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Kathleen O'Toole and Matthew Mehan on The American Book of Fables
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Hello, this is Jeremiah Regan, Executive Director of Online Learning here at Hillsdale College, and I have some great news. We've brought Hillsdale's incredibly popular free online courses to the Hillsdale College Podcast Network, and our next series is the American From Liberalism to Despotism, a course taught by Associate professor of Politics Kevin Slack and Hillsdale President Larry P. Arn. After listening to all 11 episodes, you'll have a deeper understanding of what has happened to America in the past 60 years and what we can do about it.
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Today.
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The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, hosted by Online Learning Marketing Director Juan Davalos and me, expands Hillsdale's mission to provide all who wish to learn the education necessary to increase happiness and to preserve the civil and religious liberties of America. We want you to be a part of it at podcast hillsdale.edu. subscribe now to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast to hear new episodes every week with additional commentary and insights from our team. Go to podcast hillsdale.edu to learn more. That's podcast hillsdale.edu.
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C
Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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D
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show and at our website k12hillsdale.edu. Today we'll hear a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Dr. Matthew Meehan from Hillsdale in DC. He has a new book out for young children, young adults and big adults too. It's called the American Book of Fables. Here's Dr. Kathleen O'. Toole.
- [02:18]
C
Well, I'm so pleased to be joined by Dr. Matthew Meehan. Dr. Meehan is the Associate Dean and Associate professor of Government at Hillsdale's Van Andel Graduate School of Government, where he teaches young undergraduates and young professionals about political philosophy and literature on the Hill. And along with that, he's also a children's book author and a father of numerous children himself, so he's come by it honestly. Matt, thanks for joining me today.
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B
Thanks for having me, Matt.
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C
My kids and I have really enjoyed reading your two children's books that you've already published, Meean's Mammals and the Handsome Little Signet. And one thing we notice about them is they're beautiful and they give you a lot to think about, both as a child and an adult. I think you meant for them to be that way, didn't you?
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B
I did. I wanted it to be for the whole family.
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C
I regard man's mammals as fascinating and perplexing, and I'm going to resist the urge to ask you a bunch of questions about it. We'll do that later, maybe. For now, I want you to tell us a little bit about this new children's book that you have coming out
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B
later this spring, the American Book of Fables. It's a big book, 250 pages for the 250th anniversary of the country. 13 chapters for the 13 colonies. And it's something old, something new, something red, white and blue. Sort of a lot of old nursery rhymes, but a number of them updated and adapted for the American experience and for modern English sometimes. And then it also. I've written some new ones that match the Declaration of Independence and its themes and its principles. And then a section for middle, sort of middle readers, which is a bunch of fables, some of them very old, all of them adapted to American animals and the ecological zones that we go through in the 13 chapters. I'll say more about that in a minute. And then a section for Biggs, where it's primary source material from the founding and the settlement of the country, with some glosses from me. But also a funny new genre, which is a kind of think Animal Farm meets a Socratic dialogue where animals sort of talk about the principles of virtue and self government, but also of constitutional republics with this lead character named Hugh Manatee. Yes, a terrible dad pun come to life. But humanity travels the country on a mission to help the manatees through a hurricane by gathering friends from around the country. But he had no idea how long the journey would be. So it becomes moot by the end. But so it's. It's a. It's an unusual, fun, but a very exuberant and fitting sort of tribute to 250 years. That is going to be a big heirloom copy. Beautifully illustrated book for families.
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C
So I want to get into the content of the book, but first let's talk about the illustrations. You have this painter, this artist that you've worked with over the years. Tell us about him. Tell us about the work that he's produced.
