Listen to the chapter here
[Neil]
Hi Jon. Hi, how are you doing? I'm doing good.
The fake hello after we've been talking for three minutes. Yeah. Well, I don't, yeah, exactly.
It's okay. Everyone knows by now. It's all understood.
Right. It's all understood. Cause yeah, I just logged in and you know, we're doing this virtually.
So I'm sitting here in my basement in Toronto. Um, I built this room within my basement in the pandemic, like the pandemic started. I was like, well, I immediately need a room, you know?
Oh, wow. You did, you did a pandemic room. That's great.
Yeah. Actually that's not, that's true of my garage too. Is that this was, this was, uh, it was already finished, but I, I like redid it over the pandemic.
Same way. Yeah.
[Jon Klassen]
Tell me more.
[Neil]
So you, you had the pandemic. First of all, how did that affect you? Cause for me, it was like, I was traveling a ton giving speeches.
They were all immediately canceled. So I was like, I'm not only do I need a room, I'm going to be, I'm going to be in this room for a long time. I felt bad how little it affected me, at least in the immediate, because I was deep in a schedule of art.
We have, we had two little kids. We still have two little kids, but they were very little then. And we had moved to this house that had a finished garage and I had a studio space outside the house for years and years.
But when we moved here, I started working in the garage instead. Um, and so my commute was just, you know, the 12 feet from the house to the garage every day. I was deep in some production of books that those things go on for, you know, six to eight months or something like that.
And then the kids, um, were home. And so my day changed very little. It was, I felt horrible about it because everyone else was just like having to adjust.
And it was these horrible, you know, how do you like, I couldn't imagine. And then I was going back and still drawing my turtles every day the way I had been because my deadlines were still what they were and the books were still going to come out. You know, it was unclear how that was going to go, but like my deadlines remained, you know, everything kind of stayed.
And I was just like, it felt like I was below the water of the storm. You know what I mean? Where you like you, you every now and then a piece of a ship would float down into your view, but you were underneath the ocean of all the waves of it.
It was really a strange feeling. Wow. What a great metaphor below the water of the storm.
Every now and then a little piece of the ship I had would float down. I love that. I love that visual.
It just, yeah. It drops down and you're like, Oh, it must be pretty bad up there. Yeah, yeah.
And it would get, you know, you'd get reminders whenever you'd go out. And like we had very little kids and so we didn't have any childcare after that. And they were so small and like parks and things, all that stuff was gone.
And we just figured all that stuff out. So that was tough, but it wasn't, you know, professionally speaking, I was very lucky in a lot of ways. I had this escape that remained an escape even more so.
And it stayed, it stayed steady. And, but it did provoke you to redo this garage. Uh, yeah.
Um, and I'm looking at you just for people that are listening. Most of our listenership is like still listeners, kind of old school podcast that way. I can see you, you're wearing a red baseball cap.
You've got like a teal shirt on a Navy blue sweater. This is kind of the uniform these days. Yeah.
I love it. You look great. You got the great stash too.
It's like, Oh yeah, I grew this. My, well, there was a reason. Oh, there's a show called, um, over the garden wall.
It's like a mini series. The Cartoon Network made like 10 years ago and our son got really into it. Both kids did actually.
And they, they were both, there are, there's a, there's two like brothers in it that are wandering around this landscape and they were both those guys for Halloween. And so, and there's also a school teacher in one of episodes, like a school, like an old timey one room school teacher kind of thing. And she's lamenting her boyfriend who's run off.
Um, he's a no good two timing, handsome man is how she puts it. I think. And, um, so my wife wanted to be the school teacher.
She loves that character. And I was the no good two timing, handsome man, except that he most of the time is stuck in a gorilla suit in the episode. And the only thing if I was that guy stuck in a gorilla suit, but the only to really identify me as not just a guy in a gorilla suit, but as that particular man in a gorilla suit was that he had like a dandy mustache.
And so I spent like two months trying to grow this thing in anticipation of this. And then I was like a month after Halloween. I was like, I don't think I'm kidding anymore.
I think I have a mustache and it's just stayed. I think one of the kids said something nice at one point. And what, like, I don't know if with mustaches, you're like water in the desert.
Anyone who doesn't, anyone who says anything small, I feel it's not bad. You're like, okay, that's the rest of my life. Then not bad.
I'm going to keep it for the rest of my life. And like, that's just how it's felt since then. I don't know.
It's one of those things. I don't, it looks good. It looks good.
And you know, I, as you know, like when guys grow facial hair, you mostly get compliments from other, other men and the facial hair.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah. That's true too.
[Neil]
They're like, nice one. Nice one. The guy in our coffee shop, um, was like, looked up one day and he's like, oh, that's coming along nice.
And then he grew in after that. And I was like, I'm keeping this thing. That's the highest.
Like, how do you do better than that? The coffee shop guy grows one after that. Like, maybe not.
Maybe he was seeing them around. They're not, I'm not the only one with these things these days. No, but you're right.
The coffee shop barista is usually like a fashion icon in the neighborhood. Yeah. I mean, this guy, yeah, exactly.
Usually, you know, they've, they've got like a style. Coffee baristas have been starting this. I think it's their fault we're here mustache wise anyway.
So it's, it's fine. It's full circle, but I don't know. The other thing I realized about it was that someone asked a while ago, I always wear hats.
I've worn hats since like sixth or seventh grade.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
All your book photos and stuff, right? Yeah. It's always a hat.
And, um, someone asked about it at one point and I was trying to get into why it is I did wear them. And in seventh grade we moved, um, from Toronto to Niagara Falls and it was a rough move. I'd grown up in the suburbs of Toronto in like kind of a gentle, it turned out like social circle and they dropped me right into this rough situation in Niagara Falls.
And, um, I remember someone coming up to me at that school, this guy named Don Chersky, not Donald Chersky rather as I knew him. And he had a shaved head with spiked hair everywhere at the front. And, um, I think he was wearing an Aerosmith t-shirt and he comes up to me and it was no one had talked to me in like a week.
And he's like, I'm Donald. And I was like, no, I've heard your name. Cause there's like 14 of us in the whole school.
And he's like, you can call me Don. And I thought that was the nicest, most, what was the word disarming? I guess it was like a way to ingratiate and a friendly kind of motion.
And from then on, I was Jonathan and I went by John from there on out. I was like, I want to do what Donald Don did for me that day. If in whatever capacity I can, I changed it.
But I think I also decided that wearing a hat was also a way to be like, it's not so serious. Like, let's all just relax a little bit. And it was a communication too.
I like hats. So it's handy. Um, but I also just felt like it was two things at once.
It was that it was like, let's all just relax. But it was also something of a gentle middle finger to whatever formality may have been put on to an event. I like wearing them to like formal things too.
I love a suit and a hat. I like the contradiction of that. And the mustache that occurred to me later does that too.
You can wear just about anything, but if you have a mustache, you are kind of showing up, right? You're not totally careless. Something was, some effort was made.
Yeah, right. It's the facial that requires, you know, other grooming. It was, there's this great line.
Um, I almost put a Dennis Johnson book on this list, uh, cause I love him so much too. And I just couldn't really choose one, but there's a line, I think in tree of smoke where, um, this guy in the military, this younger guy has an uncle who's like a, like a higher up in the military. And he's kind of in the military cause his uncle got, and then I think was the situation.
He goes to dinner at his uncle's house and I guess he's grown a mustache in between having seen his uncle the last time. And, um, his uncle says something along the lines of like, uh, well, I see you've grown a mustache and he goes, yeah, yeah. He goes, you know, a guy with a mustache has to have a special skill.
And he says, why is that? And he goes to make up for his vanity. And I was like, oh man, I'm keeping that in my back pocket too, because that's fantastic.
And it's true. There is, it's a vain, it's a vain move. It's completely unnecessary.
Same as a hat, which is why I liked them for narrative reasons. They are emotional. They are an emotional reaction.
You do not almost ever need a hat on sometimes for the sun or something like that, but I don't wear it for that. And a mustache is even more useless than that. Um, they are affections, right?
Or affectations. That's the word. Affectations.
They are just, they're extras that you've decided to do. And whatever communication is being done, that's what's being done. And it's their first impression.
It's so interesting. Oh my gosh, I could just listen to you all day. You are, you are, you are, you know, you know, I think I've had four cups of coffee already.
That's what's going on here. I love it. I love it.
I love this energy. It's great. And it kind of, it kind of makes sense to me why you have so much going on too.
Like you, you, you know, you've got, you've got, you've got the books you're writing and drawing yourself like the, you know, the, your places, the series, the board books. You've got the looking at picture books sub stack, which is like, you know, long form regularly publishing sub stack with, with Mac. You could do, you're doing books with Mac, by the way.
Um, how does Santa go down the chimney is like my kid's favorite Christmas book of all. Oh yeah. We love that book.
We've loved that book. We, that's our favorite. So we have a, a basket of Christmas books that kind of come out less.
My wife, Leslie is like, um, maybe she's like, cause it sounds like your wife's really into Halloween. Right. Cause I saw the dress up thing on your Instagram.
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
[Jon Klassen]
That's right.
[Neil]
Yeah. She is really into Halloween. She decorates the whole house every, every year.
I'd like to be the kind of dad that did that too, but she runs Halloween decorations for sure. Yeah. And you've got, you've got the Apple TV show.
Yeah. That's, I mean, that's, that's been finished for a little bit, but it's on, it's on. So I feel like it is ongoing.
We still hear about it. And that counts. And you're, I mean, you've, you've just got the first thing that strikes me is you've got a lot going on and then you just can't, you hint to that, that the route map a little bit, because, you know, for Canadians, um, the route from Winnipeg to Los Angeles is not a common one.
And I know that there was a big, steep adolescence in the GTA and the greater Toronto area like me, or about the same vintage, right? Like I'm born in 79. You're like 81.
Is that right? I'm 81. Yeah.
Yeah. So it would have been the same Toronto, the same.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
Are you from the city? Are you from like down?
[Jon Klassen]
Born in Oshawa.
[Neil]
Okay.
[Jon Klassen]
All right. Grew up in Oshawa and then Whitby.
[Neil]
So like, I know Markham well, you know.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
That was my, Markham was my spot. We were in Unionville, Markham that like, we lived in Unionville and went to school in Markham, but it was all very blurry. Um, but yeah, that early, we talked about suburban Toronto a lot because it's like, it was so different.
We felt like we were on the edge of a giant field most of the time. And so it felt like rural, there were creeks and trees and stuff. And we're, we say suburban Toronto, but it was pretty fresh.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially that time in the eighties and the nineties, you got dropped into Niagara Falls.
Of course you went to Sheridan College. For those that don't know, that's the number one kind of rank school in Canada for animation design. Like very hard to get into a really top-notch college.
I always say this for like Canadian schools that people don't, don't know about.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
Well, that means Sheridan is a very specific one. If you're, if you're not into animation, especially when we were, uh, going to college, it, I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't heard about it. It's hyper-specific for that.
It's kind of a career college besides, although they've gotten, I think they've gotten much more well, well, like renowned since then. Yeah. But yeah, they were kind of the Cal arts of Canada that way where they was just like, yeah, it was tricky to get in.
Very tricky to get in. And then you go to, you go to Los Angeles, you're working for, you know, Kung Fu Panda and Coraline and, and, and you get asked to illustrate a book and you're plunked now in LA. Like, it seems like you're settled there and you got the two boys you mentioned.
It's Augie and Augie and Isaac. Yeah. Augie and Isaac.
I see their birthday posts on your, on your feed. Yeah. You know, and there was another post, but I thought it was one of your sons, but then it was Justin.
I'm like, wait, he doesn't have a Justin. Oh, Justin's my youngest brother. I have two brothers, Will and Justin.
And those are, um, they're both still in Ontario. Will's in Toronto and Justin's further up North, um, in Wireton. And this is probably why your, your Canadian sensibilities come through.
Like you've been out of the country for a while, but you're, you post pictures of yourself in Blue Jays hats, you know, you're, you're Canadian through, you make entire money jokes, you know, in your sub stack. So I'm catching the Canadiana off of you. And I was just curious, like, you know, it's, what's it feel like being a Canadian in the States right now or in LA right now?
Yeah. Those are, those are two different questions too. I think being a Canadian in the States is one thing, being Canadian in Los Angeles in the States is probably another.
I think that it's not as sheltered as it was the first administration, the 16 one when he was elected again, when Trump got elected again, it was kind of like, it was a couple of people wandering around saying the same things as they were in 16, where it's like, well, you know, we live in this kind of liberal bubble. We're going to hear about this existentially, but practically speaking, it'll probably be pretty quiet. And then right away it wasn't right away.
It was a completely different situation. And Los Angeles is really funny because it's very photogenic for whatever it is you need it to be doing like media wise. And so there were the protests downtown that are not far from here, 15 minutes.
Um, but we were still walking our kids to school that day. And we hadn't, if we hadn't heard all the helicopters, we wouldn't have even known it was going on, but the pictures look like a city on fire. Right.
And then the city did go on fire and we were still like, that's so spread out and so wide that your days really are sequestered to your little zones. If that's how you work them or how we've set them up. And that is how we've set it up.
And so it does feel a lot different this time. The city is very affected by ice and very affected by all that stuff going on. And they like to make an example of Dem run cities and Dem run States and all that.
And California is Los Angeles is both. Um, and it feels much more in your face this time than it did. I think the first time around, which we were lucky for that again, you're, you're, you know, the first time it was more existential and we were thinking it was in your heads and you were wondering what kind of country this was and all that.
And now we can see it much more clearly. I think. And so being a Canadian in America, it's a lot different, obviously being Canadian, like Ohio or being Canadian in Florida or being Canadian in any number, it's a huge country, right.
And very different experiences with this whole journey. The whole time being Canadian in LA has always felt a little funny. There's lots of Canadians here and no one seems to be from here.
And so everyone's kind of figuring it out and there's no real definition of LA. I think that's where you kind of rest is that like, there's no figure there's some cities, you can figure them out, right. They have a vibe and you kind of click into it, but that is not how this city works.
It's sort of this weird cloud that you sort of make your own vibe into. At least that's been my experience. Um, and so you get to bring your Canada with you then you do get to, you get, you do get to sort of, I don't know.
I think a lot of people do return for that reason is that like, they miss a peculiar part. Like they miss a specific city. I miss like when you go to Toronto, it's, it's big, but it's, it's, it still has a feel to it.
