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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand, I am grateful you are here. On today's show, we're talking all things children's literature. In the second hour, we'll focus on the life, work, and legacy of one of the most beloved authors for kids, Judy Blume, but now, we start with All Of It serialized celebration of kids' writing, our book club spin-off, Get Little. Let's get things started.

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Alison Stewart: Get Little is our live radio kid-friendly event for our book club Get Lit. We interview a beloved author on days when New York City public schools are closed. When school is out, Get Little is on. It's a series we kicked off last year with Raina Telgemeier, the writer, cartoonist, and number one New York Times bestselling author multiple times over. She is the author of the hit graphic novel Smile, Drama, Sisters, Ghosts and Guts.

Raina's books are often drawn from her own life experiences and tackle difficult topics with a deaf touch, from bullying to anxiety to therapy to puberty to racism, and all the stories are brought to life through Raina's vivid and expressive art. To kick off our Get Little hour, you're going to hear an encore presentation of my conversation with Raina, and since it's not live, we won't be taking calls today, though you'll hear callers on the air. Without further ado, here's my interview with Raina Telgemeier.

Raina Telgemeier: Hey, Alison. Thank you for having me. This is great.

Alison Stewart: Everybody is so excited about this. All right, let's dive into a little bit of your history for people and for all young artists out there who are listening. Who was the first person to really encourage you to really realize that you had talent as an artist?

Raina Telgemeier: I have been drawing since I was too young to remember. I think it was both my parents who, not only gave me the tools that I like using, the crayons and the paper and everything, but started saving everything and just putting everything in boxes. My mom would write the date of things on the back of the paper, and so she kept them and I still have most of them too.

A few times throughout my life, I've gone through and [unintelligible 00:02:33] like, "Okay, I don't need this many pictures of a flower, but this one is pretty good so I can save that." My parents were aware and facilitating pretty early on. Then they sent me to art classes, and I always had teachers in elementary school and art teachers who would say, "Oh, you're really good at this." In fifth grade, I received the school art award.

[laughter]

Raina Telgemeier: Yes. It's just been part of my life for as long as I've known, and comics especially, have been part of my life since I was nine. It was my dad who picked up on that and started taking me to the bookstore so that I could buy collections of my favorite comic strips and read them in the newspaper. I've been really lucky that way.

Alison Stewart: Who have been some of your inspirations?

Raina Telgemeier: Oh, I have so many, and the ones that I always come back to because they're the easiest to see where my style is born from, they're comic strips. Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, it's funny, it's touching, it's complicated, it's heartfelt, and it's beautiful to look at. For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston, which was a chronicle family strip that ran for almost 30 years. It was kind of a soap opera in that the characters were just real people that they aged in real-time, and they had relationships and falling out, and there were births, there were deaths and so just that sort of idea of real life can be entertaining and funny.

Those are my two biggest, most primary influences, but I discovered a comic when I was 10 called Barefoot Gen. It is an almost autobiographical telling of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 in Japan. It was brutal. It was realistic. It was a first-person account, and it was a graphic novel. I thought, "Oh, comics, I love comics." Then I read it, and I was like, "I hate comics, that comics tell you too much. Comics are intense," but I was really lucky that my parents were both there with me and they had read it too, and so we were able to talk about it.

It absolutely shaped my views as a person, but also as an artist, I just-- with the power of comics and graphic novel-type storytelling can do, so ever since then, I've been on a quest to make sure that people know that comics are really important. It's really lovely to be doing that now as a career and to be able to tell those kinds of stories as well.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Raina Telgemeier. This is Get Little. Well, you may have known this. Well, I don't know if you knew this or not, but we had a phone line open for a few days for people to leave questions, and here we go. This question comes from Judah who is 10 years old.

Judah: I'm Judah from Austin, Texas, and I was wondering how Raina became an author.

Alison Stewart: Judah from Austin, Texas wants to know, how did you become an author?

