Under My Thumb: Brian Selznick on Control

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brian Selznick (00:04):
When you're a kid and you have so little
control over things, to be thebig entity controlling the
smaller entity, whether it'sdolls or, you know, soldiers or
whatever it is. They do what youtell them to do. They become the
story you're making.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey (00:22):
As kids, we're too small to have power
over much. We're told what todo, what to eat, what to say,
and sometimes we don't even getto tell the truth about who we
are. So it makes sense that aswe get older, we are motivated
to become the masters of our owndomains. And some people are

(00:45):
more motivated than most.

Controlling everything. That's what my job
is.

Brian Selznick is a number one New
York Times best selling author,an illustrator, and Caldecott
medal winning creator who'sreimagined what a picture book
can be. From the invention ofHugo Cabret to Wonderstruck and
more recently Run Away With Me,his stories weave words and

(01:12):
images together in ways thatdemand that we read them
differently. In this episode,Brian opens up about control.
Why he wants it? How he wieldsit?
And when ultimately, he has towalk away from it. Along the
way, he unpacks his fetish forall things miniature, and he

(01:33):
gets unsparingly honest aboutthe ups and downs of life and
death with his father. He alsoreads from his biggest influence
and teaser. It's not a picturebook. It's not even illustrated.
Although, as you will hear, itoffers an intensely visual
experience. My name is JordanMoybookie, and this is The

(01:57):
Reading Culture, a show where wespeak with diverse authors about
ways to build a stronger cultureof reading in our communities.
We dive deep into their personalexperiences and inspirations.
Our show is made possible byBeanstack, the leading solution
for motivating people to readmore. Learn more at
beanstack.com, and make sure tocheck us out on Instagram at the

(02:21):
reading culture pod andsubscribe to our newsletter for
bonus content atthereadingculturepod.com/
newsletter.
Alright. On to the show. Hey,listeners. Are you looking for a
fun, easy way to track yourreading and earn cool rewards?

(02:43):
Well, meet Beanstack, theultimate reading app used by a
community of over 15,000schools, libraries, and
organizations nationwide.
Are you an avid reader? Checkwith your local library to see
if they offer Beanstack forfree. A parent? Ask your child's
teacher if the school libraryalready uses Beanstack. And if

(03:04):
you are an educator searchingfor a fresh alternative to
accelerated reader, Beanstack isthe perfect tool to cultivate a
thriving reading culture.
Ready to turn the page? Visitbeanstack.com to learn more.
I wanna start off by talking a little
bit about power dynamics and theunevenness of power dynamics and

(03:29):
how those can be baked in, Iguess, in a sense to all
children's books. And then Iwanted to know from you, like,
who you would describe when youwere younger as having power
over you when you were young.

Two things are coming to my mind. One feels
darker, but isn't very dark.

Okay.

And one on a very sort of a brighter, lighter
side. When I was a kid, my dadwas very into sports and I was
not. And I think my dad and Iwere just from very different
planets. And for as much as Ifeel like we didn't understand
each other and he did scare me.Like, you know, he was a bit

(04:08):
controlling, and he had waysthat he liked to have the house
run.
My dad was a man of the fifties,and he expected his children and
his wife to do what he said andto have things taken care of in
a certain way around the house.So there was a kind of fear. And
then when my youngest brothercame around, he actually turned

(04:28):
out to be really great atsports. And I remember feeling a
great amount of relief that mydad had someone he could focus
that on. Mhmm.
It felt like of all the peoplewho you know, everyone has power
over you, you know, pretty muchas a young person as you were
saying, my dad's feltparticularly like something I

(04:51):
had to react to or against orhide from or be secret from. And
as a young queer kid, I guess Ifigured out I was different when
I was in fifth or sixth grade.And it didn't come out to my
parents till I was 25, so it wasa long time Because I had a
sense my dad might not take itvery well and, you know, I was

(05:13):
right. But again, we got throughall of that.

Even while dealing with those difficult
power dynamics, Brian feltloved.

He and my mom, from the time all three of my
siblings were young, they madeit very clear to us that what
was important to them is that wedid what made us happy. So there
was an undercurrent of a kind ofunderstanding and love, which I
think is very important to stateas I'm talking about the other
more complicated parts.

And while his sexuality and athleticism
were absolutely areas oftension, there was one
particular interest of Brian'sthat his father encouraged
wholeheartedly. And that bringsus to that brighter, lighter
example of power that Brianmentioned earlier.