You know what Toronto is or at least sections of it. And the city goes through things together. Weather goes through weather together.
LA doesn't go through weather together. There's nothing that groups us that way. If it snows in Toronto, everyone wakes up and has to do something about it.
And almost besides an earthquake or something catastrophic, the city doesn't, that's why COVID was so wild here is because almost the first time my living here, the whole city was involved in something collectively. Um, it was a real trip. That's really interesting.
The city goes through things together and that kind of bonds and yeah, you're right. And we talk about weather all the time. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like a, it's the daily, it's the daily chatter. Um, that's interesting.
And what, what an interesting perspective, uh, kind of from where you are, I didn't say this upfront, but just a huge congratulations on, on your success. It's amazing. Well, you're in this industry that, you know, more people want to be a children's book writer than any other type of writer.
It's more difficult to become one than any other kind. And it's more difficult within that to have success. I mean, my, I have one children's book.
It was considered a huge hit, gigantic in proportions. I was told it was a massive bestseller. I was told 30, it's all 35,000 copies.
You've told millions of kids books. It's like, it's so astronomically rare. I don't think people really realize how much of a black Swan it is to be doing what you're doing.
It's a quiet job. And for the most part, like, I think it's hard to get perspective on it because it is so separate from both the work and from your day to day responses to it. And so when you travel and you find out, you know, that people have the book in different places, it kind of blows your mind because yeah.
How would you intuit that? How would you guess at that? You kind of, you kind of intellectually know, well, they do have my books in Japan or something like that, but until you go and sit down and people know the book in Japanese, you're like, oh man, they weren't even lying.
It's here. I don't know. I don't, I think it's hard to fit that into your brain.
And it, and I think I've also seen that it can affect the work. If you try and swallow all of it, if you try and internalize it because you think you ought to, because again, it's very rare, right? And so you should, you should pay, you should pay the scale tribute somehow and try to hold it.
It's very hard because the work depends on quiet and like weird moods. And those things can get affected when you think that it's gone big or that it's gone very well. I don't know.
It's a tricky relationship to have to the work. I feel very lucky though. I think that it does mean I get to do weirder stuff than I would normally be allowed to.
I think it's not an industry that often likes to take tons of chances, or at least it goes through phases where it doesn't. And I think I've been lucky sales wise and on recognition that they kind of let me try things out. And I don't take that for granted.
I try to, I try to try things out because of that. That's the one thing where I think I've learned how to spend it a little bit. I love that.
I try to try things out and the work depends on quiet and weird moods. Well, um, I would say all three of your formative books have quiet and weird moods in them, but we may as well start with the one you read the first. And before we hit record, I did ask you kind of which order you thought in your life that these might've bumped into you.
And when we began each one, I'll kind of describe for the listener so they can picture holding it in a bookstore. And the first one is The Little Trilogy by Anton Chekhov, C-H-E-K-H-O-V, originally published in 1898 in the Russian journal Ruskaya Misk, which I'm sure I'm saying wrong, but the cover's like this muted landscape image of a small wooden church sitting on a grassy hill, sheltered by a few trees with a wide river or lake in the distance, pale blue and silvery grays under an expansive and subdued sky layered with gentle clouds.
At the top of the cover, we got this little rectangular box. This is Anton Chekhov in a skinny serif, all caps, I brought a thin line and a title case, italicized serif font saying The Little Trilogy. Below that there's a small black band saying Pocket Essentials, which I looked up and it's just cause that is the kind of British publisher that's putting out these like pocket classics again.
Chekhov lived from 1860 to 1904 and was a Russian doctor, playwright, and short story writer. So interesting that he was a kind of a doctor. He actually said, medicine is my lawful wife, literature is my mistress.
He died of tuberculosis. These three books in The Little Trilogy, tiny little stories, they're vast. They feel huge when you're reading them.
Um, they describe it as displaying Chekhov genius for psychological nuance, moral ambiguity, and emotional restraint. So we get this and they're all told through conversations of someone telling the story. So we get the story of an uptight school teacher, but it's told as a conversation between two guys.
Yeah. You know, another of a guy like seeking pleasure in the form of gooseberries at his country estate, it's called gooseberries, that title. And another unspoken love is filed.
This one for Dewey Decimal heads out there. 891.73. That would be East Indo-European Celtic literature slash Russian fiction. John, please tell us about your relationship with The Little Trilogy by Anton Chekhov.
Oh man. See, I'm already intimidated because I didn't ever study literature. I went to school for animation instead and always told myself that I would read on my own, which is probably what a lot of people tell themselves if they don't take literature like that.
Um, and so my relationship with Chekhov is really, um, my own, I don't have a lot of analysis on these stories and I know that there's been tons. And, um, he was the first writer where I was like, I think like I loved him sincerely, where, you know, you read so many books that you've heard that people love. And so you read them and they are big and you've, and they feel big the way you've been told that they are.
And I think I found Chekhov on my own. I didn't know that he was big and I can't remember even why I picked it up in the first place. Do you remember how old you were, where you were or anything?
I think I was 17 or 18. Um, and it was just his short stories. Uh, I hadn't read his plays or anything.
We didn't read that in college. I think the first one I read of his was called The Kiss. It's an early story of his.
And I wanted to make a short film of it. Actually, when I was in animation school, I thought of it for a long time for my student film. Um, it would make a great animated short, that one.
Um, but he was so, um, there was so much about his attitude and his writing and what wasn't said and how gentle everything was. And even though everyone's really going through it, it was never on the surface and never in the narrative. The plots weren't huge.
It was, you'd finished this thing and it, like you said, it felt vast, but you couldn't even really quite say what had happened event-wise for a lot of them. And it was like, how did he do that? How did, how did it feel like we just finished this monumental piece of work?
And I can't even quite say what physically happened a lot of times. Um, and he just like lands it, he lands it like, like you didn't even know what he was, what he was doing. And then suddenly you feel it just thud at the end and you're just like, man, there was another one.
And I just remember wanting to write like that. Or like, it was the first time I started writing was after reading him being like, I want to, and I can't tell whether it was like stylistic. I don't think so.
I don't think I was picking him apart stylistically. Some writers you want to do that, right? But with him, he's very, and I don't know, maybe it was the certain translations I was reading that were harder or less stylistic.
Maybe in Russian, he's very stylish. I don't know. Um, but with these three in particular, I think I read Gooseberries first and then found the other two, found out that it was a trilogy.
And I was so happy because mostly what I liked about Gooseberries was the format. I think all of these books, the reasons that they've been formative is the structure of them. And with these ones, these two guys walking across this like crazy Russian landscape, yelling at each other.
And that's where, that's where you open. That's where you find them. And they're already like deep old friends and they're yelling at each other or something, and they're getting lost or it's about to rain or something.
It's all just so gorgeous. The structure of it. You just like, even just that setup, the construction, regardless of what he's about to do or talk about or be preoccupied with in a story.
I just love two guys walking across a giant field, looking for shelter from the rain and beginning to tell each other a story. I think that's just such a gorgeous setup. And so that I was so happy to find that there were two more because I just get to hang out with those two guys for two more stories.
And I know there's so much more going on, but that's why I think I go back to those stories just to hang out with those two guys who, you know, they disappear for large parts of those stories. You go into, like you say, they begin to explain a story and then you go in there instead. And you come back out to these other two guys every now and then.
But you're, you're always aware that you're with them. You're always sitting in the barn with them or in, in, in a fire lit room or something like that. You can feel that.
And there's a, the, the construction of it is just amazing. I've never read stories that work like that before. That's such an astute point, the setting within the setting, because you're right.
It's two guys walking, kind of chilling in a barn and then they tell the story. That's the bulk of the, of the story. And then it kind of returns at the end to them.
And then they stays with them for the next one, go somewhere else. Like, it's like, it's like your, it's like your, your studio within your home or your, or your, you know, your Canadian-ness inside your American home. And there's a, there's a place within a place there.
You, you of course have your own trilogy now, the hat trilogy, the hat, you know, calling back to our hat conversation. Yeah. The structure of three, of course, pops out to me a little bit.
I think too, the third book in that trilogy is about two turtles. And when you meet them, they're old, old friends by then. And I think that was direct really, like, it was just like how he does that too, how he begins to, I'm not sure he ever says they were two old friends who'd known each other so-and-so.
He just has, he does it through how they speak to each other and what they don't say. And their mannerisms are so well-worn by the time you meet them. But I always admired that, that we weren't, there was something so deft in how he explained how well they knew each other.
And I always wanted to try for that, being like, how do we show that two people have known each other for this long without saying so? What, what is that? What's the quality in that kind of a relationship?
And I tried for that in the turtle one in a, in a smaller way, being like, how, the stakes of that book are like, we should care if they break up. We should be, it should be a shame if they, if they, if one of them betrayed the other and it was the destruction of the relationship. But I don't want to open the book.
There's no narrator anyway to say like, these two are friends. So how do you show it? And like, he would do that.
He would do that in those stories to show this ancient relationship that was like, it survived a fence all the time. They were always yelling at each other and making fun of each other and stuff, but you knew it wasn't going anywhere. They weren't going to, you know, they weren't going to split up on the field or anything.
They were going to go to the same place together. It just felt so nice to sit in that. Yeah.
What a great point. And also that, I mean, one thing I often hear when I read reviews of your books is your conjured magic and creating negative space and the, what's not said and what's off the page. And you just described Chekhov doing that with the fact that these two get to know that they're good friends, but it's never said, it's never explicit that way.
Yeah. It's all off the page with him. It's all off the page, right?
Like I heard you talk to Tom Power a few years ago on CBCQ and you talk a little bit about how, you know, your character's eyeballs are kind of meant for the kids, but the lines are meant for the adults because kids kind of read ahead through visuals. I thought that was maybe one of your writing craft tricks or tips. You know, I always think of this show in the back of my mind as, without explicitly saying it, a bit of a writing tutoring show for me and a lot of other people listening who want to write or write better.
Is there anything else you're doing or employing that you think about or that's even conscious to you when it comes to saying stuff without saying it? I think I've become more and more distrustful of language generally, as I've written more. I think that's because I'm a nervous writer and I don't think of myself that way.
I have that insecurity about it, but also it feels increasingly like it's more interesting and seemingly more truthful that the words are what we would like to be saying or like to be feeling or aspirational, and that's the use of them, right? You're condensing some sort of vague emotion or something larger into this thing, and by the time it comes out, it's what you hope people hear. But then there's the character on the page.
I have that. Writers don't have that necessarily, novelists and short story writers and stuff, right? They have to imply it in other ways.
But I have a picture, and so if someone says something and I have a picture next to it, it's just more interesting to watch if the picture is doing something else. If it's a double beat or redundant, then why are you drawing it? But also, I think kids relate a lot to saying one thing and thinking another or feeling another.
I think everybody does, but kids do too. I do get in trouble sometimes for implying that kids lie or for showing kids people lying or something like that, and it's like kids lie all day. They're fascinated by lying.
They can't believe they can say one thing. They lie more than not. Yeah, it's like one of the first discoveries you have, right?
You're like, if I say I didn't do this, does that work? And sometimes it does, and they can't believe it. It's like they're first, to adults even, they get to fool us sometimes.
And of course, you do that all the time as soon as the first time it worked. And you feel bad, but you've also got away with the thing, that crazy discovery, right? And doing it in subtle ways too, where it's not an overt lie, but you're shaping what you'd like to be heard.
All of that nuance, I think, is so much fun, especially next to a very simple character, using simple language. If you do it with language that a first grader is comfortable reading, with a character that's pretty simple, but it has that complexity in it, I really love that mixture of like, oh, he's not quite lying, but why did he say that? But we've read four syllables, and it's a turtle.
And I just love the mixture of all that stuff. I really like how you can do that with very few elements, actually. It's really fun.
And I get to hear part of the power of that is because you're thinking in these big evocative essay-like paragraphs, but what comes out is that distilled bit of wisdom. And on the lying thing, particularly, I'm also a father of boys. I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not.
So I have an 11, 9, 7, and 5-year-old boy. And I don't know whether to... I don't know where the line is on encouraging them to lie or letting them get away with it.
Like this morning, my 7-year-old is leaving the house. I'm like, did you brush your teeth? Yeah.
I did the sort of opposite of what I'm saying I should have done. I'm like, oh, really? When did you brush your teeth?
Just now. Okay. And I'm like, oh, yeah.
Was it just now? Because the toothbrush is already dry. And he's just like...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He looks at me like, oh, you're really going to check my toothbrush? Then they figure out they could just wet the toothbrush.
[Jon Klassen]
That's the great thing, too. Well, let me smell your breath, right? But why am I doing this?
[Neil]
But they're offended that you would think they had lied. They were like, oh, yeah, you're really... That's how little you trust me?
It's like, well, yeah, you just lied to me. And I also, I feel like I'm bad about doing this because then I'm like, I kind of want him to get away with this a little bit. You know what I mean?
I want him to be able to see the malice.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah, what I like about talking to kids about it.
[Neil]
Can't trust anything. We don't talk about like morals with it. When I do like a class visit or something, like we talk about drawing sometimes.
I do an exercise with them where it's a turtle, actually. And I draw a turtle for them. And then I keep the pupils in the drawing on a separate layer.
So they're movable. And then it's just a turtle. He can't...
I like turtles because they can't express themselves physically. They don't, they're stuck in there. It's just a shell with like sticks out of it.
Right. And so you don't know how the turtle is feeling based on his body language. There's no way to know except his eyes.
And so you say, you know, how do we make this turtle look like he just did something terrible and is lying about it? How do you draw a lying turtle? And then I kind of go to say, well, when you lie and you put it that way, like when you this morning, when you lied 10 minutes ago, notice the next time you lie and you don't discuss like, because you're a terrible person or because this is the wrong thing to do and you haven't figured it out or anything.
You just say it matter of factly. When you lie, it's hard to make eye contact with the person you're lying to. It's hard.
You feel bad. Or at least you think you're nervous. You're going to get found out.
One of those things. And so you look away. And so watch what happens when we put this line.
We asked the turtle if he's like stolen a bicycle. And if he looks down at the ground, what do we think? He looks like he's lying, right?
And it's a very simple movement. But that's the way you put it to kids. And you sometimes get flagged for that to be like, you know, don't assume the kids are lying.
It's like, I do assume the kids are lying. They're all lying all day. But you don't put a moral on top of that.
