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

32:48I mean, Miyazaki, like Japanese storytelling generally, 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 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.

33:27I 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 is more like a distillation of the question that we might all have. And it doesn't mean we have an 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 clearly, that's you using the skills you've gained over the last 40 years that a kid might not have to do that.

34:07Where 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'm 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 we have another here's another example of stories that do this though um like fairy tales yeah yeah uh and folk tales 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 and i hear them talked a lot about as examples of like clean structure and like classical storytelling and i don't think have you read any real ones yeah they're like a dream 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.

35:22And they're not that either. Kids misbehave and bad things happen to them sometimes, but 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 and 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 parts. You know, like John and I worked on a Three Billy Goats Gruff. And then I have one coming out with Carson Ellis, a Rumpelstiltskin next year.

36:04And in all of them, it's like when we go out and talk about them, people are like, why is this story stuck around? Like, what do you think it has to offer? And usually they 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. It's just like it's just got a weird beat. It's a beating heart inside a log. I don't know. Like, yeah, I do. Yeah. 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.

36:47And 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. No, I think that's right. I think, um, first of all, there's not a clear thing that that would have been. I don't think like the morally right thing to do. Um, 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 um 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 feel like 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 in some direction but you um but you wanted to arise out of out of the character's desires or actions and not kind of some superimposed bit of classical storytelling.

38:26Yeah, 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 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.

39:04It's 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 um 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 and uh 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.

40:38They will work so hard to empathize with a character or with even like a robot, even an AI. 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 It 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.

41:14And 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 just a little thing to wrap that up i probably have just consumed too much youngian thought because my feeling that when i'm reading it was like you need to turn towards the shadow like that 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 No, no, no, it's okay.

41:58But, I mean, it's been around for how many hundreds of years you had time to read. To read it, that's right. 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 going to choose to be together anyway. Might not be the best thing for these two. That's how I was reading it. No, but that's not my job, right? Our job isn't to choose.

42:43Again, it begins to feel like you can feel the authors taking control of the wheel a bit too much when that kind of stuff happens. And so like, that's not your job. I don't know. 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 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 um 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 um 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 off 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 like so that freeze frame where she's in the air kissing him and his expression is like mild panic.

44:22This is like, 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. Like, and there's still, 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.

45:07And it just has this moment of just like, ooh, this is like, I've been rooting for them, but this isn't perfect, is it? It's just inevitable. But that kind of confirmation we are much more interested in than something that doesn't feel even real. Like we can't, you couldn't name a relationship even when you're four 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's 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.

45:38No, you know how you like that one friend more than he likes you? like here it is like that is the most recognizable dynamic 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 you're giving over to that and being like i am happy in my position in this too this is 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.

46:14And 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? So 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.

46:54And 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 like 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 you you show them this weird thing that that that it's just you're like again even at age four 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?

47:39Yeah. 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, this book is incorrect. They feel like maybe their read on things that they've seen wasn't the correct thing. Right. Where they like, that's my, 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, they don't show me the world and they're just going to 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.

48:14It doesn't reflect my life at all. So there must be something wrong with me.

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49:10I 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 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.

49:51Tell us what you guys do there. um yeah it's called looking at picture books um and i a lot of it is is literally we just look at a single picture book and try to figure out why it's so good um and john and i write the posts um by texting each other um and thank you i like it yeah it comes from the fact that we just text each other a lot. Um, it occurred that we were texting each other that we should text each other about this. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, we will, we'll, we'll look at where the wild things are, um, or, or shortcut or, uh, good night moon. And we'll, we'll look at specific spreads and page turns and we'll just try to figure out, um, kind of how, yeah, how it works.

50:42I think that like, 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, like we know how chapters work or, or, or, you know, that, 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, ah, I remember learning about this at school.

51:28Right. Okay. And then it's going to do this at the end. And we don't have that knowledge of how picture books work. 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? 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, it can be the work and the decisions that we assume or know the author or illustrator made.

52:21But 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'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 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?

53:14What'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, uh, 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?

53:55All the stuff on the fronts of boxes and bottles 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.

54:24They 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. Yeah, you have that like with good night moon, you know, which came out over 60 years ago. Yeah. Um, why is this stuck around? Like, why do we all know this book? Why is it still read? Um, and I, it is, it's again, you, you know, it's on that fairytale trajectory. It's because there is something there, some, some life force, some beating heart.