I got art classes. I grew up in East
Brunswick, New Jersey wherethere was a fantastic art
program in the public schools,and he was always very proud of
the art that I did. One of thethings my parents did as a young
person when they saw that I wasinterested in art was find a
really good after school artteacher for me to study with.
They found a woman in my areanamed Aileen Sutton who was a

(06:20):
professional artist and who didart classes for adults and for
children. And she saw my workand she started working with me.
And Aileen Sutton and I workedtogether until I graduated high
school, which coincided with hermoving to Alaska. And that kind

(06:40):
of power dynamic was a veryinteresting one. So she's the
person who comes to mind as theother end of what a power
dynamic can mean when you lookat it as a kind of mentorship,
you know, where a power dynamiccan be a very positive thing,
where someone who has knowledgeand has the ability to do
something recognized as ayounger person who has some

(07:01):
potential and takes them undertheir wing and helps them become
who they are. We've all hadteachers who try to make their
students into versions ofthemselves, and that's not
always helpful. And then otherteachers, other mentors who do
what I believe a good teacher issupposed to do, which is help

(07:24):
you discover what it is you'recapable of doing and help you
make the best version ofyourself that you can.

Aileen was more than just a tutor to Brian.
She became his mentor and guideto the art world. Thanks to her,
he had a live encounter with afamous painting and a revelation
about size and artistic powerthat would have a dramatic
influence on his future work.

So Aileen did all these amazing things with
me. Like, she introduced me toartwork I didn't know about. You
know, I never really knewanything about Pablo Picasso
when I was 10 or 11. So she gaveme a book of his work and then
took me to a huge Picassoexhibition that was at the
Museum of Modern Art and justopened my eyes to what it means
to look at art in person. In abook, Every image has to fit

(08:12):
inside the pages of the book.
And I think about this a lotwith phones. Everything has to
fit onto your screen. Sowhatever you're looking at, it's
all the same size. It's all thesame format. It all feels the
same because you're holding thesame thing in your hand.
Mhmm. But when I got to themuseum, Guernica, that war

(08:32):
painting that I had seen iswhat, like, 30 feet long It's
massive. And 10 feet high. Yeah.And the extraordinary sensation
of being in the presence of thepainting was something that
really affected me.
So, like, when you're looking ata book, generally, you're always

(08:55):
bigger than the book. Andtherefore, you the relationship
of size is, you know, in termsof power differentials, you are
always going to be physicallymore powerful than the book that
you're holding or the phone thatyou're scrolling through in now.
But when you are in the presenceof of actual work of art, then

(09:17):
you know that the artist hasalso taken into account the
relationship between you and thephysical object that they're
making. So when I'm standingwhen anyone in is standing in
front of Guernica, I just didstay on that for a moment, we
are all dwarfed by that physicalobject, and then it's a painting

(09:39):
about pain and injustice andwar. And it affects us in a
certain way.
That's a power differential.Right? Like, the power of that
work exists only when you're init, you know, when you're
experiencing it.

You might assume that having had his mind
blown by a 30 foot painting,Brian would eventually fixate on
making large scale art. But if Ican show you what I saw behind
Brian during his interview, andI will post some videos on
Instagram so you can see itthere, but you'll realize that
his fascination with size endedup going exactly the opposite

(10:20):
way. People cannot see this, butbehind you are so many
miniatures. Perfectly organized and looking
so nice.

And I do have a lot of shelves with a lot of
small things on them.

Yes. You do. You have a lot of them. And
I have heard you talk about thebook, The Borrowers. So maybe
that was it.
But what was it that you foundor find so appealing about the
tiny world, the world ofminiatures?

When you're a kid and as we were discussing,
you have so little control overthings. To be the big entity
controlling the smaller entity,whether it's dolls or soldiers
or whatever it is, small things,they do what you tell them to
do. They become the story you'remaking. If you have a dollhouse,

(11:07):
you are the person in control ofthe house, which is inside a
house in which you have almostno control. And the pleasure of
having that ability, I think, isa relatively universal idea.
What were your miniatures thatyou played with then and, like,
now? How do you

view that as an evolution in your life?

Yeah. I made I didn't have a dollhouse, but I
made miniature rooms. And Iremember I made a colonial room.
I had found or gotten thislittle set of plastic colonial
furniture, and I made a littlecardboard room for it, and that
was very, very satisfying.

