It’s the first LIVE show of the Secrets of Story podcast! We recorded it at the Book Stall bookstore in Winnetka, IL, with a live audience mostly of folks from the North Shore SCBWI (Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustators). Thanks to Robert Macdonald and the staff of the Book Stall for hosting us, to Andrew Atienza for the ace recording and production, to Anny Rusk and everyone in SCBWI for putting the event together, and to Ruth Spiro for the picture above!

In this episode, Matt Bird and I join his wife Betsy Bird, who is a famous children’s librarian with the influential kidlit blog A Fuse #8 Production and an author of children’s books in her own right, most recently of A Long Road to the Circus. I met Matt through Betsy, actually—she contacted me after she noticed this goofball Newbery Medal-related rant I wrote on my blog back in the day, and soon after she interviewed me on Fuse #8. After that, our friendship was off to the races!

Here Matt, Betsy, and I discuss different techniques of how to represent the experience of childhood in writing. Matt argues that novels that feature truly authentic kids are by definition not children’s books, which is just the first of the many hot takes in this episode. Folks, it’s a banger, and you can hear it here:

Wait, did I say there were hot takes? Yes! You’ll hear claims that “Beverly Cleary isn’t really on Ramona’s side,” that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a deceptively sophisticated and multivalent text, and how kids nowadays don’t seem to vibe as much with the classic “unlikeable” characters in books like Harriet the Spy and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. We’ll bring in examples of representations of childhood from sources as varied as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Auberon Waugh’s autobiography Will This Do?, Annie Barrows’ Ivy and Bean books, Daniel Handler’s recent memoir And Then? And Then? What Else? (which I recently reviewed for the Wall Street Journal), and more. We talk about kids’ flexible sense of truth and reality, their generously cartoonish sense of the possible, their attraction to weirdness and arbitrariness, their comfort and perhaps even preference for a whiplash switching of tones, and so much more!

This is an all-time great episode with a guest who really knows her stuff (and knows how to keep Matt and me from fighting). Give it a listen!