- [05:19]
B
So John Folley is his name, and he is a realist, impressionist. So it's the best of both worlds. In my mind, he's Trained in the Boston school. And he traces his sort of pedigree, master, apprentice all the way back through the Ecole des Barts in Paris, all the way back to Rayfield's workshop in Florence. Yes, that Rayfield. So he is in the deep classical tradition. But he's also innovative and has wound up mixing realist sort of beautiful, very tight and clear. What you see is what you get and more with impressionistic flair. So each one feels a little dreamy, but also has really popping very specific points of focus. He's doing 14 oils, big, beautiful, like big screen TV sized oils that are going to be double page sized that, that highlight humanity's journey and shows us all kinds of beautiful landscapes from the country and then with quotes from to American artists and American folklore and all kinds of things. And then there's going to be about 35, 40 watercolors that are really beautiful. And so combining both me and Mammals, which had a bunch of oil paintings, and the handsome little Signet, which was all watercolors, now we're going to sort of put those together. And then beyond that, because it's such a big book and there's so many little fables and stories and nursery rhymes, we wanted to have at least a little bit of illustrative accompaniment for everything. But there are going to be a bunch of pen and ink jots, think Shel Silverstein, but not as ugly. And maybe they'll have graphic design color. With the publisher, we're sort of ironing that out now, but. But there'll be probably 100 and I'm hoping 150, but we'll see whether how much of John's sleep I can eat into to get him to do all that. But. But there'll be at least 150 illustrations total. So it'll be a very beautiful, classically illustrated, illustrated book.
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C
Yeah, an incredible amount of work. Let's talk about the importance of illustrations in children's books.
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B
Yes. So John and I are unusual in that what you usually do is you hand off a manuscript to a publisher and then they just go get someone to illustrate it and the author just comes back or receives an illustrated version and goes and gushes and like, this is great. I, as an author, I could never like, I actually find it appalling. I'm like, that's what you do. You release the images to someone else. It's like, no. John and I have forged a friendship over many years. We actually spent a year before we illustrated our first book just doing political cartoons and we sold a few to Local papers. And we actually got one in the hands of all the senators, which we were told tipped the balance because everyone said this image was so arresting. I had to vote no on this horrible treaty. It was like this awful UN treaty. But we just did one, one a week, just as a discipline to figure out how my words could get into his pen and faithfully translate so that we had a unified image that the word and the deed, the illustration and the story were one and worked as a single piece of art. And we've taken that to heart, and I think it shows because each image is. Feels very mysteriously textured, like the text. And we have a sort of idea of one. It must be beautiful and in a certain sense, ancillary too, that are supportive of it. It must be careful that everything in the illustration is carefully chosen and everything you look at is material for your reflection, for your enlightenment, for the improvement of your wit and your wisdom. And so there's nothing wasted. Every part of the buffalo is used. But also there's a lively level of detail and symbolic layering so that it feels alive. I'm with Aristotle. Right. Good. Art is an imitation of nature. Right. And nature is so full of liveliness. You look at a cadaver and you can see it's dead. You look at a living person, even if it's completely still, with their eyes closed like a sleeping beauty, there's something alive. Why every little vascular movement, like, we just sense that something's alive because there's so much happening in lively things. Natures are alive. They're teeming with life because of so many little actions. So every one of our poems, every one of our fables, every one of our stories, and every one of our illustrations are just jam packed with life and meaning and layers of detail, history, symbology, ethic, moral. And I think the result is. Is the way things used to be. Like, I sound like I'm doing something really special. This is kind of how it used to be.
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C
Right, Right.
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And we've forgotten it. And so we're kind of trying to restore that sort of care and beauty.
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C
Yeah. My own children, we love reading together. And, you know, it's obvious, I guess, but, you know, their experience of the book is primarily the pictures when they're very young. And over time, your voice saying the words becomes just as important. And eventually it will become more important as they learn to read themselves. But when they're 1, 2, 3, 4, it's the pictures that their eyes are resting on. And if those pictures aren't beautiful and if Those pictures don't give them something to think about. Then the book is much lower quality, even if the words are excellent.
- [10:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, I won into my veins, as the kids say. Like, totally agree, like 100%. But also what I see often. And I don't like to dunk on my colleagues in kid lit. I mean some people I will. But generally speaking, there's a lot of people trying to do good work.
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C
Yeah.
