538 - Find Your Point of View, Story Insights, and Artist / Audience Dynamics with Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

Summary

Creative Pep Talk, Episode 538: Find Your Point of View, Story Insights, and Artist/Audience Dynamics with Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

Date: January 14, 2026
Host: Andy J. Pizza
Guests: Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

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Episode Overview

This episode of Creative Pep Talk dives deep into the creative journeys of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen—luminaries in the world of picture books. Andy J. Pizza guides a rich conversation about how artists find their creative point of view, the dynamic relationship between artist and audience, the nuances of storytelling for children, and the invaluable practice of critical engagement with creative heroes. The trio also explores the role of looseness and intentionality in narrative art, the importance of trusting readers (especially kids), and the necessity of maintaining both seriousness and fun in creative practice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Value and Process of Developing a Point of View

• Andy J. Pizza opens with the assertion that artistic point of view is more essential than raw skill:

  "Having a point of view... is even more important than being super talented or super skilled. I actually think this trumps all of those." (00:31)

• Mac & Jon discuss how their own creative identities formed and evolved, often through dialogue and tension with each other and their influences.
• Jon Klassen on evolving his relationship with audience contribution:

  "I used to think as a storyteller, you had to be in control and give all the information. Anything the audience brought was a bonus, but it shouldn’t make or break the story." (09:33)

• Mac Barnett segues into how being reactive—sometimes cantankerous!—to other works, including those of heroes, can drive artistic independence.

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2. The Artist/Audience Dynamic: Control, Gaps, and Trust

• Jon reflects on his journey from being suspicious of leaving gaps for the audience to fill, to seeing it as vital:

  "Giving opportunity for [kids] to bring things isn’t a creative cop out. It doesn’t cost you anything as a creator." (08:58)

• Mac compares storytelling to game design, where artists determine the field and invite the audience to play within boundaries (10:28).

Authority, Lying, and Make Believe

• Mac emphasizes how picture books inherently question authority—adults insist on truth, while kids sense otherwise:

  "Being an adult saying, 'I am telling you the whole truth,' and you as a kid being like, 'No, you’re not.' That authority of adulthood—the book is revered—but I want to knock that down." (16:31)

• The trio celebrates the agency of children as active, critical readers.

Contradictory Narration—The Power of Gaps

• Mac and Jon discuss Maurice Sendak’s view that “the pictures say what the words don't, the words say what the pictures don't," arguing that the richest picture books create tension or contradictions between image and text (19:19).
• If the text contradicts the image, readers always believe the image, reinforcing the idea that language alone is inadequate to capture reality (21:43).

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3. Creative Structure, Storytelling Devices & Emotional Honesty

Dreaminess, Reality, and Catharsis

• Jon on his book The Skull:

  "A lot of my interest in storytelling was catharsis, not education... I used to be cagey about letting the reader bring their own meaning, but I’ve learned it’s essential." (07:38)

• Fairy tales and Japanese storytelling (Miyazaki, manga) are referenced for their comfort with ambiguity, open symbolism, and leaving readers with unresolved but resonant questions (32:10, 33:57).
• Mac:

  "Fairy tales are misunderstood. They’re not clean structure, not just didactic fiction. What sticks are the dreamy, weird parts, the bits of gristle never shaved off in 400 years of retelling." (34:24)

Endings: Resolution vs. Leaving Something Unsaid

• Stories don’t always have a “right” answer or a perfectly moral resolution—the important thing is organic honesty:

  "The best ones, the most memorable, are the ones you are helpless to in one way or another. Even for kids, anything too simplistic doesn’t reflect their experience." (45:08, 45:57)

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4. Critical Engagement with Heroes & Peer Work

Becoming a Creator: From Mimicry to Taste

• The group discusses the growth from fandom to practicing creator, and the necessity of developing independent taste—even when that means disagreeing with your heroes (63:57-64:46).
• Mac:

  "There’s a heavily reactive, sometimes cantankerous way of engaging with art that’s so linked with how I write. Sometimes I get angry, and that’s strong enough to get me writing." (64:47)

Loving & Diverging from Influences

• They examine how even your favorites won’t “get you” every time:

  "Maurice Sendak has been my favorite since I was a kid... but after Outside Over There, his later books don’t do it for me. I find that liberating." (71:54–73:12)

• Recognizing when a creative idol's trajectory diverges from your own can be inspiring in itself.

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5. Collaboration, Overlap, and Differences

The Magic of Creative Partnerships

• Andy notes the strong overlap in Mac and Jon’s tastes and process but probes for differences.
• The pair highlight how their partnership works because their differences complement rather than contradict:

  "There's a nice balance... what Mac likes that I wouldn’t do isn’t wrong—most of the time, I admire it about him." (105:07)

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6. Fandom, Critical Practice & “Looking at Picture Books” Substack

• Mac and Jon’s Substack, Looking at Picture Books, dissects the form and function of picture books (48:42).
  • The project is both a celebration and a critical analysis—done through text conversations between the two.
  • The best literature for kids is both art and entertainment, rigorously crafted and joyfully shared.

  "It's about giving picture books the dignity of a real read—which kids do all the time. We're just trying to catch up with them." (54:11)

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7. Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

On the Relationship Between Art, Seriousness, and Fun

• Andy:

  "What I love about you two is your ability to hold the tension between, 'This is art—this is as serious as it gets,' and, 'This is pure fun.'" (80:58)

• Mac:

  "It is a popular art form... the best works are extremely ambitious and entertaining. You have to do both things." (82:16)

• Jon:

  "Anything less than taking it seriously feels like a waste of time. But if you don’t let it also be inconsequential and silly, you freeze yourself up." (84:14)

On Trusting Children as Readers

• Jon:

  "It’s much easier to just assume kids care as much as you do." (82:59)

On Collaboration

• Jon:

  "There are places that John and I have gotten to in the books we’ve made together that I don’t think either of us would have gotten to alone." (108:53)

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Key Timestamps

• 05:14–07:22 – Dream logic in The Skull and the challenge of “revealing” a character’s past by inference
• 09:32–13:30 – Audience participation: leaving space versus sole creative control
• 14:35–18:25 – Looseness in narrative, project-to-project variety, and “Is it a cop out to let the audience decide?”
• 18:35–22:53 – Word/image tension—why great picture books make the audience read critically
• 32:10–37:34 – Open-endedness and ambiguity in Western vs. Japanese storytelling and fairy tales
• 45:08–47:58 – The problem with didactic, over-simplified stories for kids
• 48:42–54:40 – Mac and Jon’s Substack: Why critical fandom sustains creativity
• 63:57–70:59 – Creative independence: forming different opinions than your heroes
• 91:13–98:40 – The alternate endings of Sam & Dave Dig a Hole—dedicating to the gag vs. maximalist storytelling
• 105:06–109:10 – Collaboration, differences, and the mutual respect at the heart of creative partnerships

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Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps)

"Having a point of view... is even more important than being super talented or super skilled. I actually think this trumps all of those."
— Andy J. Pizza (00:31)

"Giving opportunity for [kids] to bring things isn’t a creative cop out... It doesn’t cost you anything as a creator."
— Jon Klassen (08:58)

"I want to, like... knock that [authority] down and just be like, look, just because this adult who got a publishing deal is insisting the world is this way, you don't have to believe everything he says."
— Mac Barnett (16:31)

"Great picture books always have some tension between text and image. You actually want the words and pictures to disagree a little bit."
— Mac Barnett (19:28)

"The best ones, the most memorable, are the ones you are helpless to in one way or the other."
— Jon Klassen (45:08)

"All we have is our point of view... If you can get it out into the world so that people who are receptive recognize a fellow traveler, that is the most Electric connection."
— Mac Barnett (97:56)

"Kids are children’s books’ smartest, most devoted critics. It will always be that way, and it should be that way."
— Mac Barnett (54:11)

"There's a nice balance... the things that Mac likes that I wouldn’t do aren’t wrong—most of the time I admire them about him."
— Jon Klassen (105:07)

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Episode Flow: For New Listeners

This expansive episode is equal parts insightful, funny, and warm. It will resonate with anyone curious about how successful creatives develop their unique voice, enter into genuine artistic dialogue with their influences, and build working collaborations that challenge and support them. It’s a celebration of the craft and joy of picture books but also offers universal creative wisdom on balancing seriousness with play, giving kids (and all audiences) genuine credit, and the lifelong journey of creative growth.

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Recommended Next Steps and Resources:

• Read Mac & Jon’s writing at: Looking at Picture Books Substack
• Explore more about Andy J. Pizza and the Creative Pep Talk community: creativepeptalk.com

Stay pepped up!

Transcript

[Andy J. Pizza]

Okay, let's talk about finding your point of view as an artist. For me, this is maybe the most essential thing in your creative utility belt. Having a point of view, having an opinion, having something to say, being able to tap into what you have to say and what you think and what your taste is. This is having your own point of view. And I think it's the most. It's even more important than being super talented or super skilled. I actually think this trumps all of those, and it's so important. And so today on the show, I am thrilled to have a chat, an interview, a conversation that I had with Mack Barnett and Jon Klassen about point of view, artist point of view. The reason I'm thrilled is, first of all, these guys are freaking legends in the picture book space and. And beyond, but they. They just have so many incredible books under their belt. They've made a couple together like Extra Yarn and Sam and Dave dig a hole, and then they have a bunch of books apart from each other. Mac is an author. John is an author and illustrator. And these two guys just have such a clear, compelling creative point of view. And as you'll find out in this interview, they had a big impact on my decision to commit to picture books as a big part of my creative journey. So excited to get into this, and we really do spend lots of the conversation talking about point of view and what it means and how to get there and what that looks like and how to differentiate from your creative heroes. And also, I took a couple risks in the questions and the way that I approach this, but I'm really glad I did because this is just one of my favorite episodes that we've had on the show to date. So I. We go through so much, and there's so many little takeaways that I'm not going to come back with a call to adventure at the end because I think this thing is got enough of it. But I can't wait to have them back on the show. Mac was on a previous episode with Carson Ellis because they had made a book called what Is Love Back a couple years ago, and I really hope that we get to chat again soon. Without further ado, here is my chat with Mac Barnett and John Claussen on the creative journey.

[Mac Barnett]

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[Andy J. Pizza]

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[Mac Barnett]

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[Mac Barnett]

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[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, I love the book. And then John, I just read the Skull and I hated that. Just kidding, just kidding. I absolutely loved it. The atmosphere is amazing. I love how much like a dream it feels. I know it's kind of an adaptation, right?

[Jon Klassen]

It is, yeah. But that means a lot. You try to make a dreamy thing whenever you can. Or at least that's what that format afforded. I felt like it was like a bit of a longer ones here. Like it's hard to get dreamy with a picture book. I always felt like that's too. They're, they're so short but with something with a little bit more room. You're like, oh yeah, let's see if we can like wander off a little bit.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It does feel Very, very dreamy. A lot of dream logic.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Just that the haziness feels kind of like what things look like in a dream.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I know that from following you guys for a long time, hearing you talk about picture books. I know that you have a relationship where you're necessarily not trying to nail everything down, but did you have a feeling of what that was about?

[Jon Klassen]

The skull?

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah. I think that especially.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Do you want to talk about it?

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah, I think it was about. You mean, like, literally or just like the.

[Andy J. Pizza]

No, more. No, the book itself, symbolically, potentially here.