55:02Um, and some of this is, it may be, uh, the author and the illustrator's intent. You know, we do have in Margaret Wise Brown, like one of the great American poets, Clement Hurd, an incredible painter. Some of it will be accidental. And this is true of any artwork. Um, but it is about like, it's about giving, uh, 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.

55:45And it should be that way. We're just trying to like kind of catch up with them a little bit with this thing. 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 dart like you were major fans of this direction um 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.

56:51And 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. Yeah. Does that make sense as a question? Okay. It does make sense. Yeah. I think John is trying to calibrate his own. Well, yeah, I always loved picture books. I had kind of a, like, 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 our house that was empty. It was designed to be filled with my books that she got me.

57:30So 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 it. 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 one of 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.

58:08And, um, 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 looked at me that's a great point yeah he was so betrayed working at he's like all right what does this say yeah 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 and then starting in high school they became like a really active part of my life because i started working with elementary school kids then um John, you had a little I feel like when we met each other, we were all in the same place with picture books, but you had maybe like a slightly different.

59:02Yeah, 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 got into 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, I just wanted a job drawing and I didn't care what it was. As long as it was the Little Mermaid. As long as it was the Little Mermaid. As long as she was in there somewhere. You went around the studio.

59:35I was like, are you guys doing a remake of Little Mermaid per chance? Yeah. That's all I want. 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 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. Zeus story, it turned out. But the style of them was all like the 60s kind of style.

1:00:11This 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 it it was like I it was like I remembered something I haven't thought of in 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 in five kids and so they 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 Digest and everything was in his room.

1:00:51And 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 didn't keep them around. I didn't think of them through high school, through college or anything. And then I went into work at the animation studios and I had done a student film and the student film, an art director at Simon & Schuster wrote me after college saying like, Hey, I saw this thing on YouTube.

1:01:34You 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 Sam and 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'd 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 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 um but 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, yeah.

1:03:09And 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, we met and we ended up talking about frog and toad at this, at this party, like for like hours. Um, and it was really like that conversation, um, that, that is the reason we became friends. And I do think that like in, 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. We've been doing it since that night.

1:03:47Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly how it feels. And, uh, 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 Segel.

1:04:34And 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 on 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 what 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.

1:05:16And 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. um and i was curious if 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 oh yeah but i appreciate but you appreciate it that's part of the fun is that it's not yours yeah does this make sense oh there's so much there i mean i think that's sort of like heavily reactive almost like cantankerous way of reading stuff like whether it's people I admire or not like yeah that to me has been so linked to to how I write like if I read something and and I think like I would do this differently often like it's really visceral I get angry and I'm like I 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.

1:06:32But that is a creative impulse that I feel like it would be easy to not even recognize that as what it is. I talk to kids about that a lot where like, because 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 some advice. And it's like, I don't know. But one of the things is that I do think is maybe useful to think. I talk to them about like, yeah, read all the time. But also if you want to be a writer, reading books that you don't like is very useful.

1:07:22That I learn more from the books I hate than the books that I love. And like you can even feel when I say books that I hate at a school, there are there are teachers sometimes we're 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. Some books are not magic. Yeah. And some books are just not magic for you. Exactly. And some of them are crap. And some are just not magic. But also, there is a thing of like, what is magic for you is a really important thing.

1:08:05Yeah. Yes. And so like that and like what we're talking about is developing taste and then a point 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 this other piece of just like looking at stuff that that people you admire make and like thinking I wouldn't do that. And I still admire it. That's so much of reading. Well, that's that's most of it, isn't it? Increasingly, I feel like is that you get attracted to the things you wouldn't.

1:08:41And it's not that you disagree with them. it's 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 beautiful books and i was um i picked out dead souls and mac's like have you read dead souls by google 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 no come on and like no and then and then uh that uh what's called the george saunders book about analyzing russian short stories came out a couple years ago which if that's it's an amazing book i read it a couple times and he has a description of a swim in the The pond in the rain.

1:09:39In a pond in the rain. In a pond? In a pond? Not in the pond. In a pond. 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! It's not even the stuff I like about what my preoccupations are. It's just whatever he says is like, Yeah, that's me. All right. Like from every angle that's gotten like Mac was right, but it's like, you're not going to make necessarily, and this is another lesson of that book too, is that you don't really necessarily make what you set out to make.