Oh my god. You had to make your own
dollhouse. You didn't get

a dollhouse. And the borrowers, you mentioned
about the family of littlepeople that live under the kids'
floorboards was something Ithought was true. So I made the
borrowers that lived in my houselittle tables and objects that
have spools of thread like theydid in the book, and then I just
would leave them around thehouse for the borrowers to use
if they liked. And, actually,you were mentioning that your
dad loves toy soldiers. My dadhad a set of tin soldiers from

(12:12):
his childhood that he gave tome.
I mean, there's only, like, sixor seven of them left, but I
still have them. And I remember,you know, lining them up on my
shelf and the pleasure of havingthem lined up. I loved making
dioramas in school. I wouldalways make dioramas. I made a
very big diorama.
What does that mean? Like, twofeet by three feet? Two feet by

(12:33):
two feet?

It's bigger than a shoebox, basically.

Bigger than a shoebox of a dinosaur world.

Wow.

I love stop motion animation when I was a
kid, and I'm distantly relatedto David O. Selznick who made
Gone With The Wind and KingKong. And so there's great
scenes on Kong Island where Kongis battling dinosaurs. And it's
done, you know, with miniaturesand stop motion animation, and
the landscapes are reallybeautiful. So I remember making

(13:01):
a whole landscape of dinosaurs.
There was also a TV show in theseventies called Land of the
Lost about a family that they godown a waterfall when they're
rafting and end up in the landof the lost, which is, you know,
mostly dinosaurs and Yeah.Interesting cave people and
aliens for some reason. And thatminiature world and making the
miniature dinosaurs. And then inhigh school, I built, like, an

(13:22):
armature and a movable versionof King Kong that would be the
same size and type that wouldhave been made for the movie.
Wow.
And then a little world in whichthat character could have been
filmed, like, with a glass frontthat has painting on it and then
a background that has otherpainting on it. So it looks like
a three-dimensional jungle thathe's inside of. So yeah. But

(13:43):
really anything that was small.Oh, I also had a train set in my
basement, and I made a l shapedtable for it and then bought all
and made all of the miniaturebuildings.
And I made a tunnel, and I madea lake, and I made hills, and
Oh, wow. And all of that kind ofthing. So that was all very
pleasing to me, and that neverreally went away. Right? And I

(14:06):
think that's part of why I writethe books that I do, and those
things that interested me as akid are what interest me now.

It's interesting you pointed to a
book as, like, we have a controlover the book in a way. But I
kind of feel like with yourbooks in particular, you control
the reader's experience a lotmore. Do you think of it in that
way? Like, I'm looking at oneperspective now. I'm looking up
close.
I mean, depending on how you'reusing your illustrations, but my

(14:34):
experience is completelyinformed by you.

I'm having a contradictory thought about that
because I'm very, very consciousof controlling everything.
That's what my job is. What doyou

mean that's what your job is?

My job is to make something that tells a
story that gets across to you,the reader, the way I want it
to. So my very first book, theHoudini box in 1991, I read it
to kids before it was publishedto get their feedback. It was
incredibly helpful, so it'skinda funny that I've never done
it again. But I noticed thatwhen I was reading it to the

(15:09):
students, I mostly went toclasses where my friends were
teaching. I noticed thatsometimes I paused to build a
bit of dramatic tension.
So when it was time for me tobegin thinking about what this
was actually gonna be like as abook, I remembered all these
places I had paused and I madethem into the page turns so that

(15:29):
I'm forcing you as the readerwhen I'm not there to make those
pauses in the same place as Iwas pausing. And that's why
sometimes even in the Houdinibox, I had some pages with full
paragraphs and, like you werejust saying, some pages with
just a line. And every page hasessentially has one drawing on

(15:50):
one side and text on the other.And when you're introduced to
the kid who is obsessed with themagician Houdini, and the
drawings begin on one side ofthe book, and the text is on the
other side of the page of thespread, and it stays like that
until the boy actually meetsHoudini at which point it
switches. And my thought wasthat, hopefully, most readers

(16:14):
won't actually consciouslynotice that, but I wanted to
underscore the idea that whenthe boy meets this character,
everything changes.
So that idea of what happenswhen you turn the page and the
structure of the book has alwaysbeen a part of my thinking. And
going back to what you wereasking me about the control of
the storytelling within my bookthat I'm controlling how you

