Matt de la Peña on Small Stories and the Power of Perspective

Episode Transcript

Transcript

Matt de la Peña When I was a new writer and I didn't have a book yet, I used to dream of becoming banned because I thought, Oh my gosh, how cool is this? I'm banned.

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Adwoa Adusei This is Matt de la Peña. He’s the Newbery Medal-winning author of seven Young Adult novels and five picture books. In 2012, when his Young Adult novel Mexican WhiteBoy was banned in Arizona, he learned first hand what it felt like to have his book taken off of school shelves.

Matt de la Peña Your job is to control what you can control. And that’s to make the best possible story. And whoever is illustrating it comes along and makes the best possible visual story to go along with the words. And then once the book goes out there, it no longer belongs to you. So if somebody’s going to use it as a political tool, you really … I mean there’s nothing you can do about it. You can try to help support the people who are fighting to keep it from being pulled from a classroom. But you can't have control over how people are reading into the story or the way they're going to use your book to make a political point.

Virginia Marshall Since his first experience of being banned, de la Peña has unfortunately encountered more censorship of his books. We asked Matt what it felt like to have his picture book in the top ten most frequently banned picture books last year – and we also talked about how he crafts compelling picture books, and what it means to write the kind of book he calls “diversity 2.0.”

Adwoa Adusei You may have heard parts of our interview with him in episode four of our series about the seminal children’s book The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. But there was so much we couldn’t fit in. So, we’re going to share the rest of our conversation here, as a bonus episode.

Virginia Marshall You’re listening to Borrowed & Returned: a podcast from Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed us, and changed America, too. I’m Virginia Marshall.

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei. And now, back to our interview with Matt de la Pena.

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Virginia Marshall We started the conversation by talking about Last Stop on Market Street, which is the picture book that earned Matt de la Peña the Newbery Medal – and his collaborator Christian Robinson the Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. Last Stop on Market Street is about a little boy riding a bus with his grandma. It’s a simple story where the main character CJ is Black – and it has a lot of similarities with The Snowy Day, both in its art and in its simplicity. In Last Stop on Market Street, CJ doesn’t want to ride the bus, but along the way he notices all the people around him and he feels affection for them. By the time he and his grandma reach their destination – a soup kitchen where they’re volunteering – his perspective has changed. Here’s Matt de la Peña.

Matt de la Peña Yeah, Last Stop on Market Street, there was an idea that I was exploring as a novel, actually. This idea of embracing your neighborhood, even if it isn't the most beautiful neighborhood. I just love to, I don't know, show moments of grace and dignity of people living on the quote-unquote wrong side of the track. So, I was kind of trying to do that.And around that time my agent, whose name is Stephen Malk, he sent me a link to a blog by Christian Robinson, who was unpublished. And he had a few really cool little illustrations that were very personal, and one of them was a boy on a bus with his grandmother. And I gravitated to that one image immediately. At first, the first thing I did is I thought, all right, I'm gonna insert my own story into this because I have a very central grandmother in my life. She was my Mexican grandmother. So I just thought of the book in terms of her and being on the bus, because we rode the bus a lot when I was a kid in San Diego, in a border community. So that's where I started from. And then I wrote the first draft that way. And then when we found out that Christian was going to be the illustrator, I started to sort of bend his direction a little bit more because I found out more about his backstory, the fact that he was raised by his grandmother. And so I think the story sort of evolved from there.

Virginia Marshall Cool. Yeah, and I mean, his images are so reminiscent of, you know, The Snowy Day and just that quiet, like, journey of a boy through the world.

Matt de la Peña Yeah, absolutely.

Virginia Marshall Yeah. And I wonder if maybe you could talk a little bit about, I mean, did The Snowy Day have any influence on your story, the writing of the story?

Matt de la Peña I know Christian was very influenced by the art and he felt that that book was kind of a seminal book in his childhood because he felt represented. But the one thing I'm gonna say about looking at the craft of that book. The thing that you can really learn, and I don't think I really picked up on this until I was like four or five picture books in, is that I think the biggest error many people make when they're approaching a picture book text is they try to make it too big. And I would say the best picture books, the story arc for the character is just so tiny. It's almost not even a full movement, but a suggestion of a movement. Whereas if you're writing a novel, you can have a pretty dramatic character arc over the course of the story. But in a picture book, it feels more realistic if that arc is just the beginning of an arc.

