furious. He throws it out the window and lands on an iceberg, floats all the way back across the sea where Annabelle, the girl who first found it, is just sort of waiting on the seashore, sort of as if she knew it was coming on some level. Yes. And it arrives back, she opens it, and it's full of yarn, and she knits a sweater for a giant tree, and that's the end. I so where did that story come from for you? So that story usually with a picture book, the words come first and then the pictures come second. But that book was illustrated by John Clawson, who's a good friend of mine, and we were friends before we started making books together. And so I was actually we'd already met, hung out. We actually met. And and when we met, we we found out that we both loved frog and toad growing up. And that was sort of we spent two hours in the corner of this party just talking about frog and toad. And at the end, I was like, I think that I think that I think I just made a friend. I think our best friendship has been secure. Yeah. Absolutely. So I was I was looking on his website, and he had a picture that he'd done in college of a girl and a dog walking through the snow wearing matching sweaters. And it was really funny and charming. And now I dragged it to my desktop to save it. I where I just sort of save images that I come across that I like. And the file name was extra yarn dot JPEG. I was like, oh, that's really funny. She had some extra yarn, so she knit a sweater for her dog. And that's basically a line in the book that that thing that occurred to me where I was just basically getting the joke that John was setting up. But it I mean, that's the magic of a picture book right there, right? Is that it's an image and text laid together. And when you put them together, the story grows or there's a little joke or a connection. And even just like a digital file with a file name can get that magic of text and image that a picture book has. And so that sort of sent me off. And I I was like, I'm gonna write I'm gonna write this story out. And I I wrote the first draft of the story and then had this panic like, oh, wait, like, maybe John's already written a story for this. Maybe he won't like my story. So I sent him a sort of a sheepish email. Yeah. And I was like, hey, I don't know if you've written a story for this. If you have, great. Sorry. This would be such a weird email. But, like, also, if you haven't, here's a story. And if you don't like it, that's fine. And and don't worry. And this will also be a weird email. Right. And luckily, he like And can we still be friends? And can we still be friends? Totally. It was early in the friendship. Totally. So that's one of those things we

[16:47]Guest: We're still okay. Right? Yes. Yeah.

[16:51]Julie Chavez: And luckily, he did like it, and and we made we made that book. I think it's really it's like in terms of the influences, it's influenced by some of those picture books that I mentioned, especially, I think, Tommy Ungerer. I don't know if you know his books at all. He did Three Robbers as one of them. Schirring, I'll have to look it up. Check it out. And and folk tales, fairy tales. In some ways, John and I both talk about that book. It felt like we sort of remembered it into being both the words and the pictures rather than actually made it ourselves. We like In a way that's different from any other book I've made, and I think, you know, John and I talk about this, I think he feels the same way. We look at that thing and we're like, this is this feels like this feels like it already existed. And then we just sort of

[17:38]Guest: brought it. Right. You were a conduit. Conduit. Yeah, totally. Through you. I What a gift to feel that way, right? And to see sort of the the fruits of it, have that. I don't know. It's attachment and detachment that feels, I think, really neat to see, right? Because you're part of the creation of it. But I can see that it does have that feel of. Have I read this story somewhere before, but it's so beautifully told. And I love the details like the fact that but is the word but is on the iceberg in that An ultimate illustration, I think, or just before that. Are those touches are amazing. And I love I mean, Shawn Clawson is also on my list of people love his books. And I also love seeing how many people you've been able to partner with.

[18:31]Julie Chavez: Do you enjoy

[18:33]Guest: working with?