(16:36):
turn the page, I'm controllingwhat you see, The other thing
that I think I had mentionedearlier, it's slightly
contradictory, and I don't thinkI ever mentioned what the
contradiction was. Thecontradiction is that the reader
needs to feel like everything ishappening because they're making
it happen. And I do look atbooks as being collaborations
with the reader, and that'ssomething that I'm very aware

(17:00):
of. And I want the reader tohave to do some work.
And I mean that in whatever wayit sounds. I want you to do some
work narratively where you haveto put pieces together. I want
you to have to remembersomething. So in my new book,
Run Away With Me, it opens witha visual sequence of a walk

(17:21):
through a relatively emptyversion of the city of Rome
where you see the Pantheon andthe elephant obelisk and you see
cobblestone streets and you seeall of these things, interior of
a church that later when you getto the text, because then the
rest of the book is essentiallytext, when the characters in the
book get to an elephant that'sholding an obelisk on its back

(17:45):
and they get to a big giantbuilding with a huge dome with a
hole in the top, you as thereader, even if you've never
been to Rome, will remember thatyou had seen that in the opening
drawings. And, of course, in abook, you can flip right back
and, you know, look at it.
But I'm asking you to make thoseconnections. And how a reader
picks up and spends time withthe book is also out of my

(18:07):
control.

A lot of Brian's experimentation with
words and pictures and how theypush and pull each other and how
they steer the reader'sexperience is directly inspired
by his all time favorite picturebook.

Where the Wild Things Are. I always say that
that book is really all you needif you wanna get an education
and what the potential forpicture books can be. It's all
in that book that covers it.

You love that book and Maurice Sendak.
And that book is also, like,coincidentally, I think about
control or feeling completelyout of control as a kid and
wanting to seed it by the end.Mhmm. Where'd you say you were a
Max type character? Were you inyour head imagining things, and
did you want to have your wholeother world that was, like,

(18:54):
separate from this one thatwe're in?

In terms of the world of the imagination, I feel
like I would be comfortabledrawing a parallel between me
and Max, but not with Max'sability to express his anger.
That is not something that Iidentify with. I felt like I had
to keep a lot of things tomyself. And therefore, you know,

(19:19):
I did have a very active life ofthe imagination. It did spill
over into different ways inwhich I wrote stories, told
stories, made up stories withfriends and tape recorded them
on cassette players, storiesabout people and teachers in our
elementary school.
Some of them were, like, rudekind of parodies about teachers
we didn't like or the stories onmy own were more like fantasy

(19:43):
stories about horses with wingsand unicorn horns, which I
thought I had invented. And Iwrote stories, yeah, about
underwater cities, and Iremember writing a story about
kids who could fly, and that wascalled Lift. But I never thought
of myself as a writer at all.Control, I think we could
probably, you know, talk aboutthat as a main theme throughout

(20:06):
this conversation in differentways. You know, I did a book
called Big Tree where I made upthese two siblings, Merwin and
and Louise.
They're sycamore seeds, butthey're trying to save the world
at the end of the Jurassic erabefore the meteorite hits the
planet. And and Merwin is, like,really controlling and really,
like, he has to live by therules and do everything that
mama says. And his sister,younger sister Louise, is very

(20:26):
dreamy and poetic and followsher instinct, and she drives her
brother crazy. And, you know,ultimately, of course, they need
each other in some way. And itwasn't till I finished the book
that I had, like, written anX-ray of my own psychology.
Right? Like like, it was justlike, I made up nothing. It's
just me arguing with myself totrust the instincts that are

(20:49):
there and to trust the poetrythat's there and to trust if
Louise is the idea of yourinstinct and the idea that you
know what to do in on some leveland Merwin is the idea that you
believe you can controleverything. But it's also
connected to the idea that welive in the real world, and
there are things that we need todo, and there are ways in which

(21:10):
we have to deal with variousissues. We don't live in a
utopia where we can just dowhatever we want.

I'm in Washington, DC, so I really know
that right now.

You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. But
that idea that they need eachother, that there's a balance to
be struck, I think, is mayberelated to a larger theme that
is connected to where I am in mylife right now.

When you look back, and then we'll move
from that era or that time. Whenyou think back to, like, the
voice in your head now, like,whose voice is sort of, like, in
there?