[Jon Klassen]

Actually, from the start, about revealing her depth of the experience, whatever happened before the book starts. The more we see her do things in the book and finally do some really big things, I think just the more we got a window into what she'd had to deal with before the book started and that became sort of the assignment, was that there wasn't a turn she was going to take or some epiphany she was going to have. We were just going to get to watch what had already happened kind of to her. And that was. The chapter of. It was just this kind of a reveal of who we'd been watching. Because there's a nice middle ground between something like a novel and a picture book where you get time with a character, but it's still brief. Right. It's still clipped, and the sound of things is still clipped, and you're still only looking at one picture per page, so you don't reveal everything. And so using that to be like. Yeah, we haven't told them much, actually, after, like, 50 pages, we still don't know tons about this person. And so you get to sort of parcel out that information and then really dump it. And to be like, this is who we've been hanging out with the whole time also.

[Mac Barnett]

I think that's true for both of them, both her and the skull. Like, we get their past by inference, but, like, we're finding out the consequences of things that happened before the book started. Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

And it was really fun. Right. You don't get to do that very often that way. I was never. I don't know. I like thinking about that kind of structural stuff much more than, I don't know, character or anything else. It's just like a fun device or a fun expositional trick, I guess, is much more interesting to me than. Than an idea for a character or something like that. And so you've just got to be that thing. I don't know. And it also just felt like I'd realized that a lot of my interest in storytelling was like, catharsis rather than some sort of education or. Or just some way of getting something out of our system as a. As. As an audience to somehow. Yeah. Release some sort of energy. We've been either built up in the story, but hopefully you can pack other stuff in there. And we'd been watching kids do that with our books too. We see this happen where we're like, kids are like, oh, this, this. You know, that you could tell that they really got excited because of something that they were working on or something that they brought to it themselves. And I don't think that maybe Mac had more access to his belief in that before we started. I think that he did, but I've always been very cagey about that. To be like, it's. Whatever's in the book is what they're bringing to it. Like, I don't want to count on them to bring things into this experience. I want to make everything here. How should I. I can't count on what they're bringing. And the more we've been traveling together and talking it over and just making books for kids, the more it's been revealed that that is actually really important. And. And it doesn't cost you anything as a creator to. To give up that to the audience and giving opportunity for it to happen isn't a cop out creatively. You're not giving anything up by saying you can. You guys can pack stuff into this if you want to.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Are you just. Because I want to know if I'm following that. Right.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Are you saying that when you were getting started, you struggled to believe that the audience was going to come to the table with stuff and fill in things?

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Am I missing.

[Jon Klassen]

I don't know if I didn't believe in that they were going to do it. I just didn't think that the success of the project should depend on it. Or at least I thought you as a. As a. As a storyteller or a creative person, that it was about bringing. It was about control and about giving them all the information that they needed. And if you.

[Mac Barnett]

If.

[Jon Klassen]

And. And anything that they brought to it personally was bonus. But that. That wasn't ever going to be, you know, the reason that someone got attached to the story. It was just extra stuff. And I think that it's at least even now in my mind that, like, it's not. And again, it's not because that the. That you had. It's not because you didn't give much away or because you didn't even understand your own story or something. That's what I thought it meant. It was like, well, how am I like you? You know, you want to understand your own work. I'm not just going to give them the meaning to do themselves. And the evolution of that to be like, no, you can have both. You can understand what you're doing and give it up a little bit, but that they can bring that stuff together.

[Mac Barnett]

Hear the other thing too. You'll hear artists say, and I do think it's a cop out. You'll say, like, I'll hear artists or writers say, like, well, you know, the reader decides what my thing means. The kid decides what my story needs completely. And they cede all control. That's not what it is either. And I think that, like, I mean, it's a game, right? It's like you draw the field and you can draw a big field or a little field, but you say, like, everything we do is going to take place on this field. Like. And then once you've got those boundaries set up, you can run around in there. And part of. Part of the fun of any game is sort of like pushing as hard as you can at the rules without breaking them, right? They'd be like, oh, can you do this? Can you do this? And I think that there are stories, there are books, there are artworks that have, like, a very tight boundary, a very small set of acceptable interpretations. And there are artworks that have, like, much wider boundaries. And then there are artworks that have no boundaries. And I think that those tend to feel really not fun to.

[Jon Klassen]

There's no change or look at.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

It's also like, it's. It's also kind of an admission that you aren't totally in control of what it is you're making, like, the result. And your preoccupations when you started it and what you thought it was about don't actually have, like, they don't have to be completely figured out that we are kind of mysterious to ourselves. And that's a kind of a maturing thing. It seems like too, to be like, when you're 25, you're like, I'm totally in control. And then later on you're like, oh, maybe I didn't know what I was up to there. Why am I so obsessed with this particular kind of thing? And why do I keep making books about it? And you don't really know it doesn't mean you can't make the work as strong as you can make it, but that people can bring that meaning into it. And that can be as valid and true to the project as anything you thought it was about. And that. That used to sound like some hippie crap to me and now I understand that it's not. Or at least it's not a zero sum game.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I. I really like that. I think so. I've been doing there. I have a lot. I'm trying to like chew, be choosy about what to respond to there because there's a lot of really interesting stuff. I've been doing illustration since 2008. I only really started writing. I've tried. I tried to write books probably as early as like 2011, 2012. Didn't really have a co author credit until a few years ago, maybe. Maybe four years ago, something like that. I say that because I think that I'm in. I feel I was thinking about this kind of as a journey. You were talking about how it can feel like a cop out sometimes when someone's like, well, well, it's whatever you make of it. I don't even know what the song means or I don't even. Whatever. And I think for me, I started probably more in that place as a crutch years and years ago of like. I'm just gonna like throw something subconscious onto a page and then whatever, you know, you take from it, you take from it. I think I'm in an era. The past 10 years I've been in an era of. I want to do it in a way that is controlled. And I'm telling you something, even if I'm not like nailing it all down because I want to know how that works. And then I feel like there's an era or there's like a pendulum you can swing in and out of where. Yeah. I would like to get to a point where I also do some projects that are much dreamier after I've learned that stuff. And it got me thinking about for how much you guys seem to appreciate looseness and interpretation and that kind of thing. Macbe Spy Kid feels a lot. Or Kid Spy. Sorry, is. Feels pretty tight, right? These are tight stories because of the nature of the kind of story you're telling. Is that like, you know, speaking of going through these different phases that I'm kind of talking about, do you feel like you're at a place now where you're. You go project to project of how you want to approach that?

[Mac Barnett]

No, I think that. No, I don't. I don't do a lot of sort of like. Like, you know, like Meta thinking about what I'm trying to achieve with something. Yeah. It's really like, am I excited about the story? The macbe books, those are, like, spy mysteries, right?

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

With, like, this weird historical element, like, where it's just, like, there's, like, jokes about history. I don't like a lot of stuff that I'm interested in. I guess I would say that, like, where the trap door, if there is one in those books, where that is, to me, is that insistence that I make over and over again that this is all true and actually happened and is the memoir.

[Jon Klassen]

That's what I was gonna say. That is where the dreaminess. Dreaminess is. Right. Like, the kids are. So when they talk to Mac about that book, whenever I'm around them, their eyes are lit up by the idea that they know that it didn't happen and that they're also partly convinced that it did. And the way that Mac answers the questions about it maintains that and that the dreaminess, the relationship to reality and the phasing in and out. The execution of the book itself seems, like, super tight. But the. But the looseness of it is in the premise of whether it happened.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Jon Klassen]

It does feel like it has to increasingly be in there somewhere for us. Right. Like, it's like whether it's in the execution of the thing or whether it's in its basic larger conception, like that without it, we kind of lose interest.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And I, like, I only just thought of this, but as I was reading it, there's. There's a lot of times where you say, it's true. Go look it up. And that feels very like a commentary on our modern day. Like, do your research.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That's how you can trust me is because I'm saying you should do the research, which implies that I've done it and it's true.

[Mac Barnett]

Well, I think that there are two things there. Right. One is, like, one thing is just on this basic level, that trick. If I say, look it up, you can look it up and it's true. But there's a million other things that aren't true that I say that I do not tell you to look up. But, like, I try to use that just for the sake of the artwork, like, for it to maintain this fiction, to just be like, well, there is really a golf course on the main street of that town, so this guy must really be, like, telling me the truth. But I also think that just in general, whether it's like, our particular moment and information in this age, or just the experience of being a kid, an adult, saying, I am telling you the whole truth. And you as a kid are like, no, you're not. And I know that you're not. But I can't find it, like, you know, that authority, the authority of adulthood and the authority of authors and the authority of the book that, like, just comes with this thing as an object that is placed in libraries and classrooms and is, like, revered. I get it. Cause I revere it. But I'm not interested in that either. I want to, like. I always want to knock that down and just be like, look, just because this adult who got a publishing deal is insisting that the world is this way, like, you don't have to believe everything that he says. And so I think that there is something like that artistic stance in itself. I love to just be like, yeah, this is an adult. And that's what I perform when I go. And the kids talk to me, too, is I will continue to give you that knife's edge of, like, yeah, sure, yes, this is all true. And yet there's something slightly off. I do think that that is, like, you're in that situation a lot as a kid. And so I am then reprocessing it or performing it in some way as an artwork there.

[Jon Klassen]

You know, it is also, like, rhythmically useful, too, right? As, like, a. Like, just the thing to say at the end of a paragraph to be like, yeah, it's true. You can totally. It's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And I've heard you guys talk about this elsewhere, but I feel like it's. It was so interesting. I'd love for you to speak to it a little bit. That nature of, like, lying to kids or making. Making inconsistencies between art and text that make them think critically is, like, a really interesting thing to do. Especially in this moment, I would say. Can you guys speak to that for a little bit?

[Mac Barnett]

Well, I guess a little bit of this is just like, this is essential to the form of the picture book. And I think we talk a lot about it in that context. So a picture book, if we say it's gonna be words and pictures telling a story together and that they share the work, but they do it in this sort of fluid and interesting way. There's a Sendak quote that says, like, the pictures say what the words don't, the words say what the pictures don't.

[Jon Klassen]

Or something like that.

[Mac Barnett]

That is kind of how they work. That dynamic of leaving some space. So that the words are only telling you part of things so that the reader, the kid being read to, has to look at the pictures to fill in the rest of it. That's exciting. It's dynamic. It's a very active way of getting these stories. But, but I think the most interesting picture books there is some tension between text and image. The dynamic is, you know, not only is it not redundant so that you don't ever say like, John was wearing his blue. His favorite blue shirt and then the shirt is blue, but you just say John was wearing his favorite shirt. Then kids look at the picture of the shirt to learn more about the shirt. That's interesting. Right? You want to separate information into words and pictures, but you actually want them to disagree a little bit. You want like the, the pictures to overplay it and the words to underplay it or vice versa. Or sometimes you want the words and pictures to contradict each other. And I think John and I like doing that a lot.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

As soon as you do things.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

That Sendak quote as like a formal jumping off point if it, if you agree with just the fact that, you know, it would be boring for the words and pictures to do the same thing. Even if you don't politically minded about the idea of reading critically and how you shouldn't trust everything you read. If you just dig down formally on that trick to be like, let's keep ratcheting up that relationship and that tension, you find yourself pretty quickly backing this up. To be like, yeah. To separate them more and more, to see how far you can get them apart before it breaks or before they start arguing with each other and interacting and then you're in like some meta stuff. Even if you didn't have any intention of doing any of that stuff or any creative interest in it, if you just go with that rule of like, these two things shouldn't do the same thing, you're very quickly in territory that you find yourself like. Yeah. Commenting on this and broadly teaching your reader to not believe everything they read.

[Mac Barnett]

And I think it's interesting. We talk about this a lot. So in a picture book, if the words tell you things are one way and the pictures tell you things are another way, you're always gonna believe the pictures. I can't think of a time where you would believe the words.

[Jon Klassen]

Right.