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B
But this is why John is such a treasure for me is were both classically trained in our skill sets. Right. And because he actually did the groundwork of drawing. Right. He, he drew his way to painting. He didn't start with impressionistic or collage or he, he went through the old classical disciplines to build up to reality. It's so packed with what is real. And what is real is a reflection of God and the imago DEI in creation. And you see some of these illustrations, you're like, there's something breathtakingly interesting about that painting or that illustration, but there's also something wrong. There's something off. And it's very hard to put your finger on it when it's well done. Even like the. Some of these books that are well done, but there's still something not healthy about it. And it's. And that's the best of them. But that you slide quickly down into this is actually harmful to the child in some esthetic bleeding into moral way where it's like, this isn't good because you actually want them to be acclimatized to, acclimated to beauty so that they demand it in their own life. And by analogy, they'll demand it in their own deeds and words and in the words and deeds of their friends and family. And so you actually raise the culture and raise society and civic life that way. And if you put ugly things before children, they will start to imitate ugly behaviors. I do think that's a responsibility that again, we're kind of slouching. We're not doing that as well as we could.
- [12:46]
C
Yeah, yeah. It means you have to understand what beautiful is. And that takes, that takes education and time. So let's talk about this. These three levels that you have. You've got nursery rhymes for little ones, you've got fables for middle age kids, middle aged kids. And you've got.
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I'm one of those.
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C
And you've got primary source texts and other things for adults and for older readers. Let's talk about nursery rhymes first. So why do we read nursery rhymes to our little ones? What is it about a nursery rhyme that can shape and form the imagination of a very young child.
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B
So several things leap to mind in answer to that question. One is obviously just the idea of word and song and making sure that those are bound because then it. It actually makes reason and beauty bound right from the beginning. So I think it's very good to start with nursery rhymes for children because while yes, in the journey towards education, you're going to have to basically sort of murder to dissect, right, and go into prose and like just read clunky things, you know, like you've got to read a textbook on echo, economics and college. There are things that aren't so beautiful, right, but. But at the end of the day, that really is those two things are those transcendental should be one. The good, the true and the beautiful should be one at the end of the day. So it's good to start at the beginning in a kind of little postage stamp image of what the rest of your communicative life. And frankly, if you go all the way to the pursuit of happiness beyond the grave, what do we do in heaven? Sing, right? Like word and song, like word and beauty. These. This is transcendence. So I think that's just as a baseline, a very good grammar of ascent, if you will. That's important. I also think that in the tradition of nursery rhymes, I did a lot of research for this book over the last five years and one of the things I realized is there's a whole cottage industry that is now dead, but people writing and explaining what nursery rhymes are about. And they're actually think of Shakespeare songs, these strange little songs, and greasy Joan doth keel the pot. Like what is this song in love's Labor's Lost about? Well, if you actually look very carefully at that funny little song, it's a very quiet and deep, simple, almost psalm like meditation on the themes of that play, but so suppressed, one that's easier to see, right? Because evil is less artful, is double, double toil and trouble, right? The doubleness of betrayal. And that leads to all kinds of toil and eventually just trouble that ends your life, right? Just a tiny little sing songy witches brew. Song is the play in. In writ small. And that's what real good nursery rhymes are doing. And there's people who analyze them so you can actually see the old nursery rhymes from England and then the glosses from all these Oxford dons, like this is what this one's about. And so. And you know, maybe they're wrong, maybe they're right. Sometimes they're certainly right, sometimes they're certainly wrong. But it's actually a kind of way of giving shorthand memory, like ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. That is about the bubonic plague. And most people kind of vaguely remember that, but that's a little token of memory of our past, of a suffering of Western civilization. Right. And. And it's. It's a very somber little reminder of difficult times. And so these nostril rhymes also are sort of these historic tokens that teach you to make small images of great things that you can then carry as a reminder. And I suggest that actually the educated citizenry of the United States prior to I. I don't know when exactly, but in a phaseal way, sometime in the 20th century, let's say, for the sake of argument, adults used to know this about nursery rhymes. They should know what I just said much more like, oh, this is about something. So I tried to recapture that and I made it a little clearer because the book actually all 13 chapters take 13 parts of the Declaration of Independence. And so each section of nursery rhymes and fables and big kid material, each section, those nursery rhymes are housed under some thematic statement from the Declaration. So it actually sort of asks you to think through what does this rhyme have to do with that. And so whether or not you figure it out every time, it doesn't actually matter because of these other things I've said about why nursery rhymes are useful. But I'm trying to bring both song and idea together again. And I think that's what rhyme has always done for civil society.