[18:34]Julie Chavez: I mean, I would think so, right? You're working with I love it. I've gotten to work with some great illustrators. As somebody who writes but doesn't draw, still my favorite form is the picture book. And and so that means I'm always gonna have a collaborator very early in the process. But it's very freeing as as a writer. I think that if you're writing a picture book, it allows you to to write about things that that words can't describe. And even though I've always loved language, loved books, I'm also really interested in the limits of language and picture books. Think just acknowledge that right off the bat that there are limits to what language can do. But if you add images in there, you can get to a new place. And I think that that's really I think that's really exciting. I mean, any piece of art you let go of, and it doesn't become what it is until it reaches its audience. With a picture book, you let go very early, and and it's not even close to what it is when I'm done. It's a bunch of words on a page, and and the words shouldn't even make sense without pictures. There should be big holes in the story. If you just read a picture book text out loud, it should feel kind of lackluster and even confusing because the pictures should be doing at least half of the work. And then an illustrator comes in and adds these pictures. It's still not done because we picture books are read to kids usually, not by kids. And so there's an adult often or at least a literate human, maybe an older sibling. But, you know, usually, an adult is there reading this picture book out loud, choosing whether to use voices for the characters, maybe adding in jokes or taking out sentences that I spent weeks writing, putting page turns where the illustrator did not put page turns. All that stuff is totally valid. Right? A good reader knows their audience and knows their audience that day and knows like, okay, we're gonna we're gonna read this story a little quieter today because we need to bring the mood down or like, we can really go for it today. Today is going to be that perfect. Like it's going to be like big wave surfing. It's going to be raucous, but they're going to be ready and we're just going to it's going to be we're going to really we're going to let loose on this book and just so sensitive to the audience they're reading to. Yes. And so every picture book is really made in that moment. Every picture book is a performance. Every reading is a new artwork because the adult reading this book out loud, the teacher, the librarian, the caregiver, the babysitter, are they're artists who are making this happen. And then finally, you reach that kid. And and if everything has gone well, there should still be spaces for that kid to fill in, to to figure out what it means to bring their experience, their intelligence to the artwork, and to make meaning from it. And and that chain of collaborators that starts with a writer moves through pictures, through a reader, to a kid. It's so exciting, and and energy is created each time somebody comes in and and reinterprets the work. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[24:30]Guest: I love how you put that. That made me a little teary. I just I but I feel that so deeply. And you're so right. What a beautiful thing for children to see and be part of. And for adults, I mean, that's my favorite part of the gig is reading to them and sharing those stories. And you're exactly right, leaving space then for them to enter in. I love what you said at the very beginning about there, it should have a lot of holes without the illustrations. Because as someone who lives to overexplain things, just ask my editor, that is a good note, because I was thinking about children's

[25:11]Julie Chavez: writing, and I never considered that a picture book. You're right. It's incomplete without the other half. The first manuscript I wrote for a picture book, which was for my first picture book, Billy Twitter's in his Blue Whale Problem. I sent it to an author who sort of inspired me to start writing picture books for kids, John Cheska, who wrote The Stinky Cheese Man. I read that book. I was like, this is so smart, so funny, so experimental. I want to write for kids. This is the best stuff. Okay. And he's the one you wrote Battle Bunny with. I wrote Battle Bunny with John. Yeah. Which oh my gosh. I love someone. Okay. Continue. So I sent him I sent him the manuscript and he's like, this is great. This is really funny. But, like, go through and cross out just as a first step anytime you're describing what something looks like. And he just did it as an example. And he was like, some of this stuff is really funny. Some of it is beautiful description. None of it belongs in a picture book. You're gonna have pictures doing this. And he did it for a few pages and just kinda crossed out the stuff that the pictures would make redundant. And that unlocked so much for me about how you approach this thing because it's you know, once you take out those redundancies, then you also start thinking about how do I construct something where it's not just removing redundancies, but it's actually the words are going to amplify because of the kind of peculiar relationship they have to an image on that page? How can we design the entire thing to be a dance between words and images? Oh, I love that.

[26:39]Guest: That is such a good description. You're exactly right. This book speaking of which, how this book was made, I feel like you described it so perfectly when you're talking about the collaborators. And again, books that just make me want to cry with their last lines. I loved this one from the first time I read it because it is so it honors the reader. And I love that idea because you're exactly right. It's it's not really a book until someone reads it. Yeah, I think and I think that's just right. When I when I hear

[27:11]Julie Chavez: artists talking about like making art for themselves and not caring about the audience. I mean, I think that that can be a way of getting at something. I think it also can also just be a pose that sounds really cool. Yes. I'm too I'm too evolved to even care about that sort of. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Got it. But I don't feel that way about art generally. You're always making it to communicate something. You're trying to communicate something, yes, authentic and particular about yourself, something you truly believe in, something that you sincerely feel. Yes. But it's finding somebody else who sincerely believes or feels that thing too. That's that's what we're all searching for. That's we're putting out messages and we're receiving messages, and it's that conversation, that interaction that makes an artwork powerful. And in kids' books, if you're just writing for yourself, you know, I'm a I'm a 39 year old adult. Like, that's not my audience. I have to I have to write for particularly kids have a different experience of the world, and you're communicating across a gulf, and you have to know. Like, I'm I'm making I'm making a piece of art for somebody who's having a very different emotional and even physical experience of the world, somebody for whom the world I inhabit, it's truly like literally not built for them. Right? My chair is too big for them. Like, it's how do I communicate something that I believe, but I know that they can relate to as well?

[28:44]Guest: I love that. I also and I think I'm loving hearing you talk about it because your heart and the way that you approach the work completely comes through in this and all of your books when I read them, and they're all so different. I loved what is love. Have that here just because at the end, I just was like, Is there anything truer? I'm just going to sit here. And I still read to my boys. So of course, I made them come over, which they enjoy, because that's what teenagers love. In how this book was made. I also loved the picture behind the scenes of the details of how books actually happen. Right? Because the editing, the back and forth, the printing,

[29:28]Julie Chavez: the I loved it. The I thought the global that's our global supply chain book. We just, you know, we just unfortunately, we came out. We came out like three years before. That global supply chain moment was on everybody's mind. It's just really true ahead of its time.

[29:44]Guest: I mean, I'm so glad that I can be highlighting it. And it's sort of a prophetic work that you made. And then that way, release it into the world. Well, I have one more question for you. And that is, what is something that you're not good at that you wish you were good at? Oh, wow. There's so much. I feel like I'm actually like,

[30:05]Julie Chavez: I'm only good at a few things and I have trouble when when I'm not good at something like really sticking with it because I get I get so frustrated with myself. Obviously, we've talked about painting at the beginning, but I wouldn't. Don't care if I'm good at painting or not. I don't know. It's it's not going to spark joy. Exactly. I wish I was good at woodworking. I I've always like I've always loved wood carvings, and I think carving something out of wood is so cool or building something out of wood, building furniture, building a cabinet. I read about woodworking a lot. I refinished a dresser for for my baby son, and it was such a fun project. It was such a basic project. But, like, I said, this is so fun, not just just making it all look nice, but actually, like, sort of fixing the the drawers a little bit just in the the lightest way. And then you mentioned what is love, the illustrator of that book, Carcinelis. She is somebody who I think also she's she's long been, like, I'd love to get into woodworking. And we were kind of talking about this at the same time. She immediately started, like, carving beautiful like, she carved a thumb, like a giant thumb that's like the size of of her forearm. That's just like a realistic thumb. That is just the most beautiful, absurd thing you've seen. I feel like it was like week three. She's like hammered that out. She's building furniture. She's she's made like five tables. She and and I I I know that she started at the same time I did. So it is it's like I'm not good at this, and I wish that I was. I can see it's not like, well, if you just give it time, it's like, well, look, look what Carson is up to. She's doing she started on the same day.

[32:02]Guest: That's amazing. And those are those sort of friendship moments, right? Where you're like, Gosh, I'm really glad I like you. Because if I didn't, I would really feel bitter about this. Yes. Because here I am with my I'm sanding the piece of my drawer feeling really And good about you're whittling.

[32:18]Julie Chavez: It's not fair. It's not fair. Was. And this is the I wish, you know, this is a podcast that you can't see, but the sort of the the your sanding motion, which was so sort of. I mean, really, I mean, you could risk diminishing the work that I was doing, but actually looked exactly like what I was doing. It was just detail like work. Yeah. I mean, no, not even detail. Was like just like just like I'm just so proud of myself for for badly sanding something is exactly that's what it was. With a tiny square of sandpaper. Right? Yeah. That was like the minute. And also, like the the grit had already rubbed off, but I didn't buy enough sandpaper. So really, I'm just like rubbing copy paper. Right. Over a dresser and saying like, Good job, Mac. Today today was a great day. You better buy like an expensive leather tool belt. You're to keep your sandpaper.

[33:23]Guest: No, perfect. You can tuck it right in there and then you walk through the house with it on, right? Absolutely.

[33:28]Julie Chavez: Go to go walk the block. Wave to the neighbors.

[33:34]Guest: Tell everyone what you're doing today, which is sanding. Yep, I'm busy sanding. Sanding. Today's sanding day. Today's sanding day. Really It's going to be it's going to be tough on the biceps, but I think we can get it done. I love it. Well, I think that you can safely stay in your lane. You have one book coming out soon. John's Turn. John's Turn. That's right. When does that come out? That comes out in March,

[33:59]Julie Chavez: early March. And that is yeah. That that one, I'm I'm very excited about. It is set in an elementary school and sort of just about a beautiful performance that happens in an elementary school. But I've spent so much time in elementary schools, I guess, starting in attending one and then then volunteering in them and working in them. And they're just such fun, weird, specific places. And so I'm excited for them I to come

[34:28]Guest: cannot wait. And hopefully we can chat about it again when it comes out. Would love that. I would love that, too. Well, thanks so much for being with me today. And this was a pleasure. Thanks for spending these minutes with me. Oh, for me too. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Okay.

[34:44]Julie Chavez: Thank you for joining me for this episode of Ask a Librarian. As always, it's my joy to share and learn with you. You can follow me on Instagram at Julie Writes Words or you can go to my website, juliewriteswords.com. There you'll find the show notes, including all the books mentioned in the episode. See you in the stacks next week. And until then, friends, never go anywhere without a book.