[Mac Barnett]

So if the text of a picture book says the weather was fine and then it's a picture of a thunderstorm, you're gonna be like, the words aren't getting it right. Like it is raining. You believe the picture. And so you get very quickly there to the inadequacy of language to describe the world. Right. You get to. Also, now we're back into authority, like, yeah, an adult using words to describe the world and you, a kid, are looking at the world and seeing something else again. That is something that happens all the time and that is built into the picture book. The picture book, because I'll say, as a writer, I love it because it acknowledges the inadequacy of language. It says words are not going to be enough to tell this story. And in fact, it in some ways feels always a little bit about the inadequacy of language to me, which is.

[Jon Klassen]

A really useful talking to illustrators who begin to write like you were talking about earlier. Like, I think that a lot of illustrators, myself included, are really insecure about their abilities as writers because it wasn't where we started.

[Mac Barnett]

Right.

[Jon Klassen]

And that, yeah, that acknowledgment, that trick to be like, yeah, what if. What if this isn't my strength? And what if. Or at least, what if the two things have to count on each other and the admission of that in the writing to be like, I don't know, actually the best, most beautiful way to describe this. What. What if that's what the book is about? Or at least what if that is what this kind of writing is about? There's very few other forms that let you do that successfully without it feeling like you just didn't know how to write.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, yeah. You know, like, it's so interesting. Like, Ishiguro, the. The novelist, he. When he was on his last book tour, he was asked, like, who his influences were and he was like, oh, contemporary picture books. I. I'm really interested in them. And I, like, I.

[Jon Klassen]

We're pretty sure he meant ours. You know, we're pretty sure he was probably.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I was hoping it was going to go.

[Jon Klassen]

He's never. His publicist didn't write back. But like, we.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, yeah, we've written. We've written so many emails to his publicist.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Can he just say, sam and Dave, dig a hole. Just anywhere, any context.

[Jon Klassen]

Come on. We know you're thinking it.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, but I think that, like, he is somebody like, I. His work is so picture book, like. And he is another person who, like, is, as a novelist, who is in such tight control of his prose, is also always talking a little bit about, like, the inadequacy of language. Right. Like, so he's most famous probably for the Remains of the Day. Have you read that, Andy? I Haven't read it so good. It is about a butler serving a manor house in the late 30s, early 40s in Britain. And it's first person narration. And he pulls this magic trick off where you will realize that the scenes that the butler is describing are not exactly what is happening, even though there's.

[Jon Klassen]

Nobody else telling you it's going on yet.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

There's a scene where he is like, crying while. While serving this family. And you don't know that he's crying. He's not telling you that he's upset. But the way that other people are reacting to him. You, you. You real. He starts to like he's reporting himself.

[Jon Klassen]

A little more, hearing them say.

[Mac Barnett]

Because he doesn't know. He doesn't know that he's betraying himself. And you get this thing that John and I will try to achieve in a book where John will draw a scene and I will describe it. And by laying the words and pictures next to each other, you create this tension he is creating only with words. The tension between the scene as it exists and the scene as it's described. And it is the most beautiful magic trick. And it's like it's picture book writing in a novel. It's so. It's so cool.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That is really cool.

[Mac Barnett]

And I'm so. And I'm so glad that Sam and Dave was such a big influence on him when he was writing the Remains of the day 30 years before Sam, Dave was published. Because, you know, the anxiety of influence. Harold Bloom, he says that you can influence people in the past, and that's us.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I haven't heard that. But there's a couple of things I want to kind of go back to real quick. First, I just want to say that I love this thing about, you know, lying to kids in a way that gets them interested, gets them thinking critically in modern times. I feel like that just makes tons of sense and is like a really powerful thing to do and. And talk about through these. Thinking about it, like, oh, you have all these markers of authority. And it's similar nowadays. It's very easy to create your own new show online or whatever it is. You have these markers because you're an author and you're published and it's in the library and the librarians telling it to you and all that and just giving them the authority to have some critical thought, have their own perspective and know it's right. I just think that is really, really cool. And I just.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. Oh, thank you. I think there are, like, two things there. One is this like, I mean, this thing about lying also is like, that's all fiction, right? Like, that's literally what fiction is. It's like a lie that we all agree to. Coleridge called it the willing suspension of disbelief, right? Like that we. There's agency there, right? The willing suspension. Kids have a phrase for it that's really similar and I think is actually even prettier than Coleridge's, which is make believe. They make themselves believe, right? Like that. It's not. We're not duping our audience. We are again, we're engaging in a game. We say, like, let's, like once upon a time this happened and the kid makes believe. The kid decides, yeah, I am going to treat this as true. And this is what I do when I read novels too. It's just, I think kids are better at this. They can kind of straddle fantasy and reality and channel back and forth between the two in this way that is like, really, it's very natural for them. I think it's very useful for people to be able to do this. But it's like, it's why, it's why store. It's why we do stories.

[Jon Klassen]

They're also not threatened by it yet. They're not, they're not. Their sense of themselves built on, on. On 40 years of make believe yet. Right? Whereas, like, by now, how we operate in the world and where we live and what we wear and drive and all that stuff is all based on, to a certain extent, a bunch of assumptions that we've made that we've forgotten, we've made and forgot to explain to ourselves fully. But we're operating in the world on a. You know, this apparatus we've built is like, largely based on these things that we've kind of pieced together. But we would like to believe we know more firmly. And as soon as you begin to poke at that, it's like, well, no, no, no, no, no. I know some things for sure. If I don't, then like, this whole thing comes down where kids know, they don't know very much yet, and their sense of themselves isn't built on any of that stuff. And so they're very comfortable in this much looser framework. Have been like, well, maybe it's real, maybe it's not. I don't. It doesn't threaten my sense of myself to, to sit there with that. And so much of our work increasingly is being brave enough to, to do that as well as they do. To be like, yeah, what if this. And what if, like, what if we can poke at that without completely bringing down this house of cards of our sense of ourselves. It's. It's actually. Yeah, it's the reverse of what we thought, where it's like, we're supposed to have this authority and tell kids something, and instead we're just. We're trying to get back a little bit and understand what it's like to be able to do this very strongly. It's a strength, it feels like, that they have about it.

[Mac Barnett]

And then I think that's where we get to your second point, Andy, which is like. Yeah, I think that by letting kids interpret, by leaving gaps for them to fill in, it is a seeding of power to them. And I think that adults aren't used to that. We exist, and usually for good reason, in a position of authority to kids. But like books, fiction, art, this is one of the few places where adults and kids can meet as equals. I think it's uncomfortable for. For adults to. To do that a lot of the time. We're just not used to. That's not the relationship we have with kids. To say, like, what do you think? You're in charge of this right now?

[Andy J. Pizza]

It feels similar to why when I was growing up, it wasn't super normal for adults to apologize to kids. Yeah, it was kind of like a letting go of the illusion of authority or the illusion that we have it all figured out. It feels kind of in that realm. The other thing it makes me think of is this idea that there's a gap or the words and the pictures disagree with each other, and you're leaving it to the kid to point out the inconsistencies are real. You're letting them complete it. It gets back to what we were talking about earlier, where you're leaving space for the audience. And it reminds me of something that I feel makes sense, but I haven't fully wrapped my head around it. In the book Making Comics by, I think it's Scott McCloud. He talks about how he thinks that's what's so powerful about manga, which is really interesting to me, as my son is 13 and he's just like, gone through every. Every book that I will allow him to have. He's just gone through all of these series and his art. Scott McCloud's argument is just that it's a theory. He says, like, that this. The manga really leaves tons of room for you to be part of the journey. And he gives some examples, but I don't. I didn't fully feel like maybe just Because I don't have the wealth of experience reading them that I can't quite grasp it. But it feels like this kind of thing that you're talking about here, where you are. It only works if you let your audience have some intelligence in the way that they're approaching the work. Right. I don't know if you have other examples of that or have any thoughts on that, but it's really interesting. And I think we don't really like stuff that doesn't give us some of that.

[Jon Klassen]

I mean, Miyazaki, like, Japanese storytelling, generally.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

Like, both Mac and I are deep in the Miyazaki stuff because our kids are of the age and have been for a while. And the more you watch these movies and you're like, holy cow. Like, it's just. There's a comfort with symbolism and a use of it that is just, like, you can't even dig down enough. Like, there's just constant layers that they're working on and the line between what is symbolic and what is literally real in the movie and even what they're meant to be saying or if they're meant to be saying anything. Like, what is the. Like, it seems like what we really take from a lot of that stuff and the stuff we've been talking about is, like, how does a book feel like it ends when a book is over and an audience is finished? I think there's a conventional Western idea that, like, that means that you've answered a question that maybe the project has brought up or that you thought your audience had inherently. And I think the more we look at things that we really admire or things that we feel like we've made that really did what we hoped it would do, or at least got to a place where we were happy with it. It's more like a distillation of the question that we might all have, and it doesn't mean we have the answer. And that's kind of how you. It's a reframing of that authoritative relationship with the kid, too, where it's like, if you can put a question elegantly or more universally or more clear, clearly that's you using the skills you've gained over the last 40 years, that a kid might not have to do that. Where if you say, yeah. If you say the question and they're like, yeah, that's how I feel. That's right. I've never been able to put it that way because I've only been at this for four years. But that's a great way of putting that. Question. I do feel that way. That's as much exercise of authority and skill that you've accumulated than, like, trying to answer the question for them. And this great work that we like from any one of those places, but, like, certainly increasingly, cultures that aren't here have a comfort with that. And that is their goal, too. Great question.

[Mac Barnett]

We have another. Here's another example of stories that do this, though. Like fairy tales. Yeah, yeah. And folktales. And I think that, like, fairy tales, to me, feel so misunderstood. Like, why. Okay, so why are these. These enduring stories that we still tell? And I hear them talked a lot about as examples of, like, clean structure and, like, classical storytelling.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And I don't think I've read any real ones. Yeah, they're like a dream.

[Mac Barnett]

Yes. They're so dreamy. And it is these dreamy, weird parts that stick with us. Right. Also, they get talked about as, like, as. As examples of didactic fiction that is meant to just, like, instill good behavior in kids. And they're not that either. Kids misbehave and bad things happen to them sometimes. Sometimes they get away with it also. And also, most of the time, bad things happen to kids despite the fact that they didn't do anything wrong. They're just stories. They're just these great, rich stories with these, like, weird gaps in lacunae and bits of gristle that have never been shaved off, even in 400 years of retelling. Because it turns out that those are actually the most important, important parts. You know, like, John and I worked on a three Billy Goats gruff, and then I have one coming out with Carson Ellis Rumpelskin next year. And in all of them, it's like, when we go out and talk about them, people are like, why has this story stuck around? Like, what do you think it has to offer? And usually they think, like, what great lesson, what great piece of wisdom from the ancients is contained in here? And you're like, I don't know.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I.

[Mac Barnett]

It's just like. It's just got a weird beat. It's a beating heart inside a log. I don't know. Like.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, I do. Yeah. I. I feel that. I like. And I think, going back to the skull, what I. So, I really like. I personally really like things that resolve well. But I like also when you have a thing that makes it linger on. And I feel like the skull, I felt, like, resolved well in that the characters chose to do what they were going to do. But I also felt attention with the choices they made. So there was a feeling of like, I don't know if they did the quote unquote right thing here.

[Jon Klassen]

No, I think that's right. I think first of all, there's not a clear thing that that would have been. I don't think like the morally right. No, I don't either thing to do that wasn't. And that's what I like stories best. When the options presented, or at least what ends up happening feels organically correct. Like you understand why that character felt like and did do that. And then you empathize with that or even feel again like a catharsis of having watched it play out. And in the end, there is usually a beat in my stuff where everyone's kind of at the end and maybe they're examining it, or maybe we're meant to be examining it in that moment, but there is some breath left for at the end. Everyone's still hanging out for a second and everyone's like, is that. Is that the right. Was everyone like what happened yesterday? And that's how a lot of life feels anyway. And so it's just like giving that be and that feeling like the end, something is resolved. Like, I. I feel like I. I'm not satisfied with. With one of my own stories unless the problem is definitively solved one way or the other. Right. Like, I wouldn't want it to feel like things didn't get really nailed down in some direction.