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C
Yeah. You gave a talk yesterday to the. The graduate students here in the Classical Education program about images and the importance of being able to use images to call up the right image to make your point, you know, and how an image is so much more effective than a full explanation to which people may not be willing to listen. For example, fables are images, aren't they?
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Definitely.
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C
And so let's talk about that. How does giving young children, perhaps older than nursery rhyme age, these American fables to think about, help them conjure up the right images? And what, what kinds of images were you trying to get them to imagine when you wrote the book?
- [18:18]
B
So I try to be a genre buster in each of my books, as you know from me and's Mammals and Handsome signet that it is, yes, a Alphabet, abecedarian Alphabet poem, but it's doing a little more than an Alphabet poem. And I try to do a little Storybook. But there's something a little more than a weird storybook going on there. Like I try to sort of break the genre and sort of make it a little more interesting and for the adults so they can sort of. So but with the fable, what I wanted to do was both give a moral as you would expect, but I also wanted to recapture the fable tradition which is not so infantilized as most fables are today. They're simple, but they don't always have a clear moral conclusion. Or rather they have a clear moral conclusion but you're left going, that's not all that's in here. And that's actually the old Lestrange Caxton, the ones that were on the founders libraries on the shelves. Like those fables were complex and were designed to train upper level moral reasoning. That wasn't just easy. Good guy, bad guy, white hat, black hat. It wasn't so simple, right? Because self knowledge is to realize that actually you have a problem too. Right? And so you might find a bad guy. But now your reaction to the bad guy is also a danger, right? Because you have to do you have to answer the problem with the right kind of solution or you become part of the problem. So they're very clever and witty, almost like moral puzzles. And it turns out that animals give you so much room to play one you get some distance, right? But also sometimes you can include human beings and even sometimes Greek and Roman gods will play a part in the tradition and sometimes just human beings. The fabled tradition has a lot of freedom, but I like to use American animals one to get people to know and love the creation they've been given to care for. Right. Like manatees are a wonderful new creature. Let me back up for a moment. In the founding Peel, the famous museum keeper had a museum above Independence hall when they were drafting the constitution. Literally above where they were drafting it. And when you bought a ticket and the, the representatives would, would, would go up and visit and sort of relax and take it in. It was not a zoo like we have today with living creatures. They didn't have the means to keep them all. It was a taxidermist to do so. Not quite as fun, but it says the book of nature will teach thee how to govern. That was literally on the ticket. Like this you, by learning the animal spirits and characters, by learning the irascibility of the wolverine, the appetitive desires of the manatee, right. The stubborn pride of the bull. Right. That these kinds of the cleverness and duplicity of the raccoon, the Masked Marauder and Bandit. The Trash Panda. Right. Like by, by. By thinking these through, you actually get a kind of easy to deal with image of your own passions, your own sentiments that have to be governed. And so as a way to both teach us to love our land that we've been given and its ecology and history, but also to come to know ourselves, the fable tradition is just the richest mind. It's such a great and such a neglected genre, so I wanted to really build it up again.
- [21:52]
C
Yeah. And this book, it sounds like, is kind of a. You know, it's beautiful fables, it's nursery rhymes, it's stories. But it's also a kind of encyclopedia, naturalist, encyclopedia of American animals and American landscapes, too.
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B
Yes. So we. We start in the Everglades. There's a big hurricane coming. And the opening lines right in Congress. July 4, 1776. The. The manatees hold a congress, and they send Hugh Manatee on this mission, as I mentioned. And so he heads north up the east coast, which, by the way, manatees do. I don't know if you know this, but manatees actually feed on seagrass up through the summer and get as far as Boston.
- [22:32]
C
Oh, wow.
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B
Which I didn't know.
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C
I thought they were just Florida animals.
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B
No, they. They migrate up the seagrass and then they come back down for winter.
- [22:38]
A
Wow.
