Brian Selznick

Brian Selznick: When you're a kid and you have so little control over things, to be the big entity controlling the smaller entity, whether it's dolls or, you know, soldiers or whatever it is. They do what you tell them to do. They become the story you're making.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: As kids, we're too small to have power over much. We're told what to do, what to eat, what to say, and sometimes we don't even get to tell the truth about who we are. So it makes sense that as we get older, we are motivated to become the masters of our own domains. And some people are more motivated than most.

Brian Selznick: Controlling everything. That's what my job is.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Brian Selznick is a number one New York Times best selling author, an illustrator, and Caldecott medal winning creator who's reimagined what a picture book can be. From the invention of Hugo Cabret to Wonderstruck and more recently Run Away With Me, his stories weave words and images together in ways that demand that we read them differently. In this episode, Brian opens up about control. Why he wants it? How he wields it?

And when ultimately, he has to walk away from it. Along the way, he unpacks his fetish for all things miniature, and he gets unsparingly honest about the ups and downs of life and death with his father. He also reads from his biggest influence and teaser. It's not a picture book. It's not even illustrated.

Although, as you will hear, it offers an intensely visual experience. My name is Jordan Moybookie, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive deep into their personal experiences and inspirations. Our show is made possible by Beanstack, the leading solution for motivating people to read more. Learn more at beanstack.com, and make sure to check us out on Instagram at the reading culture pod and subscribe to our newsletter for bonus content at thereadingculturepod.com/ newsletter.

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Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I wanna start off by talking a little bit about power dynamics and the unevenness of power dynamics and how those can be baked in, I guess, in a sense to all children's books. And then I wanted to know from you, like, who you would describe when you were younger as having power over you when you were young.

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

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay.

Brian Selznick: And one on a very sort of a brighter, lighter side. When I was a kid, my dad was very into sports and I was not. And I think my dad and I were just from very different planets. And for as much as I feel like we didn't understand each other and he did scare me. Like, you know, he was a bit controlling, and he had ways that he liked to have the house run.

My dad was a man of the fifties, and he expected his children and his wife to do what he said and to have things taken care of in a certain way around the house. So there was a kind of fear. And then when my youngest brother came around, he actually turned out to be really great at sports. And I remember feeling a great amount of relief that my dad had someone he could focus that on. Mhmm.

It felt like of all the people who you know, everyone has power over you, you know, pretty much as a young person as you were saying, my dad's felt particularly like something I had to react to or against or hide from or be secret from. And as a young queer kid, I guess I figured out I was different when I was in fifth or sixth grade. And it didn't come out to my parents till I was 25, so it was a long time Because I had a sense my dad might not take it very well and, you know, I was right. But again, we got through all of that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Even while dealing with those difficult power dynamics, Brian felt loved.

Brian Selznick: He and my mom, from the time all three of my siblings were young, they made it very clear to us that what was important to them is that we did what made us happy. So there was an undercurrent of a kind of understanding and love, which I think is very important to state as I'm talking about the other more complicated parts.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: And while his sexuality and athleticism were absolutely areas of tension, there was one particular interest of Brian's that his father encouraged wholeheartedly. And that brings us to that brighter, lighter example of power that Brian mentioned earlier.

Brian Selznick: I got art classes. I grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey where there was a fantastic art program in the public schools, and he was always very proud of the art that I did. One of the things my parents did as a young person when they saw that I was interested in art was find a really good after school art teacher for me to study with. They found a woman in my area named Aileen Sutton who was a professional artist and who did art classes for adults and for children. And she saw my work and she started working with me.

And Aileen Sutton and I worked together until I graduated high school, which coincided with her moving to Alaska. And that kind of power dynamic was a very interesting one. So she's the person who comes to mind as the other end of what a power dynamic can mean when you look at it as a kind of mentorship, you know, where a power dynamic can be a very positive thing, where someone who has knowledge and has the ability to do something recognized as a younger person who has some potential and takes them under their wing and helps them become who they are. We've all had teachers who try to make their students into versions of themselves, and that's not always helpful. And then other teachers, other mentors who do what I believe a good teacher is supposed to do, which is help you discover what it is you're capable of doing and help you make the best version of yourself that you can.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Aileen was more than just a tutor to Brian. She became his mentor and guide to the art world. Thanks to her, he had a live encounter with a famous painting and a revelation about size and artistic power that would have a dramatic influence on his future work.

Brian Selznick: So Aileen did all these amazing things with me. Like, she introduced me to artwork I didn't know about. You know, I never really knew anything about Pablo Picasso when I was 10 or 11. So she gave me a book of his work and then took me to a huge Picasso exhibition that was at the Museum of Modern Art and just opened my eyes to what it means to look at art in person. In a book, Every image has to fit inside the pages of the book.

And I think about this a lot with phones. Everything has to fit onto your screen. So whatever you're looking at, it's all the same size. It's all the same format. It all feels the same because you're holding the same thing in your hand.

Mhmm. But when I got to the museum, Guernica, that war painting that I had seen is what, like, 30 feet long It's massive. And 10 feet high. Yeah. And the extraordinary sensation of being in the presence of the painting was something that really affected me.

So, like, when you're looking at a book, generally, you're always bigger than the book. And therefore, you the relationship of size is, you know, in terms of power differentials, you are always going to be physically more powerful than the book that you're holding or the phone that you're scrolling through in now. But when you are in the presence of of actual work of art, then you know that the artist has also taken into account the relationship between you and the physical object that they're making. So when I'm standing when anyone in is standing in front of Guernica, I just did stay on that for a moment, we are all dwarfed by that physical object, and then it's a painting about pain and injustice and war. And it affects us in a certain way.

That's a power differential. Right? Like, the power of that work exists only when you're in it, you know, when you're experiencing it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You might assume that having had his mind blown by a 30 foot painting, Brian would eventually fixate on making large scale art. But if I can show you what I saw behind Brian during his interview, and I will post some videos on Instagram so you can see it there, but you'll realize that his fascination with size ended up going exactly the opposite way. People cannot see this, but behind you are so many

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: miniatures. Perfectly organized and looking so nice.

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

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yes. You do. You have a lot of them. And I have heard you talk about the book, The Borrowers. So maybe that was it.

But what was it that you found or find so appealing about the tiny world, the world of miniatures?

Brian Selznick: When you're a kid and as we were discussing, you have so little control over things. To be the big entity controlling the smaller entity, whether it's dolls or soldiers or whatever it is, small things, they do what you tell them to do. They become the story you're making. If you have a dollhouse, you are the person in control of the house, which is inside a house in which you have almost no control. And the pleasure of having that ability, I think, is a relatively universal idea.

What were your miniatures that you played with then and, like, now? How do you

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: view that as an evolution in your life?

Brian Selznick: Yeah. I made I didn't have a dollhouse, but I made miniature rooms. And I remember I made a colonial room. I had found or gotten this little set of plastic colonial furniture, and I made a little cardboard room for it, and that was very, very satisfying.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh my god. You had to make your own dollhouse. You didn't get

Brian Selznick: a dollhouse. And the borrowers, you mentioned about the family of little people that live under the kids' floorboards was something I thought was true. So I made the borrowers that lived in my house little tables and objects that have spools of thread like they did in the book, and then I just would leave them around the house for the borrowers to use if they liked. And, actually, you were mentioning that your dad loves toy soldiers. My dad had a set of tin soldiers from his childhood that he gave to me.

I mean, there's only, like, six or seven of them left, but I still have them. And I remember, you know, lining them up on my shelf and the pleasure of having them lined up. I loved making dioramas in school. I would always make dioramas. I made a very big diorama.

What does that mean? Like, two feet by three feet? Two feet by two feet?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: It's bigger than a shoebox, basically.

Brian Selznick: Bigger than a shoebox of a dinosaur world.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Wow.

Brian Selznick: I love stop motion animation when I was a kid, and I'm distantly related to David O. Selznick who made Gone With The Wind and King Kong. And so there's great scenes on Kong Island where Kong is battling dinosaurs. And it's done, you know, with miniatures and stop motion animation, and the landscapes are really beautiful. So I remember making a whole landscape of dinosaurs.

There was also a TV show in the seventies called Land of the Lost about a family that they go down a waterfall when they're rafting and end up in the land of the lost, which is, you know, mostly dinosaurs and Yeah. Interesting cave people and aliens for some reason. And that miniature world and making the miniature dinosaurs. And then in high school, I built, like, an armature and a movable version of King Kong that would be the same size and type that would have been made for the movie. Wow.

And then a little world in which that character could have been filmed, like, with a glass front that has painting on it and then a background that has other painting on it. So it looks like a three-dimensional jungle that he's inside of. So yeah. But really anything that was small. Oh, I also had a train set in my basement, and I made a l shaped table for it and then bought all and made all of the miniature buildings.

And I made a tunnel, and I made a lake, and I made hills, and Oh, wow. And all of that kind of thing. So that was all very pleasing to me, and that never really went away. Right? And I think that's part of why I write the books that I do, and those things that interested me as a kid are what interest me now.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: It's interesting you pointed to a book as, like, we have a control over the book in a way. But I kind of feel like with your books in particular, you control the reader's experience a lot more. Do you think of it in that way? Like, I'm looking at one perspective now. I'm looking up close.

I mean, depending on how you're using your illustrations, but my experience is completely informed by you.

Brian Selznick: I'm having a contradictory thought about that because I'm very, very conscious of controlling everything. That's what my job is. What do you

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: mean that's what your job is?

Brian Selznick: My job is to make something that tells a story that gets across to you, the reader, the way I want it to. So my very first book, the Houdini box in 1991, I read it to kids before it was published to get their feedback. It was incredibly helpful, so it's kinda funny that I've never done it again. But I noticed that when I was reading it to the students, I mostly went to classes where my friends were teaching. I noticed that sometimes I paused to build a bit of dramatic tension.

So when it was time for me to begin thinking about what this was actually gonna be like as a book, I remembered all these places I had paused and I made them into the page turns so that I'm forcing you as the reader when I'm not there to make those pauses in the same place as I was pausing. And that's why sometimes even in the Houdini box, I had some pages with full paragraphs and, like you were just saying, some pages with just a line. And every page has essentially has one drawing on one side and text on the other. And when you're introduced to the kid who is obsessed with the magician Houdini, and the drawings begin on one side of the book, and the text is on the other side of the page of the spread, and it stays like that until the boy actually meets Houdini at which point it switches. And my thought was that, hopefully, most readers won't actually consciously notice that, but I wanted to underscore the idea that when the boy meets this character, everything changes.

So that idea of what happens when you turn the page and the structure of the book has always been a part of my thinking. And going back to what you were asking me about the control of the storytelling within my book that I'm controlling how you turn the page, I'm controlling what you see, The other thing that I think I had mentioned earlier, it's slightly contradictory, and I don't think I ever mentioned what the contradiction was. The contradiction is that the reader needs to feel like everything is happening because they're making it happen. And I do look at books as being collaborations with the reader, and that's something that I'm very aware of. And I want the reader to have to do some work.

And I mean that in whatever way it sounds. I want you to do some work narratively where you have to put pieces together. I want you to have to remember something. So in my new book, Run Away With Me, it opens with a visual sequence of a walk through a relatively empty version of the city of Rome where you see the Pantheon and the elephant obelisk and you see cobblestone streets and you see all of these things, interior of a church that later when you get to the text, because then the rest of the book is essentially text, when the characters in the book get to an elephant that's holding an obelisk on its back and they get to a big giant building with a huge dome with a hole in the top, you as the reader, even if you've never been to Rome, will remember that you had seen that in the opening drawings. And, of course, in a book, you can flip right back and, you know, look at it.

But I'm asking you to make those connections. And how a reader picks up and spends time with the book is also out of my control.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: A lot of Brian's experimentation with words and pictures and how they push and pull each other and how they steer the reader's experience is directly inspired by his all time favorite picture book.

Brian Selznick: Where the Wild Things Are. I always say that that book is really all you need if you wanna get an education and what the potential for picture books can be. It's all in that book that covers it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You love that book and Maurice Sendak. And that book is also, like, coincidentally, I think about control or feeling completely out of control as a kid and wanting to seed it by the end. Mhmm. Where'd you say you were a Max type character? Were you in your head imagining things, and did you want to have your whole other world that was, like, separate from this one that we're in?

Brian Selznick: In terms of the world of the imagination, I feel like I would be comfortable drawing a parallel between me and Max, but not with Max's ability to express his anger. That is not something that I identify with. I felt like I had to keep a lot of things to myself. And therefore, you know, I did have a very active life of the imagination. It did spill over into different ways in which I wrote stories, told stories, made up stories with friends and tape recorded them on cassette players, stories about people and teachers in our elementary school.

Some of them were, like, rude kind of parodies about teachers we didn't like or the stories on my own were more like fantasy stories about horses with wings and unicorn horns, which I thought I had invented. And I wrote stories, yeah, about underwater cities, and I remember writing a story about kids who could fly, and that was called Lift. But I never thought of myself as a writer at all. Control, I think we could probably, you know, talk about that as a main theme throughout this conversation in different ways. You know, I did a book called Big Tree where I made up these two siblings, Merwin and and Louise.

They're sycamore seeds, but they're trying to save the world at the end of the Jurassic era before the meteorite hits the planet. And and Merwin is, like, really controlling and really, like, he has to live by the rules and do everything that mama says. And his sister, younger sister Louise, is very dreamy and poetic and follows her instinct, and she drives her brother crazy. And, you know, ultimately, of course, they need each other in some way. And it wasn't till I finished the book that I had, like, written an X-ray of my own psychology.

Right? Like like, it was just like, I made up nothing. It's just me arguing with myself to trust the instincts that are there and to trust the poetry that's there and to trust if Louise is the idea of your instinct and the idea that you know what to do in on some level and Merwin is the idea that you believe you can control everything. But it's also connected to the idea that we live in the real world, and there are things that we need to do, and there are ways in which we have to deal with various issues. We don't live in a utopia where we can just do whatever we want.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I'm in Washington, DC, so I really know that right now.

Brian Selznick: You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. But that idea that they need each other, that there's a balance to be struck, I think, is maybe related to a larger theme that is connected to where I am in my life right now.

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

Brian Selznick: That's interesting. I do have voices. I think we all have voices. I do fully identify them as mine. I can probably talk about how those voices or some of those voices have been formed by experiences with, you know, my dad or, you know, I mean, Sutton or whoever it is, then mentors who I had later on, like Maurice Sendak and Remy Charlotte.

But, generally, it feels more like what's happening in my head is a kind of tug of war between having instincts that are deep and real and sudden and that other thing that I think a lot of people have and recognize and can understand, which is the voice saying that's not real. That's not a good idea. You're not a good artist. So, like, my dad would never have said like, that's nothing that my dad would have said to me. Yeah.

Right? So it's not my dad. So who is it? Like, I don't know. I guess it's from something.

It's like an amalgamation, really. An amalgamation. But, right, like, we often feel like we have to compare ourselves to other people and the Internet has only made that worse. You know, Instagram is designed to make you feel bad about yourself because you will compare yourself to everyone else who's showing what's going on in their life. But ultimately, we have to figure out how to do our work for ourselves and to do what makes us happy for ourselves.

But the voices still are there and they still rise up, but I find different ways to just think about something and or, like, let them go or acknowledge them.

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

Brian Selznick: Right. And your Merwin. They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see missus k eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust, which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons when the fossil sea was warm and motionless and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed and no one drifted out their doors, you could see mister K himself in his room reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphics over which he brushed his hand as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Bryant read from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Published in 1950, it's a fix up novel made of nearly 30 short stories by Bradbury about human colonization on Mars. The passage comes from one of the earlier stories, Hila describing an alien family's daily life on the Red Planet before humans arrived. Bradbury's imagination and even more so his lyrical language were a revelation to a young Brian.

Brian Selznick: So like you read that as a 13, 14 year old and there's so much happening. Right? There's this specific imagery of the science fiction of it. Right? This world that he's evoking on this planet, this foreign world that have things we know, crystals and spiders and books and oceans and fruit.

But everything is combined in a way that you've never had it combined before. The spiders are electric and the books are crystal and and silver. And, like, it just I could feel my mind shifting as I was falling into that language. I felt like I could see and hear and taste what he was talking about. And he feels like he has a kind of rhythm to his language that feels musical.

I'm not a musical person myself, but I think every single time I write any line of anything I'm working on, somewhere I'm thinking about Ray Bradbury. Or maybe I should say Ray Bradbury has offered me a space in which to work, in which to live. So I'm writing my rhythm. I often know the rhythm before I know the words that go in the rhythm. So it's a little bit like writing lyrics to a tune.

Can you say a little more about that? I have a sense that the that the sentence needs to be, but I don't know the words yet.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. I've never heard anybody say that. What do you mean? Like, you have a sense of, like, you can see that you want it to be, like, this long, do you mean? Or just, like, it's gonna kinda hit a cadence?

Brian Selznick: I can feel the cadence.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay.

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

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. I'm reading like the end of Run Away With Me, and

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: it says, and the rose petals are falling, and miracles are real, and Rome is ours forever. It was so be that was like chef's kiss to me. The ending was but I'm now thinking about you thinking about that must be, like, really big for you, the very end of a book because you're already thinking of ending, so it must have, like, a different need, like, that gravity of that final.

Brian Selznick: Right. And I knew that I was gonna have that last line. I knew that pretty early on, those words, and Rome was ours forever. And for anyone who hasn't read the book yet, the two things I'll say is this is not a spoiler conversation. And there are images that follow those words, so it's not the last experience of the book.

But I would say that anyone who has not read the book yet, if you get a copy of the book, don't flip ahead to look at the drawings until you get to them.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: They're so beautiful. Oh my god.

Brian Selznick: Because I think that might make it a more strong experience. But in terms of the rhythm of those last lines, because I knew and felt very strongly that and Rome was ours forever. We're gonna be the last five syllables. It became about finding the rhythm that leads up to it. But that, again, that's something that came from my reading and love of Ray Bradbury.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: As it turned out, Ray Bradbury was a fan of Brian too.

Brian Selznick: Ray Bradbury wrote me a fan letter after the invention of Hugo Cabret came out.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Really?

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

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh my god.

Brian Selznick: I have the letter framed on my wall, but it's on the other side of the country. And I wrote back, and I told him what a fan I was of his and how important his work was to me. I ended up at some point on the phone with his daughter, and she said, well, if you're ever in Los Angeles, let us know. And I was like, what an amazing coincidence. I'm gonna be in Los Angeles next week.

And they invited me over. And I spent an afternoon with Ray Bradbury in his studio. Wow. And he was I think he was in his eighties. He was sitting in a in a lounge chair sort of in the middle of this studio that was filled with books and DVDs and VHS tapes and models of things like the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which he had written the screenplay for.

And he was sitting in this big chair, and he pointed to a box on the other side of the room. And he said, that's the book I just finished. And I said, you know, mister Bradbury, I really wanna look at that. And so he said, go get it. And inside was a typewritten manuscript for a new book, a new collection of short stories.

I think it was called We'll Always Have Paris. And so I turned the page, and I saw the list of story titles. And one of the stories was called Remembrance Ohio.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: What?

Brian Selznick: And I said, mister Bradbury, that is a very, very beautiful title. And he said, thanks. I made it up. And and it was one of the most extraordinary afternoons I had spent.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Bradbury's keen eye for small town Americana, Midwestern outposts like Remembrance, Ohio was just as vibrant as his visions of faraway planets. On that note, Brian asked to read us a second passage from his friend, mister Bradbury. This one from his book Dandelion Wine. In the interest of time, we've shortened his reading a bit, but here's a taste. And as you'll hear, it's one that has stayed with Brian because it deals really with the one aspect of life that we can truly never control.

Brian Selznick: He was only 10 years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the wax and effigy in the coffin when he was six and great grandfather passed away, looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed, and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized she'd never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born.

That was death, and death was the lonely one, unseen, walking, and standing behind trees, waiting in the country to come in once or twice a year to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was a little light to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was death.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I

Brian Selznick: do write about and I think about death a lot and, you know, the idea that death is what makes life have meaning. Right? It's probably why we have religion. Right? Because we wanna find ways as a species to understand something that we otherwise can't really understand.

I mean, there's, of course, science, which says, basically, you're born, you live, you die. But it's weird to be alive. And so not wanting to believe that this is it seems extremely normal and extremely natural. You know? Right?

And then if you've ever actually seen somebody die, right, like, was at my dad's deathbed. I saw the moment he died, and it was fascinating. Right? It's very, very strange because my dad had been unconscious for a while. He'd been breathing very, very slowly, but I was looking at him and he was alive.

And then he took a breath that didn't then go out and he wasn't alive. And it was like it was the reason people believe in the soul. I feel like I was witnessing something leave. And what was left behind wasn't my dad. The thing that was my dad was no longer there.

But I it's a little weird, but I remember just, like, looking and being so astonished by what I had just witnessed that I wasn't sad at first. Like, I I it was

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: like I I was too shocked and too, like, amazed to be sad. Did that experience change how you view like you said, that's how people believe in the soul. Like, did you before that?

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

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Even science says that things don't, like, stop exist that matters matter. You know? I mean, that is also science. Right?

Brian Selznick: Right. And so what is the soul? Does the soul have matter? Is it something else? You know, these are great questions.

These are questions I love. And I love them because they are not answerable. The only people for whom these answers exist are people who really have a strong religious belief who say, like, okay. When you die, you go to heaven.

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

Brian Selznick: Of course. And I think that's totally okay. Right? If religion gives you strength, great. But again, like for me, I'm interested in living in that ambiguity, which I think perhaps is a way of me dealing with my desire to control things.

This is a space where I feel intellectually confident or aware that I can't control this part of my understanding, and that actually makes me feel good. Right? We live in a world that demands you pick a side and you believe this thing or that thing. And if anyone doesn't believe everything you believe, you're being told you're supposed to look at them as the enemy. And it denies the chance to have conversations.

It denies the chance to understand each other. And we have to live with some ambiguity. We have to live with pain. We have to live with all of these things that are very difficult. And our world asks us or tells us not to.

And so if you're going to try, then there's gonna be a lot of challenges. And you have to find a way to be strong enough to exist within that ambiguity if that's something that you think is important. And I do.

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

Brian Selznick: Yeah. It was just twenty one years. He died right before I started working on Hugo.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That must have been hard to not have him see that.

Brian Selznick: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because yeah. He would have really liked all the success that Hugo had. Like, I had won a Caldecott honor for a book I did called The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and he came to the ceremony and saw me recognized and saw that. And and I know how proud he was.

But, you know, one of the things I will just say quickly is that when I started writing that book, I was very conscious of not wanting to kill Hugo's father. So when I started writing because I didn't want Hugo to deal with death, So I tried all these different ways to make the dad not die because Hugo I knew he needed to end up alone in the train station, so I needed to get the dad out of the way. And I remember the moment I was sitting at my desk, I had written almost the entire plot, and I just had this sense that there was this emotional hole in the center of the story that even though the entire plot was in place, the emotional drive for why the story was happening wasn't there. And I was sitting at my desk, and it just hit me. Hugo's dad dies.

And the second I said that to myself, the entire rest of the plot filled itself in. He's died. Hugo loved him. The dad was obsessed with a movie where a rocket flies into the eye of the man of the moon that he remembers seeing as a kid.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So that came. I see.

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

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: But you didn't know, like, why was the movie like, why did he know this movie?

Brian Selznick: I didn't know that till that moment.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh my god. It was like its last puzzle piece.

Brian Selznick: Yeah. And, of course, you know, then I realized the reason I didn't want Hugo's dad to die was because I didn't wanna deal with writing about my own dad's death. But the second I did, it finished the story. So it was my dad's death that in many ways gave me the book and gave me the story. So I was obviously heading towards the death of Hugo's father, but I wasn't consciously ready for it yet.

So I kept writing everything else. And then when I was ready, I wrote what I needed to write.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: For his reading challenge, Brian brought the same thoughtful and meticulous approach he takes with his own books. In fact, to bookend his two reading passages, he crafted two absolutely wonderful reading lists. The first is about that part of himself that was so difficult to reveal to his father years ago.

Brian Selznick: I put together a list of books that I've been thinking about in terms of queerness and the ways in which queerness has been written about over time, times in which people have felt comfortable expressing their queerness, times in which people did not feel comfortable or were not able to. I put Orlando on this list by Virginia Woolf, The Go Between by LP Hartley, which is about this kid who ends up running messages between these two lovers. When he grew up and learned about the relationship between his mom and Virginia Woolf, said that Orlando is the longest and most charming love letter in all of literature. And then Moby Dick. The queerness in that book is very coded.

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

Brian Selznick: Yeah. I I think maybe part of the reason I was thinking about this theme for this list was because of what I was doing with Runaway With Me, and it's really about these two boys in the eighties who fall in love. But I remember when I grew up, I didn't really know anyone else was gay. And when I got out of college and started learning about queer history, discovering that I was part of a long lineage and that I've always existed, we've always existed, and we're not going away no matter how hard people try to make us go away.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Brian's second book list, Power of the Page Turn, ties right to our conversation today. It's all about his commitment to books that experiment with form and the balance of control between writer and reader.

Brian Selznick: If you're interested in thinking about what the page turn can do and how the page turn can help tell the story, control the story, then there's two by Maurice Sendak, who was a master of the book form, of course. Then two books by Remi Charlotte, who I mentioned earlier, who made all of my favorite books. The first one is Fortunately, where something bad happens on one page and it's black and white, and then something good happens and it's full color. And then I was thinking about pop up books. The Dwindling Party by Edward Gorey, which is a very obscure pop up book that he made.

A party in an estate where one by one everyone disappears, but like a full gazebo pops up.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: There are many more intriguing titles on both lists. You can find Brian's reading challenges and all past reading challenges at the readingculturepod.com. This week's featured librarian is Chelsea Pisani, a rock star children's librarian at Maple Valley Branch Library in Akron, Ohio. Chelsea shares the story of how one student, also with a keen ability to take control, is spreading his passion for reading among his peers by setting up his own book club.

Chelsea Pisani: I started a book club at the elementary school Schumacher CLC. They are one of the only Akron public schools that have a book club for kids in grades second through fifth grade. And because of book club, I had a little boy in there. His name's Cameron. He wanted to start his own book club at my library.

So I was like, okay. I'll help you with it. He created flyers and then it was funny. It was during winter. He wanted to take a picture outside with the sign with books.

And I'm like, Cameron, it's too cold. And he was like, miss Chelsea, it's going to take one take. I'll be quick. And I said, okay. So he went, we made him little flyers, and he got people to come to book club.

He had more people come to book club here than, like, I had the week before. So I told him, I'm like, okay. You get the kids here. You pick the books. I'll buy the snacks.

And he had book club, like, twice a month here.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I love that story, and thank you Chelsea, and thanks to all the librarians listening, and to those out there making change and a difference in your communities. We love and appreciate you. This has been the reading culture and you've been listening to my conversation with Brian Selznick. Again, I'm your host Jordan Lloyd Bookie and currently I'm reading Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult At Last She Stood by Erin Entrada Kelly. If you enjoyed today's episode, please just take one moment to give us five stars on Apple or Spotify or Castbox wherever you listen.

Your reviews really help us get the show recommended to others. So thank you. Thank you for those reviews, especially those nice written ones. We so appreciate them. This episode was produced by Mel Webb, Josiah Lamberto Egan, Brian Sutton, and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan.

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