[Mac Barnett]

But you, but you wanted to arise out of. Out of the characters desires or actions and not kind of some superimposed bit of classical storytelling.

[Jon Klassen]

And there are. I think there are permissions. It doesn't work all the time. I think what attracted me to the skull in particular was that the skeleton himself, the. The headless skeleton is a great vehicle for this kind of thing. We're talking about if it had been like an evil man, even with a face and a voice and things he said, running around chasing them, you couldn't have the ending. We have the ticket. There was a headless skeleton who only screamed one thing robotically over and over again. The design of that is very important in books generally. There's this anecdote I use a lot, but it's still so interesting to talk about. Is like Pinocchio, the Disney Pinocchio. When they're under the water looking for Monstro near the end of the film and they're meeting all these fish on the way and asking if they've seen Monstro. And all these fish are swimming away because they're very scared of even the word they're Very cute fish with like expressions. And they get all wide eyed when they're asked about it. And they have like range and they have like people faces kind of. And then it cuts to a school of like tuna that are swimming in the dark. And we're close to Monstro and we're away from Pinocchio and the cricket and everything. And then these tuna look like a different movie almost. They're like shiny and their eyes are expressionless and they're just sort of floating along in a group of like a hundred. And then the whale comes into frame and eats all of them. And that's how you're introduced to Monstro. Design of those two fish are very important that they're different. If it had been a hundred personality scared fish, if they look scared when they're about to be eaten, you would track that and be really like disturbed and you'd break something. Right? But they are designed to be eaten. Those fish are symbols of fish. And they're meant to introduce Monstro, the scale of him and what he's capable of doing. But you can design your characters for what their job is in the story. And so a headless skeleton is designed to be destroyed five times over. Right. And you make sure to keep that rule. He can't say anything else but his one line. He like, it's all in caps. It's not like it's with a period. There's not even an exclamation mark. I don't think, like anything you can do to back yourself away from attaching yourself to that character because audiences want to attach themselves so badly, they will work so hard to empathize with a character or with even like a robot, even an AI, right? We're finding out we're very good at empathizing and emotionally attaching ourselves. They'll take any window in. And so your job, when you decide that, okay, the story structure works, the more she gets to destroy this villain over and over and over again. Then your visual job and even in the writing is to say, then your permission slip has to be, am I feeling bad at any point when we do this? And if I am, then I have to remove what makes me feel that way. We want to feel as an audience, permission to do this for character over and over again. And so that was the interest there was like you buy yourself permission wherever you can to do the thing you want to do in the story, but it doesn't work for everything. There's a very easy way to feel too violent or to feel too dark. Or to feel like, too mean with the same movements. But hopefully what you've done in the end is crafted the thing that gives you permission to do that other thing.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Just a little thing to wrap that up. I probably have just consumed too much Jungian thought, because my feeling when I'm reading it was like, you need to turn towards the shadow. Like, the. The skeleton guy is gonna help you get back to whole. And you just killed him. And it felt. But what was great about that. I'm sorry for everybody and giving away the spoilers. Okay. But. But, I mean, it's been around for how many hundreds of years you had time to. To read it?

[Jon Klassen]

But.

[Andy J. Pizza]

But I just thought. What I liked about the ending, though, is it felt very. It felt very, like, mature in the way that fairy tales feel mature. So you can give them to kids, but it gives them a window into a reality. And it felt like two kind of. It kind of felt like the end of Eternal sunshine or something, where it's like, okay, they're gonna choose to be together anyway. Might not be the best thing for these two. That's how. That's how I was reading.

[Jon Klassen]

No, but that's not my job. Right. Our job is. Yeah, right. Like that again, it begins to feel like you can feel the authors taking control of the wheel a bit too much when. That kind of stuff.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

And so, like, that's not your job. I don't know. I. It, again, it would sound like hippie stuff to me not too long ago, but, like, this idea of following your character, like what Mac just said, where it's like, what would they want to do? I don't know what's best for them. It's not my job. I want them to be together. If I've, you know, if my job here is to have crafted a relationship that feels valuable and these two characters to have meant something to each other and whether or not it's good for them isn't my job to judge. I want, like, they, like. The happy ending here, is that they get to be together in a nice, quiet situation. And whether or not that's. We talked. I think we brought up afterwards the ending of Let the Right One In. Did you ever see that with the two kids? It's like a vampire movie. And there's a kid who's eternally a vampire, and she finds a little boy to, like, help her be a vampire. And at the end of the movie, it's just them heading out to God knows what, and his fate is probably not great, but they, like, Each other very much, and you're satisfied with that. And there's a tension there, though, too. It does feel like the ending of a ghost story where you're like, this is happy because they like each other, but he's in for a rough ride and. But there's the duality of that. It's boring otherwise. Right. Like, we can relate to that. We have friends we want to hang out with that we know we probably, you know, this isn't going to go great.

[Mac Barnett]

All we were even talking about, we were talking about this the other weekend. Like, speaking of Miyazaki, the ending of Ponyo. I love so much that freeze frame where she's in the air kissing him and his expression is like mild panic. This is like, this is they. Yeah. It is a beautiful friendship and they are in some way meant for each other. This is inevitable that they would end up together. But they are basically betrothed now, right? They are linked forever. She is far more powerful and intelligent than he is, even in her diminished human form. Like, it's just this completely mismatched, strange thing. They've had this huge adventure and there's the joy of the adventure, the movie we've just shared. And then she's like, great, and now this is forever. And it's like the end of the Graduate too, right? Of just like, oh, my God, like, here we are now. And it just has this moment of just like, ooh, this is like, I've been rooting for them, but this isn't. This isn't perfect, is it? It's just inevitable.

[Jon Klassen]

But that kind of confirmation we are much more interested in than something that isn't. That doesn't feel even real. Like, we can't. You couldn't name a relationship, Even when you're 4 years old, that doesn't have a power imbalance. And so when you're confirming the existence of that two kids, and that is the word for it, it's not that you're inventing something that new to them. You're like, oh, look at this new way of having a friend where one is more in control of the other.

[Mac Barnett]

No, you're like, you know how you like that one friend more than he likes you? Like, here it is. Like, that is the most recognizable dynamic.

[Jon Klassen]

And like, that's what it's going to feel like your whole life is that someone's going to be wearing the pants in certain, like, areas more than the other. And part of the joy and the confusion of it is your giving over to that and being like, I Am happy in my position in this too. This is all everywhere I want to be. And I don't like that's how we calculate our relationships. There isn't some chart about pros and cons here. You just the best ones and the most memorable ones and the ones that will define your life are the ones that you are helpless to in one way or the other. And even just describing that, again, just like a beautiful description of that is the work it feels like. And. And kids seem to get it when you're honest about it. And you don't make unrealistic dynamics that don't hold water because that seems to be, you know, how it ought to go. It's not even how it ought to go. We don't think, what would that look like?

[Mac Barnett]

And I actually think the result is like. And when you do that, like, and we talk about this a lot of just like anything that's too simplistic. You know, a character who's been quote unquote, bad for 31 pages and then right before the last page has an epiphany and changes his entire character. And like, the liar learns that it's always good to tell the truth. The selfish kid learns that she should share. This isn't how the world works. It may be how adults wish it worked, but when you are putting art like that in front of kids, I think it's really alienating and it's a terrible advertisement for what the power of literature is, which is to describe the complexities of the world. And instead you show them this weird thing that the. It's just. You're like, again, even at age 4, you're like, I've. I've been. I've been at 50 recesses. I've never seen this happen. Like, what is this book talking about?

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah, yeah. And I think that the bummer part about that is that that's not. They don't even necessarily come to the conclusion that this is book, book. This book is incorrect. They feel like maybe their read on things that they've seen wasn't the correct thing. Right. Were they like, that's my suggestion?

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. I mean, that's sort of like, those are the two options. Option one is that, like, I don't really love books, they don't show me the world, and they're just gonna go seek the world elsewhere. And then option two is, well, there's something wrong with me. Because this thing, books, which adults keep saying is the most magical, powerful, wise, true thing in the universe, it doesn't reflect my Life at all. So there must be something wrong with me.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your sub stack, which is really great, by the way, tell people about it. And then I want to do this in the context of being a fan. You know, it's interesting. That's one of the things that strikes me about it is seeing established folks fan out about something which is not a super common thing really, I don't think. I think there's a general idea that there comes. There comes a time in your journey where you cease to be a fan or you should cease to be a fan. And so that's really refreshing. So, yeah, I don't know if you could tell us about. Tell us what it's called. Tell us what you guys do there.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, it's called looking at picture books. And a lot of it is literally we just look at a single picture book and try to figure out why it's so good. And John and I write the posts by texting each other.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It's a good device.

[Mac Barnett]

Thank you.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I like it.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

It comes from the fact that we.

[Jon Klassen]

Just text each other a lot. It occurs, texting each other that we should text each other about this.

[Mac Barnett]

But yeah, we'll look at where the Wild Things Are or Shortcut or Goodnight Moon, and we'll look at specific spreads and page turns and we'll just try to figure out kind of how.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

How it works. I think that the picture book is one of the great literary forms and that it deserves a place alongside the novel, poetry, the short story, theater. It doesn't get its due, and I think it doesn't get its due for two reasons. One is that we just. We don't understand how picture books work. Right. Like, we have some sense of how the novel works. Like, we know how chapters work or you know, that it's going to be about this long. We have a sort of an instinctive formal familiarity with it. Probably even with, like, with sonnets, we know that even if you don't remember exactly what a sonnet is, if you heard a sonnet, you'd be like, I remember learning about this at school. Right. Okay. And then it's going to do this at the end. We don't have that knowledge of how picture books work.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Time.

[Mac Barnett]

The other reason that picture books are underestimated is because kids are underestimated. And that's the stuff we've been talking about up until now, I think. But I think a lot of looking at picture books is getting into the first thing, like, how do we actually talk about the formal techniques and tricks that are unique to the picture book and explain how they create an effect on us when we're reading them.

[Jon Klassen]

I think the other thing too, about the fanning out on stuff and where we might, what we've discovered anyway, about doing it more and more is that a lot of what we're talking about isn't nest. It can be the work and the decisions that we assume or know the author or illustrator made. But then a lot of the other talk ends up being about our responses to what's going on, whether the author meant that or not. And sometimes we get comments or we even have discussions about, and we've done posts about like authorial intent, like, you know, 60 year old book. How are we supposed to know what the author was trying to do here and how are we speaking authoritatively on it? And we, we've worked really hard to kind of develop a tone where we're not stating the definitive theory on what we thought they were up to, what we're interested in. And all we can really know is how we're responding to it. And so the talk has become more and more like a celebration and examination of what we do when we're reading something or taking something in and how hard we look at it and what we're feeling when we given the smallest or largest prompts or most skillful prompts, or sometimes we look at stuff that maybe wasn't as skillfully made, but we're still in it, we're still invested. And what is that? What's going on? And like just how, how lucky it is to have a job in the business of that, to prompt those kinds of things to be dealing with people's sensitivities all the time. But just it's fun to talk about and to acknowledge that it happens. Because that's our response to everything all day is like we are having emotional responses to things we're seeing and we are reacting. There are decisions being made. I think some of the excitement too is that with picture books, it's almost like to me, it feels like when you see people break down like company logos or package design or something, because there are decisions being made and there's good and bad work in those areas, but they're also just wallpaper by now, right? All the stuff on the fronts of boxes and bott models and things are just. They're there to inform you about the thing, but they're also there to, you know, tell a bit of a story. And as soon as you begin to, like, acknowledge again that someone made that. That was a series of conscious decisions. It becomes interesting to talk about because you've just been staring at it for however many years, not thinking about someone behind it. And picture books, I think, are kind of the same way. They are. They're ubiquitous in all these children's spaces, and there's shelves of them, and some of them are kind of wallpapery. They are kind of flat, and they didn't really do much. And so you lump that in. And as soon as you begin to pick someone up and say, look at what happened in here. Look at what they did, look at this moment. It's exciting to look at the exact same object and to understand that there's something going on behind it. It's exciting.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. You have that with Goodnight Moon, which came out over 60 years ago. Why is this stuck around? Why do we all know this book? Why is it still read?