That's interesting. I do have voices. I
think we all have voices. I dofully identify them as mine. I
can probably talk about howthose voices or some of those
voices have been formed byexperiences with, you know, my
dad or, you know, I mean, Suttonor whoever it is, then mentors

(22:09):
who I had later on, like MauriceSendak and Remy Charlotte.
But, generally, it feels morelike what's happening in my head
is a kind of tug of war betweenhaving instincts that are deep
and real and sudden and thatother thing that I think a lot

(22:30):
of people have and recognize andcan understand, which is the
voice saying that's not real.That's not a good idea. You're
not a good artist. So, like, mydad would never have said like,
that's nothing that my dad wouldhave said to me. Yeah.
Right? So it's not my dad. Sowho is it? Like, I don't know. I
guess it's from something.
It's like an amalgamation,really. An amalgamation. But,

(22:52):
right, like, we often feel likewe have to compare ourselves to
other people and the Internethas only made that worse. You
know, Instagram is designed tomake you feel bad about yourself
because you will compareyourself to everyone else who's
showing what's going on in theirlife. But ultimately, we have to
figure out how to do our workfor ourselves and to do what

(23:14):
makes us happy for ourselves.
But the voices still are thereand they still rise up, but I
find different ways to justthink about something and or,
like, let them go or acknowledgethem.

I hadn't thought about Big Tree, I guess,
in that way, but I I do see how,like, a lot of growing older is,
like, understanding is, like,embracing your Louise in a way,
I guess, and being okay withthat.

Right. And your Merwin. They had a house of
crystal pillars on the planetMars by the edge of an empty
sea, and every morning you couldsee missus k eating the golden
fruits that grew from thecrystal walls or cleaning the

(23:56):
house with handfuls of magneticdust, which, taking all dirt
with it, blew away on the hotwind. Afternoons when the fossil
sea was warm and motionless andthe wine trees stood stiff in
the yard and the little distantMartian bone town was all
enclosed and no one drifted outtheir doors, you could see
mister K himself in his roomreading from a metal book with

(24:20):
raised hieroglyphics over whichhe brushed his hand as one might
play a harp. And from the book,as his fingers stroked, a voice
sang, a soft ancient voice,which told tales of when the sea
was red steam on the shore andancient men had carried clouds
of metal insects and electricspiders into battle.

Bryant read from Ray Bradbury's The Martian
Chronicles. Published in 1950,it's a fix up novel made of
nearly 30 short stories byBradbury about human
colonization on Mars. Thepassage comes from one of the
earlier stories, Hila describingan alien family's daily life on
the Red Planet before humansarrived. Bradbury's imagination

(25:05):
and even more so his lyricallanguage were a revelation to a
young Brian.

So like you read that as a 13, 14 year old and
there's so much happening.Right? There's this specific
imagery of the science fictionof it. Right? This world that
he's evoking on this planet,this foreign world that have
things we know, crystals andspiders and books and oceans and
fruit.
But everything is combined in away that you've never had it

(25:34):
combined before. The spiders areelectric and the books are
crystal and and silver. And,like, it just I could feel my
mind shifting as I was fallinginto that language. I felt like
I could see and hear and tastewhat he was talking about. And

(25:58):
he feels like he has a kind ofrhythm to his language that
feels musical.
I'm not a musical person myself,but I think every single time I
write any line of anything I'mworking on, somewhere I'm
thinking about Ray Bradbury. Ormaybe I should say Ray Bradbury
has offered me a space in whichto work, in which to live. So

(26:18):
I'm writing my rhythm. I oftenknow the rhythm before I know
the words that go in the rhythm.So it's a little bit like
writing lyrics to a tune.
Can you say a little more aboutthat? I have a sense that the
that the sentence needs to be,but I don't know the words yet.

Okay. I've never heard anybody say that.
What do you mean? Like, you havea sense of, like, you can see
that you want it to be, like,this long, do you mean? Or just,
like, it's gonna kinda hit acadence?

I can feel the cadence.

Okay.

And it often happens at the end of a
paragraph where I want to wrapsomething up for a moment. Then
he looked out into the distance.Then he looked out into the
distance. Right? So the so theout is the accent in that
sentence in my mind.

Okay. I'm reading like the end of Run Away
With Me, and
it says, and the rose petals are falling,
and miracles are real, and Romeis ours forever. It was so be
that was like chef's kiss to me.The ending was but I'm now
thinking about you thinkingabout that must be, like, really
big for you, the very end of abook because you're already
thinking of ending, so it musthave, like, a different need,

(27:25):
like, that gravity of thatfinal.