1:10:17You don't even going to 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 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. Um, yeah. And so a lot of, it feels a little bit like, yeah. When you meet somebody who's too much like you and you're like, no, no, no, no. Yeah. It is the same.

1:10:51I 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 as we talked about is William Steig, Steig, Mac, Steig. 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 things about how he puts together something.

1:11:27but you cover your tracks pretty good on stealing from someone like that, 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 sort of like and who you do like, you're stealing a lot, right? Even if you don't want to be, you're kind of shoplifting from them. Whereas people you don't completely understand who are just so far out from what your impulses are, and you can't, 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.

1:12:02Maybe that's why you get attracted to that kind of stuff too. It just feels good to shut it off and you can just read again. 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. I don't understand what they did. I don't know why it made me cry or feel something or whatever. I 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.

1:12:55or I would have, or I actually feel like, yeah, if I was doing that, I might do it. It's not that you just would have done it differently, but you just, I wish they hadn't have done that. It could be either. I have this with like an entire basically run of work in some ways. 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 like I recognized it it was it was like nostalgic for me because I was like oh I grew up here in in Maurice Sendak's drawings um and I just like I I loved his work then I love his work now like as a as a writer I come to it again and I admire it even more I 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 um 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 going to 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 right like yeah none of the work really gets me very excited after that um 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.

1:14:44I still think he's the greatest to ever do it. And he's still my favorite. And like, maybe what he was doing is like, was important to him to do. I actually find it super liberating to just be like, there's not actually a lot in there. There's not, 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 what I get from that is this story about what it would mean to make this stuff for my whole life I started pretty young he started pretty young it's a long time okay I could have 30 years of stuff that I'm just like I'm loving it, I don't really care what y 'all think It feels a bit like – Here's another one.

1:15:36Here's some more me interpreting William Blake's drawings. This one's for my brother again. It feels a little bit – when you're saying it that way, it reminds me of when you love a band. And 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, 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.

1:16:19But John, can I just say one thing? I think this is interesting, but it may not be. This could just be me in so deep. This is a podcast, so go for it, man. That's what we do. All of that.

1:16:34it's loud 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 uh 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, oh, there it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it's very interesting. I think about this a lot. Cause 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.

1:17:23And 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. And it wasn't an intention. Was it a curiosity? Was it what there's some, we don't know, but But there, because, and also, would he have said, yeah, go ahead. No, you say, you finish yours. Would he have said, was he frustrated or did he love them? Right. I think he loved them. Right. So that's really interesting too.

1:18:04Yeah. What were you going to say? 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 due. And he's right about that. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But then I feel like he started making this turn to just be like, I'm going to 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.

1:18:44Right. I mean, it's a nice quote, but like you can find the exact opposite quote where he'll like. 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. 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.

1:19:25I'm almost there. But this idea that I feel 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. um 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?

1:20:13And 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, um, 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.

1:21:07This 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 in 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.

1:21:57I was like, Oh, you could spend your life doing this and it would be art and it'd be worthy of doing it. Um, and so first of all, I just want to say thank you for that because it really did have a big impact on me. Yeah. 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? Cause 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 sub stack, 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.

1:22:37Does that feel accurate to you? Yes. Okay. Yeah. No, I, that's, I mean, I'm glad. That's what I hope. I think that

1:22:50we make jokes in the sub stack. You do. You make jokes. The whole Grinch post was very much a joke. Not at the cost of taking this seriously, though, either. 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 we know. we know like oh yeah 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 the ones that have endured are extremely ambitious like uh just like pieces of of of excellent writing and illustration and they're entertaining.

1:23:36You 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 want to have fun. And like, that's great. That's why like, let's pay both of those things off. Like, let's like, let's dig deep but have a good time doing it that that's all i want to do yeah yeah i think you have to assume too that your audience knows um 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 gonna be fine it's kids right like there's a there's a there's a 75 percent that you get to and then the last 25 are kind of given up on pretty easily because you can convince yourself that the eight-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 where 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 um 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 and respecting your audience they seem almost one in the same um and whether that's kids or anybody else uh it's just like we just never had that discussion where they're like well they're four though like you know they love a bright color let's just give them just why would we do that we're bored i think that's a lot of it is that we just be bored making that stuff.

1:25:29Why 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 like feels like a waste of time. And this is the form we've chosen in 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.