[Andy J. Pizza]

And.

[Mac Barnett]

And it's, again, you know, it's on that fairytale trajectory. It's because there is something there, some life force, some beating heart. And some of this may be the author and the illustrator's intent. You know, we do have, in Margaret Wise Brown, like, one of the great American poets, Clement Heard, an incredible painter. Some of it will be accidental, and this is true of any artwork.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

But it is about, like. It's about giving. Giving picture books, like, the dignity of a real read, which they deserve and which is, by the way, like, kids are doing it all the time. And this is the fun thing about it is that, like, really, like, children are children's books smartest, most devoted critics. It will always be that way, and it should be that way. We're just trying to, like, kind of catch up with them a little bit with this thing.

[Andy J. Pizza]

You guys know a lot about these books. And I was curious if one of the things that I found myself being most curious about with this sub stack was this. Both of you having this focus on picture books professionally and then having this kind of fandom or. Or interest in the history of picture books, different picture books that you. You love. Did that come, like, did this start, like you were major fans of this direction, or did it develop over time as you found yourself in that place? Like, did you. Were you before you were working in picture books, crazy about picture books, or did it happen over time? Because I think there's something interesting there, because I feel like anybody that reads that, my guess would be that they would assume you guys, as kids were. This was your only thing. And since day One, you've been just collecting these things and analyzing these things. And I have to imagine at least it's somewhat different to that.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Does that make sense as a question?

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah. Okay.

[Mac Barnett]

It does make sense.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

I think John is trying to calibrate his own. Well, yeah, I always love picture books. I had a kind of a light. My mom reading to me was really important. That was how I figured out I loved books. And then I think just kind of by accident. So my mom got a big bookshelf. She had a big bookshelf in her house that was empty. It was just. It was designed to be filled with my books that she got me. So as we got picture books, it started to get filled. And then as I started reading novels, they just went on the higher shelves. But she never put the picture books away. And I don't think she meant. I don't think it was not any statement about the value of picture books. Although I do think that she also loved reading those picture books to me and maybe wanted them around. But I just grew up with them, like, sticking around. And in high school, I started teaching reading to kids. I would volunteer at this elementary school down the hill. And they just had these terrible classroom materials. These, like, primers and readers that were awful. And. And I remember, like, just sitting next to a kid who was working so hard to, like, to decode the sentence on the page. And when he did, it sucked. It was, like, really boring. And he just, like, he looked at me.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It's a great point.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. He was so he's working at.

[Andy J. Pizza]

He's like, all right, what does this say? Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

And he was so betrayed. And I was like. It was one of those where I was just like, you're right. You're right. Like, this is bad. So I was like, I'm gonna just go. I'm gonna go home. I went home and I picked out some of my favorite picture books. And then starting in high school, they became like, a really active part of my life. Cause I started working with elementary school kids then. John, you had a little. I feel like when we met each other, we were on the same place with picture books. But you had maybe, like, a slightly different. Different.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah, I was surprised by them. It was a weird, like. Like, usual suspects looking at the big wall behind you moment when picture books came up again. Because it was a bunch of, like, vague impulses or, like, reactions to things. I'd gone to school for animation since I was a kid. I thought I wanted to work in animation. I wanted to be A guy with one of the desks drawing the Little Mermaid over and over again. Or I just wanted a job drawing and I didn't care what it was.

[Mac Barnett]

As long as it was the Little Mermaid, as long as it was a.

[Jon Klassen]

Little Mermaid, as long as she was in there.

[Andy J. Pizza]

You went around a studio like, are you guys doing a remake of Little Mermaid per chance? Yeah, that's all I want.

[Jon Klassen]

But I remember a day in school when I was in school, we had an old art history teacher or like animation history teacher who brought in these reels, like literal film reels of these UPA films which were like from the 50s and 60s. And these guys had done short film adaptations of picture books. Some of them they'd done Madeline and they'd done one called Rudy Toot Toot and one called Gerald McBoing Boing which was a Dr. Seuss story it turned out. But the style of them was all like the 60s kind of style. This really reduced, graphic, kind of jazz art inspired stuff. It was all very like kind of frame to frame, much less fluid than the Disney stuff or anything else we've been looking at. And I remember like it like changed my brain to see it. And I didn't know why I was reacting so emotionally to was like I remembered something I hadn't thought of since I was very little. And the only picture books I had really a lot of growing up were at my grandparents place, my dad's room. He was the only boy and five kids and so they'd given him his own room. Everybody else had to share another bedroom. But that meant that his room was also the library room was where they kept all the records and all the books and all the magazines and the Reader's Digests and everything was in his room. And when we visited my grandparents house, we would stay in that room still. And it was the same deal, just a wall of books. And they had all of the Dr. Seuss ones, all the I can read ones and they were all published around the same time. And there's this aesthetic in them. And I would sit on his bed and pull his books down and just read them over and over again. And I hadn't looked at them since then, I don't think. I didn't keep them around. I didn't think of them through high school, through college or anything. And then I went in to work at the animation studios and I had done a student film. And the student film an art director at Simon and Schuster wrote me after college saying like, hey, I saw this thing on YouTube you want to try and make a book out of it? And I thought, yeah, that sounds like, sure, I'll try that. And so I went and found a copy of the only book I could remember for that shelf, my dad's shelf, which was Salmon The Firefly, a P.D. eastman book. And it was like 88 pages long or something like that they used to do. And so I gave her an 88 page dummy based on my student film. And that was my. The first time I'd looked at a picture book, I think in a long time. It wasn't on my mind. But looking at that book again, I remember thinking like that day in college where we watched all those movies and then suddenly the form here, it was almost like this background thing had burst into the front to be like, wait a minute, this has been a huge part of my creative brain. And I've been looking just to the right of it for like 20 years, thinking, I wanted to make this stuff. What if I had always wanted to do this instead? And it was this really, like, I understood just like so much of it made sense of these weird. I was running into walls so much in animation and I didn't understand why. What was it about this? I wanted to do this. Here I am working in it. Why am I arguing all the time with myself about it? Yeah. Opening up that book and working on that first one being like, oh, no, I was running crooked the whole time. And that's how it felt. And then after that, then the floodgates opened up and then I couldn't stop getting all these old ones and examining the new ones and kind of catching up, but also just being like, right. That's right. And then since then, it's just been voracious looking at every book you can find just indiscriminately kind of. And yeah, so it was a bit of a different way in, but the last 15 years, I think for Mac and I have looked kind of the same where we just.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. And I think when John and I met each other, we were both like on the, on the verge of having our first picture books come out. And we met and, and we ended up talking about Frog and Toad at this party for like hours. And it was really like that conversation that is the reason we became friends. And I do think that, like, in some way, like what we do on looking at picture books, which I hope it feels like just like two friends who love this stuff talking about books like, that's the origin story of our friendship and it's. We've Been doing it.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It.

[Mac Barnett]

We've been doing it since that night.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, that's exactly how it feels. And the thing, the next piece that I wanted to talk about was, obviously, everyone gets to their place creatively in a unique way. That's part of what's great about it. But you notice certain sorts of patterns. One that I think is interesting is the critical impulse of an artist. So I like this idea that one thing, that one leap from consumer to creator can sometimes be. You're not just a fan. You form, like, opinions. And some of those opinions are different to your favorite artists. And I think about. I was watching this. This is an example of that. I was watching this interview between Seth Rogen and Jason Siegel, and I thought, these are two people that I really respect creatively. I love their writing and humor and everything. And I thought when I was a kid or a teenager watching this, and I'm watching them pretty actively disagree with each other a lot of stuff. I would have thought, okay, maybe I would have thought, like, who's my favorite of these two? And that person's right. That's why I think that's what I would have heard it. Whereas now, you know, almost 40, been doing this for a long time, I hear it completely differently. I hear it as. That's exactly what they need to be doing in order to create their own point of view. And so. And I feel like that's an. That's an important thing for. I wish I would understood that earlier because I think I. I consume tons of things from my heroes, listening to their point of view and thinking, either I'm wrong or I'm going to have to learn that or whatever. And I was curious if to. I'm curious to hear what you guys think about that little theory. And then also if you have favorite picture book makers where you're like, you know what? Like, I don't see eye to eye with them. I wouldn't have made it that way. That's not how I move through making something. But I appreciate. But you appreciate it. That's part of the fun, is that it's not yours.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Does this make sense?

[Mac Barnett]

Oh, there's so much there. I mean, I think that sort of like heavily reactive, almost like cantankerous way of reading stuff, like, whether it's people I admire or not. Like, that to me, has been so linked to how I write. If I read something and I think I would do this differently, often it's really visceral. I get angry and I'm like, it is one of the things that is a strong enough emotion to get me into the chair, because I generally don't want to sit and write. But it is that reaction.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I have a creative impulse that I feel like it would be easy to not even recognize that as what it is.

[Mac Barnett]

I talk to kids about that a lot where, like. Cause often you're asked to give advice when you're visiting kids. And so much of my writing for children is, like, avoiding giving kids advice. I don't think it's the job. And then suddenly they're like, Mr. Author, give them advice. And it's like, I don't. But one of the things is that I do think is maybe useful to think I talk to them about. Yeah, read all the time. But also, if you want to be a writer, reading books that you don't like is very useful that I learn more from the books I hate than the books that I love. And you can even feel when I say books that I hate. At a school, there are teachers sometimes who are like, but that. Yeah, that's right. And we do love books. And part of loving books is hating some books. And there is sort of a. There's a every book is magic attitude that we have when we're talking to kids that we know is not true.

[Jon Klassen]

Some books are not. And.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. And some books are just not magic for you.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Exactly.

[Mac Barnett]

And some of them are crap.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Like, also, there is a thing of, like, what. What is magic for you is a really important thing. Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

Yes. And. And so like that. And like, what we're talking about is developing taste and then app of view. And that should start early. And I think that, like, one useful thing I can do is to just be an author who obviously loves books very much, who says, like, I get angry when I'm reading a book that I don't like. And then I start writing this other piece of just like, looking at stuff that people you admire make and like, thinking, I wouldn't do that. And I still admire it. That's so much of reading.

[Jon Klassen]

Well, that's most of it, isn't it? Increasingly, I feel like, is that you get attracted to the things you wouldn't. And it's not that you disagree with them. It's the. Just the difference between not thinking you would never have gotten there and not admiring it or not thinking like, God, I wish I could almost. But it's like, well, Mac has a story. I like to tell this one because it is kind of complimentary in a way to me. But, Mac, when we first, I think when we first started talking about stuff, we were talking about who we were reading and who we liked and everything. And I think I was going through. Mac has this giant library of beautiful books, and I was. I picked out Dead Souls. And Max, like, have you read Dead Souls by Gogol? And I said, no, I don't really love him. I've read some short stories, and they always kind of annoyed me. And he's like, that's weird, because that's basically who you are. Like, that's your. I was like, what?

[Mac Barnett]

No.

[Jon Klassen]

Come on.

[Mac Barnett]

And like, no.