You examine it as a phenomenon, things that we do. I don't know. I think that's the part where I get suspicion sometimes.
It's just like, well, you haven't said what you think of that. And it's like, don't we all know? I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt that they know it's not correct.
It doesn't mean they're going to stop doing it. But just to examine it as something that happens, something that we do. And where does that go then when you're lied to or when you do lie?
Let's follow that down. I don't have an ending in mind. Let's find out what happens.
I like your stance because telling people what to do never works anyway. No, they smell it. They sniff it out.
There's actually a great book in this context with Chekhov. It's George Saunders' book called Swim in the Pond and the Rain, which is a title brought from Gooseberries. He examines a bunch of Russian short stories in that, including Gooseberries from this trilogy, and a couple other Chekhov ones too, I think.
But he has another story. It's a Tolstoy one, and he has a character make a huge change in it. Tolstoy does.
But Saunders is examining the story and he says, how does he do this? We've known this guy to be one way the whole time, and he's about to have a change of heart. How does he pull this off believably and make it not sound like propaganda?
I love that term for this, and I think you can apply it to a lot of children's books too. They can sniff out propaganda for good behavior, which is a good word for it. It sounds a little harsh, and we've had this term for other things that are called that.
But they can smell propaganda. They're like, I don't believe it, so this is trying to tell me something and not earning it, and I smell a rat. They can smell it right away.
If you have a message in mind going in, it's going to be propaganda for the message, even if you do feel it in certain pages. Watch it. Don't make propaganda for kids.
Yeah, thanks for shouting out that book. George Saunders was our guest in Chapter 75 of the show. That was an incredible book.
That's actually the book I was interviewing him about at the time. What a book. What a book.
But now his new book, Vigil, which I don't know if you have or you've read, but the reviews of it all are like, George Saunders is back with moralism, to your point about avoiding morals. Now he's returning with moralism. Yeah, I think he talks about this in that book though too.
He talks about how you can have, and I related this to Chekhov really strongly, where he says you're not going to write like the writers you love. You're going to begin maybe when you're starting because he has that story about Hemingway and how he just wanted to be Hemingway this whole chapter of his writing career. And then as soon as he let go of that, he was able to be himself.
But at first you have these guys in your head that you want to be so badly because you admire the work so much. And I badly wanted to write like Chekhov. It's all I've ever wanted to do.
And I don't write like him, it turns out. I'm a little bit brattier, I think, than Chekhov was. I'm precocious and he's not at all precocious.
And it took me a long time to come around to that. That book was really clarifying for that reason. And also because I'd heard from Mac actually, I'd tell this story because it's kind of flattering in a sideways way, is that when I was getting to know Mac, the guy I make books with sometimes, he has a big old library.
And we were looking at Dead Souls, the Gogol book, another Russian guy. And I read a lot of Gogol's short stories, but never Dead Souls, never the long one. He goes, you should read that.
And I said, I don't think I even like Gogol. I think he kind of annoys me a little bit. He's just too meta or something's going on with writing.
The nose just kind of lost me. He's up to too much in that one. He's too clever by half, I feel like.
And he's like, that's really weird because you're basically like Gogol. So much about your writing and what you're interested in reminds me of Gogol. And I was like, oh, that's awful.
That's too bad. I'd never thought of that. And then I read Saunders' analysis of Gogol and that story.
The nose is in that Saunders book. And everything he talks about, like when he writes, I've never taken literature. I never had a teacher explain who these guys were to me like that.
And I was like, oh crap, he's right. Everything about Gogol's interest in language and how it can be twisted and all of what he was angry at, it seems exactly in line with, I just related to it so much. And it was like, yeah, you're not the writer necessarily that you'd like to be.
You're something else completely. Um, that book taught me that really clearly. He's a wonderful teacher.
George Saunders is. Yeah, he is. He is.
He is. You're not necessarily the writer you want to be. And you're talking a little bit there about finding your voice, you know, Saunders towards Hemingway, but then finding, I think he said he, he, um, you know, he wrote like a silly little note to his wife and then he had a nice response and he was like, oh, that's the style I'm writing.
Do you have advice when people ask you that sort of classic question of how do I find my voice? I had a pretty clear illustration of that because my first book, I Want My Hat Back, was an exercise in, um, like removal. There's a better word I'll remember later, but, um, I had written a bunch of, I had the title and the cover for that book before I had anything else.
I thought it was funny, this character not wearing a hat and the title says, I Want My Hat Back. And I was writing a, like a narration driven story about a duck who had taken it, but left there some clues. It wasn't going anywhere and I hated it.
And I kept trying at it and kept trying at it. And I knew I had to write something. My agent had said like, you should write your own.
This, this works better if you write your own too. And so I wanted to try. And then I was actually reading Cormac McCarthy a lot and we'll get into him in a sec, but he writes often without quotation marks.
Um, and I had never read anybody who did that, who speak, don't necessarily have quotes around it, but it's beautiful on the page. It's graphically beautiful. And you're working when you're looking at it, you're, you're, you're, it makes you work.
I thought it was great. Um, and then I thought we could do that. I could do that.
Um, with the, with the books. Well, I think what's partly what's tripping me up is quotation marks and commas before the quotation marks and said the bear and said the duck and all this stuff. And I hate writing all that.
I think that deep down, I just didn't like myself as a narrator. What am I doing in my own book? Get me out of there.
And so I thought, well, how would you know who's speaking though? And I thought, well, you can do it with colors. If the bear is black and then all the other animals are primary colors, that's how you'd know who's speaking.
And then I wouldn't have to be in my own book at all. And stylistically, it got me off the hook because then it meant even if they speak weirdly or if the writing is bad, quote unquote, that's just, there's no narrator. It's just these animals who didn't know how to speak in the first place.
We didn't know that foxes could talk. So if he speaks badly, that's kind of impressive still that he's speaking. And like all of this, the more I got out of my own book as a narrator and stylistically, even by removing quotation marks or anything, then I could write.
I just had to get out. And it was this removal of myself from it. Whatever was left was my style of it.
It wasn't anything I was adding or thinking it needed. Something was blocking it. And that's almost always been my answer is that something's in the way.
I don't feel like doing something is really the bratty answer. It's like, I don't want to. And the clearer I get on what it is I don't want to do and just take it out, then I can work.
But that's more often than not been how the voice was found is that it's just left over from the things I just, for whatever reason, understood or not understood, I don't want to do. Wow. That's great.
The voice is what's left over when you take it, everything you don't want to do. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, wow. That's a great line when you take out everything you don't want to do.
Um, I got to ask you just, uh, well, I have so many questions, but we have so many books. Maybe we'll save this one for later. We'll move on.
You, since you, since you hinted so nicely at Cormac McCarthy. Yeah. Why don't we use your perfectly set up boost?
Sure.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
Jump right into Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. By the way, I should say for listeners, I read and loved. So I hadn't heard of any of these three books.
I mean, maybe heard of them, maybe heard of, maybe, maybe not, maybe not. I mean, I heard of all three authors. I'd heard of all three authors.
I hadn't heard of any of the three books. I read all three books, which I don't always do, but I always tried to help that they were all kind of skinny. And I loved all three.
I loved all three books. I just wanted to clear my own relationship with them up front. So Cormac McCarthy writes this book called Outer Dark published in 1968 by Random House.
Of course, I have the new newer Chip Kidd designed cover featuring a stark atmospheric photograph of a darkening sky, heavy blue-gray storm clouds rolling across a fading yellow horizon. Across the bottom edge of the image, a thin black line of tree silhouette stretches across the landscape with the author's name, Cormac McCarthy, in a prominent serif-y, what do you think, stoic font across the top. You probably know that the typeface.
I don't. Oh, I don't actually. Kidd would know it probably, right?
He used it. Yeah, yeah. And he did the same typeface for all the Cormac McCarthy.
[Jon Klassen]
He did the whole set.
[Neil]
Yeah, he did the whole set. Right. And at the bottom, it says Outer Dark in all caps across the actual land.
And at the very bottom, there is a Houston Chronicle blurb that says, he is nothing less than our greatest living writer. Below his name and really small font says Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road. This book is like, it's a soul-shaking book.
I had to admittedly refer to the Wikipedia plot summary during the reading of the book about five times. What's going on? Where are we?
Yeah. I was like, what's going on? And I also decry, the publisher, Vintage, if you're listening, how dare you tell me a plot point that does not happen until page 100?
I checked it. I folded it twice here because I was like, they don't reveal until page 193 of this book, which is only 242 pages, a major plot point, which is told right on the back. They say it right in the back.
So I won't say it because it's like 80% of the way through we find this out. And when I found this out, I went back to the back and I was like, what the heck? It's basically a brother and a sister on two separate searching paths a hundred years ago in some unknown Southern U.S. Appalachian type of town. And you don't quite know what's happening, but the scenes are dramatic and tense and the language, the dialogue, it just rips at you like almost nothing else. McCarthy was born 1933 in Rhode Island, died 2023 in Santa Fe. He wrote 12 novels and of course, won the Pulitzer National Book Award, National Critics Award, and a ton of other things.
Follow us on Dewey Decimals on 813.54 for American literature in English from 1945 to 1999. John, please tell us about your relationship with Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. I'd read The Road first because it was everywhere.
And I haven't read it since because it hit me so hard. It was one of those things where it's like, well, I'm not sure I want to go through that again anytime soon. I just remember at the end just weeping on our front porch without even really understanding why at the end of that one, but then deciding to read everything the guy had ever written or as much as I could get a hold of.
And I think that Outer Dark was like the third or fourth one I read, but I remember thinking it was actually a lot more entertaining in a way. It was like a fairy tale. It felt like a weird Appalachian fairy tale in the way it was, especially the beginning was so fairy tale-ish.
And I think that I haven't read it again since. I've been meaning to because I remember it being a bit of actually an easier read than some of the other ones where The Road was pretty accessible, but Blood Meridian I remember crawling through. And then The Border Trilogy, another trilogy, was a big hefty pile of books.
And then Set Tree was really hard for me. It was like a lot of description and stuff, which is beautiful, but I remember taking a while. And there's a few other ones.
But Outer Dark felt like- Well, this is interesting because at some point, I want to get your McCarthy reading guide. Okay, so we'll get that later. Well, I don't.
Yeah, it's been a minute since all of them. But The Road first. This is both of us.
The Road was first and I think that was probably for a lot of people. It just exploded and you're like, who's this now? And again, I wasn't especially well read.
And so everyone knew about McCarthy already and No Country for Old Men, I think, had already come out even. I can't remember. Maybe not.
But Outer Dark felt like the most fun in a weird way to me, even though it's so hard and the subject matter is really gruesome. It felt like it was a fun kind of setup. And I think that again, structurally, we talked about Mosey's book structurally.
He does a thing, without spoiling it too much, where he toggles between a couple different threads. But one of the threads is so fantastical and so mythical. It's like a tornado that we cut to every now and then, just like tornado going across the landscape.
And then you get these two quieter ones that are following each other in a quieter way. And then this tornado, again, for like 30 seconds to remind you that this thing is coming for the whole story. It's going to destroy or it has intent to destroy everything.
And it's just a brief cut to it. And there's something about that that was really formative. I think that what I like in storytelling is permission.
I want a book to feel a certain way or to sound a certain way or to not do certain things. But in order to get permission to do that, I just mean creatively. I don't mean publisher-wise or anything like that.
I just mean to make it work creatively. I always feel like I need a counterbalance, some sort of permission. So people can speak very plainly and not have any visible emotion.
But in order to get permission for that, someone has to die at the end of the book. You have to pay that off. There has to have been something boiling up underneath.
Or someone can be talking about where he wants to stand in a field, and that's fun. But in order to get permission to do that, you have to have an unseen rock just falling somewhere above him. And is he going to get hit with it when putting it where he stands?
The rock is the permission to have my guy standing in a field wondering if he should stand there or there. I like the guy on the field, but my permission slips. That's how I kind of structure these things.
And I thought that Outer Dark felt that way. He wants to examine Appalachia, and he wants to examine these two characters and their differing relationships. And he wants to just hang out in this place.
And this tornado thread that we are just reminded of every now and then, that's coming for all of it, almost felt like it's a huge driving thing. I'd be curious to see how it reads even without that. But it's a permission slip.
It's got this great pace to it. It's got this underpinning tension. It's this amazing, beautiful thing.
And it eventually does. You have to pay it off. And of course you do.
It can't just be this thing that happens to give you permission for these other two. Eventually these trains have to run into each other, and what's going to happen? I think a lot of these things were like lessons about how I like stories to be set up.
This is how the setups I like. And I think you can steal from that pretty easily because your endings to those setups are going to be different than these authors. But in terms of how I want them to begin, what's a good start?
Both of those stories have had amazing constructions and setups that way. Yeah, what an incredible analysis. Permission.
I don't know if he would have... I'm not sure if official these things have been analyzed to death. I'm sure Outer Dark has whole essays everywhere, and even what McCarthy would have said about it.
But that was my fascination with it. It was like, look at this giant permission slip. Yeah.
I like that a lot. And the tornado story you're mentioning deals with three outlaws who we don't know who they are, where they're coming from, what they're doing... Or even what they are.
Or what they are, yeah. One of them has no name. And every few chapters, we just get a one or two page story of them.
And then when they interact with our protagonists, it's extremely memorable and vivid. Yeah, it's crazy. As much as you've been toggling between all of these different factions of the story, when they finally meet, there's this horror of realizing that these three creatures, whatever they are, did really exist.
You almost thought they might have been a dream inside the book. At least I felt that way. It was that horror.
Remember in Rear Window, in the Hitchcock movie, where the guy who they've been watching the whole time finally comes across the courtyard and comes into the room that they've been watching him from? And it's like this insane horror of the thing that you knew existed from a distance, and then suddenly it's in the room with you, and you almost can't believe it. It's almost too scary that he's in the room.
And it felt like that. It felt like this thing that had been distant and moving, and you just get glimpses of it, suddenly was next to your people that you've been hanging out with in a much more gentle way. And you couldn't, even though they've all been established as real, you can't believe they're together.
It's crazy. I haven't seen Rear Window. I'll say it again, since I just fell over my own lips on that one.
But I know exactly what you mean about the person you're looking outside and suddenly coming inside. Suddenly they're in there. Yeah.