Raina Telgemeier: I feel like I've always been an author, but I didn't realize it. I have always been an artist. I was somebody who drew first and then I started writing stories. I started keeping a journal when I was 10 years old. I took creative writing classes, I read a lot, I read a lot of comics, I read a lot of books, and then realized that if I wanted to tell the kinds of stories that mattered to me, I was going to have to both draw them and illustrate them. I started making short story comics when I was in my late teens and early 20s.

I was publishing my own books and my own mini-comics and selling them at these small press comic conventions. I was doing it as a passion, and then eventually, I connected with Scholastic and they said, "We're starting up a graphic novel line, and we would love for you to pitch some comics to us." My first gig was the Baby-sitters Club graphic novels. I started publishing those in 2006, and so it's just been since then. It really was just something I did for myself and then eventually it became my career.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to a live call. Ria is calling in from Millburn, New Jersey, and she is nine years old. Hi, Ria. Welcome to Get Little.

Ria: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi, you're on with Raina.

Ria: My question is, what inspired you to write your books?

Raina Telgemeier: My books are inspired by my life most of the time, things that happened to me when I was about your age or just a little bit older that I wrote about in my diary and then would tell people the stories about later, "Oh my gosh, there was this time my family went on a road trip and this thing happened with my cousin." I've just been back-logging stories to tell for most of my life. Then when I became a professional cartoonist and started thinking about what I wanted to share with my readers, I was like, "Oh, there was this funny story about this time we took a road trip."

It's still the stories that I tell. It's still the stories that have happened to me, but now, I'm putting them down on the page. Even my fictional books are rooted in and inspired by people that I know, people that I've met, and things that I have had experience with.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to Madison on Line 7. Hi, Madison. Thanks for calling All Of It. This is Get Little with Raina Telgemeier.

Madison: Hi, my name is Madison. I'm [unintelligible 00:07:58] old. First, I wanted to say that you inspired me to become a therapist from your book Guts.

Raina Telgemeier: [gasps] Wow.

Madison: Oh, wait, you could go. Sorry.

Raina Telgemeier: No, you can go. Sorry. It's okay. You go. [chuckles]

Madison: I'd also like to ask, does your family ever get upset when you put them in your books? If so, who gets the most upset?

Alison Stewart: Wow, she wants the tea. She wants the truth. [laughs]

Raina Telgemeier: If this were a therapy session, you would say to me, "And don't worry, I won't tell anybody else what your answer is."

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Raina Telgemeier: I'm not going to answer that question too specifically, except to say that I talk to my family before I publish my stories and I ask them if they want to read what I've written. I tell them, "If you have any problems with any of this, please let me know. I'm not going to publish anything that you don't want me to because this is our family. This is super important to me, and how we feel is more important than me publishing something."

I try to take the care that I need to, and that applies to just about everything that I do. It's not just my family, but it's also my friends. If my friends are going to inspire characters or if there's subject matter that I feel like is sensitive, I want to get it out ahead first, and so I try to ask a lot of questions beforehand. In the end, I try to make something that we're all okay with and proud of and can stand behind. I'm so happy you want to be a therapist. Thank you. You're going to help a lot of people.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to Lily, calling in. Hi, Lily. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on with Raina.

Lily: Hey.

Alison Stewart: Hey.

Raina Telgemeier: Hey.

Alison Stewart: Lily, go for it.

Lily: How do you make your books so realistic, and what's your favorite author?

Alison Stewart: How do you make your books so realistic, and who's your favorite author?

Raina Telgemeier: Oh my gosh. I will answer the second question first and tell you I have a lot of favorite authors, but I have one favorite book, and that book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. He was a Newbery winner in the 1970s and inspired a movie called The Secret of NIMH, but I think the book is better. [whispering] Don't tell [unintelligible 00:10:25] I said that.

It's funny that you ask how my books look so realistic because, to me, they look very cartoony. They look like comic strips. They look like animation instead of realistically rendered characters, but that's my favorite style. I like to skirt the line between cartoony and realism, so I look at a lot of photographs and I look at real places and I use a ton of reference when I'm drawing.