Right. And I knew that I was gonna have that
last line. I knew that prettyearly on, those words, and Rome
was ours forever. And for anyonewho hasn't read the book yet,
the two things I'll say is thisis not a spoiler conversation.
And there are images that followthose words, so it's not the
last experience of the book.
But I would say that anyone whohas not read the book yet, if

(27:50):
you get a copy of the book,don't flip ahead to look at the
drawings until you get to them.

They're so beautiful. Oh my god.

Because I think that might make it a more strong
experience. But in terms of therhythm of those last lines,
because I knew and felt verystrongly that and Rome was ours
forever. We're gonna be the lastfive syllables. It became about
finding the rhythm that leads upto it. But that, again, that's

(28:18):
something that came from myreading and love of Ray
Bradbury.

As it turned out, Ray Bradbury was a
fan of Brian too.

Ray Bradbury wrote me a fan letter after the
invention of Hugo Cabret cameout.

Really?

Said, dear Brian Selznick, I love Hugo Cabret.
Ray Bradbury.

Oh my god.

I have the letter framed on my wall, but
it's on the other side of thecountry. And I wrote back, and I
told him what a fan I was of hisand how important his work was
to me. I ended up at some pointon the phone with his daughter,
and she said, well, if you'reever in Los Angeles, let us
know. And I was like, what anamazing coincidence. I'm gonna

(29:00):
be in Los Angeles next week.
And they invited me over. And Ispent an afternoon with Ray
Bradbury in his studio. Wow. Andhe was I think he was in his
eighties. He was sitting in a ina lounge chair sort of in the
middle of this studio that wasfilled with books and DVDs and
VHS tapes and models of thingslike the Nautilus from 20,000

(29:25):
Leagues Under the Sea, which hehad written the screenplay for.
And he was sitting in this bigchair, and he pointed to a box
on the other side of the room.And he said, that's the book I
just finished. And I said, youknow, mister Bradbury, I really
wanna look at that. And so hesaid, go get it. And inside was
a typewritten manuscript for anew book, a new collection of

(29:50):
short stories.
I think it was called We'llAlways Have Paris. And so I
turned the page, and I saw thelist of story titles. And one of
the stories was calledRemembrance Ohio.

What?

And I said, mister Bradbury, that is a very,
very beautiful title. And hesaid, thanks. I made it up. And
and it was one of the mostextraordinary afternoons I had
spent.

Bradbury's keen eye for small town
Americana, Midwestern outpostslike Remembrance, Ohio was just
as vibrant as his visions offaraway planets. On that note,
Brian asked to read us a secondpassage from his friend, mister
Bradbury. This one from his bookDandelion Wine. In the interest
of time, we've shortened hisreading a bit, but here's a

(30:47):
taste. And as you'll hear, it'sone that has stayed with Brian
because it deals really with theone aspect of life that we can
truly never control.

He was only 10 years old. He knew little of
death, fear, or dread. Death wasthe wax and effigy in the coffin
when he was six and greatgrandfather passed away, looking
like a great fallen vulture inhis casket, silent, withdrawn,
no more to tell him how to be agood boy, no more to comment
succinctly on politics. Deathwas his little sister one

(31:22):
morning when he awoke at the ageof seven, looked into her crib,
and saw her staring up at himwith a blind, blue, fixed, and
frozen stare until the men camewith a small wicker basket to
take her away. Death was when hestood by her high chair four
weeks later and suddenlyrealized she'd never be in it
again, laughing and crying andmaking him jealous of her

(31:43):
because she was born.
That was death, and death wasthe lonely one, unseen, walking,
and standing behind trees,waiting in the country to come
in once or twice a year to thistown, to these streets, to these
many places where there was alittle light to kill one, two,

(32:06):
three women in the past threeyears. That was death.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I

do write about and I think about death a lot
and, you know, the idea thatdeath is what makes life have
meaning. Right? It's probablywhy we have religion. Right?
Because we wanna find ways as aspecies to understand something
that we otherwise can't reallyunderstand.
I mean, there's, of course,science, which says, basically,

(32:42):
you're born, you live, you die.But it's weird to be alive. And
so not wanting to believe thatthis is it seems extremely
normal and extremely natural.You know? Right?
And then if you've ever actuallyseen somebody die, right, like,
was at my dad's deathbed. I sawthe moment he died, and it was

(33:07):
fascinating. Right? It's very,very strange because my dad had
been unconscious for a while.He'd been breathing very, very
slowly, but I was looking at himand he was alive.
And then he took a breath thatdidn't then go out and he wasn't
alive. And it was like it wasthe reason people believe in the

(33:28):
soul. I feel like I waswitnessing something leave. And
what was left behind wasn't mydad. The thing that was my dad
was no longer there.
But I it's a little weird, but Iremember just, like, looking and
being so astonished by what Ihad just witnessed that I wasn't

(33:49):
sad at first. Like, I I it was

like I I was too shocked and too, like,
amazed to be sad. Did thatexperience change how you view
like you said, that's how peoplebelieve in the soul. Like, did
you before that?