1:26:04I think it's probably happened to Mac, although I haven't seen it happen to Mac, where if you don't keep a loose rein 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 commitment 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 if there's no poking fun at it or no acknowledgement of how silly it actually is too you won't make anything you you're frozen solid and you won't make a move in any direction and so it's it's very useful to regularly poke holes in it because like otherwise you can't move yeah there's something silly and by the way like the silliness like when i go i love i love i love going to see i just love going to see plays and the first like 30 or 90 seconds when everybody comes out of a play on for a play and they have to basically convince everybody that this is a natural thing yeah to do yeah um and what we're going to do is we're all going to sit here again like for for 90 minutes and we're going to make believe we're going to pretend together.

1:27:23But right now we like, we were just chatting with our friend and then the lights came down and a bunch of people are coming out in costume and maybe singing 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, it's, I, 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.

1:28:02This is beautiful. I love it. And I get worked up. Yeah. Yeah. 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. And I think it's what you're getting at is 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.

1:28:52And I like, it gets to what we were talking about at the start where it's like, you have, it almost feels like it's giving you space to be part of it. Cause they're saying you're going to have to make believe, like you said, you're going to have to participate. My first job, when I was in high school, I had an internship at a theater company in Niagara on the lake. And 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 set. I'd never been to a play either.

1:29:23And 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 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 weird. And they sat very patiently. They were like, John, if someone is sitting in row F, they need to see someone coming down the stairs. So that's why it's bent that way.

1:29:52We'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 more now 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 than thinking that doorway's 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 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 surrender to your curiosity about who's coming down the stairs is like the whole work.

1:30:44It's 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. 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 really encouraged me to push through the gatekeepers and the walls and all like knowing that this is hard to get into.

1:31:23And 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.

1:32:06I 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'd 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.

1:32:34You were missing pirate ships and dinosaur bones and alien spacecrafts and like just everything. But the more, and that seemed like And it was meant to be an escalation as well. So that I think the way we had it first is that they miss a gem. The gem was the first thing. And then as they go further, it was going to be a skeleton reaching for the gem. And the skeleton was wearing a crown with a lot more gems in it. and then that was the clarity came from or at least when we roughed that out and i think it did get completely roughed out or at least pretty close yeah i remember when i was going to say when you were presenting i remember thinking it's like pretty finished as with all these different things and then being done very differently yeah yeah but it wasn't clear you weren't um it wasn't funny either which both of those things are usually the same thing is that it was much funnier if the gens bigger you were sure then that you would have been less 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 or page six yeah and also it was just dividing focus like it was fun to draw all this stuff and um and complicate the image and then And there are these like little focal points for these two kids, but you are emotionally attached to your characters.

1:34:09You want to be focused on them by the, 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, those, that's your way in. And so it was just almost like, it felt like a, like a me 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? What, like, um, and it's easier to draw too. And so that was nice, but it was just a cleaner, it was just a cleaner joke.

1:34:42I think like to your point, it's just like story and joke. I will say though, but you know what I'll say, John, I'm going to just, I'm going to tee Andy up for what's coming, for what I feel is coming. You know what I'm going to say, but it's not. It was a, 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're like, this is better. We, we fixed the problem with the book. Right. It's how we felt. And I, yeah. And I'm not going to sit here and end the interview with, and here's my critique. No, you can.

1:35:19I'm not going to. Honestly, you can and we would love it. We would love it. But no. It's honestly like, summer people, you know, like that was, that was helpful. Yeah. it was for less cultured folks honestly yeah you know we just thought it got movie guys movie guys yeah like me uh but that no but honestly because i thought it's a funny thing to bring up but it's yeah it it was true and that i thought this feels exactly like what you two would do with this and it felt right to go 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.

1:36:04And 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, you know, all these kinds of things, which you guys do a lot of that too. 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. I think some of that has to do with the fact that around then, um, Mac and I would have been touring together a lot. We would have been doing extra yarn and my own hat books.

1:36:40I was beginning to tour and we were, Mac had been at it for a little longer than I had presenting in front of kids and getting that kind of page to page response um but if you picture the book with pirate ships and dinosaurs and stuff um 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 like oh look at that and like oh look at the one oh yeah no less valuable a sound but what we want is an but a different one like furious when you turn a page from a small diamond to a bus size 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.