You can't believe the proximity, I guess. Yeah. And it also strikes me that both you and McCarthy have this ability to compress a vast amount of stuff you're thinking about and processing into this distilled, concentrated form.
I looked up McCarthy's writing routines. I was very curious about it. There's differing accounts, but some accounts say he got up at six and he didn't talk much about writing.
In fact, he says talking about writing is the antithesis of writing, so you shouldn't do it. He kind of goes on the record saying that. But though he's famously private, it sounds like he got up at 6 a.m. every day. He worked on the same specific typewriter for 50 years. He liked the practice of typing on a typewriter. And only later in life, apparently, did he switch to a computer kind of reluctantly.
And then he wrote all day. That was kind of the thing. He wrote till he was done writing for the day without any interruptions.
And he famously didn't take meetings. He didn't do what we're doing right now, podcasts obviously, but he also didn't do anything else. And his life was pretty poorly known until afterwards.
We can talk about that in a second. But what is your writing routine now? It's very erratic.
These books, I don't even think of it as writing. It's something else. I guess it's writing, and I'm getting more interested in the writing as it goes on, I think.
But I don't know how to rough things out with writing. I don't know how to outline writing or think about it that way. It feels much more like you find a sound and you're almost holding on to a little wild animal for as long as you can before it finally escapes.
I mean, that sounds way too dramatic. My best stuff, or at least the stuff I'm proudest of, is when it really did surprise me completely. I was like, that's what's going to happen?
I did not know. And that's why I like beginnings so much. Because if I have a good beginning, I feel confident enough to just let this thing take me wherever it's going.
The worst stuff is when you thought you just kind of built your way towards an ending that you wanted. But my favorite experiences with writing anyway have been like, huh, I didn't know that was what was going to happen. I get so impressed with writers who are able to step back from their work, especially in the middle of it, and analyze it, and pop the hood, and tweak it and stuff.
Because I don't feel like that at all. I feel like I have a run, like a screaming tightrope walk run in me. And I get to the other side, and I look back at whatever's happened.
And maybe go in there and massage it a little bit. But the main pieces of it were done out of a sense of running down a hill or something. It's just this momentum of just don't fall, don't fall, don't fall.
I know at the end about what I could to the next thing, for instance. Screaming, running across a tightrope. What a great visual.
Also, I can feel that in your books. I feel that in your books. There's a sense of propulsion.
Yeah, it's a sense of momentum and propulsion. And who knows what unlocks it? Again, it's usually omission.
It's usually like you took a word out, or you took a way of writing something out that was blocking you. And suddenly, you know at least how to run with it. You don't know where it's going, but you know how to run for a minute.
So when you get up and you take your kids to school or whatever, and you get into your studio or your garage that you're speaking in now, what do you do? Sorry, but are you grabbing a pen and a piece of paper? Do you go to the computer?
Are you drawing? Are you looking at what you started yesterday and trying to see where it goes? You must have a lot of scraps for everything finished.
Lots of scraps, lots of scraps. I think that I give up too easily, too. I'll try a few pages, and if I'm not feeling it, then I'll give up pretty quickly.
Because again, you don't want to get five feet out onto the tightrope and not have it. You run back home pretty fast. And so unless it happens, I'm pretty spoiled on the format, too, because it's very short.
I relate much more when I hear about songwriters than I do about reading about novelists or something like that. That always sounds more familiar. I have this book called Songwriters on Songwriting, and it's just interviews with all these guys, mostly guys.
I think there's like 100 people in the book, and it's all interviews with how they think this goes. How do you write a song? What happens?
How does it happen for you? And there's this huge debate with almost all of them as to whether it hits you like lightning, and you are just like this receiver, or whether you can sit in a hotel room for 10 years and craft it. And I think it seems to have happened both ways to a lot of them, and so there's no real knowing.
But that sounds more familiar. You get spoiled by picture books, again, because they are so short. I want my hat back was like 15 minutes, and it's basically what it was.
I think there was one edit because we needed to trim a page, and that was it. What's there was like standing at the laptop, literally just following it down to be like, someone lies. If it's going to be pictures and words together, and we can see, and it's no narration, someone should lie.
And then like 10 minutes later, well, I'd be pretty upset. Let's kill them. And you're impulsive.
You're not planning. You're not outlining. There's no bullet points next to the thing.
You're just writing. And you get so spoiled by an experience like that when it works, because you're like, well, that's how long a book takes to write then. And it's not always.
But I think that happens with songwriting, too, it seems like. They're in a cab one day, and some song comes to them, and it's like the rest of their career is spent playing that song for everyone, and they don't know where it happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And if you don't call it writing, maybe we broaden the term to like creating or to making or... Yeah, composing, I guess, because you're composing the page is the other thing. You're not just writing.
The final experience with what I'm writing is going to be next to a picture on a page somewhere. It's never going to be the text anywhere. And so that can happen, too.
You can write a text that you think is working great. And then you sit down to lay out the book itself, how it's going to relate to the illustrations. And something doesn't work.
You think you have some clever trick, or you think it's going to be okay. And then you put it on the page, and you're like, I hadn't thought of that. Shoot, it breaks it.
And you know right away that it's broken. And you thought you had this great text, and you'd gone to bed the night before thinking you got it. And then you start to lay it out, and then the final product doesn't work.
For whatever reason, it could just be like simple stuff, stage direction. He can't come in from the left, or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
It doesn't work. Something's not working, and you thought you had it. And so there's this extra stage where it's like you could have a great text, you could love the sound, or whatever it is.
And it has this other secondary proof that doesn't work. What's a good day to you? What do you call a good day?
I'm in the middle of a bunch of them right now because I'd finished some books, and I don't owe anybody anything right now. And so I have three or four things that no one knows about that I get to hang out with for a while, and figure out what they even are, if they're even anything. And those feel really special, those days where you haven't had to show.
And I don't resent collaboration or anything. I really love working with people, actually. But I've become more and more comfortable with this period, where it's like no one's seen it yet.
You're just kind of spitballing. You're figuring out how the books are going to feel more than what they actually are. You're just crafting the mood of them, I guess.
Which is, to me, just as important as what they're going to do specifically. How do they feel? What's this book?
Because so much of what I've talked about while you go back to books is how they feel. And kids were that way too, I think. The books that I went back to over and over again, I don't think it was the story.
It was just, I want to sit in there again. Yeah, you aim for that emotional state. And then you mentioned the four coffees at the beginning of the conversation.
McCarthy is famous for discussing alcohol. I have written sober, and I've also written with cannabis. I'm just curious, because your stuff's so creative.
I asked this question of Daniel's too, and they joked back to me. And they were like, because everything ever all at once is such a spastic, creative movie. And they were like, well, you're basically asking us what drugs we take.
And I was like, well, tell me about your head state, mind state. How do you get to these creative places? I think it's fear.
Fear is probably my drug. Just fear of it not working, or fear of failure. I just read a Leonard Cohen biography, and it turned out so much of those things were written just out of his mind, just in 100 degree heat and grease with just on every drug he could find.
And he was like, what? That's how he wrote some of this stuff that just feels so conscious, and so considered, and so careful. And he was just out of his mind in the sunshine somewhere.
It was crazy. I can't relate to that. I guess I haven't tried all the harder stuff.
So maybe something would unlock. But no, I think I'm very nervous as a writer. And I think I've learned to count on that as the thing that drives it.
There's so much talk about conquering your fears in creativity, but I think I don't know what I would be without them. And so, yeah, I think it's just being really, really oversensitive, maybe, is part of it too, where you're like, well, I wouldn't feel that. If he says if instead of and there, then how would I take that?
How do I take that when it's said that way? Because kids are like that too. So much of our interactions with our kids are constantly like, oh man, he was really listening to that.
I shouldn't have tossed off that line so quickly. He felt that and remembering that. And I'm still that way.
And so being like, yeah, if you do feel it, then that's real. Keep track of it. Those lines are important.
Our word choices are important. Kids books are so great for that. They're so great at letting you think that things are like small movements are important because they're so distilled, right?
They're so simple. Yeah. Yeah.
And there is David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas calls poets apex predators of the literary world because if you have an incorrect word, you have a dead poem. This is somewhat similar to the work you do, which is like maybe a hundred words in the book. If any word's wrong, the whole string fails, right?
Yes. That's exactly how it feels. That's right.
That's right. And that, and the fear of that, just like the a thousand feet high on the cliff face fear of that, I think is what thrives my thing. And it's not unpleasant.
I really enjoy it. It's making it sound like these days are spent in angst and like fretting and stuff, but they're not when I, when, when you figured it out too, when you think, when you know you're safe, when something is going well enough where you're like, okay, I think, I think I got what I like. It's the best.
It's so great. Um, but I don't, um, I wish I had some sort of chemical thing that would help me out that way. Um, but I think you've actively thought not to pursue that, which is probably a wise decision.
Like, I don't know. Yeah, maybe for example, well, my example was, uh, we'd been going through like ADHD kind of diagnosis with my eldest son and through the process has become painfully aware. I've become very, it's been obvious that like, clearly I have this too.
And I, you know, I'm reading the books and I'm like, I obviously have this. Now the question I'm faced with right now is should I pursue like a formal diagnosis, perhaps leading to medication, perhaps leading to, should I go down that route? Like maybe that'll make me feel better on the same time.
This, this undiagnosed ADHD, Neil is kind of someone I've really liked for a while and has done pretty good in a lot of things. Now he has now, the other thing is this stuff changes over time. So now at 46, maybe now's the time I really should look into that stuff because it's starting to become problematic, you know?
So that's just kind of, you know, some examples there. That was my example. I think, no, I think I've got a bit, I've got a bit more of more of a spoonful than that of that stuff too.
And I think that I hate letting people down or disappointing them. And I think that drives a lot of my, my work as a, as a host too, as an author, you feel like you, you want to pay off their attentions. Why are you reading my book?
Why, why mine? You know, why do I get this time of yours? That's the fear that, that you would have wasted their time or that it wasn't enough.
It wasn't worth their having spent time looking at it. And you, I think that I can tell, or at least I think I can tell when you've crossed past the reasonable fear of that. Like there is, there's being polite and then there's being super afraid to let people down and then there's being paralyzed by it.
Right. And I think that intellectually I can tell, well, now we're, that's unreasonable. You should probably not be as worried about it, but there's a certain amount of it, like you say, that's, that's useful.
It makes you a good storyteller. You're being conscientious of how your audience is feeling. Your sensitivity to that is your tool.
Yeah. It's also very strange to be a semi-public figure that way though too, right? You spend all this time introspectively in your garage drawing turtles, and then they think that that also makes you a good podcast guest or like a good person on stage.
And like, why is that? Why? When it's almost the opposite.
You are a great podcast guest. You're extremely affable, literary, considerate.
[Jon Klassen]
I wasn't fishing, but you know what I mean? Your metaphors were awesome though.
[Neil]
I love host. I love author as host. I've never heard that before.
That's such a great metaphor. Oh, I feel that that's most of the feeling I have is like you, you are, yeah, you've, um, you're a host to your audience. It doesn't mean that you, that you, like they, that they know what's coming or anything, but you are in your, your job is taking care of what you've even built them up to yourself.
You've, what's that great Hitchcock line, something like you've built your audience into a state. And if you don't satisfy that, they're going to become very angry and like, yeah, that's your fault. You set up a problem, work it out.
Um, but all of that, they're here for that. They've come to your book or whatever it is you've made for an experience. The public feature thing's interesting because of course, McCarthy was famously private.
And, uh, in 2024, one year after he died, a big vanity fair article came out featuring a long profile revealing how at age 42 McCarthy met and befriended a 16 year old girl who became a secret muse for decades. Uh, it kind of reminds me a bit of that sort of Alice Monroe post death reveal of that. She was aware of her daughter's abuse from her second husband.
And I'm like, this is the era of the reveal. Like what the app, you know, the Epstein files, of course, every day there's like a new thing. Um, you know, and it's almost like first Peter Atiyah gets called out for, you know, using vulgar language in an email to Epstein.
And now the followup article is like, you know, entire longevity science questioned. Right. So I just wonder how you thought about parting art from artists.
If that's something you think about, if that simply adds to your fear, I don't know, like your public. No, I don't know. I think that this is going to sound like I, I believe in separating art from artists and I'm not sure that's quite where it lands.
It's so nuanced and so particular and specific to the situations, right? Like, I don't think you can have a rule about this. Every time you think you've got a maximum for it, you're like, what about that guy?
You're like, oh no, that guy, that doesn't apply to that guy, obviously. And so you're always finding exceptions to those things when you make, I don't think we can make a blanket rule about it. I do feel, I think that working on stuff for kids, you're, you're, you're often in the business of remembering your own experiences as a kid reading or watching or, or, or experiencing something that was made, right?
And those experiences were mine. They were, they're very important to me. And often I go back to books that I loved and they weren't, I was putting things into them that weren't even there.
I go back now, I'm like, this was the book, this was the one I read, like, this is boring or like, there's not even a story here. What was I doing returning to this? Or like, it wasn't nearly as well done as I thought or something was up.
Um, and it's so mysterious why you get attached to things. I don't think it's any of our business why we get attached to a lot of things. We just do.
Um, but there are as though, whatever it is that you're returning to is completely yours. And it doesn't, it helps me as a creator to think that then too, because if I'm trying to hold responsibility, either good or bad for what a child takes from what I'm doing, it's impossible. It's too much.
Even if it's all good, even if they all love it, you can't hold it. Um, and so giving that over to them to be like, it's yours. That's, it's not mine anymore.
And that's such a pat thing to say, right? It's so stereotypical of being like, well, it's not mine. I gave it out to the world.
That's not quite it. It's like those things, whatever you're bringing to the books and whatever it is that is itching, um, those moments on your bed with the book were yours. And I would defend that.
Um, I would defend my ownership of those things, um, of those experiences and kind of the work is doing that as being like, well, what do I, what, you know, what do I make now? Now that I've had those things and those experiences, um, I feel a fierce defense of those moments. Um, and that doesn't, I don't, that seems like, again, like it points to separating art from artists that it doesn't matter what kind of life McCarthy had or what happened.
And it does matter. I think it does. Obviously it matters, but it, um, it's a strange thing to equate it to making things for kids too.
Right? Because, um, I think there's a lot of people who have had some really strange and sometimes not great lives who've made beautiful work for kids. And they feel especially, you feel especially defensive of children then you'd be like, well, if he did that, then should he be, should his work be led into a room with, with kids?