[Jon Klassen]

And then. And then that. What's called the George Saunders book about analyzing Russian short stories came out a couple years ago, which is if that's. It's an amazing book. I've read it a couple times. And he has a description of Gogo.

[Mac Barnett]

Swim in the pond, in the rain. Swim in a pond, in the rain.

[Jon Klassen]

In a pond. In a pond. In. Not in the pond.

[Mac Barnett]

In a pond. In a pond.

[Jon Klassen]

But he analyzes Russian short stories and talks about these different writers in there. And he describes Gogol in it and does one of his stories, and it's my least favorite story in that book. And his description of Gogol is like looking into a very. Almost too clean mirror where I'm like, oh, man. Like, he, like. And it's not even the stuff I like about what my preoccupation are. It's just whatever he says. It's like, yeah, yeah, that's me, all right. Like, from every angle that's got. And like, Mac was right. But it's like, you're not going to make necessarily, and this is not a lesson of that book, too, is that you don't really necessarily make what you set out to make. You don't even make the things that have the same outlines of the stuff that you love about that form, what brought you to books or brings you to any form, if you like. After a while, that's not what you're going to make. The maturing is that you have to kind of give that up and be like, I'm not going to make. Make Chekhov. I'm not going to be him. I might be something I don't actually even really like when I get a distant enough view of it.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

And so a lot of feels a.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Little bit like, yeah, when you meet somebody who's too much like you.

[Jon Klassen]

And, yeah. You know, you're like, no, yeah, yeah, it is the same. I think it is the same thing is that, like, you don't. Yeah. And so a lot of the writers, one of the kids book ones we talk about is William Styles. Stag. Stigma.

[Mac Barnett]

Stag.

[Jon Klassen]

Anyway, everything he does, how he draws, how he writes and everything is like opposite to what my impulses are. Like. He's a beautiful, like, verbose writer and just paragraphs on the page and his writing is loose and suggestive and quick. And I'm the opposite of both of those things. And he's my favorite guy. And like, I think you can learn larger things from them. I certainly have like structural big thinks, how he puts together something. But you, you cover your tracks pretty good on stealing from someone like that. If you. If that's even the business you're in. After a while, most of the time you just sort of admire the work and it's nice to do that too. If you look at people who you're sort of like and who you do like, you're stealing a lot. Right. Or you don't even. Even if you don't want to be, you're kind of shoplifting from them.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Right.

[Jon Klassen]

Whereas people you don't completely understand who are just so far out from what your impulses are, are. And you can't. Like, it's so far away that immediately you're just like, I'm just going to sit and enjoy this. It feels good to do that, to turn it all off and just sit in this great work. Maybe that's why you get attracted to those. That kind of stuff too, is just. It just feels good to shut it off and you can just read again.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, I feel that there's a lot of stuff where if I really get blown away by something, it's something I don't understand. Yeah, it's like I don't understand what.

[Jon Klassen]

What.

[Andy J. Pizza]

What they did. I don't know why it made me cry or feel something or whatever. I do have no idea. I wouldn't have no way of taking anything from that because I don't get it. Do you have any. And I don't know if anything will come to mind, but do you have any examples of something that you read maybe from. Might be easier to speak to something that you're a fan of or an author or illustrator that you're a fan of than something you just genuinely hate and don't want to name, but where you read it and you were like, oh, I would have done that differently. Or I would have. Or I actually feel like, yeah, if.

[Jon Klassen]

I was doing like you actively like, it's not that you just would have done it differently, but you just. I wish they hadn't done that like, that.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It could be either. It could be.

[Mac Barnett]

I have this. I have this with, like, an entire basically run of work, in some ways. Yeah, like that. So Maurice Sendak has been my favorite since I was a kid. He was my favorite author and illustrator when I was a kid. And I didn't really understand what an author and illustrator was. I just recognized his line, the way he drew the world so much. So I grew up in California. I grew up in the Bay Area. And the first time I went to New York in high school, I recognized it. It was, like, nostalgic for me because I was like, oh, I grew up here in Maurice Sendak's drawings. And I just, like. I loved his work then, I love his work now. Like, as a writer, I come to it again, and I admire it even more. Think that he's the. I think he was the greatest maker of picture books and also the greatest writer about picture books. His essays about how the form works, it's just like. It's the best work we had toward developing, like, a real body of literary criticism about this form. Everything outside after. After a book called Outside Over There, which he makes in 1980, I'm gonna say. And so we're talking now about, like, more than 30 years of work. The picture books I like, they don't do it for me.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Right?

[Mac Barnett]

Like, yeah, none of the work really gets me very excited after that. There are parts of it that I like more than others, but, like, there's, like, three decades of stuff that I at least don't find what I love about his work in there. I still think he's the greatest to ever do it. And he's still my favorite. And maybe what he was doing was important to him to do. I actually find it super liberating to just be like, there's not actually a lot in there. I don't get. When I read that stuff, I do not get the thing where I'm like, I know what I would do with this. I don't have that impulse. I. What I get from that is this story about, like, what it would mean to make this stuff for my whole life. Like, I started pretty young. He started pretty young. It's a long time. Like, it. Like, okay, like, maybe I. I could have. I could do 30 years of, like, stuff that I'm just, like. I'm loving it. I don't really care what you all think.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It feels.

[Mac Barnett]

Here's. Here's. Here's another one here. Here's some more me interpreting William Blake's. Drawings.

[Jon Klassen]

It's.

[Mac Barnett]

This one's for my brother.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Again, it feels a little bit when you're saying it that way. It reminds me of when you love a band and if. When you love someone's work, there's a Venn diagram of taste that has this overlap. We're like, oh, I like this thing that you like or do. And then sometimes a band takes a turn and it's not part of the overlap. And then they just go that way. And you're like, okay, it's. And that's part of the evolution of what they become. And you had that nice moment where they did three albums that really kind of fit your taste or whatever. But, John, you know, it's like.

[Mac Barnett]

Can I just say one thing? I think this is interesting, but it may not be. This could just be me and so deep.

[Andy J. Pizza]

This is a podcast, so go for it, man.

[Jon Klassen]

That's why all of that podcast, it's allowed.

[Mac Barnett]

But, like, in that period of time, like, he is writing essays, giving speeches, and even making drawings for, like, stage productions of operas and ballets that still do the thing for me. It's just not in the picture books. So, like, there's something maybe about the form or what he wanted out of it, that. That it wasn't the place for it. But I still even, like, he will get there in other. He'll get there on a poster that he makes in, like, 1990, and I'll be like, there it is. Yeah. Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It's really. It's very interesting. I think about this a lot because when I. I grew up in a household that was not super cultured in any way, and that they would not be offended by me telling them, saying that, because there's no denying it. And the one thing that we did that I feel like was kind of culture adjacent was we would analyze actors decisions, especially in, like, what they took, like, what roles they're taking, whatever. And so I am just endlessly fascinated by, like, what. I would love to know what contributed to that run of books. Was it an intention? Was it a curiosity? Was it what? There's so. We don't know, but there's because. And also, would he have said, I have a theory? Yeah, go ahead.

[Mac Barnett]

No, you say you finish yours.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Would he have said, was he frustrated or did he love them?

[Jon Klassen]

Right.

[Mac Barnett]

I think he loved them.

[Jon Klassen]

Right.

[Andy J. Pizza]

So that's really interesting too. Yeah. What were you gonna say?

[Mac Barnett]

I think. I think for him, like, I think he was a guy who considered himself one of the 20th century's great artistic Geniuses, right? And that he never got that dude. And he's right about that. But then I feel like he started making this turn to just be like, I'm gonna give you my artistic genius books and whatever that frustration. A lot of this stuff feels like it was coming out of that frustration to me. And you see him, like, flip flopping. He's got this very famous quote where he's like, I don't write children's books. I write books, and people tell me that they're for children.

[Jon Klassen]

Right.

[Mac Barnett]

I mean, it's a nice quote, but, like, you can find the exact opposite quote where he'll, like, at the where the Wild Things Are acceptance speech. He says, like, this book was made only for children. Adults don't understand it. They don't understand my work. I wrote with children in mind expressly. And, you know, he's all, yeah, that internal struggle becomes, like, the most generative thing for him. And it's probably not a surprise I don't have that hang up. And so it's probably not a surprise that I don't find the work that's coming out of that struggle very interesting.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Which, you know, this gets to maybe the last thing I wanted to bring up, which I'm not going to bring up quite yet. I'm almost there. But I. This idea that I feel your. Your creative path has these pendulum swings or even project to project. You have these different devices you're trying on, different approaches, different interests, different curiosities. Like I said earlier, when I first started really trying to do writing, I was coming at it through the lens of nonsense and dream and all that. And that is very, very, like, close to my heart. Now I'm in a period of time where I'm interested in the story as kind of the flip side of a joke. Like, I'm interested in the setup and the punchline and what they can do. And if a joke makes you laugh, can a story make you cry? And what are the mechanics? And I could. I hope to be in 10 years. I hope to be going backwards. I want to go. I want to lose all that, too. Right. But so it's. The reason I bring that up is because, okay, I can't. There's no way to get around this. So this is what I was. I almost talked. I almost took this conversation into a place of. I. What I love about you two and your work is you're really good at doing, holding attention between two things. One is. And they're those two things that Sendak did. So one is this is art. This is as serious as it gets in terms of art, and this is pure fun. This is. And so that's something that this. So I told you that I tried to get into picture books. I'd done client illustrations since 2008, tried to get in picture books, like, 2011, 2012, 2013, was getting nowhere, and so I kind of just let it go. And then I saw you guys talk at Icon illustration conference in 2015 in Austin, I think it was. And honestly, it had to do my own fandom. It had a major impact on me. And there were two reasons, but the first one was the serious side. Like, I really felt like watching you guys talk about. I think you were talking about Sam and Dave. Dig a hole. And just. It felt like the level of seriousness in which you were playing, I was like, oh, you could spend your life doing this, and it would be art, and it'd be worthy of doing it. And so, first of all, I just want to say thank you for that, because it really did have a big impact on me.

[Jon Klassen]

Thanks.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And then I'll tell you the second thing in a minute, but maybe you guys could just speak to whether that feels true. Do you. Are you aware of that? Because you guys can take picture books so seriously in a way that I love, and I can't get enough of that. And that's. I feel like you're doing that in the substack, but at the same time, in one second later, you're tearing it apart and laughing at it and, you know, getting frustrated with what people put on it. Does that feel accurate to you?

[Jon Klassen]

Yes. Okay. Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

No, I. That's. I. I mean, I'm. I'm glad. Like, that's. That's what I hope. I think that, like. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, first, maybe we should. The substack. We make sure jokes and the substance, everybody. Do you.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Do you make jokes? The whole Grinch post was very much.

[Jon Klassen]

Not at the cost of taking this seriously, though, either. Like, I think that the jokes almost. Sometimes the jokes are about how seriously we're taking it, and it's sort of like a release of, like, we know. We know. Like, oh, yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

I think that the picture book, like, it is, like, it is a popular art form. Like, and it's one of the last popular arts where it's, like, the best works, the ones that have endured are extremely ambitious.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Like.