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B
Not all of them, but a bunch of them will go up. So he goes up, goes to the great bays, and you learn about the Chesapeake and how special Chesapeake and Delaware Bay are in the whole world. Like, just the part of patriotism comes from gratitude for the gifts God gave us in this country, and part of the gifts that our founders were so keen on. George Washington had two huge paintings of the Potomac and two of the Hudson, because everybody recognized the Hudson was this insanely fertile and deep channeled river that was easily like. Like it was great for economic commerce because it was such a felicitous river and that these bays were the most felicitous bays that anyone has heard of, and to this day are still the greatest trade bays. Deep enough for ships, solid ground on all sides, no brackish swamps, just like soil, so you can easily put a dock in, meant for trade. No tons of protection. Many wide rivers and channels like these are great gifts. And so all the, the, the, the fables and stories, as they tell the Moralia that I was mentioning, they're also kind of opening the door to a new sense of wonder about our land and its beauty. So I, I do, I do think that that is an important Part of rekindling patriotism is just coming to love the land and, and the people. And each. Each stage of settlement has its own beautiful, noble and harrowing stories which we tell. There's a number of them that are brought forward through primary sources that are intermingled with these dialogues with Hugh and these creatures from each region.
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C
So tell me more about that. The portion of the book that's for older kids, adults. What will I find when I open it?
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B
So I leave it to the bigs, that is the adults, to decide what in the bigs section they want to read to their children. I suspect most of them will want to read the dialogues and adventures of humanity, which is the big oil painting illustrations. But there are also other stories, other fictions, such as there's a beautiful story that's actually based in history of Matt Warner, who was a bandit in southern Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, who ran with Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid, who went clean and felt really bad about the wickedness of his early life and spent his last years trying to bring Butch Cassidy in so that he too could beg forgiveness, gain amnesty and go straight and suffered a lot to try to bring his old bandit friends in. It's a beautiful story of redemption, but of like, you know, the Wild west and wrongdoing. So I tell a kind of fictionalized account of one of his escapades trying to bring Butch in. And Butch refuses, and he did in real life. He fled and then died somewhere in South America. This is a very sad story, but it's. It's kind of Wild west adventure. Gunslinging, lost in a canyon, drought, bullet wound. You know, it's a fun kind of like a Western, you know, magazine story.
- [25:34]
C
Yeah.
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B
So they get those kinds of things that are deeply enmeshed in our history, but teach lessons. And then they have primary source material, some of it from the settlement of the country in that region, but oftentimes back and forth recourse to the Revolutionary War, a letter from Abigail Adams, a letter from John Adams, a speech from. Or a letter from George Washington, an account of a father and son. There are beautiful poems written by various women who had to flee from New York. And they liken their. Their flight to Aeneas fleeing Troy. And they say that they're. They don't have to bring their household gods with them. They actually, they carry their God within their heart, the new Christian God, but they are nevertheless fleeing from their burning home to found anew. And it's this really beautiful kind of like Roman sternness, you know, sort of Roman Republicanism, you know, sort of, but with this beautiful new Christian American overlay. It's. I bring these things up and try to show the heart and soul of the founding and relate each one to the various statements of principle in the Declaration. So it's a combination of primary sources, poems from the founding era, some patriotic, some about the various principles of, you know, family, virtue, nature, rights to life and liberty. I have a speech from Frederick Douglass in the chapter that's just on liberty, which is the Great Plains, sort of cowboys go wherever you want, but it turns out you can't go everywhere you want. You need water. You have to avoid prairie fire. Right. You've got to have. You got to have a mission. And so liberty actually has laws to it. And so they learn these lessons. But in the. In the midst of these dialogues, humanity will literally explain something to another character who's too reckless or thinks freedom is. Just do whatever you want. He'll explain with a paragraph or two from Frederick Douglass, right. Talking about bleeding Kansas and how lawless that is to just decide to undermine the natural rights of the Declaration and the constitutional order through popular sovereignty of the wrong sort of. So it's a very fun. It's. It's. I've. I'm very glad that I found a genre that allows you to integrate very new, fun, sort of playful drama, animal fable with a re presentation of primary sources where you get to see the beautiful souls that founded and settled this country. And not all of it's beautiful. I don't hide from certain definite pockmarks. Slavery's in there. Some of the Indian relations were far less than savory, although nowhere near as evil as the popular culture today would leave you to believe. It's actually a very complicated situation. And I bring that forward. It's actually quite beautiful how some people really tried to handle it with great patience, others not so much. But it's a beautiful story. I fell in love with the country again in the research. I thought I loved the country. I'm a big patriot, sort of fife and drum America School of government, Washington, D.C. just getting to know the country and the founding again in this more sort of almost folk wisdom like way and principled, sort of patriotic way. I hope the book will translate to others and give that gift to another generation, maybe more than one.