I don't know. I don't, it's, it's impossible to answer. I guess there's all sorts of exceptions and, and again, making a rule for it seems dangerous, but I do know that I think that I, I, however it fits in, I feel very defensive of my own experiences with this work.
Um, and, um, and they feel like mine, those moments feel like mine. And so that seems important to say without necessarily following it all the way down and still making room for, you know, all the variations. Yeah.
That's a really great, uh, delineation though. Which is slipping out of answering the question.
[Jon Klassen]
No, no.
[Neil]
My experience with this work is uniquely mine. And the other thing I think I somewhat picked up early since the belief I have is that how can you morally evaluate any, anyone? I mean, it's just like, uh, you know, um, uh, yeah, John Lennon, uh, you know, uh, has all kinds of massive, uh, personality defects that are pretty well known.
Everyone wants to listen to the Beatles. Like it's really hard to pull those apart, um, and judge people separate from the work. I know, but I just asked because it's kind of like interesting that like, you know, famous person dies and then that date plus X, you know, shocking revelation comes out.
It's like that we're getting that with all these people. It's also like McCarthy in particular, all that stuff that they found out, like if you'd read his books, you're like, how shocked are we really? Like you had to like, who, what kind of mind makes this up?
Like what, you know what I mean?
[Jon Klassen]
Like how do you, yeah.
[Neil]
And I think that, um, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think that I'm, I am of course, cause he was so reclusive and so mysterious that you were hungry for any bit of detail. There's a funny detail about him that we learned not too long ago.
Mac Barnett and I like to talk about clothes. We have very different tastes in men's clothes, but we like to talk about it and encourage each other in our various journeys sartorially. And he sent me a picture the other day of a, of a beautiful like coat rack with like six blazers hanging on it.
And, um, like tweed ones. And he's like, who do you think that's, that belongs to? And I was like, I don't know, who are you talking about?
And he goes, it's an author. Try and guess who's, who's those, whose jackets those were. And I was like, I've got no idea.
Like, what do we, um, you know, Fitzgerald. I have no idea. They were, they were nice.
I could tell they were at least nice. And he goes, that's McCarthy. And I was like, really?
Like he said, those are all McCarthy's blazers. I was like, that's so cool that he like, after all that time, like whittled it down to like, you know, this great little collection of jackets. And then Max says, no, that's not the case.
What we're seeing here is like six or seven of his favorites. He apparently had an entire warehouse. He was obsessed and he collects blazers his whole life.
He collected them and he was insatiable. And it was such a crazy roller coaster ride to think, oh yeah, this fits with this stoic man I've read so much about, right. This like monk, of course, he only has like three jackets and he like, that's his, this is probably all he wears his whole life.
And I spent five minutes with that. And then to be flipped again, to be like, no, he was voracious and completely indecisive. And like, you go through that and you're, you settle so quickly into your picture of a person that you just don't know.
Right. And so you're that was going to be real for me, that four jacket McCarthy. And now the much more interesting and complicated warehouse jacket McCarthy is the truth, apparently.
And like, I was like, I remember even being like, hold on to that experience too, because we're so quick to then settle into what we hear. And it doesn't mean it's all good. And we should, you know, have, have, you know, make room for bad behavior and bad decisions and things, but also like how quickly we settle into whatever it is we've decided fits what we know of these people that we'll never know.
Of course we won't. Exactly. Exactly.
What a great, what a great little story. And it also isn't good.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
I mean, it also makes me think, I don't know how it's cool how he got a picture of that. It was in some magazine.
[Jon Klassen]
Someone drove it around his closet.
[Neil]
Oh, okay. Okay. I thought he was like in.
[Jon Klassen]
No, no, no, no.
[Neil]
It was like in some feature someone had gone to because he, I think he worked at the Santa Fe Institute, the latter part of his life, the physics Institute. And he just liked it over there. And so he had like a little apartment or something in there that that's where it was, I think.
So this also makes me think about obsession in general, as a thing that we like, you know, we fawn upon when we see it producing great art that we love. And then you sort of see the sort of like side part that's like squirted out. I mean, I love Jerry Seinfeld.
I've been, I've, I've been, I've watched Seinfeld since I was a kid, when we were kids, that was the most popular show. And then when you find out later that like, you know, he owns a hundred Porsches, you know what I mean? You're like, what?
Like that guy, how does that square? But of course it's like, you know, he's got no other major vices. So he's got a lot of money.
So he buys cars. It's like that, that big a deal. Or even if he did, you know, it, you know, what, what would, and then how would that change?
If it turned out that we found out there was another couple of major vices, you know, how would that square with your justification of the warehouse of Porsches? Like we're constantly reacting and adjusting and trying to make, we're trying to make like an understandable theory on people that sort of holds like a mathematical theorem on a person where it's like, well, now we know that if we ever had, you know, and you don't, we're not like that. I think that we're massive.
And one of the reasons that it's so much fun to write for kids, especially is that they understand, or at least are comfortable with contradiction, massive contradiction, and adults are less and less comfortable with it. They need a unified theory of people. And once they figured that out very hard to break it on people.
And so, but kids, they're not threatened by contradiction because they don't, that's not how they're working yet. They don't have a theory of themselves certainly. And so contradictions in stories and in conclusions to stories or in people are just, that's okay to leave it there.
And it's wonderful to create stories that that's where you leave it. You leave it at a contradiction. It doesn't happen often, but yeah.
We're all full of contradictions. We've been talking a lot about the virtue and nature and fun of writing books for kids yet. We have not talked about a children's book author yet until now.
The third and final, I mean, I was expecting when I got your books, I was like, is it going to be three picture books? Like I was curious what you're going to send me. Yeah.
And, but the third and final book, which is, you said, I think you just read most recently, he is Dominic by William Steig. I think I pronounced that right. S-T-Y-G.
[Jon Klassen]
I always, I've heard both and I can't remember. You say Steig?
[Neil]
I say Steig, I think first, but then everyone, I'm always corrected. It's yeah. Sound off in the comments, I guess.
I can't remember how it goes. Dominic, D-O-M-I-N-I-C, published in 1972 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. The cover is a bright blue diamondy pattern.
What do you call it? Is that like a Paisley? What do we call that here?
That is the most recent one. The original cover was all yellow and he hand drew it all. I think if you find the older edition, it's all bright yellow and he's walking past a tree.
It's very spare, but it's that same drawing of the dog. It's just on an older cover. The dog, Dominic, the dog who is wearing a blue coat, a red scarf, and of course, small top hat, walking on his hind legs, carrying a bundle tie to the pole in that old kind of vintage hobo fashion that we are used to seeing from history.
I want to say the font on the top is sort of like this princess bride type of all caps. Seraphi font, it says William Steig in capital letters. What's this book about?
Well, not much. Basically, Dominic, it's time for a change. That's the first line of the book.
It's time for a change. Dominic passed his collection of hats and his piccolo. It's all you need, obviously, and heads out letting the world take him where it may.
Steig, for those that don't know, was born in the Bronx in 1907, a socialist Polish Jewish immigrant, and lived 95 years all the way up to 2003. He is most famous for writing the book that turned into the movie, Shrek, but also a number of other fabulous children's books like Brave Irene and Pizza Pizza. I'm sure that's one of your favorites as well as one of my favorites.
Filed this book under 813.5 for American Literature and English. John, please tell us about your relationship with Dominic by William Steig. Um, I came to Steig, however we're supposed to say it.
Yeah, S-T-I-E-I-G, which is how it's spelled. Yeah, I didn't have his books when I was a kid. I only found them pretty late into doing children's books at all, and he was one of the other ones.
It was sort of like McCarthy, where I was like, well, now I have to read everything this guy ever wrote or try and find it. He's an amazing writer.
[Jon Klassen]
I like that about you.
[Neil]
The compulsive full discography. Yeah, I don't know why I do that. I'm not a completist in a lot of ways, but for some reason, that's my rhythm with writing.
If I read something by someone, I'm like, well, okay, grab the pile. I don't know why that is. Maybe I could take comfort in seeing the variation or seeing them grow or not grow or something.
But for him, my favorite works of his are his longer ones. There's three that I know of. Dominic, Abel's Island, and The Real Thief, which is a little shorter than the other two.
These are short novels, Dominic and Abel's Island. I can't remember which one I read first. I think I read Dominic first of all of them.
It's, again, the structure of it. I think what he does at the end of this book, he does this in his picture books sometimes too. There is something about his stories.
Dominic does it in a different way, but a lot of his picture books are like this, where there is some sort of fantastical premise with magic or some sort of coincidence, something crazy that isn't really explained and not quite believable that kicks off the action. Then it leads to really relatable and very beautifully described sincere grief or peril or just a dark spot for our main character. Then just at the precipice of total disaster, he reminds you that this all started with something kind of unbelievable and fantastical, and we should pull that card again to solve our problem in also an unbelievable way.
But isn't that a relief? Because we said magic existed on page two, why not have it solve this completely impossible problem on page 78? Now we're out, right?
Isn't that nice? There's something that he manages to do in that where he gets you to the bottom and he describes it in a way that you've been there and you're truly distressed by. Then he says, but not here, not this time.
Today in my book, it's going to end well. And there's almost an acknowledgement that it shouldn't end that way and that we don't even almost believe it ends that way, but that he's not going to let it end any other way, not today. It's very merciful, his stuff is, because it acknowledges how bad it can get.
And yet he's like, but maybe not today, sometimes not, every now and then not. And how about this is one of those times, I'm in charge, I'm writing it, so today not. And Dominic pulls that off in a really interesting way, where you don't even really know, like you said, the very first line is, it was time for a change.
But the entire book, almost repetitively, too repetitively, Dominic is ecstatically happy with his life. He's walking around, he's on sort of a walking tour, kind of a weird nomadic, like he doesn't even know why. He's left his house on page one, put a note on the door and headed out for reasons that he's just the time for a change.
Everywhere he goes, he's rolling in the grass, literally can't believe how happy he is and how beautiful the world is. And only a writer like Stagg could pull off those sentences even just over and over again, just describing the complete beauty of the world and how lucky Dominic feels to be alive. And it's almost monotonous.
You're like, what is like, shouldn't this guy have a problem? Shouldn't books have characters with problems? And then at the end of the book, finally, in the last five pages of the book, his problem is revealed to us that he didn't even know was his problem.
The thing he was searching, I'd never seen a book do that, where it was like, you're going to go 98% of the way through this book without the problem being stated by either the character or the narrator. And at the very end, he's going to get something that he was wanting all along. It's an amazing trick, I couldn't believe it.
It shouldn't work. So much of Stagg's work shouldn't work, but he's just such a craftsman that it works. He's just a gorgeous writer.
And I saw this. I don't usually get really sentimental about original art. In kids' books, you see a lot of original art and ephemera and stuff like that.
And I never really get much out of it. It's always like, I'm not romantic about that kind of thing. But at the Eric Carle Museum, they have an archive and they had Dominic and he wrote it with like a Bic pen in a 10 cent notebook.
And you can tell he did it straight. He just wrote it. There's small notes here and there that he was telling himself a story.
And it just dropped me on my head. I couldn't believe it. Yeah.
And I'd love to write that way. Again, he's one of those writers that I don't write like him. He's very descriptive and very comfortable and very verbose in his writing.
And I'm the opposite almost. But to write like that, to sit down and be like, let's tell myself a story. And maybe you never know, right?
Maybe in his head, he had this whole thing mapped out and he was just executing. But it felt, it feels to me like he was just writing this and wondering where it was going to go. And then he just landed this crazy jet.
Yeah, absolutely. What a great way to describe it. And you just revealed to me so much more than I noticed while reading the book.
I mean, it's a strange structure. Your description of it is like the magic to me. Well, yeah, it's a strange structure.
You don't know why you're reading it. It's just this episodic weird, like what is going on? The thing I'm talking about, that permission slip isn't there.
It's that thing that should justify all of this meandering and all of this pastoral wandering on the part of this dog. He doesn't have a permission slip for it dramatically. There's no tension.
There's this gang that's following him around. But even that just feels episodic. And so there's no propulsion.
The only propulsion is this guy being like, I'm going to move on. And that shouldn't work. And you shouldn't be able to introduce the main thing he's been pining for that he didn't even know in the second last page of the book.
I also, in this one, without giving too much away, hopefully, in a lot of these books, this happens too, where the character ought to die. Really, dramatically, they almost feel like they do. And then something pulls them back right at the edge and says, not today, magic, psych, he's okay, he's fine.
It's actually very beautiful right after that. But you almost feel like that last bit is almost too good to be true. And it's very powerful that it's almost too good to be true.
It gives him license to be almost heavenly in it, or there's some sort of dreaminess in the last bit after the person should have died. And so you almost don't believe it. You're like, this is what I hoped was going to happen, but I don't think this actually happened.
And it's an amazing trick, because of course, the narrator, he never blinks. He never says, this didn't really happen. This is just some sort of weird dream he had.
But he does this in his picture book sometimes, where he's like, by all rights, it should have ended terribly. And so it gives him license almost to be too sweet in the ending, because you don't quite think it's happening, I don't think. It's really interesting.
He's a very interesting writer. I just love that book. I've read it a couple times now.
It's amazing. It is amazing. And Able's Island, also a gem.
Oh, man, so good. Yeah, I love Able's Island. I get a lot of emails, I'm sure you do too, for people asking, I've written a book, how do I publish it?
But more than they get those, they come more for children's books than anything else. So I imagine you're just buried in those. I noticed Stig didn't actually become a children's author until he was 61 years old.
That's how old he was when he wrote his first children's book. I was just curious for those people listening who are interested in becoming a children's book author, what your current advice to them would be? Yeah, it's hard.
It is a hard one. I think that usually if you're coming to it at a certain point in your life, you have a reverence for the form, right? There's preciousness to it that you've realized or remembered or something.
Or you're like, well, I've had kids and we've been reading these books, and I have an idea for what I want to be part of this experience that I've been having. There's a bunch of weight on the thing that isn't anything to do with what it is you might be working on, your story itself, what the book might be. There's all this baggage you bring to it, either positive or negative, where you're like, well, this is a special time that I remember when I was a kid, or I just spent this time with my own kid.
There's almost like a strange feeling of that. Because I felt so much in these books, or because I think they're so important, that almost gives me the right to do this. I think it's a really hard discussion when it doesn't go well.