I'm still drawing it in my own style which is cartoony, but I'm trying to make you feel like you're in a real place, whether that's being stranded in the desert in New Mexico or whether it's walking down the street in San Francisco or up on the cliffs above the ocean south of San Francisco which is where ghosts takes place.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk a little bit about certain school districts and areas of the country that want to have certain books not be in libraries or in classrooms. I think we've all heard the news that the Pulitzer Prize went in graphic book Maus, which is about the Holocaust was banned by a school board in Tennessee. You've had some familiarity with this. Your book, Drama, features a chase kiss between two middle school boys.

I'm going to read this directly because I want to make sure I say this correctly. "Drama ended up making the American Library Association's top 10 list of frequently challenged books a couple of years in a row. In 2019, it was number eight in the list, didn't make it for 2020." What has been your reaction to seeing your books treated this way?

Raina Telgemeier: It's a head-in-hands reaction, but that's been the case since 2012 when the book was published, and I was disinvited from a couple of school visits, and then people started making noise about, this book features gay characters, and there should be a big warning on the cover, and there should be a big rainbow stamp to warn parents that they should not let their children anywhere near this book. I'm thinking, "What about the queer kids? What about their friends? What about their family members?" They need to see themselves too.

That's such an important part of my work is just letting kids see themselves. That story, even though it's fiction, is directly inspired by me and my friends and people that I still love and care about very much when I was younger, so it's like saying that their stories don't exist. It's like saying that their stories don't matter and that my friends don't belong, and I think that's nonsense. I feel like the story speaks for itself and the reaction of the characters to their environment and their friends.

Everything I've wanted to say about it is in the book, but we're having a moment right now, and I feel like my book is [laughs] at the bottom of a list of challenges that are bigger because people are trying to suggest that we shouldn't talk about the Holocaust by letting kids read Maus and we should protect children from history and brutality. I read Maus when I was either 15 or 16, and it was after reading Barefoot Gen my dad brought home a copy of Maus for me. He called it Maus. It was very cute. He's like, "I bought this book for you called Maus and you should read it."

I was taking German in high school and I was like, "It's Maus Dad." Then I read it, and again, it was just like, "Oh my gosh, the power of comics to tell a story and to put you into the shoes of the characters and to make you feel for them." The word is empathy. The word that should be the banner of this entire conversation is empathy, and so asking a school board to remove a book that's going to create empathy for others is, I'll use that other word again, nonsense. [laughs]

I don't have the language to really talk about this the way that I'd like to except that it makes me really sad, and I hope that we can be loud enough and we can continue writing books that are important and that kids continue to have access to them. That's the most important thing, so support your school board, support your libraries, run for office now or in 20 years when you're old enough, these books matter. These books are really important. Please keep them around so that I can read them and you can read them.

Alison Stewart: Let's get to our last voicemail that was sent in from Ramona, age 14.

Ramona: Me and my sister love your books. Together, we practically memorized all of them, but I have one question. In Sisters, Smile, and Guts, you talk about how music was your escape. What kind of music do you listen to?

Raina Telgemeier: Oh my gosh, that's a great question. I listen to a lot of different stuff, and a lot of times, it's just what the algorithm suggests and feeds at me through internet radio, but I like to tell people that my favorite genre is music that sounds like it was produced in the '80s, whatever that means. It's probably contemporary, but it's got the synth and the drums, beats, and certain sound effects and then certain vocal effects, and so it evokes something that was there in my childhood and now I just get tons of it and that's fun.

I've been listening to a lot of soundtracks lately. I don't know if that's because I need more wordless music while I'm writing or if I just have discovered a ton of really great soundtracks lately.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with cartoonist and author Raina Telgemeier from our Get Little series. Next up, another Get Little author, Spy School creator Stuart Gibbs takes calls from his young fans. This is All Of It.

 

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