[Mac Barnett]

Just, like, pieces of excellent writing and illustration, and they're entertaining. You have to do both things. And I like that requirement that you have to do both things. And I think that like we have an audience in kids. They are like such keen observers with big questions about the world and flexible intellects, but also like they're, they want to have fun. And like that's great. That's what like you, let's pay both of those things off. Like let's, let's, like, let's dig deep but have a good time doing it. That, that's all I want to do. Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

I think you have to assume too that your audience knows. Like, I think there's something about, you know, I've worked in animation studios and you worked with this kind of stuff. And there's an approach sometimes with stuff for kids where they're like, well, they're going to be fine. It's kids. Right? Like there's a, there's a, there's a 75% that you get to. And then the last 25 are kind of given up on pretty easily because you can convince yourself that the 8 year olds won't know the 25% that was left on the ground that didn't get picked up on. And there's different ways of talking about that or you can talk about like underestimating your kids or anything else, but I think it's much easier to just assume that they care as much as you do about the stuff. And you either care or you don't. Right. And like it's no fun for us to leave 25% in the ground either. Like that's, that's a bummer for people making things. And so it's, there's very little room between you wanting to satisfy yourself creatively and making something as good as you can make it it and respecting your audience. They seem almost one and the same. And whether that's kids or anybody else, it's just like we just never had that discussion where they're like, wow, they're four though. Like, you know, they love a bright color. Let's just give them just. Why would we do that?

[Andy J. Pizza]

We're bored.

[Jon Klassen]

I think that's a lot of it is that we just be bored making that stuff. Why do you want to be bored making it? And so it's not a conscious decision to take it more seriously than it would occur to us to take it. It's that anything less just, just like feels like a waste of time. And this is the form we've chosen and the form we have an emotional attachment to for again, reasons we might not ever examine all the way down. Why do we like that? We don't exactly know, but it's the one that seems to have attracted us. And so when we are doing the work, it seems like. It seems like, yeah, shortchanging ourselves to not, like, try and examine every part of it that we can, but we know also that we've seen. And it's happened to me, certainly. I think it's probably happened to Mac, although I haven't seen it happen to me. Map where if you don't keep a loose reign on your relationship to it and don't treat it as also very silly and very fun and inconsequential, largely that you freeze yourself up on the import of it. Because we've seen lots of people who get into picture books because they have this huge emotional to it, and they have so much built into it from their childhood and from maybe their kids that all that. And they bring all that to the work, and then they're just like, okay, it has to hold all of that. And. And if there's no poking fun at it or no acknowledgment of how silly it actually is, too, you won't make anything. You're frozen solid, and you won't make a move in any direction. And so it's very useful to regularly poke holes in it, because otherwise you can't move.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah, there's something silly. And by the way, the silliness when I go. I love going to see. Going to see plays and the first, like, 30 or 90 seconds when everybody comes out of a play for a play, and they have to basically convince everybody that this is a natural thing to do. And what we're gonna do is we're all gonna sit here again, like, for 90 minutes, and we're gonna make believe we're gonna pretend together. But right now, we were just chatting with our friend, and then the lights came down, and a bunch of people are coming out in costume and a song and telling you that they are people. They're not. And it's like. It's really silly and vulnerable, and I love it. And it's actually one of the most emotional parts. No matter if the piece ends up being good or bad, I always love that part because I'm like. I get really worked out because I'm like, look at this thing that we do. Look at this thing that we all agreed is both, like, really important, but also, like, it's really strange and silly. This is beautiful.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I love it.

[Mac Barnett]

And I get worked up. Yeah. Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Speaking of not being cultured, growing up, that was. It took me forever to appreciate plays and musicals it took marrying someone from England for really.

[Jon Klassen]

That'll do it.

[Mac Barnett]

That'll do it.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And I think it's. What you're getting at is I've. And I've tried to explain this to my older brother, who's not in the arts. He's like a finance guy. And trying to get him to, like, have some kind of positive relationship with a musical or a play. And I'm like. I think I started to realize everyone there, the people on stage, everyone in the audience, we all know this is weird. We all know there's a. In a lot of the. There's even just like some kind of winking at the audience through most of it. And I like. It gets to what we were talking about at the start, where it's like. Like you h. It almost feels like it's giving you space to be part of it, because they're saying you're going to have to make believe. Like you said, you're going to have to participate.

[Mac Barnett]

First job.

[Jon Klassen]

When I was in high school, I. I had an internship at a theater company in Niagara on the lake. And they have. There's a Shaw Theater there. And I was in charge of, like, painting the backs of sets black so that the lights wouldn't catch them. But I was in the set design department, and I'd never seen a. That I'd never been to a play either. And we were setting all these. We painted all these pieces in a separate room, separate building somewhere, and we brought them all over to set them up for the production. And they were much more skewed than I expected them to be. The doorways of this apparently square room were off. And then the staircase went off at a weird angle through the door. And I was asking. They were setting it up. I was like, I didn't know it was going to be this, like, weird. And they sat, like, very patiently. They were like, john, if someone is sitting in row fish, they need to see someone coming down the stairs. So that's why it's bent that way. We're not making, like, this isn't a wacky production. This is like Ibsen or whatever it was. But they need to see the staircase, so we need to bend it for them. And there was something so big in that for me, that this is a serious play. We're not making. This isn't meant to be, you know, this is not Mernau or something. We're not making expressionism sets. Row F needs to see who's coming down the stairs and like that. Like that suspension Row F knows that angle's off, too, but they're more interested in who's coming down the stairs. Stairs. Then thinking that doorway is off. It shouldn't. It should be a 90 degrees. They want to know who's coming down the stairs. And that suspension being like, it's not real, but I need to know who's coming out the door is like, it's this. I'm still working it out. I'm still working out that moment. And I'm still. Whenever I remind myself of that, the fakery of it, but the complete, like, surrender to your curiosity about who's coming down the stairs is like, the whole work.

[Mac Barnett]

It's like.

[Jon Klassen]

Like picture books are so good at it and kids are so good at it. But it's also the most exciting thing when. When. Yeah, when that. When those two things are acknowledged and then you can move on and make your thing.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah. Well, all right. You guys have given me so much time, and I really, really appreciate it. I have one other thing. As I was going over what I wanted to talk to you about and the questions I had, one of the things that came up was that 2015 talk that you guys did. And I thought I knew I'd actually told this to people before. Like, that talk. Talk really encouraged me to push through the gatekeepers and the walls and all. Like, just knowing that this is hard to get into, but it's worth doing. And so that's something I had known that I'd taken away from that talk after reviewing it for this and knowing I was going to talk to you about point of view and kind of having a different opinion to your heroes and whatnot. The second thing I realized that it gave to me was not in a critical way, but in a kind of an awakened sense of my own point of view. Because in that talk, I thought it was so fascinating what you guys were talking about, the two different directions that book could have taken. So before I talk about my piece to that, maybe you guys could just explain what that was or the different direction that didn't end up being in the book.

[Jon Klassen]

I think initially the conception of the book was like, for people who haven't seen it, it's like an ant farm view of two kids digging a tunnel or like a hole down into the ground. And because of our point of view on it, you're seeing what they're digging around and just barely missing by choosing to turn left or right whenever they do. And they sort of emotionally give up and go straight, and then they emotionally give up on that and go right. And it's always at the wrong moment. And initially the thought was that they were going to be missing just anything you would hope to find in the ground. You were missing pirate ships and dinosaur bones and. And alien spacecrafts and, like, just everything. But the more. And that seemed like.

[Mac Barnett]

And it was meant to be. And it was meant to be an escalation as well, like, so that. So that. Like, so that. So that. Like, I think the way we had it first is that, like, they miss a gem.

[Jon Klassen]

The gem was the first.

[Mac Barnett]

And then as they go further, it was going to be like a skeleton reaching for the gem, reaching for the gem. And the skeleton was wearing, like, a crown with a lot more gems in it. And then.

[Jon Klassen]

And then that was. The clarity came from her, at least when we roughed that out. And I think it did get completely roughed out, or at least pretty close.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I remember when I was gonna say when you were presenting, I remember thinking, it's, like, pretty finished with all these different things. And then ended up being done very differently. Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah. But it wasn't clear you weren't. It wasn't funny either, which. Both of those things are usually the same. Thing is that it was much funnier if the gens got bigger. You were sure then that you would have been less happy. Happy or more increasingly upset anyway, if you knew you were missing bigger and bigger gems. And the joke was getting funnier and funnier the bigger the gems got. Because it wasn't like you couldn't decide if there was a kid who was, like, more into pirate ships than he was. Dinosaurs. Right. Is page eight worst? Page six? Yeah. And also, it was just dividing focus. Like, it was fun to draw all this stuff and. And complicate the image. And then there are these, like, little focal points for these two kids. But you are emotionally attached to your characters. You want to be focused on them. By the time you get to bigger gems, the laugh is almost just seeing you're not looking hard at the gem anymore. You're just filling in a big gem. You're looking at the boys. You're looking at them, because that's your way in. And so it was just almost like it felt like being more and more honest about your own feelings about the picture. Right. Where you're just like, what am I really feeling here? What do I want to feel more of? Like. And it's easier to draw, too. And so that was nice, but it was just a cleaner. It was just a cleaner joke. I think, like, to your point, it's just like story in general.

[Mac Barnett]

I will say, though. But you know what? I'll say, John, I'm gonna just. I'm gonna tee Andy up for what's coming. For what I feel.

[Andy J. Pizza]

You know what I'm gonna say. But it's not.

[Mac Barnett]

It was, you know, it was a cleaner joke. Yeah, it was a cleaner read to us. Ah, for us, it was the book. We were like, yeah, this slotted in. Yep, yep. We. We're like, this is better. We. We fixed the problem with the book.

[Jon Klassen]

Right.

[Mac Barnett]

Is how we felt.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And I. Yeah, and I'm not gonna sit here and end the interview with. And here's my critique. I'm not going. Honestly, you can.

[Mac Barnett]

And we would love it. We would love it.

[Jon Klassen]

But no, if the other one was like, summer people, you know, like, that was how that was.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It was for less cultured folks. Honestly.

[Mac Barnett]

Movie guys.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, but that. No, but honestly. Because I thought. It's a funny thing to bring up, but it's.

[Mac Barnett]

It.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It was true in that I thought, this feels exactly like what you two would do with this. And it felt where it ended. Where it ended up. Where it ended up is a dedication to the gag. And this way that is very, like, dry and funny and it's just really great. And I just thought. I think the more that I thought about it, the more I thought, oh, I think I'm like a maximalist. I think I. Rather than lean into the joke, which is a great way to do it, I would lean into what's hidden and then all these kinds of things, which you guys do a lot of that too. But. But that was the second piece that I got from. It was, oh, I have an impulse. I have like a feeling of what feels right to me.

[Jon Klassen]

I think some of that has to do with the fact that around then, Mac and I would have been touring together a lot. We would have been doing extra yarn and my own hat books. I was beginning to tour and we were. Mac had been at it for a lot longer than I had. Presenting in front of kids and getting that kind of page to page response. But if you picture the book with pirate ships and dinosaurs and stuff, when you click through that presentation in a gym in Texas, you would get a lot of considered and interested sounds. When you went to pirate ship from dinosaur Bones, right? You'd be a lot like, oh, look at that. And like, oh, look at the 1. No less valuable a sound. But what we want is an.

[Andy J. Pizza]

But a different one.

[Jon Klassen]

Like furious. When you turn a page from a small diamond to a bus sized diamond. They're furious and they yell and you get this and you're just up for volume. Then you're picturing just the volume level going up to red. And when that becomes your goal, when we were in that we wouldn't like we were spending half the year on the road sometimes in those years. And so we just wanted that level to go to red. And that's no less, again, that's no less valid than pouring over a page with a thousand details, you know, and that being the experience of the book. I love those books. I think I was actually probably more like that kid than the kid who needed it to be an exclamation point. I was more the quiet, like, let's spend half an hour looking at this spread.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Just to your credit, I just want to say that it is a more. It's a less obvious choice. That's the other thing. What you ended up with is a much less obvious choice. You know, I think it's interesting, but.