You're like, but I love children's books. I don't understand. I don't get to make one.
I love them. It's a hard thing to do. It happens with my stuff, too.
It's like, well, isn't this my job? What do you mean this one's not going to work? But I think what it reminds me...
Happens with my stuff, too. I should say I get more rejections than acceptances by a lot. Yeah.
Some stuff just doesn't work. The form itself is not enough. Just because you love the form, and because you felt so much for it, and because your children loved it, or because your kid liked this, any of that, you're not owed it.
What's that great line at the end of Unforgiven? That's my favorite line at the Clint Eastwood movie where he goes, he's about to shoot the sheriff in the head, and he says, it deserves got nothing to do with it. And that's exactly right.
The work has to work locally as much as you can to focus on what's the book? What's the next page? Why am I turning the page?
Get out of your head about how reverential you are to children's books and what a special time childhood is and all of that. It's only going to make you freeze up or make you make weird decisions because this is this diamond time. And it is.
It doesn't mean it's not, but why are you turning the page? Get as hyper-local as you can to the thing to make sure it's working technically. That's what you owe them.
That's what you owe the form. Not that you love it. No one cares if you love it.
Is it working? That's how you pay tribute to this. Make it run as well as you can.
You get to bring your head up later and then revere the whole thing again and be very respectful of it and childhood and magic and all of that. But in the moment, don't think of any of that stuff. It's just getting in your way and it's going to make you angry if it doesn't work.
It just makes you really upset when it turns out you don't get to make the book that you thought you were going to get to make. You just get bitter because you loved it. Shouldn't I get to do the thing I love?
And it has to work. It's got to work. Kids don't care that you loved it.
They don't care about you at all, which is the freedom of it once you start to do it. Kids do not care, I don't think, about who's making the thing. Does it work?
Why am I turning the page? So say someone writes a book that they feel like it does work. Say the right now is someone listening who has a gem and you and I would both read it and we'd agree it was a gem.
Publisher would know it was a gem. Market would know it's a gem. There is still that missing, what do I do with it thing?
And what's your advice for that? How do you get published? What's your advice on how to get published?
Because you got found and so did I. So my blog was popular and the blog I wrote, 1000awesomethings.com, got popular. So then I got found.
But what I'm usually hearing from is, how do I, I want to get found.
[Jon Klassen]
Find me.
[Neil]
Here it is. I want this to be discovered. Those structures change all the time.
I can only govern my own advice, which is like, have something viral online. I slipped in just before that. And that's what makes my impressions and advice a little bit obsolete.
My job started pre-online. I had a website. It was old-timey.
It was web 1.0 basically. And so I had a website and I had a student film and I heard from an art director at Scheinman & Schuster who saw my student film on YouTube 1.0. There were 10 videos on it. And she said, do you want to make a children's book?
What she said was, I think this would make a good book. She was an art director and so she couldn't push it through herself, but she could help me submit it. Or at least she thought it was worth trying.
And I had not thought of books at all. They were not on my radar. I was in animation.
I'd gone to school for animation. I was going to spend the rest of my life in animation. And so the only book I could remember or think of was Sam and the Firefly.
And I went to the bookstore and bought it and brought it home and thought, okay, this is a children's book. This is 90 pages long or whatever it was. So I gave her a 90-page dummy of my student film.
And she said, this is ridiculous. Children's books are 30 pages. So I don't think it's going to work, but I'll keep you in mind.
And then three years later, she wrote with a text that someone else had written saying, you want to illustrate that? You could try that. And I did that.
And that was my first book. And in the making of that one, that was Cat's Night Out by Carolyn Stetson. And it was with Simon & Schuster.
And the art director was Lucy Cummins. Lucy Cummins is a children's author herself now. A very, very good and successful one.
And she's still at Simon & Schuster in a better capacity, but she still makes these beautiful books. But in the course of making that, and not necessarily because of any particular page or anything, but I'd been working in story and design and animation and something was wrong. I wasn't fitting well.
And there was something about my storytelling sensibility that I didn't know about, that it was emerging the more work I did. I was like, something's up. I'm hitting a wall.
And suddenly I did this book illustration and I was like, oh no, oh no, I've been at the wrong thing the whole time. Here's this beautifully tailored format for everything I want to do and everything I don't want to do. And what was I doing the whole time?
I should have been doing this. And so I got a book agent and I had two years left in my DreamWorks contract as a designer there. And I told the book agent that, and I said, at the end of two years, can we get enough work going where I might be able to not renew my DreamWorks contract?
And that's what happened. And that was like 20 years ago. Wow.
What a real story. It does also remind me of everyone's story. It's so useless to anyone looking to get found though, isn't it?
What a great little ramp. It is and it isn't though, because what you did do was put a lot of stuff out there. And when you say saw it on YouTube or something, and you say old-timey website, you were putting your work, you know, it's like Austin Kleon's old adage, like show your work.
Keep showing your work. A Sloan Canadian band used to always say, good old Sloan, they used to always say like, just keep playing. If it's good, you'll get noticed, you know, like just kind of keep putting yourself out there.
I will say too, like that first book, I Want My Hat Back, we sent that out to a bunch of places because I didn't have a publisher yet. And only one of them wanted to make the book as it was. You only need one.
I think that there's a temptation when you're starting, before you know editors and art directors in particular, to think of it as a monolith that publishing doesn't want my book or that editors don't want my book or something. But they're not that way. These are very distinct personalities working at these houses and at these places, and they all have different tastes, and that's why they're there.
And they've been hired for that peculiarity in their taste. And so you only need one. You don't need all of them to like your book.
You just need one. You can go through nine before you find your one, you know, you only need one. And so that's, I think that's important to remember is that, yeah, from the outside, it just looks like this giant building and they're all working in there.
And you just get this rejection letter that pops out of the building, but you don't. You get a rejection letter from one of them, and they have their own tastes, and they were in a certain mood that day, and they've been publishing certain kinds of books for the last five years, whatever it is, whatever the context is, it's unknowable. But you just need one to be like, yeah, I think we could try this out.
And that's all I had was just like, I didn't hear from 10 art directors. I heard from one at the beginning, thinking like, oh, this could work. And it's a lucky balance.
I know that it is. And so that makes maxims and advice and sort of wisdom only so useful because it's been a long time. It was in a different time for all of this.
I remember being horrified when I heard that publishers were looking at like Instagram following numbers and stuff like, holy cow, how would I have done it?
[Jon Klassen]
I don't think I would have.
[Neil]
I don't know if that would have happened. I didn't have anything like that. And I'm not great at that side of it.
And so, yeah, I don't know. It's only so useful. I do think it was also, I don't know.
I think they're also, also what they're looking for and how they're looking for it always changes because when everybody follows, like now, if you look at Instagram numbers, you get this homogenous, like algorithmically derived viral stuff that isn't necessarily going to sell books. So it might be off of that train already. I do think it's worth it.
What I heard later about some of the work, not from the art director initially or anybody else, but I do think it helped is that I was getting interested, the stuff I was putting on a website for reasons I didn't understand was that I was starting to draw letters and write sentences underneath the drawings. I'd always liked that. I'd always liked captioning my drawings with a funny line that switched what you were thinking of.
And I think as an illustrator, if you want to make it look like books, make it look like a book, put words next to the thing. It'd be surprised how much of a difference that makes. We're like, how come no one wants me to illustrate books?
I would love to. And you're like, well, as soon as you put words next to the exact same illustration you just got rejected on, they'd be like, oh yeah, well now it looks like a book. And it's just coming to them that extra bit.
Again, being a good host to be like, I'd just be very, very, very clear and go as far down the line of making it look like an actual book. Don't count on them to picture anything you haven't shown them. Make a cover, do a title on top of it.
Think of the book as an object, almost from the start. It is an object. It's never knocked in it like the final product will be an object.
So think of it that way. What's the cover? What's the back cover?
What's the title page? What's the chapter one title? All of that stuff that gets people thinking that they're a book.
All that is important, I think, into having them picture it being a book. And it doesn't mean it's going to stay that way, but it helps them now I can pop the hood on this and we can craft it together or it's done. Who knows?
But thinking of it as a book from the start and not anything else, not a manuscript, not a rough, not a sketch. It's a book. What is it?
I love that. There's a lot of pieces there and it's how much do you push on the selling of its side versus on the craft side? Also, this is kind of my last question before we get into fast money around.
We'll kind of tail things off here, but I have one last question. It's kind of around ambitions, kind of around how big you want to be or how big do you want your life to be? Because I was looking at Steig.
He had a massive life, four marriages back to back, like every marriage that ends, his new marriage is the same year, if you look at it. He was a boxer for a while, I think, 2600 drawings for the New Yorker, including 117 covers. His early stuff looks nothing like his later stuff.
His early stuff, he was trying to be like Charles Adams or something. It's washy and heavy and it's gorgeous. He's so good at it.
But then his later stuff is nervous and light and wispy and stuff like is completely changed throughout the course of his thing. Yeah, it does change. He's got 40 children's books, 20 adult books.
He lived a long life. There's that old quote that one of the best ways to ensure a long life is to be a workaholic. What size of life do you want?
You are a craftsman, it's obvious. You focus deeply on the craft, on story, and that's why your work is so good. At the same time, you're in a world now where you have to probably think about how big you want to be and how ambitious you want to be.
You've got kids, you probably have all these other tensions on your personhood. How do you think about that? I think I'm in the middle of thinking about it consciously for the first time, maybe ever.
Maybe that's just what happens in your 40s with kids and everything. It's like, okay, can I take the wheel of this a little bit? Can we make it into a picture?
Because you do meet people too who are around your own age who did, and they've made these days that look the way that they want them to. It's a whole work of art of its own, how your days are paced, and it makes a huge difference. I think I felt out of control of that for a long time.
I don't think that I felt that it was something I could steer. I was more reactive. So much of my work is reactive.
I don't like making things from scratch. I like reacting and seeing the best I can do with something that's given to me. I think I thought that my life and my days were going to be like that too.
But little by little, you're like, wait a minute, maybe if I don't like something, can I change it a little bit? That's just now coming up. We're taking that control.
Some people, I think, were born with the comfort of doing that, but I wasn't. So it's new, that idea that you can make your days look like something that you thought of. I don't know.
It's pretty good right now. It's not bad. I think that for a long time, I was used to moving every three or four years for the work.
I was on Coraline, like you said, up in Portland, Oregon for a couple of years, and down here for a couple of years. Well, it's been a long time now, but I would move around a little bit for the work. I liked the rhythm of that.
I kind of miss just the uprooting and seeing what the life looks like that you would make in a new place. I miss home very much. I miss Toronto.
I think my days in Toronto would be fun, too. So I don't know. The work doesn't need to come from anywhere.
No one cares where you hand these books in from, to a certain extent, and so you don't need to be anywhere. But that almost freezes you up more if no one's telling you to move. Twenty years go by and you haven't.
If you like your desk and you like your work, you look up and you haven't moved. And so I think that all that's at once. I don't know.
I don't think I'm very ambitious on the size of the work. I really love books for that. They can be small but still get a ton of exposure if it goes well.
You can make this small thing in your garage, and if it goes well, it's in 30 countries and all of that. That combination is really exciting. I think I thought I liked the reverse, or at least the bigger one.
When I was working at the bigger studios, I thought, this is great. We're working on these things together that are going into all these different countries, and they blanket the culture for a while. Isn't that exciting?
But this combination is, I think, more suited to my sensibilities. It's something small, but if you do it right, it can zip around anyway. It's a nice combo.
Even when I think of film and TV and all those other things that could happen, I always want the smallest version of it. The adaptations of my stuff, what would be appropriate, is always pretty small and janky, and that's the way it ought to be. It's almost harder to get that stuff made, right?
Who wants to make a seven minute adaptation that's really strained and nervous? I don't know. Those adaptations that would be correct to the books are really unmarketable.
I haven't made any characters, really, if you think about it. None of my characters have names. They're not commercial.
I think if I was more ambitious, I would have leaned more into that side of it. Again, we're full of contradictions. I love mass communication, and I like when these things go everywhere, but I almost resist what I know would probably be more commercial in some certain ways.
And you still on your Instagram sell throw pillows that are made by your mom, with your unnamed characters on it. Yeah, unnamed characters. I refused to...
[Jon Klassen]
Sold out, I noticed.
[Neil]
Yeah. Well, there was only like seven of them, but yeah, it's true. You can say sold out even if you only make four, it turns out.
[Jon Klassen]
That's right.
[Neil]
Yeah. Shout out to those felt pieces though, too. But that's another thing.
We have a lot of discussions, Mac and I do, and I increasingly do, too. As you travel around and people our age now have businesses that have had a couple decades to grow or whatever it is, you run into people who either run bookstores or even like we do events sometimes at clothing stores, like we talk about, or other guys, like people who have started their own work, who are into their own work. And the people that I relate to the most, I think Mac feels the same way, are people who have consciously limited their growth to a certain size where they know they are happy.
I think that maybe that's a generational thing where we all watched our parents in the 80s just like unlimited to the moon growth, and it just killed everybody. But I think there's an understanding, or at least I relate to an understanding where you're like, I'm happiest if I stop here. I can work here.
It doesn't need to get bigger. This is perfect, actually. And I make my best work here.
It's people who have decided to do that be like, well, if we go any bigger, the work's going to suffer. We know it will. We might get richer, but we're going to make stuff we don't like as much.
And that seems like such a simplistic thing to say, but it's very rare that people know when to stop, right? And be like, this is perfect right now. This amount of work, the size of the work, this is just right.
I can make exactly what I want. And I haven't given anything up any bigger, and it begins to cost me in different ways. And right now I have control over my days.
I have control over my product, for lack of a better term for it. And it's pretty rare. These things are always dynamic.
The book industry is dynamic. Where we're going is all of this. The markets are dynamic.
The world is dynamic. And so who knows how long that particular arrangement will hold. But I don't have ambitions of growth for the sake of it.
I never have. Stability is the goal, I think, but that's a different thing than growth. Mm.
Stability is the goal. And happiness as the output of controlling your days and controlling your work and your art. Oh, look at us with the maxims and big sentences.
I didn't think we made those as much. I collect quotes. I feature them.
I'm writing stuff the whole time we're talking. You are a wordsmith, and it's really beautiful listening to you. Can we do some fast money questions to close us off?
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah, let's do it.
[Neil]
We can. It's obvious that we could open up a lot of these conversations, because they all got to a good deep level. And then we could repel down any of these holes for kind of forever.
But there's a lot there. There's a lot in how you think about your art, your craft, your work. There's a lot there for writers, for readers.
It's really, really beautiful. And I really appreciate your time. So fast money questions.
Here we go. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e? I like a paperback.
I love a paperback. And you make me realize, of course, I didn't put board in there, which maybe I should have. We're talking about books that we read, right?
Yeah, your preferred format for holding and carrying. Yeah, they get shoved into things so often that I like a paperback. Yeah, they get shoved into things so often.
Okay, that's a good reason for it. How do you organize your books on your bookshelf? Tone, or not tone, that's the wrong word.
Vaguely subject matter. I have a whole section for folk tales, but that's merged with poetry for some reason. And then there's art books, but that's mixed with photo books and things.
There's an outsider art section. So it's pretty organized, but then above that, that's the main shelf. Then there's two shelves above it in the main room, and all bets are off up there.
There's fiction mixed with books on physics and stuff. I know where everything is. It's that classic thing, right?
I can find you the book right away, usually. But that good luck outside the bottom shelf that I know is right in someone's eyeline that you'd like to show people and people look at if they come in the house. Above that, it's just like, these are my books.
I love your vlog sub stack that you have in addition to the shared one with Mac. Oh yeah, my own weird one. I feel like I'm craving a vlog about your bookshelf.
Yeah, it's very reactive. What's your reading life? Where do you put reading into your days and how?
Because the time to read. I go through moods, I guess. It depends on the book.
It's a hard thing because we get a lot of questions for kids about how do you get kids to read or isn't reading worthwhile? It is, but they're only going to read if they like the book. If the evidence is to be believed, I don't think I believe in reading as an activity to be done all the time because I don't read all the time.
But if I do find a book I love, it's hard to do anything else for a while. It's that way. And then you come out of it and then you don't read for a long time.
I go through long spells where I don't read and then I forget how good reading is and start to read another book again and think like, what was I doing? Let's read five books and I do. And then you get out of that again.
So I wish I had a more regular reading schedule. I think I get through a lot more books that way because I'm not really broadly read. I have favorites I go back to.
What am I doing going back to a book? I haven't read anything. Go read something new.
It's very erratic. There's no system to it. Which is maybe what is achieving peak discoverability or something like that.
Yeah, I think that's right. On the finding a book that you like, do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead? Oh no, I should have prepared for that.
Or a library or you have a place that you find you have a nice connection to. I love, shout out to Type on Queen Street in Toronto. That's probably what I would say, that exact store.
Yeah, I mean, that's a great. I wish they were my local because I don't live there. But if I did, they would be.
I remember, was it called Pages on Queen Street? Yes, yes, yes. I remember Pages.
Yes, I do. I found, yeah, after a show in Toronto, because I went to college in Oakville. And so we take the train in and we go see a show and get some food.
And then they were open pretty late, right? And so you go in there and they always had gorgeous art books. I never could afford any of them.
You couldn't buy them, but you'd flip through them. And I found more stuff in there. I remember finding David Lynch's paintings in a book there and I'd never seen his paintings before.
It was like right before they closed, I think. I found that and been like, what a great store. Who else would carry?
I mean, shout out to the late night bookstore. I mean, it's a dying breed.
[Jon Klassen]
I know.
[Neil]
Our local here is called Skylight and they're open till 10 and it's perfect, right? Because we have babysitter and the kids won't be asleep till 930 on babysitter nights at least. And so we finished dinner by nine and we're like, what do we do?
We go to Skylight and you buy a book that you didn't know about before. And yeah, exactly. Late night bookshops.
Um, special thing. Um, I feel bad asking this cause you've, you've shared like 20 large dollops of advice already. But my typical last question is, do you have a final piece of hard fought wisdom for those out there, um, who are on their own journey around largely, I have, this is the only show in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.
So that's our audience. Any hard fought piece of wisdom that you want to share that you've learned over the years? Ah, I mean, we talked about being reactive before and, um, as far as making things, but just generally to be aware that you are largely reacting to things instead of in the business of making new ones.
Don't worry about that. Um, and, and, uh, that it's, yeah, that the life is made of, of, and the work is made of, of a series of choices between things, not something that you're responsible for completely and that you are found in those, in, in the aggregate of those reactions in your choices. And there's a truth underneath all of it that probably again, isn't any of your business, but, um, but it's not just you, never just you.
And so like what, man, there was this crazy letter that someone published of Steve job right before he died, where he goes, he goes on and on about like, I don't make my clothes. I have no, like, I didn't invent the mathematical theorems that I use every day. I don't, I don't know, half of computing or whatever it was.
It was all these things that he just admitted he was not responsible for. I don't grow my food. I don't do this or that other thing.
I am part of the human race and I'm indebted to them. And that kind of thing where it's like, um, there's something about that. There's something about understanding that you are part of a collective and part of history and moving through it.
And you're just, you're, you're indebted to all of it. Um, there's this Wendell Berry essay on, this is going to be a bit F, but it seems to fit and it's a good last bit where, um, he wrote an essay on Amish people and I come sort of from Mennonite stock, Winnipeg, Clawson's, um, all that. And so it was only one generation back from low German and a lot of farmer sausage.
And so he read this essay on Amish people, which had some overlap to it. And he talked to Amish people in Pennsylvania. And they said, it's very strange being Amish in America because Americans are obsessed with finding themselves and Amish people want to lose themselves.
And it was like, that's, that's, that's it. That's the work. That's the whole thing is there is something I'm not worried about finding myself.
It's there. I don't need proof of that, but to lose yourself in the thing, to step back again, to get out of it and to see what happens then is was like that, that line really nailed me to the wall. Yeah.
Uh, that's a really beautiful quote. And isn't that good?
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah. Yeah. It's really good.
[Neil]
Uh, yeah. There's this quote on death that I'm going to have to email you afterwards because it's something about like when you get close to death, it's about feeling like you're part of the soil and the water and the dirt. And you know, she has another one.
Wendell Berry has one on death and he has God, it's beautiful. He says something along the lines of like, we miss the people that we love when they die. But after a part of the eternal world, it is we who are the absent ones.
Um, along those lines, I know, right? Like, yeah, yeah. He's good, man.
Yeah.
[Jon Klassen]
Yeah.
[Neil]
Yeah.
[Jon Klassen]
He's all right.
[Neil]
Really good. He goes, all right. Um, you're good too, John.
Really good. And your work is beautiful. Um, on the shelf behind me, I've got, um, your trilogy.
I've got the skull, which I loved, which is like, I'm surprised. I was surprised when that book came out and it was at the front of type. I think that's where I saw it.
And I was like, Whoa, nice, really different type. Um, and you're prolific. You know, it's like not a, not a, not a, not a season goes by when there isn't a new book from you.
Um, you are, uh, all class. It's got a huge mind behind it. A beautiful mind to listen to.
I'm really so grateful for your time and your thoughts and energy. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for listening to me.
Chad away. Thanks for the questions. This was an amazing prompt.
Thanks so much for having me on. I was really excited. Thanks again.
Thank you, John. Hey everybody. It's just me.
Just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening back to the eloquent wise, positively verbose. I mean, verbose in a good way. Like the man is, what did he say?
Four cups of coffee, five cups of coffee, whatever number of cup of coffee I could have done that much or more with this guy. Like, he's just like oozing knowledge, intellectualism, information, a thoughtfulness and intentionality. I mean, he's writing kids books.
When you see the book, uh, you know, uh, you're like, Oh yeah. Some pictures, like 10 words. You don't realize that the vast giant iceberg of a mind is sitting underneath the whole thing.
Do you? Maybe you do. Well, I mean, obviously you do because he's just like, you know, he just won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
Astrid Lindgren was the woman who wrote, uh, Pippi Longstocking, by the way. And the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is pretty much the biggest children's book award you can win globally. It comes with like a half a million dollar something like prize money for children's books.
You got to fly around the world. You're going to Sweden, you're accepting, you know, these giant metal things. He won.
He is the winner. He hadn't won it when we recorded this conversation, but he won it like a week later or something. And then I went down to LA and I hung out with John.
It was like in person after we'd done this podcast, I like was staying in this hotel in Long Beach. He's like, I'll come over. He comes over.
We go for dinner. We walk, we talk. It was like the podcast part two.
I wish I had recorded that as well, you know, but it was now after he'd won this award and I could see he was still, as I think anybody would, still also like processing that, you know. And we had, we discovered we had a lot of overlaps. One of them being Daniels, Dan Kwan.
He like worked with Dan Kwan, Dan Daniels, chapter 101. Anyway, so much to say about John Clafton. Lots of quotes jump out.
I usually try to do three, maybe I'll do six this time. Like how about this quote early, early in the chat, Toronto goes through weather together. LA doesn't go through weather together.
There's nothing that bonds us together in some way. I thought that was so fascinating. You know, when you go to like frosh week at university or college, they like try to give you like, everyone's got to jump in the lake together.
Everyone's got to like, whatever, chug 20 beers together, some stupid stuff. But like the collective battling that we face when you go in the lake or when you dig out from a snowstorm, it's worth something. It connects you as a community.
And he said that's why the pandemic is so profound in LA. Cause it was like one of the very few times it was collective adhesion, adhesion, sticking togetherness. I'm going to use adhesion.
Reminds me of tape. Um, how about this one? I think it's hard to fit that into your brain.
And I think I've also seen that it can affect the world. If you try and swallow all of it, if you try and internalize it, because you think you ought to, because it's very rare because you should pay the scale tribute because the work requires quiet and weird moods. I do think it means I get to do weirder stuff that I would normally be allowed to.
There's a whole lot of stuff happening in that quote, right? We're talking about success. I talked to him about like, I had this huge giant children's book.
Awesome is everywhere. Um, it's so it was on the bestseller list and people told me that I guess the one of the bestselling children's books of the year. And I remember it sold 35,000 copies.
I was like, that's tiny. They're like, Oh no, for a children's book. That's not tiny.
Most children's books sell like 500 copies. And I also know it's really the hardest industry to write because it's the thing that people want to do the most because it's the thing that most people think that they can do the easiest. So if I'm approached by a hundred authors a year, how do I get my book published?
I'd say 75% of them are children's books. It's just, that's the thing that people try to do the most. And yet the classics really sell, you know, good night moon and so on.
Uh, Dr. Seuss, whatever. So breaking into the industry, it's extremely difficult. Breaking into the industry and selling is extremely, extremely difficult.
Breaking into the industry and selling 2 million copies or whatever he sold is extremely, extremely, extremely, he's like this black Swan. So all those comments about success, it's really hard to fit that into your brain. I've also seen that can affect the work.
If you try and swallow it because you think he ought to, because it's very rare because you should pay the scale tribute because the work requires quiet and weird moods. Yeah. He kind of goes, I love that thoughtfulness.
He goes this way, he goes that way. And then he flips it on you. And he says, well, I do think it means they get to try weird things.
I mean, on my shelf behind me right now, I have this skull. Have you read the skull? I mean, it's gotta be one of the weirdest children's children's books you'll ever read, uh, period full stop.
And the fact that it was allowed to be published in such high quality paper and in color and is done well, it's like a, such a sign of this guy's genius. Astrid Lindgren, your estate genius. You picked the right guy.
I like the quote. I try to try things out just like that. I like the tribe before the tribe.
We'll do a short one after the long one. Um, I like, I think I've become more and more distrustful of language generally. And that's where he talks about the turtles and the eyes and how do you communicate without communicating and all that stuff.
It's just amazing. It's true. Me too.
Aren't you distrustful of everything? The news, what's objectively happening, what's on screens and now language, you know, maybe in the post AI world, we're going to just connect and trust each other. That's it.
Like our voices, our eyeballs, our skin, our smells, our touch, our affectations, our affections. Getting into the word of the chapter now. Don't want to get there yet.
Yes, there's going to be a word cloud, but only on audio. So if you're watching this on YouTube, jump over to audio. Cause in the audio version of this show, I don't do like freemium.
I don't say like pay and you get transcripts, pay and you get, I don't do that yet. Maybe I will one day. Um, for now I just say on the audio, on Spotify, on Apple podcasts, on wherever you listen to the audio, we go real deep.
We go letters, we go phone calls, we go words of the chapter, but on YouTube, I'm just like trying to, you know, hang out with this YouTube algorithm here. And also like, do I want to have everybody's phone calls and letters just on the internet on video forever? I don't know.
So I just take it with quotes, any more quotes, any more quotes, jump out. You're not the writer necessarily that you'd like to be. You're someone else completely or something else completely.
I thought that was great. Um, how about this one? My best stuff, or at least the stuff I'm proudest of is when it really surprises me completely.
I love that. I can relate to that. You know, when you get to the end, he's, he's so astute about articulating that emotion as a writer.
It's like when you get to the end of like a certain turn or phrase, you're like, ah, you got the little moment of joy writers. You know what I'm talking about? That's it.
That's the winner for everybody else. Um, this one, I'm a very nervous as a writer. And I think I've learned to count on that as a thing that drives it.
That's interesting. Cause you know, I feel anxiety. I'm like, how do I get rid of this anxiety?
But he's like channeling anxiety. If you want to call that nervousness and he's like, this is it. This is my fuel.
You know, I guess it depends how high, uh, uh, how much you value the work and creative output over your physiological contentment, perhaps. I don't know. It's a good question.
We could ask him on interview two and the second 22 year long version of this project that we'll get to when I'm in my eighties. There's a lot more quotes here. I could go on and on.
I got pages of quotes, but that's enough. Thank you so much to Mr. John Klassen for giving us three more books to add to our top 1000. If you go to threebooks.co slash the top 1000, or just click the top 1000 button at the top, you will see that we've been counting down the thousand forward of books since 2018. So we're like coming up on a decade almost here. And yet we're not even at the 500 mark yet, but we're getting close, including number 528, the little trilogy by Anton Chekhov. C H A K H O V.
I think that's our second. Is that our second Chekhov on the list? Everybody.
What do you think? As I know David Mitchell, David Mitchell, chapter 58 with David Mitchell, he added the dual. That was number 829.
Yes, it is. We've got two Chekhov's on the list now. That's epic.
And then he added number 527, Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. Um, is that our first Cormac McCarthy? No.
Can it be? Is it? Wow.