1:37:43Um, 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 of the quiet, like, let's spend half an hour looking at this spread. 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, in a way that's interesting. Um, but I think what you like, what you were getting there, and it is just exactly that they're like, even with that book, there were two ways to make it right.

1:38:18And 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. 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.

1:38:55Like 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. True. 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 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 it feels like you gotta fight your way through getting it out there so i had something to say about maximalism and yeah go ahead there but you just gave like a sermon and like Andy's face was just like we brought it home.

1:39:59I don't want to 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. We will come back and do it for hours. You was like, I think, you know, 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 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.

1:40:39Right. 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 a 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, you wouldn't care as much if they got home or not.

1:41:08It would be like this weird coda. But this way, you're always with them. You're emotionally tracking 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 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.

1:41:43I 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. Speaking of maximalist on the emotional front, the previous version where they're going through all these different things that increase in this kind of 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 I do think – That depends what your goal of the book is, right?

1:42:23Like, yeah. I think that's totally true. your your phrase the phrase you just used andy of devotion to the gag i think describes john and me really well i think that's true 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 what actually like it it reminds me it reminds me of a very famous trip this is like we were just starting touring together again and we did a conference in carmel california our wives were with us uh on this trip because carmel is this like beautiful seaside town and its technical name i think is carmel by the sea.

1:43:16Yeah. Um, the 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, and, 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. Um, 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 which were just all about just like you know keeping cute shops open basically it was a good contrast and I think that 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.

1:44:16But we were finding something in it and they still talk about how awful it was. But in some ways, it's 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, 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 going to reach the sublime.

1:44:59It 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 as a horse, Kristen Shaw as 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 and Dave dig a hole.

1:45:36Um, one last question and I'm gonna let you go. And this is hopefully a small one. Uh, I was thinking about, you 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? Cause I'm guessing it's not a full perfect circle. 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 the greatest like intellectual sense of why our partnership works or like how it works. I just kind of know that it does.

1:46:18Yeah. All right. Maybe, and it's too far in the game to get into it, but maybe next time. What we've, I think that there is a nice balance that we've found in that we understand, I think, probably more clearly than we know how we are different. If we don't disagree 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. It's probably the same the other way. I know you're joking, but it is. 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.

1:47:02And I think that that's where we've gotten to with that. It's not that, yeah, it's very rare that it comes up. In fact, I can't think of any time where it's been like, oh, 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 understand like what the other person would even like and be like, oh yeah, you like that thing.

1:47:39And it's not, again, it's not in the framing of like, but you're wrong. It's just like, that's, it totally works with your whole thing. Yeah. And so - Clothes is 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. This actually was one of the different things. There's been a lot of contrast today, a lot of contrast. And so, like, 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.

1:48:20and he'll like he'll do the same thing with like this was just what the hero is 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 i do not look that way in this jacket i 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 we yeah we'll go into a story 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 I don't even put it in those terms yeah 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've 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 all 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 i i think that's the ideal situation with a collaborator i makes 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.

1:49:48You have that agreement on a lot of taste things, but then you have access to different things. And that's really what makes it interesting. It's like, you're bringing something that I don't even know how you got that. I love it. Okay. That's what it's best. Thank you for the mean on each other for it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And I know that there are, there's like, there's, there's a certain kind of book. There's 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.

1:50:21And that's what you hope for. That's the ideal. 100%. All right. Please do come back. Thank you for the mega session. Um, this might be the longest one I've ever done. Um, this was so fun and, uh, everybody go check out the sub stack. Do you, what is it looking at picture books dot sub stack.com? It is. Yeah. And we'll put it in the show notes too. Thanks a lot. Thanks y 'all. Yeah. Thanks for having us.

1:51:05All 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 in creative pep talk history. That's one of my favorite episodes. Be sure to check out looking at picturebooks.substack.com. Whether you're a picture book artist or not, I think this is just a, such a rich, valuable cornucopia of creative knowledge. Um, and there's just, I mean, every time I get one of the emails come through, I'm just like inspired to re dedicate myself to the craft, um, and, uh, of being a creative and a picture book person, go check it out.

1:51:56One 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 invisiblethings.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 to get your hands on it.

1:52:32Massive 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 Y for our theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until we speak again, stay pepped up.

1:53:09Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them, like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian 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. 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.

1:53:52I 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 newsletter at andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our creative career path hand booklet 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.