Well, I I mean, I think I believed in the soul
before that. Like, I'm not anatheist. I'm not a religious
person, but I'm also not anatheist. I'm someone who
believes that there's something.That's my belief system.

Even science says that things don't,
like, stop exist that mattersmatter. You know? I mean, that
is also science. Right?

Right. And so what is the soul? Does the soul
have matter? Is it somethingelse? You know, these are great
questions.
These are questions I love. AndI love them because they are not
answerable. The only people forwhom these answers exist are
people who really have a strongreligious belief who say, like,
okay. When you die, you go toheaven.

But again, if control is the theme of the
conversation, it does. I mean,you could argue that that's also
just a way to feel that you havesome level of, you know, control
right over

Of course. And I think that's totally okay.
Right? If religion gives youstrength, great. But again, like
for me, I'm interested in livingin that ambiguity, which I think
perhaps is a way of me dealingwith my desire to control
things.
This is a space where I feelintellectually confident or

(35:12):
aware that I can't control thispart of my understanding, and
that actually makes me feelgood. Right? We live in a world
that demands you pick a side andyou believe this thing or that
thing. And if anyone doesn'tbelieve everything you believe,
you're being told you'resupposed to look at them as the
enemy. And it denies the chanceto have conversations.

(35:34):
It denies the chance tounderstand each other. And we
have to live with someambiguity. We have to live with
pain. We have to live with allof these things that are very
difficult. And our world asks usor tells us not to.
And so if you're going to try,then there's gonna be a lot of
challenges. And you have to finda way to be strong enough to

(35:57):
exist within that ambiguity ifthat's something that you think
is important. And I do.

Yeah. I'm sorry about your dad. I know
it's a while ago, but still.

Yeah. It was just twenty one years. He died
right before I started workingon Hugo.

That must have been hard to not have him
see that.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because yeah. He
would have really liked all thesuccess that Hugo had. Like, I
had won a Caldecott honor for abook I did called The Dinosaurs
of Waterhouse Hawkins, and hecame to the ceremony and saw me
recognized and saw that. And andI know how proud he was.
But, you know, one of the thingsI will just say quickly is that
when I started writing thatbook, I was very conscious of

(36:35):
not wanting to kill Hugo'sfather. So when I started
writing because I didn't wantHugo to deal with death, So I
tried all these different waysto make the dad not die because
Hugo I knew he needed to end upalone in the train station, so I
needed to get the dad out of theway. And I remember the moment I
was sitting at my desk, I hadwritten almost the entire plot,

(36:56):
and I just had this sense thatthere was this emotional hole in
the center of the story thateven though the entire plot was
in place, the emotional drivefor why the story was happening
wasn't there. And I was sittingat my desk, and it just hit me.
Hugo's dad dies.
And the second I said that tomyself, the entire rest of the

(37:19):
plot filled itself in. He'sdied. Hugo loved him. The dad
was obsessed with a movie wherea rocket flies into the eye of
the man of the moon that heremembers seeing as a kid.

So that came. I see.

Uh-huh. I mean, I had the movie as part of the
plot.

But you didn't know, like, why was the
movie like, why did he know thismovie?

I didn't know that till that moment.

Oh my god. It was like its last puzzle
piece.

Yeah. And, of course, you know, then I
realized the reason I didn'twant Hugo's dad to die was
because I didn't wanna deal withwriting about my own dad's
death. But the second I did, itfinished the story. So it was my
dad's death that in many waysgave me the book and gave me the
story. So I was obviouslyheading towards the death of

(38:01):
Hugo's father, but I wasn'tconsciously ready for it yet.
So I kept writing everythingelse. And then when I was ready,
I wrote what I needed to write.

For his reading challenge, Brian brought
the same thoughtful andmeticulous approach he takes
with his own books. In fact, tobookend his two reading
passages, he crafted twoabsolutely wonderful reading
lists. The first is about thatpart of himself that was so
difficult to reveal to hisfather years ago.