- [28:55]
C
Yeah, beautiful. In an early version of this book, I think it was called the American Families Book of Fables. You imagine this book being used, being read by a family together.
- [29:08]
B
That's right. The publisher wants. He's like, you will get max purchase if it just says the American Book of Fables. Right? Well, I don't have a family. Right, so. But you might still want to learn about the country for a 250, whether you do or not. But it's still fundamentally a family book with littles, middles and bigs. And there is a sustained theme of the family. One of the things I did in research for the book is I elected to write this policy paper on what is the role of the family in the American republic? And how does the American republic basically revolve around the family and serve the family? And how does the family strengthen republican self government? And I basically went through the Founder's Letters and did a phenomenological study of their attitude towards family and its relationship to self government. And I realized that representing family life and the ethics of fatherhood, motherhood, spousal love and dedication and fidelity, being a good sibling. I actually bring a lot of beautiful old. Like there's a I must be nice to mother. It's not nice. I must be good to mother. I must not tease. My Mother is one of the poems. It's written by an English woman, but I sort of Americanized it, changed it a little so that it's more readable. But it's a beautiful one about like honoring your mother. And that's. And that's in a spritif. A specific part of the book in the Declaration that relates to basically the kind of like, people have a right to a reputation. People have a right to the pursuit of happiness unmolested, right. Sort of. People have a right to the work of their labor, the fruits of their labor. I wind up tying the family in throughout in a way that I think is, frankly, what does a good writer do? He provides the medicine for the sickness of the time. And the family is a bit on its face right now. And so I try to gently, without hitting people over the head, sort of honor and bolster the family through the book.
- [31:10]
C
For families that are trying to cultivate a habit of reading to their children, reading with their children, what advice do you have? How can they use this book at home?
- [31:20]
B
So I recommend basically picking a region, looking at the pictures first and just sort of flipping through and then making decisions on the age groups and the kids of what pictures they find interesting and then going to those. Each of these work together. So every chapter and every subsection, because within each chapter are like maybe a few phrases and then another phrase and then another phrase and then the next chapter. So inside of a longer passage. Sometimes there are subsections. Each one of those subsections works as one thing. So the nursery rhymes are building arguments that parallel and complement are built on by the fables. And then the bigs is a kind of maturation and summation of the themes in that section. So they work as one. So if you want to do that, you can, but at the same time that maybe for an older kid to do on their own, you can just take them to which, which picture do you want to learn about? And each one stands alone. So you can just enjoy any one thing based on the illustration that, that gathers the child's interest and curiosity. That's my hope is it's. You can flip through it like you could like Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues. I can just open it and turn to anything and read and. And be. Have an enjoyable read for, you know. And let's be honest, when you're reading aloud to children, sometimes everybody's on a very short clock because it's late and people are tired. Maybe the kids, maybe the adults. Right. So. So you can go straight through, you can go straight through a chapter, you can go straight through a subsection, or you can just let them find a beautiful image and want to read what that image is about.
- [32:58]
C
Yeah, beautiful. Well, the book is coming out this May. May 2026.
- [33:04]
B
May 19th.
- [33:05]
C
May 19th, 2026. And I encourage you all to pick it up. Whether you are a parent or a teacher of young children, middle aged children or older children, there will be something in the book for you. Matt, thanks for your time.
- [33:19]
B
Thank you, Katie.
- [33:19]
D
That was Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Dr. Matthew Meehan from Hillsdale NDC. His new book is the American Book of Fables. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast.