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One More Note: This is our second entry in this week’s Winter Blog Blast Tour. To see the master schedule of all interviews this week, go here<\/a><\/strong> at <\/em>Chasing Ray, and for today’s schedule of interviews, scroll to the bottom of this post. We will also be interviewing Jack Gantos<\/a><\/strong> on Thursday and YA author Gabrielle Zevin<\/a><\/strong> on Friday of this week.<\/em><\/p>\n It’s difficult to do an interview with the one and only Jon Scieszka<\/a><\/strong> (drawn in caricature<\/a><\/strong> here by Adam Rex<\/a><\/strong> and used with Adam’s permission) when it’s coming on the heels of the informative interview in the most recent special issue of the Horn Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (the September\/October issue<\/a><\/strong>), “Boys and Girls.” There was also Roger Sutton’s<\/a><\/strong> August podcast interview with Jon, which can still be accessed here<\/strong><\/a>, in which Jon discusses teaching, reading, and the singular wit of second graders. <\/p>\n But we interviewed him anyway, ’cause we could not pass up the chance. If you’re a children’s lit aficionado who has been living under a rock, we suppose you might need a Scieszka 101, but arguably he’s an author who needs no introduction. But here’s a brief rundown: <\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you didn’t already know that Jon started out as an elementary teacher, you may not be surprised to hear it, since his books are loved by children with an intensity that rivals the heat of the sun. As his bio at his site<\/a><\/strong> states, “{h}e started as a 1st grade Assistant Teacher, graduated to teaching 2nd grade, taught 3rd and 4th grade Math, 5th grade History, and then some 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Teaching school, Jon re-discovered how smart kids are, and found the best audience for the weird and funny stories he had always liked to read and write.” For almost twenty years now, Jon — who also founded Guys Read<\/a><\/strong> in 2001, a literary organization to promote literacy in men and boys — and Lane have collaborated on a whole slew ‘o’ books (how’s that for precise?), including the Time Warp Trio<\/a><\/strong><\/em> books (now an animated television series<\/a><\/strong>). Molly Leach<\/a><\/strong>, Lane’s wife, has designed their picture books. You know ’em and you (likely) love ’em: As great as Jon’s books are, and as fabulous as our interview is (heh), you should really take any chance you can get to hear him speak in person. He’s every bit as funny and animated as you think he would be, but he’s also brilliant and completely devoted to the cause of getting kids (especially those reluctant boys) to read. <\/p>\n If you don’t have the chance to see him in person any time soon, you can sate yourself with this video of Jon and Mo Willems<\/strong><\/a> as members of a Precision Drill Cart Competition<\/strong><\/a> at ALA in 2006. Jon’s the one in the bathrobe and cheese hat lurking on the sidelines until the last few seconds of the routine:<\/p>\nAfter meeting illustrator Lane Smith<\/a><\/strong>, Jon gave him the text for a story he had named A. Wolf’s Tale<\/em>. Lane drew some illustrations for the story, and it was then promptly rejected by several publishers. Eventually, in 1989 it was published after an editor at Viking said she liked it, and that book was the wildly popular and widely-acclaimed The True Story of the Three Little Pigs<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (“There has obviously been some kind of mistake,” writes Alexander T. Wolf from the pig penitentiary where he’s doing time for his alleged crimes of ten years ago). Can anyone else believe that book will be twenty years old soon? But we digress . . . Over three million copies of that book have been sold to date, and it’s been translated into fourteen different languages. <\/p>\n
the classic Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales<\/a><\/strong><\/em> from 1992 (like Adam Rex said about himself in the above link to his caricature of Jon, Jules remembers seeing that book while working in a bookstore — way before she ever knew picture books could be that<\/em> great and that<\/em> cool and that<\/em> fun and that<\/em> clever — and being wow’ed. That book probably single-handedly turned a lot of folks on to children’s lit); 1995’s Math Curse<\/a><\/strong><\/em> and 2004’s Science Verse<\/a><\/strong><\/em>; 2001’s Baloney (Henry P.)<\/a><\/strong><\/em>; and more, including their most recent book, which is made of 100% organic awesome-ness (no fillers) — Cowboy & Octopus<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, published in September by Viking and reviewed here<\/a><\/strong> by Jules (and which Jon discusses a bit below). <\/p>\n
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Currently, Jon is collaborating with illustrators on an original publishing program\/preschool series, entitled Trucktown<\/em>, scheduled to be published in ’08 by Simon & Schuster. It’s a world in which everybody is a truck: “And all of the trucks,” he writes at his site, “act like real preschoolers — loud and crazy and wild and funny” . . . “This rough and tumble, high octane, boisterous series can boast having the very best that children’s books have to offer under its hood — its enormous commercial appeal with a strong literary core,” the Trucktown<\/em> site<\/a><\/strong> states. <\/p>\n