I put together a list of books that I've been
thinking about in terms ofqueerness and the ways in which
queerness has been written aboutover time, times in which people
have felt comfortable expressingtheir queerness, times in which
people did not feel comfortableor were not able to. I put

(38:58):
Orlando on this list by VirginiaWoolf, The Go Between by LP
Hartley, which is about this kidwho ends up running messages
between these two lovers. Whenhe grew up and learned about the
relationship between his mom andVirginia Woolf, said that
Orlando is the longest and mostcharming love letter in all of

(39:19):
literature. And then Moby Dick.The queerness in that book is
very coded.

Would you put Run Away With Me on there
too, if you could add your book?

Yeah. I I think maybe part of the reason I was
thinking about this theme forthis list was because of what I
was doing with Runaway With Me,and it's really about these two
boys in the eighties who fall inlove. But I remember when I grew
up, I didn't really know anyoneelse was gay. And when I got out
of college and started learningabout queer history, discovering
that I was part of a longlineage and that I've always

(39:49):
existed, we've always existed,and we're not going away no
matter how hard people try tomake us go away.

Brian's second book list, Power of the
Page Turn, ties right to ourconversation today. It's all
about his commitment to booksthat experiment with form and
the balance of control betweenwriter and reader.

If you're interested in thinking about
what the page turn can do andhow the page turn can help tell
the story, control the story,then there's two by Maurice
Sendak, who was a master of thebook form, of course. Then two
books by Remi Charlotte, who Imentioned earlier, who made all
of my favorite books. The firstone is Fortunately, where

(40:30):
something bad happens on onepage and it's black and white,
and then something good happensand it's full color. And then I
was thinking about pop up books.The Dwindling Party by Edward
Gorey, which is a very obscurepop up book that he made.
A party in an estate where oneby one everyone disappears, but
like a full gazebo pops up.

There are many more intriguing titles on
both lists. You can find Brian'sreading challenges and all past
reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. This
week's featured librarian isChelsea Pisani, a rock star

(41:10):
children's librarian at MapleValley Branch Library in Akron,
Ohio. Chelsea shares the storyof how one student, also with a
keen ability to take control, isspreading his passion for
reading among his peers bysetting up his own book club.

Chelsea Pisani (41:27):
I started a book club at the elementary school
Schumacher CLC. They are one ofthe only Akron public schools
that have a book club for kidsin grades second through fifth
grade. And because of book club,I had a little boy in there. His
name's Cameron. He wanted tostart his own book club at my
library.
So I was like, okay. I'll helpyou with it. He created flyers

(41:49):
and then it was funny. It wasduring winter. He wanted to take
a picture outside with the signwith books.
And I'm like, Cameron, it's toocold. And he was like, miss
Chelsea, it's going to take onetake. I'll be quick. And I said,
okay. So he went, we made himlittle flyers, and he got people
to come to book club.
He had more people come to bookclub here than, like, I had the

(42:10):
week before. So I told him, I'mlike, okay. You get the kids
here. You pick the books. I'llbuy the snacks.
And he had book club, like,twice a month here.

I love that story, and thank you Chelsea,
and thanks to all the librarianslistening, and to those out
there making change and adifference in your communities.
We love and appreciate you. Thishas been the reading culture and
you've been listening to myconversation with Brian
Selznick. Again, I'm your hostJordan Lloyd Bookie and
currently I'm reading Mad Honeyby Jodi Picoult At Last She

(42:48):
Stood by Erin Entrada Kelly. Ifyou enjoyed today's episode,
please just take one moment togive us five stars on Apple or
Spotify or Castbox wherever youlisten.
Your reviews really help us getthe show recommended to others.
So thank you. Thank you forthose reviews, especially those
nice written ones. We soappreciate them. This episode

(43:09):
was produced by Mel Webb, JosiahLamberto Egan, Brian Sutton, and
Lower Street Media, and scriptedited by Josiah Lamberto Egan.
To learn more about how you canhelp grow your community's
reading culture, please checkout all of our resources at
peenstack.com. And remember tosign up for our newsletter at
the readingculturepod.comforward slash newsletter for

(43:32):
special offers and bonuscontent. Thanks for listening,
and keep reading.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

The Brothers Ortiz

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Under My Thumb: Brian Selznick on Control

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

The Brothers Ortiz

All Episodes

Under My Thumb: Brian Selznick on Control

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang