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MEET DAVID SCHWARTZ: Leo Politi Golden Author Award 2009
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| David Schwartz |
I speak a lot because I enjoy it so much. The kids energize me and sometimes they give me ideas for new books. I learn a lot from their reactions and their questions. The first time I went to a school I was a little nervous. But I hit found ways to get kids really excited about math, science, writing, and books – what could be better? I started to have a great time at the same time that they did.
One reason I love speaking to kids at schools is that it gives me a chance to put across some of my favorite messages. I sure have plenty of them:
* the excitement and usefulness of math and science
* the importance of books
* the need for perseverance in writing, and the fact that writing (like any endeavor including art, music, drama, sports) is not always fun. You need to work at it and do it again and again to make it as good as it can be. It may not always be fun along the way, but when you’re done you'll have something to be proud of – that’s the fun part!
* the joy of wonder. “Wondering is wonderful,” I tell children as I show them how many of my books began with questions I asked when I was their age. “You don’t have to be 25 years old to have a great idea,” I say. “You already do, so long as you wonder about the world.”
What questions do students ask you when you visit schools?
Children want to know about my family, my pets and my home. More than once I’ve been asked if I live in a mansion! They also want to know about my favorite hobbies, sports, food, color, book, number… you name it. Kids love “favorites” and I usually have to tell them that I like so many things that it’s hard to pick my favorites! But I think the top three questions are:
How old are you?
How much money do you make?
Where do you get your ideas?
Teachers are aghast at the first two. “Don’t ask that!” But I answer both questions. I tell them my age (or the date of my birth so they can figure out my age) and I tell them how little money I make on the sale of a single copy of a hardcover book. Most people expect it to be a large percentage of the cover price but it is tiny, and everyone is shocked, including the teachers! To answer the question about where ideas come from, I say, “If you keep your eyes open, your ears open and your mind open, you’ll have lots of good ideas. If you wonder about the world, you’ll have lots of great ideas.”
In my presentation I use popcorn as a math prop. The quantity of popcorn increases exponentially and my audience counts with me by powers of ten (by ones, then by tens, then by hundreds, etc.). Everyone in the audience is dying to know how much popcorn I will ultimately show them. If I come to your school, you’ll find out!
What kinds of work did you do before you became a writer?
I had about as many jobs as there are grains of sand on an average beach. I worked as an elementary school teacher, a journalist, a writing instructor and residential college dean at Yale University, a lumber jack, a veterinary assistant, a carpenter's assistant, and a highway department worker who painted lines down the middle of the road. So if you saw some wavy yellow lines a few years ago . . . In my 20's, I could not decide what kind of career I wanted, so I became a career counselor to help other people decide!
What stirred your imagination when you were a boy?
I was always fascinated by the biggest and the smallest things in the universe. It always amazed me that I was both a giant (compared to ants, microbes, molecules and atoms) and a dwarf (compared to elephants, whales, the Earth, and the stars)! My books in large part come out of the kinds of thoughts, questions, musings, mental journeys, etc., that I had as a youngster.
I was also enchanted by animals and their many fascinating adaptations: The dance of the honey bees, the uncanny way some animals can blend into their environment, the ability of a moth to smell the pheromones of another moth three miles away… these and uncounted other animal facts amazed me, and many of them have made their way into my books. Animal camouflage, for example, is the subject of my 50th book, Where In The Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed and Revealed, a science book that combines poetry, prose, and photography.
What gave you the idea for your first book, HOW MUCH IS A MILLION?
As a 6th grader, one of my favorite books was Cheaper By The Dozen, the story of a very large family. In one scene, the father brings home a large sheet of graph paper with 1,000 vertical lines and 1,000 horizontal lines. He puts it on the wall, and tells his children that the lines cross to create one million tiny squares. I loved the idea of a number as big as one million being depicted in such a simple but effective way. I thought about ways that I, too, might be able to capture big numbers and compare them to each other. “A million might sound like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to a billion,” I thought to myself. “And a billion is tiny compared to a trillion.” And so on. During long bike rides, I liked to calculate how long it would take to ride a magical bicycle all the way around the Earth . . . or Jupiter . . . or to the Moon. How long would it take to count billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars. The thought boggled my mind, and I loved that “mind-boggled” feeling. Years later, I decided to write a book that would boggle children's minds in the same way. The result, after many false starts and thorough revisions, was How Much Is A Million?
Did the first publisher that you submitted the manuscript to decide to publish it ?
I wrote the manuscript twelve times before I felt it was good enough to be submitted to publishers. (Teachers love me for telling the children about that!) I thought it was pretty good, but seventeen publishers told me to get lost. The 18th publisher said, "We love it!"
The titles of your books indicate that you have a strong interest in science as well as in numbers.
I write children's books that reflect interests I have had since childhood - especially my love of numbers and nature - and I try to do it in a whimsical way that makes ideas exciting and fun. Each book in the “Look Once, Look Again” series is set up like a guessing game. First you see a close-up of just a small part of an animal or plant (the brilliant feather of a peacock for example, or the warty skin of a toad). My text gives hints about the subject's true identity. To find out, you must turn the page. In my more recent book, Where In The Wild?, readers have to find the well-camouflaged animal in the photograph and figure out its identity from a poem that describes it in some way but does not name it. Thanks to a unique layout involving gatefold pages, the reader gets to see the animal and learn about it in an unusual, interactive way.
How do you account for the remarkable success of your most recent book, WHERE IN THE WILD?
I think there are a few reasons people are going wild over it. For one thing, it has spectacular photographs by Dwight Kuhn. For another, the poems (which I wrote with my wife, Yael Schy) are diverse in style, format and rhyming pattern. There is even a haiku and a few “concrete” (or shape) poems. Some are funny, some are evocative, one poem has a hidden joke. But the main thing, I believe, is that kids love to look for things. Here they are looking for well-camouflaged animals in the photographs. Kids also love guessing games, and they have to guess each animal’s identity (along with finding it in the picture). The book has a unique layout that enables the animal to be revealed in a very cool way, and that’s another reason for the book’s appeal. Often when teachers look at the book for the first time and show it to students, they send me an email: “Ah-hah! Now I see why everyone loves this book so much!”
How did G IS FOR GOOGOL: A MATH ALPHABET BOOK and Q IS FOR QUARK: A SCIECE ALPHABET BOOK come about?
I got the idea from all the upper elementary and middle school teachers who told me that their students could use help with math and science vocabulary. Most people think that reading about math and science vocabulary is as exciting as eating tofu. (I happen to like tofu, and I also like words. With a little effort, both can be made exciting.) I did everything I could to make my math and science vocabulary books fun, funny, and even a little bit zany. Did it work? Well, shortly after the book came out, I got a letter from a school librarian in Colorado: “G Is for Googol is FANTASTIC—truly! It is absolutely inspiring and informative in a way that gets kids interested. . . .Thanks for making my work easier with such inspiration.”
IF YOU HOPPED LIKE A FROG combines your love of numbers with your love of animals. Combining the two must have been a challenge. How did you do it?
I got the idea when I was speaking to a group of teachers at a workshop, showing them pictures of animals and talking about ways that they could use math to help teach science. I used the example of a 3-inch frog hopping 5 feet. That means the frog is hopping 20 times its own length. I figured this out as a child when I asked myself what I could do if I could hop like a frog – that is, hop 20 times my own length (height). The answer astonished and delighted me. I was 4’6” tall, and I calculated that I would have been able to jump from home plate to first base on a major league baseball field! I talked about this at the workshop and afterwards. A teacher in the audience suggested that I turn that entire concept into a book. Great idea! (She is thanked and named in the book’s dedication). My book starts with that example and goes on to show what would happen if humans had other amazing abilities of animals in proportion to our size. I have so much fun with If You Hopped Like a Frog (especially in my school presentations, using toy animals to demonstrate the math/science principles) that I later wrote a sequel, If Dogs Were Dinosaurs, which uses the same mathematics of proportion to explore the relative sizes of things.
SUPER GRANDPA is very different from your other books. What inspired you to write it?
Super Grandpa is the true story of a 66-year old Swedish grandfather who rode his bicycle in a 1,000-mile race, defying the judges who had told him he was too old to enter. I learned about him in a newspaper article and I found his story so heart-warming that I did research to turn that short newspaper article into a picture book. I think it has a message about stereotyping that children (and adults) should hear. After riding out of print for a while, Super Grandpa has recently cycled back into sight with a new cover and a CD of me reading the story with sound effects and Swedish music in the background. Children and adults alike love the self-confident grandpa and they cheer for him aloud as he infuriates the judges but wins the hearts of his countrymen with his marathon bicycle ride. Super Grandpa has been one of my most popular books even though it doesn’t fit with anything else I’ve written.
Breaking the mold and not sticking with the pattern may be a microcosm of my life. I have diverse interests (and perhaps a short attention span, which many children can relate to!).
What are your plans for future writing projects?
The way the kids at schools ask that question is, “How many books do you plan to write before you’re done?” to which I say, with confidence, “Under a million.” But I have a few underway, including a sequel to Where In The Wild? a book about estimating (More or Less a Million), and a book for parents about finding the math in everyday family life.