Q. What led you to become a children's literature historian?
A. Well, when I was in college at Yale in the early Seventies, I was majoring in history and also writing poetry. I began to focus on early 19th century American history, the beginning of the American Republic. I read accounts by Alexis de Tocqueville and others about life in America at that time, which all made some reference to children and said that children in America were more free-spirited, less beholden to authority than European children.
I had never really thought about childhood as [something] that varied from culture to culture, or from time to time or place to place. That fascinated me. I began to think where I could find evidence of what childhood might have been like at that time and place, or for that matter, anywhere.
It occurred to me--partly because I was interested in literature in general--that children's books of that era [might reveal] how children were regarded, how they were raised, and what they were exposed to, and what kind of people they became as a result of that exposure. So I went to the library not knowing what I'd find, if anything.
I found there was a very wide range of children's books published in America in the early 19th century which reflected different attitudes toward childhood. So that was the first time I wrote about children's books and thought about them in a serious way. And then I began paying attention to illustration, and to what was being published in the present. Because of my interest in poetry, I focused on the work of Margaret Wise Brown.
Q. What kind of books were you reading as a child?
A. Lots of biographies. In fact, when I found Goodnight Moon in a bookstore in my mid-twenties, I'd never heard of Margaret Wise Brown before. But a lot of things came together [for Marcus] because I saw she was a poet. And that she was writing for children. And that the clarity of her work corresponded with the kind of writing I was striving for as a writer. And then I remembered that I'd always read biographies and thought, well, maybe I'd like to write a biography of my own about Margaret Wise Brown.
Q. What brought you to write Side By Side?
A. I'd written another book that Walker [& Company] published called A Caldecott Celebration, about the making of six books that had won the Caldecott Medal. Each of those books had been illustrated and written by the same person, so there were no collaborations involved. I didn't want to do just a sequel to that book. I wanted to look at picture book making from a different angle. I began thinking about books that are made by two people working together.
More often than not these days, collaborations are arranged marriages. Very often the author and the artist haven't met each other. But there have been a number of instances over the years of two or maybe three people committing themselves to each other artistically, and finding a way that they can extend themselves, do something together that they could never have done on their own. And that phenomenon really interested me.
I realized that it has an analogy in a lot of ways that children relate to each other in school or at home. You know, brothers and sisters cooperating--or not cooperating-- or kids doing a class projects, or making something in the kitchen at home with the parent. So it seemed to me it was a very basic situation that children are familiar with. And since these are books that many children are also familiar with, I thought it made a nice connection between their personal lives and the books that they experience with readers.
Q. Usually we hear it's taboo for writers and illustrators to team up. How did the teams in Side By Side get around that?
A. Well, they were taking a chance by doing that. Publishers generally don't feel comfortable having a pair coming together. But each case is different. With Jon [Scieszka, author] and Lane [Smith, illustrator] they just went ahead. They probably would have done one book together even if they hadn't been published, just for the experience of doing it, I think.
But Lane was very professional at that point. He'd published a lot of magazine work. And [book designer] Molly Leach, his girlfriend at the time [now Smith's wife], was also very professional. So they had a lot going for them. And Jon is very talented; he knows what he is doing.
But they weren't picked up by the first publishes who saw their work. There was a lot of rejection. What they were doing was a little different from what was then considered the norm. They had to find a publisher who was open to something different. And, of course, Regina Hayes at Viking had been publishing James Marshall, so she had a good sense of humor and was willing to take a chance.
Other people in this collection of collaborators met in other ways. Jerry Pinkney [artist] and Julius Lester [author] were an arranged marriage to begin with, though their careers were proceeding along parallel lines.
Q. Were there any findings that surprised you?
A. Collaboration is a very elusive process I guess. And a lot is based on intuition or shared feelings about things. The interview with Alice Provensen [co-creator with her husband, Martin, of The Glorious Flight, winner of the 1984 Caldecott Medal] was a little frustrating for me. I think it was part of her aesthetic, and her husband's aesthetic, not to draw the line between themselves. It was important for them to feel that each of them had an equal share in [both the writing and illustrating], rather than divvying it up between one and the other.
That made it a little harder to write about. You naturally want to chart who did what. But I had to learn that isn't really what collaboration is necessarily. It was very touching to realize what really went on between them. That they really merged. As she says at the end: "We were really one artist." It's such a powerful statement. It became a metaphor for their marriage, I think.
Q. I'm curious to hear which books you read to your son when he was a baby. Goodnight Moon...?
A. Actually, [laughs] we tried that on him. He didn't like it. That was the first sign that I had an independent-minded child--I was actually kind of happy about that. His favorite first book was called Where's My Squishy Ball? It was a lift-the-flap book. I forget who wrote it, but after reading it and looking at it with him it many, many times [laughs] I came to think it was pretty good.
We've been very eclectic in our reading with him. When he was very young, we would pick up what was closest at hand. Sometimes it would be a Curious George book. I found them to be very wordy, so we would just look at the pictures and make up our own story, which was a nice way to use the book.
I became a lot more flexible about books when I became a parent. You know, I realized you can use them however you choose. That there's no wrong way, and you don't have to be so stuffy about the aesthetics of things because children will find something of interest almost anywhere. So we looked at Make Way for Ducklings, but we certainly didn't read that book when he was one or two, we just looked at the pictures. We listened to books on tape sometimes, and that helped him fall asleep some nights after we read to him.
We tried not to make a big deal of it, but we did try to make [reading together] a regular part of our evening. And I think I realized that it was important that he see that [Marcus and his wife] like to read, that it's part of our lives. And we never said no to television. And there are times now when he'll say let's turn off the TV and read a book.
Q. You mentioned stuffiness. Do you think there's an element of that in children's books?
A. I think when a book is declared a "classic" it takes on aura that can be off-putting. And there are books that have won the Caldecott that aren't that interesting anymore, if they ever were. [Same with] the Newbery medal. So I think those awards and terms like "classic" are used as marketing tools, and people should be aware of that. And that they're not necessarily the best books or only books that children should have to like. Because the minute you put it in those terms, you're missing the point.
I think parents should focus on having an enjoyable experience, having it be a shared experience, when kids are young. That's the most important thing. Not everyone has to grow up to read Proust, for one thing. But people who are destined to do things like that will, over time as children, develop taste and discrimination and become bored with the more formulaic books that their friends are all reading. Some kids will never get beyond that, and that's just the way of the world, I think.
Q. Did your son read Goosebumps?
A. Oh, he loved the covers of Goosebumps. He was very into being a brave lad who could look scary things in the face. So he used to get me to borrow Goosebumps paperbacks from the library long before he was able to read them just so he could look at the gross covers. He also--to my embarrassment or chagrin, though I came to accept this--early on gravitated toward Berenstain Bear books and he wanted to have those read to him.
Q. What is it about those books?
A. I think they present a very ordered view of the world. And they touch on issues that kids are really worried about, or at least thinking about. I think it's the systematic way they work through an issue that's comforting to children on some level. It's like they touch every base, over and over again [laughs]. I don't know about the art. I could never find anything really good to say about that. But I guess it's cute. And what it is is accessible. It's not, "This is the Metropolitan Museum talking." I think a lot of mediocre art is appealing to kids because there's nothing too demanding or intimidating about it.
So, it turns out there are all these different levels of experience that you can have with children's books. And children aren't necessarily committed to any one of them, which I think parents should be flexible about.