So, if you look at Last Stop on Market Street, the ending is CJ says to his grandmother: I'm glad we came to the soup kitchen, right, where they're gonna volunteer. I tried about 15 other endings that were bigger and I thought more cinematic, or this is more commercial. But none of them felt right, they all felt unrealistic. So I ended up going back to the original ending and thinking, oh, I guess I just failed because it's probably too quiet of an ending. When I look at The Snowy Day, like, what I love about that book is it's just such a small little story, but it embraces this, its own size and it just makes sense for the story.

So, I think there are two ways to approach writing a story with diversity. The first one is to make the story about the diversity. In other words, you know, I have a book, I have novel called Mexican WhiteBoy and it's about growing up mixed race and it really directly talking about that experience. And that's the focal point of the story. And you know what? I think most people who write about “diverse characters,” they have a book like that. But then after you get that out of your system, it's, I call it “Diversity 2.0.” It's where you move on from that, and now the characters, diverse characters, are existing in a story that isn't overtly about their diversity. And I think the genius of The Snowy Day is it's not about race, even though the story around the book became about race because it was a first. It was a seminal book in mainstream publishing. So I think honestly, I think that's why the book is so enduring is because it's not pedantic. It's not trying to teach a lesson, or trying to pull on our moral heartstrings. It's just a story. And the character happens to be a race that isn't represented in books. And here's the interesting thing: even though these books under the umbrella of Diversity 2.0 aren't about race, they of course are about race. Because in the conversation that comes after it, it's always going to come up, and it's a big part of the story. But if you don't want to enter that part of a conversation, you don’t have to because it's an incredible story no matter who the character is, what race they are.

Virginia Marshall And I want to talk a little bit too about Milo Imagines the World because it's a little more serious, maybe, but it still has that same journey of like a boy on public transit going through the day, and it has like a beautiful ending as well. Can you talk a little bit about the writing of that book?

Matt de la Peña So that book was a very different experience because now, at this point, I had written a couple of picture books. I understood what I was doing a little bit better. I also went into the story knowing that I was exploring a version of Christian's own childhood, which is that he grew up with an incarcerated mother and he would visit her sometimes. So when I went to write the story, I had to just take this template of a boy going to visit an incarcerated mother. And I said, okay, well, what am I gonna do to the story? This is kind of a loud ending. So I have to make this story about something else so that there can be multiple entry points for a reader. So in other words, some kids are going to come into this book knowing nothing about, you know, the criminal justice system in America. And they're just going to focus on Milo making pictures on the bus of the people around him. So that's an entry point. And another thing I had to think about is, well, how loud am I going to make the destination, or how quiet? And one of my favorite things about picture books is, especially young kids, they're reading the visual story alongside somebody reading to them the story of the text. And so I thought, okay, well what I can do is never mention directly in the text where he's going or where he’s landed. I'll let the visual story do that so that there's a little bit more room for interpretation. And then one conscious choice I made, because this was Christian's story, is I said, I'm going to leave the last picture to him. So there will be no words. And in other words, he will get the final say. So I just said, at the end of the book, Milo shows the picture he's drawn to his mom. And I said it's probably something simple and something that suggests their life when she's out of prison. So that's the only instructions, and so he got to, you know, finish the story.

Virginia Marshall When you're connecting with kids over the book, whether it's reading to them or in other contexts, some they enter at different points, right? They have different backstories. And so I wonder if you could maybe tell a story if you have one or two about connecting with a kid over your book and what that's like.

Matt de la Peña In Milo I find the most fascinating responses, you know, when a kid might be for the first time considering what prison is and what it would be like to have a parent there. And so during the Q&A after reading that book where I don't say anything, I just say, you have to read the pictures as much as you're reading the words. And kids might start to see guards, and they might start to ask questions. And one of my favorite things that happens, inevitably, is as the conversation starts going, and the kids figure out, oh my gosh, I think he was visiting his mother, who's in “jail.” And then somebody will say, what did she do? And this is my favorite moment because I get to explore something that to me is so important to telling stories, which is anytime you tell a story, you have to take a point of view. And I always ask them, whose point of you did I take? And they all know, you know, they're like, Milo. And I'm like, do you think Milo cares what his mom did? Or do you just think he cares that his mom isn't home? And they all know, right? It's—he cares about his mom not being there. But then I'll say, if I took somebody else's point of view, it might be a different story. If I took the mother's point of view she might be really processing why she's here. And so that's such a nice discussion because I think it opens kids eyes to the power of point of view. And then some kids have this experience. You know, they have an incarcerated family member, so they can access the story from a deeper point of view, I guess you could say. But really, like, at the end of the day, I think books like Milo, like The Snowy Day, they're just vehicles to conversation. And the magic of a picture book is what happens with the people around the book as they use it as a tool to talk about a new idea or a simple idea like Last Stop or The Snowy Day.

Virginia Marshall I have a question on inspiration, so I know you write a lot of YA as well, but now a lot of picture books, and I'm wondering if there was a picture book that inspired you? Like I want to create something that is like this, or whether when you set out to write picture books you just wanted to do something totally new.

Matt de la Peña I started out writing poetry. That was the first thing I ever did before I was published, I would write spoken word style poetry. And then my first story came out and it was a novel and I loved it, but I always tried to bring my poetry into my novels. So I cared a lot about musicality, especially dialog, and I always revised my stories way too many times just for sound. And then when I had my first picture book come out, which was illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and it's about a boxer named Joe Lewis, I realized, oh my gosh, this is a place to put the poetry that is still inside me.

And then I had children. And when my daughter was born, my first, I was so blown away by the picture books that were available to me. And I just couldn't believe how amazing some of them were. And I will say a few of them have been incredibly inspirational. So, Goodnight Moon is one of them. There's one line in the book that taught me so much about writing a picture book, and it's when we're getting this list of “good night this, good night this,” and we get this moment where the narration says, “goodnight, nobody.” And I remember, you know, my daughter would kind of move past that, but I was always like, wow, that's so interesting. I don't even know what this means, but I keep coming back to that line.

Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson, who's also another Brooklyn resident. That book taught me so much because she ended a picture book on regret and I had never seen that done before and it really, like, inspired me to try to think outside the box. Jon Klassen’s books, he has the I Want My Hat Back series. Those books were so funny and were sort of not the happy little tight books that a grandmother might give to her grandchild. They were kind of subversive. And so I think his work taught me that it's to try to do something slightly subversive in a picture book. 

Virginia Marshall Okay my last question is sort of a big lofty one, but I like to ask it just to cover our bases. [Laughs] Why is it important to have diversity in picture books for kids?

Matt de la Peña So, I’ll tell a story. Ten years ago, I got to serve as one of the judges on the National Book Award for books for young people. And there was one book I really, really wanted to win. It was called Inside Out and Back Again, and it was about a girl who leaves wartime Vietnam and she lands as a refugee in Alabama. And she really struggles to fit in in Alabama because nobody's seen anyone like her. She's struggling with the language. And first of all, the writing was beautiful, it was written in verse, and I just thought it was just a beautiful book, and I really wanted it to be recognized. And I remember the night before we were trying to pick the winner, I went to bed thinking, oh, I think I know why I want this book to win. I want it to win because what if a girl coming from another country lands in a place like Alabama and she's trying to sort of survive in this new setting, what if she has a book like this available to her? She will feel seen, recognized, and validated. So I went to sleep that night. I woke up in the morning and I had this epiphany. I was like, oh my God, that was so short-sighted. I want this book to win because could you imagine if everyone in the class had read this book before that girl comes from that other place and she's so different? Wouldn't all the classmates have so much empathy for her experience? And to me, that is the power of the diverse story. It's not just the validation of somebody who is growing up like the main character, but it's the opportunity for having empathy for that person's life, how they're moving through the world. 

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Adwoa Adusei That’s it for this bonus episode. We’ll include links to books by Matt de la Peña and others in our show notes. We’ll be back next week with another bonus episode. In the meantime… keep re-reading!

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.  

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Nick Higgins, Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Laurie Elvove designed our logo.