[Mac Barnett]

I think what you like, what you were getting there, Andy, is just exactly that. They're like, even with that book, there were two ways to make it right and like, exactly that. That seeing like, ooh, I would make it this way. Whether it's something that like we were showing you this alternative thing or like I have that experience all the time where I think a book is going to go one way, it doesn't go that way. And then I think, oh, thank God, now I can make the book that goes that way exactly like that is the generative thing of reading is sometimes just like this very gut level. Like, what? No, that's the wrong note. I know the right one feeling that lets you know how you should make a book. And truly, like, all we have, I really think this is like, all we have is our point of view. Like that is that's what we're bringing. Like, that's what we are bringing to the table. And that like so much of how the business side of books works is actually about sanding down your point of view.

[Andy J. Pizza]

True, true.

[Mac Barnett]

And making it a lot like something else that has gone well or a lot like what they think your last book was. So sometimes you are even like fighting against somebody else's perception of what your own point of view is, trying to make your next thing. But all you have is your point of view. And if you can get it out into the world so that people who are receptive or sensitive to your point of view recognize some sort of like fellow traveler, that is the most Electric connection. It is the only way to build a real artwork and a lasting career. But you gotta first figure out what it is, and then you feels like you gotta fight your way through getting it out there.

[Andy J. Pizza]

So I had something to say about.

[Jon Klassen]

Maximalism and maximalism there, but you just did like, a sermon. And, like, Andy's face was just like, we brought it home.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I don't wanna pop the bubble. Please do. Please do. I'm here for it. And if you guys ever come back, I promise I will not take hours and hours of your time.

[Mac Barnett]

We will come back and do for hours.

[Jon Klassen]

Is that like, to a certain extent, and this is getting into the weeds a little bit, which is no fun considering where we are. But like, maximalism, I think that what we do, what Mac and I like increasingly, and what I think we've always been kind of interested in is like, emotional maximalism. That thing we were talking about where if you had a thousand things on the page at the end of the book, you have to care whether Sam and Dave get home. Right? And if you. If your focus had been divided and if they had just been excuses for the pirate ships and the dinosaurs, which I felt that they were turning into. That they were just the vessel for all of that other stuff that you would spend half an hour looking at. But if the bigger gems just served as, like, symbols of increasing frustration, but your focus was still on your guys, then you feel it harder when they don't get home. If you kind of had to be reminded of their existence at the end of the book, again, because you've been looking at a million things, things, you wouldn't care as much if they got home or not. It would be like this weird coda. But this way you're always with them. You're emotionally tracking their. Their. Their hypothetical frustration, but also their real state of mind. And so by the end of the book, you are still with them. And you're like, that. That. That's the point of the book, is like actually maximalism that way. There's a graphic simplicity to actually flattening them out against a million things and having them be just like excuses again to make. Move through that huge tableau of stuff. There's an. There's a. There's an approach there that actually is minimalistic and graphic, which, again, is much more my taste too. I like stepping back from my guys. But what this change did actually, is maximize, hopefully, your emotional attachment to them and put the frame back on them so that you care as much as possible about them instead of this visual journey we could have taken you on instead.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Speaking of maximalist, on the emotional front, the previous version, where they're going through all these different things that increase in. In this kind of, you know, line graph, going up to the right of intensity is a kind of more of a one note thing too, because you're having, oh, bigger and bigger and bigger. And the feeling is maybe the same feeling, but a little bit more and a little bit more versus.

[Jon Klassen]

I do think it depends what your goal of the book is. Right.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Like, yeah, I think that's totally true.

[Mac Barnett]

Your. Your phrase, the phrase you just used, Andy, of devotion to the gag, I think describes John and me really well. Like, we both. I think we try to hide it, but we love a gag. And then often that book does it. And we do it in a few of our books. Like, we start a gag and then we like to see what is on the other side of that gag. To just be like, okay, what if we take it to its biggest point and that is the middle point of the book, what's on the other side and actually like it. It reminds me. It reminds me of a very famous trip. This is like. Like we were just starting touring together again and we did a conference in Carmel, California. Our wives were with us on this trip because Carmel is this, like, beautiful seaside town. Its technical name, I think, is Carmel by the Sea.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

Very famously, Clint Eastwood was once the mayor of. He was the mayor of Carmel, California. But it is this little seaside town with, like, quaint shops and, like, you know, lots of, like, little jewelry shops or paintings of lighthouses in a shop next to another shop that just has paintings of lighthouses in it. And John and I were there with our wives and we started doing our Clint Eastwood impressions of just like having him be the mayor of this town and his mayoral decrees.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

Which were just all about just like, you know, keeping just cute shops open, basically. It was a good contrast. And I think that, like, they thought it was kind of funny when we started doing it. And then we kept doing it and we did it for 72 hours, where we were basically in character as Clint Eastwood and they hated it, but we were finding something in it. And they still talk about how awful it was, but in some ways that is like, our brains do that and we do that in our books and hopefully in a way that doesn't make people as mad as our wives were, but we're interested in, like, what is on the other side of this gag. What is on the other side of this joke? Because I do think that it may, like. It is, like, some sort of pathway to the sublime. Possibly like that. Like, by going in any one direction for as long as possible. Whether you're, like, exploring beauty or ugliness or just the dumbest gag in the world, if you keep going, you're gonna reach the sublime.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It reminds me of Kristen Shaw. I've heard her, the comedian, talk about this bitch her and her collaborative partner would do on stage where it was Kristen Shaw as a horse, and she's pretending to be a horse, and she's galloping, and then they have a song like, Kristen Shaw is a. A horse. Kristen Shaw's a horse. And they do it over and over and over, and they say there's this roller coaster that you see. Like, at first everyone's laughing, then people are mad, and now it's. The hilarity has gone up a notch, and there's just all of this stuff going on that I think is kind of akin to. Sam, Dave, dig a hole. One last question, and I'm gonna let you go. And this is hopefully a small one I was thinking about you guys. Guys clearly have this Venn diagram of point of view and taste that has a lot of overlap. But do you have tastes that don't overlap? Because I'm guessing it's not a full perfect circle.

[Mac Barnett]

I don't think it is. I don't know. I. I don't. Do you have a good sense of it, though, John? Like, I think that, like, I know that there is this huge overlap. I know that there are these differences. I don't have. Have the greatest, like, intellectual sense of why our partnership works or, like, how it works. I just kind of know that it does.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

All right, maybe.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And it's too far in the game to get into it, but maybe.

[Mac Barnett]

I think we've.

[Jon Klassen]

What we've. What we've. I think that there is a nice balance that we found in that we understand, I think, probably more clearly than we know how we are different.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yes.

[Jon Klassen]

If we don't disagree with. With the things that are different about it. It's not that the things that Mac likes that I wouldn't do are wrong. In fact, I think most of the time I admire them about him and anything. And it's probably the same the other way. I think he's probably.

[Mac Barnett]

It is. No, I know you're joking, but it is the. It is.

[Jon Klassen]

No, but that's what's happened is that it's the same thing you're talking about, where it's like someone it's the same thing as the relationship we talked about before, where it's like, the people you admire are people who can do things you can't. Can't. And. And I think that, like, that's where we've gotten to with that. It's. It's not that. Yeah, it's very rare that it comes up. In fact, I can't think of any time where. Where it. Like, it's been like, oh, that's not. That's not correct. That's the take. Or anything like that. Even on dumb stuff. Like, most of our conversations are about dumb, superficial stuff like food or clothes or something like that. But we're never. I never think he's wrong. It's just that, like. Yeah, I think. And we know each other so well by now that we also kind of like, we. We understand, like, what the other person would even like and be like, oh, yeah, you like that thing. And it's not. Again, it's not in the framing of, like. But you're wrong. It's just like, that's. Yeah, it totally works with your whole thing. Yeah.

[Mac Barnett]

And so very instructive. Clothes is very instructive because John and I, like, we own a lot of the same kinds of clothes. So much so that, like, usually when we show up on, like, a zoom like this, we're wearing the same outfit accidentally.

[Jon Klassen]

This actually was one of the different.

[Mac Barnett]

There's a lot of contrast today. A lot of contrast. But. And so, like, we. There's a huge overlap. Then there are. And we'll say this. Like, I will see something, and I'll be like, oh, that's a John shirt, or that's a John jacket. And he'll, like. He'll do the same thing where, like, this was just. Here was a Mac one. And then sometimes I will buy a jacket, take it home, put it on, and realize that I have bought a John jacket. And then I bought a John jacket. Because I like how John would look in this jacket, but I do not.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That sounds funny.

[Mac Barnett]

I do not look that way in this jacket. And it is so wrong. I'm like, I can't do this. Only John can do this. And then I give him the jacket.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah, we'll go into a store even that carries, like, only three or four kinds of brands of things. And, like, we'll be going to a wedding together, like, the next month or something. And Max, like, I need something for how I think an aristocrat, you know, 40 years ago would. It would look to go to a wedding and John needs something to look like.

[Mac Barnett]

I don't even put it in the terms. Yeah.

[Jon Klassen]

I mean, and John is interested in how he might paint a house after this is finished, and we can walk out with the same bag with the same name on it, and somehow we both satisfied this. This weird relationship we have with how each other looks. There's stuff like that where we're just like. And we both get like. I think. Yeah, I think it's. It's very weird, but it's like. Yeah, I think it's best not to disturb it because somehow there's a. There's a real calmness in it, too. And there's. There are huge differences, but they seem to complement each other most of the time.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I think that's the ideal situation with a collaborator I make. I write stuff with my wife, and I have other friends that I work with for and I have worked with for a long time. You have that agreement on a lot of taste that things. But then you have access to different things. And that's really what makes it interesting, is like, you're bringing something that I don't even know how you got that. I love it. Okay.

[Jon Klassen]

That's what it's best.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Thank you. For them.

[Jon Klassen]

Lean on each other for it. Yeah, exactly.

[Mac Barnett]

Yeah. And I know that there are. There's, like. There's. There's a certain kind of book. There's like, There, like. There are places that John and I have gotten to in the books that we've made together where I'm like, I don't think we. I don't think either of us could have gotten here if we weren't doing this together. And that's what you hope for.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That's the ideal 100. All right. Please do come back. Thank you for the mega session. This might be the longest one I've ever done. This was so fun. And everybody go check out the substack do. What is it [e-mail] it is right now.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And we'll put it in the show notes, too.

[Jon Klassen]

Thanks a lot.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Thanks a lot, y'. All.

[Jon Klassen]

Yeah, thanks for having us.

[Andy J. Pizza]

All right. Huge thanks to Mac and John for making so much time to chat with me. I feel very privileged and just grateful for having that experience. I feel like it's just going to go down and created Pep Talk History as one of my favorite episodes. Be sure to check out [e-mail]. whether you're a picture book artist or not, I think this is just a such a rich, valuable cornucopia of creative knowledge and there's just, I mean every time I get one of the emails else come through I'm just like inspired to re dedicate myself to the craft and of being a creative and a picture book person. Go check it out. One other note I want to give you. Last episode we talked a lot about my new book Mysterious Things that comes out in July. Thrilled about that. But I got some notes that said the link wasn't working for pre orders. So if you'll check that out for me, it's invisible things co. If it's not working for you, if it's like a blank kind of under construction page, just let me know so I can go fix that. I think that we got it fixed so appreciate all the people that went and pre ordered and we are going to be talking about that book in a couple different capacities over the coming months and I can't wait for you. Get your hands on it. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for being a producer and editor on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, sound design and animation. Thanks to Yoni Wolf of the band why for our theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until we speak again, stay pepped up. Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry, market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our [e-mail] and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our Creative Career Path handbooklet. And the whole process is in there. And you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up. But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up y'. All.

[Jon Klassen]

Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast.

[Andy J. Pizza]

For the past 10 years, I've been.

[Jon Klassen]

Talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them.

[Mac Barnett]

Like our recent episodes on Dante in Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian.

[Jon Klassen]

Classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.