I think it is. I don't think anyone's out of the road yet. Maybe that'll be coming sometime soon.
Who knows? And number 526, Dominic by William Stieg. You know what?
I love William Stieg. Uh, it's also our first William Stieg. We have nobody's added Shrek yet.
Nobody's added Pete's a pizza yet. If you want a good kid's book for like a two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old or five-year-old in your life, I highly recommend Pete's P E T apostrophe S Pete's Possessive of Pete, the boy. Pete's a pizza.
P I Z Z A. Pete is a pizza, but Pete's a pizza. And it's a great book.
And it's a great book as a board book, as a big book. You want to make a kid happy? Get him Pete's a pizza.
Um, but I will say I love the little trilogy. That one I would rate personally, like 8 out of 10. Outer Dark, I would rate 10 out of 10 with an asterisk as like highly recommended.
And Dominic, I would rate like a 9, 9 out of 10. Maybe I should start giving my ratings at a 10 at the end of each show. What do you guys think?
Let me know. 1-833-READALOT. Give me a call.
I always love hearing from you. If you aren't sure if you should call, please do. Don't worry, I won't play anything on the air unless we both love it.
So, uh, I guess this is it. I guess this is goodbye. Thanks so much for hanging out with me.
Thanks so much for being on three books, being a three booker, listening to our crazy giant podcast. I don't know what I'm doing here, guys. I don't know.
I don't know. If you made it to the end, maybe you don't know either. Let's not know together.
Thank you so much for listening. Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast.
Oh, I can shut off the video. It's just me and a mic right now. I feel calmer with no video.
I gotta do my hair. Well, I don't do my hair, but I gotta like look at my hair before I go on the video. I gotta like put on a shirt.
I mean, I'm not walking around my house with no shirt too often, but once in a while. So I'm kind of joking, but certainly got to put on a shirt that doesn't have holes in the armpits. That's really my big problem.
I love undershirts, but I especially love really well used undershirts. They're like second skin. They're so smooth.
They're so soft. They like turn into you, but then they do get the holes in the armpits. So my kids were like, how come you're wearing that?
That you're picking us up from school. And there's like 18 holes in your armpits. Like, it's not like a big giant gaping armpit hole.
It's like lots of small holes, and it's hard to know when you cross the point of no return on the armpit hole on the shirt. All right, now, end of the podcast club. One of three clubs we have for three books, including the cover to cover club and the secret club.
I can't say more about the secret club except that here's your clue. If you want to join, simply call our phone number 1-833-READALOT. If it doesn't work, just type in R-E-A-D-A-L-O.
The last supplemental T is just extra. If you go to your phone, every single letter corresponds to a number. People forget that because they don't look at phones that often.
I'm holding my phone to the screen, but no one's looking at the screen because I don't have it. So we know 1-833-READALOT is like dialing 1-833-7-3-2-3-2-5-6. That's actually the number, but it's 1-833-READALOT.
I guess if you were to type in the supplemental T, which is an 8, it hopefully shouldn't affect your call. Okay, let's go to the phones now. Who's calling us this time?
Here we go.
[Jon Klassen]
Hey, Neil. Jill Cario here. I am a super fan.
I love your podcast, and I just listened to the one with Vish Man. It was fantastic. I could not stop listening.
What a lot of great insight and life lessons, values, and views. He was a great interviewer, and as always, you are a great interviewer. I tell so many people about your podcast, and I have purchased so many books listening to you.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day, and tell me how to leave a review on your podcast. I can't find it.
Thanks.
[Neil]
Oh, thank you so much, Jill. I love you too. I really do.
I love all of you guys. You know, you call in, you listen. I think of this as like a hangout.
You know, they call it like a parasocial relationship when you don't really know each other, but you kind of know each other, but I feel like it's important. I also feel like those relationships are more and more vital as we have unhealthy, toxic relationships with like not real people and not real things, and you know, things that are sort of monetary-based and gamified, and you know, they woo you in, and then they sell you something, and then you come closer, you come closer, you come closer, and it's like, come to my retreat for $4,000 and all this shit.
It's like, wait a minute. Is this a relationship, or is this like a business? Anyway, I do have a business, but this podcast is not a business for me.
This podcast is a—I use the words of Mitchell Kaplan. You guys remember Mitchell Kaplan, if you haven't. Vish Man—Vish Man stands out, right?
He's a standout guy. Nobody forgets Vish Man, which is our guest in Chapter 7. Mitchell Kaplan, I'll say, is also a man who is very memorable, and he used to say in Chapter 16, I'm not in the non-profit business.
I'm in the no-profit business, and I kind of think of that the same way for three books. So, Jill, you know, drop me a line. Let me know your address so I can mail you a free book, as I do with anybody who leaves me a voicemail.
Okay, how do we review? Yeah, it's funny because it's so important and it's so impossible. So, if you're on Apple, you have to click into the podcast, and then you scroll down, past all the episodes, past the trailer, past this weird photo of me hosting guests.
They must have pulled it from the internet. I'm bald in a suit from 20 years ago when I shaved my head, because I thought I was going bald. Actually, it was like, you're my divorce.
You know how they say you change your hair when you're going through something hard? I fell into that cliche. I was like, my wife is leaving me, and I have no hair, because I put my hand through my hair in the shower, and all this hair came out.
It happened for a few weeks. I didn't know at the time that hair falls out like that. It falls out a couple months, then not for 10 years, then a couple months, not for 10 years.
I didn't know that then, so I thought I was going bald, so I just wanted to get ahead of it, so I shaved my head for years, until I got remarried, had a boy, he started having long hair, he's age 2 and 3, and I was like, I love hair. I should grow it back. Now I've grown it back.
Anyway, so then you scroll down, past hosting guests. I'm not really helping you leave a review. Then you can tap to rate it.
That's still on review. Then you scroll down, past about, past information, and there's a tiny little button in there, right in between the reviews and about, that says write a review. It's like one tiny little purple thing.
I got the newest iPhone, the newest iOS, so this is the way it is now. I didn't mean to get the newest iPhone. My old iPhone broke, and they just gave me a new one.
Thank you, AppleCare. Not a plug, not an ad. If you're on Spotify, it's like, kind of, maybe even more important there, because people are listening to Spotify more, and then there is no place to leave a review.
You can just click at the top rating. There's no writing anywhere, and I think that's it. Where else can you leave a review, guys?
I guess you can leave a comment on YouTube. You can email me. That's the letters.
That's what we do with letters, and speaking of, it is time for the letter of the chapter. This is a letter from Helen L. Helen says, Afternoon, Neil.
I've read and forgotten, it feels to me, many books, but if I had to tick off a list of books, yours? There'd be canyon-sized holes. Increasingly, I've bought and recommended books only to find I don't give a damn about the characters and their predicaments.
Margaret Atwood says, The novelist's first job is to get the readers to turn the page. I say, the reader's job is not to get old. Yet another feature many of us share with the very young is poor attention span.
I grew up in a literary household, and had read some quote-unquote difficult books by the time I was a teen. Crime and Punishment, Cancer Ward, The Solid Mandala. Maybe today I'm simply a retired reader?
Luckily, I discovered Murakami first. I do use audiobooks. I like to pay as I go.
I'm a child of the fifties. Trouble is, mostly companies choose the subscriber income stream and oblige you to find their content that way. I've subscribed to your podcast.
It's free. No advertising. I worship at your book-shaped shrine.
All the best magic and good fortune to you from Helen L. Helen, you're the best. That was a nice letter.
A child of the fifties. I'm like trying to process that. Like my dad is 81.
He's born in 1944. Are you in your 80s? Epic.
I love having a lot of listeners. Septuagenarians, octogenarians, nonagenarians. I know a couple nonagenarians.
My in-laws, my grandparents-in-law listen to the show. I was going to have them as a guest on the show and then we did a recording and it was bumbly. I blame myself.
It was bumbly. It was at their cottage. They were getting phone calls.
People were coming in and out. I was like, I gotta set this up. I gotta do it again.
I gotta do it again. What if anything happens to them? I want to make sure we get that.
And my parents. I gotta get my parents. It's hard, right?
Because they pass this threshold of like, it's not that they're not sane anymore, but you're just like, you remember them being so awesome and you like want to have them on? I don't know. I just gotta do it.
I just gotta do it. So thank you so much, Helen L. All right.
Where were we now? Should we do the word of the chapter, guys? What do you think?
Yeah, we could. I also want to say two things before we do the word of the chapter this time. Two things.
Number one, I experimented in this chapter by doing a cold open. You know how Saturday Night Live has a cold open? There's nothing that says, it's Saturday Night Live until the end of the cold open.
I tried that this time. I've tried it a few times. Chapter 123 with Suzy Batiste is probably my most famous cold open.
There's still a show, an episode, a chapter that I refer people to if they're like new to the show and they want to start somewhere. Two reasons. One, I think it's maybe the best interview I've done.
Not really I've done. She gave it to me. It was Suzy.
It wasn't me. But also because it's over three hours. So we quickly separate the wheat from the chaff on three bookers, right?
People are like, three hours? Fuck that. I'm like, yeah.
If you can't do that, I get it, obviously. But also, it's just so good, right? Suzy, the depth of that conversation gets so good.
You can't get that elsewhere. You aren't going to get that elsewhere. Same with the David Sedaris, like an hour and a half Tarantino.
You just can't find that. I like it. I mean, it's hard to get it from people.
But if you land it, it's great. All right. Second thing I want to do is, I haven't given up.
So I want to get your thoughts. What do you think about the cold open? Should we do more of that?
So 81833readalot or neil at globalhappiness.org. Just let me know what you think of the cold open. And then also, I want to talk about one of the values that I'm not following, which is this one.
Because threebooks.co slash values, all our values. So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away. And in its place, you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.
That quote comes from Roald Dahl. It is a quote from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from the Oompa Loompas, as you probably guessed when they're singing about Mike TV. Roald Dahl does have Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on our top 1000, given to us as number 638 by Martellus Bennett down in Houston, Texas, outside of his Byrd Hotel.
Yes, he had a Byrd Hotel. That is the second, is that the second Dahl book on the list? Yes, it is.
Because of course, back in chapter 44, we all remember when Kevin, the bookseller, gave us the twits in that wild conversation. Fish, Wallace, Agarwal, classic. Kevin, the bookseller, classic.
You, classic. Me, classic. This conversation, classic.
Let's those off as we always do with the word of the chapter. Here we go. Mr. Eloquence himself, John Klassen, back to you. Dandy mustache. Affections, right? Or affectations.
That's the word. Affectations. I'm precocious.
Too clever by half. Journeys, sartorially. There's a monolith.
Oh mama, that was an epic word cloud, everybody, wasn't it? I could listen to John talk all day. He's so eloquent.
If you aren't already familiar with it, at threebooks.co slash FAQ, you will find a list of all the chapters that have word clouds on them. We started it in chapter 18 with Rich Gibbons. We're adding some new FAQ questions, by the way.
We're adding an FAQ, I think you've already seen it probably on there, which is where we are compared to the number three. We take the number of chapters we've done and the number of books that have been covered, and we divide the two. It's supposed to end at the end of the show at 3.0000000. Like three exactly. The number of books covered per show is about three. But because some people have repeat books, asterisks, on the top 1,000, and some people have an extra book, as Mr. Jan Martel did. You can see where we are doing on our number three FAQ.
I'm kind of torn here. I'm really kind of torn, because we've never done this ever before. Ever.
Well, I'm about to do. But I think it's time for the first ever double word of the chapter. Yes, indeed.
We're going to do two people, because how do you choose between affection? Oh, and, uh, you know, affectation, right? I mean, that was an interesting thing.
And then there was also the, uh, too clever by a half? Too clever by half. Oh my gosh, there's a lot going on here with John.
Affection is a moderate emotion characterized by a tender, caring attachment or fondness for someone or something. Affectation, kind of the exact opposite, is an artificial, insincere, unnatural behavior, mannerism, or speech adopted to impress others or project a certain image. There is an incredible, epic blog post on merriam-webster.com, which I'm going to put in the show notes, talking about the difference between affection versus affectation. Yes, I'm not just citing AI here. I'm citing Merriam-Webster blog post. You know, although I disagree with the opening line, it's not that often that affection and affectation get confused.
Hell yeah, it is. That's exactly what happened. They look and sound almost the exact same.
Why not Merriam-Webster? Well, because they're words with very different meanings used in disparate situations. Well, yeah, I know, but they sound exactly alike.
How do we arrive at two similar-looking but quite separate words? You probably know what affection is, and if you don't, we can only say, there's a lot of time for you yet. I love the snooty tone.
Such expressions, assisted as they were by everything that look and manner could do, made Emma feel she had just never loved Harriet so well nor valued her affection so highly before. That's from Jane Austen. And you probably already know what an affectation is.
Again, Merriam-Webster, hang on. It is defined as speech or conduct not natural to oneself, an unnatural form of behavior meant especially to impress others, like speaking in a phony accent or to vaping and pretending you don't care what other people think about your vaping, when you most certainly do. Okay, so it goes on and on.
Affect, affection, affectation. Did you know that affection and affect are one of the most looked-up words ever in the dictionary? Because affect and effect are always confused.
Now they can be confused more with affectation. That's one half of a word of the chapter. The other half, of course, is too clever by half.
Means someone is too smart for their own good. Their cleverness backfires, resulting in overcomplicated strategies, irritation, or manipulation rather than a helpful outcome. What happened?
Well, back 200 years ago in England, the by half modifier was always used as an intensifier, meaning considerably or a great deal. For example, as you all remember in 1777 play The School for Scandal, a character commented, Pasha, he is too moral by half. Thing is, we didn't use too clever by half till 1858 in George White Melville's novel The Interpreter, and then the meaning shifted.
It shifted. While originally used to describe someone overconfident or calculated, it became a proper British catchphrase to describe someone who thinks they are being brilliant but actually creates more problems than they solved. Oh yeah, that is fascinating.
I got a really cool blog post on StackExchange about the origin of too clever by half. Why don't we just leave us there? You go to threebooks.co, you click the chapter notes, guess what?
You'll find all of our show notes, all of our words of the chapter, all of our guests, all of our thousand most formative books in the world. You can follow John Classen on Instagram. You can follow him on Substack.
He's got a great Substack. Thank you all so much for listening. Happy July full moon 2026.
Until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody. I'll talk to you soon.
Take care.