everything grows with love
Stories about My Experiences with Writers & Illustrators Who Bring Light into the World…by Bonnie Ingber VerburgArchive for Dr. Brene Brown
Captain Underpants and the Big Pitch
We are in Chicago, sitting in the cafeteria of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is a modest lunch, and our sandwiches are still on paper plates on our plastic trays.
I brought Dav Pilkey to this museum because he likes Chagall, and I have been hoping he will love the stained glass windows here. He does. Last night, on the phone, he repeatedly told me to “bring a big glove” to lunch because today he is going to give me “a really big pitch.” Now I am waiting.
The big pitch comes. I can see he is nervous, but I don’t know why. He tells me about going to grade school and being punished so often the teacher put a designated Dav Pilkey desk in the hallway.
Day after day he sat alone out there with pencils and paper, and what did he do? He drew.
He tells me he made up superheroes. His favorite, he says, was one called Captain Underpants. Superheroes, he says, all seem to dress in their underwear. He explains he wants to make a book that will feature Captain Underpants.
I laugh. It’s a great idea. “I love it,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
He gives me a very curious look, as if I’ve just said something in Chinese.
“Really?” he asks.
“Of course. Why not?”
The first Captain Underpants book. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We change the subject and talk about Chagall and some of the other artists at the Institute. Then we bus our trays and go back to the galleries.
It is only much later that I come to understand that something big has happened. Not to me, because I love Dav’s sense of humor. I get it. I always have. And I’m a happy camper because now I have a funny new book to publish.
But something big has happened to Dav Pilkey. All his life, grown-ups have ridiculed his humor. They’ve punished him for it. And they’ve sweetly added things like “you’ll never get anywhere in life with those stupid drawings.” He is certain the answer to the Captain Underpants book will be a resounding no. Instead, his editor said yes. No argument, no persuasion, no resistance at all.
So he didn’t give a big pitch, and I didn’t need a big glove. And I don’t feel smart for saying yes, because humor is subjective. Millions of people find Dav’s sense of humor really, really funny. Maybe you do, too. Or maybe you don’t. In book publishing a lot depends on making a good match–the way Barry Cunningham loved Harry Potter, and some other editors didn’t. I’m a big believer in single editorial vision, because it works for me, and obviously it worked for Barry Cunningham. I don’t believe committees can have a single vision. And in humor that’s particularly deadly since a group rarely agrees that something is funny. You love the Three Stooges, and your neighbor hates them.
I’d like to say the road to publication of The Adventures of Captain Underpants was simple and smooth, but because it’s humor, it wasn’t. A number of people along the way wanted the book cancelled, and they were very angry and vocal about it. But Jean Feiwel backed us up and drowned them out. Barbara Marcus and Dick Robinson gave their support. Roz Hilden, one of the most respected sales reps at that time, boldly announced it was her favorite book of the season. And although our initial print run was only 10,000 paperbacks, Alan Boyko, in Scholastic Book Fairs, was so wildly enthusiastic about the book that his division sold something like 700,000 copies in the first season. I may be wrong about the number, but whatever it was, it was astronomical. And the last time I looked, the worldwide number of books in print was hovering somewhere around 60 million. What these books have done to promote literacy is one of the great victories of our time.
What’s my point?
This is a simple story with a happy ending. Volumes could be written about Dav Pilkey and his wonderful books, and they probably will be written–someday. I skipped past the fascinating stories behind Dogzilla and Kat Kong and Dog Breath and The Hallo-wiener, but I wouldn’t have been able to publish Dav Pilkey at all if Dogzilla, Kat Kong, and Dog Breath hadn’t been rejected elsewhere. That never stopped Dav. He is such an inspiration. I guess what I’m trying to say is that many of the most accomplished writers I’ve published–Dav Pilkey, Virginia Hamilton, the Woods, and Rodman Philbrick, for example–have had an unflagging willingness to take risks, and in many cases, they failed repeatedly before they became successful. Most people don’t know that it took Virginia ten years to get published. Rod wrote novels for twelve years before he got his first contract. In her inspiring TED talks, Dr. Brene Brown calls the collective TED speakers “the failure club.” Why? Because before they became the genius successes that brought them to TED, they failed–and usually failed repeatedly, sometimes in very public arenas. ” Take risks,” she says. “Do your best. And if you fail, you fail having dared greatly.” Just because you’re assigned to a desk in the hall, and your teachers say your drawings are worthless, it doesn’t mean they’re right.
During my divorce, Dav gently reminded me that if those teachers hadn’t belittled and punished him, we wouldn’t have Mr. Krupp, and George and Harold, and Captain Underpants. Sometimes very happy things come out of pain, he said.
And that’s the truth.
Cover of Dog Breath
The Hallo-Wiener (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Kat Kong (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cover of Dogzilla (digest)
The Man in the Arena: About Reviews
Perhaps because ALA Midwinter and the Caldecott/Newbery Medals will be announced this month, I have had an unusual flurry of emails about reviews and reviewers lately. I believe most editors are taught, as I was early on, to keep our lips zipped and to never respond to the slings and arrows of outrageous misunderstandings that appear in the reviews of our books. I worked with writer Cynthia Rylant for more than a decade, and at the time she did not read her reviews. She told me they didn’t help her writing, and she asked me not to send them to her. This was not arrogance on her part, and she was a very sensitive and careful writer. The reviews did not help her work, and when she began painting and illustrating some of the picture books herself, such as her splendid Dog Heaven, it was not helpful when, for example, an elementary school teacher had her entire class write individual letters to Cyndi asking her to please stop illustrating her books. The letters somehow got to her–I believe they had tracked down her address and sent them directly, because back then I had an assistant, and we went through the letters and would have filtered out anything mean spirited and hurtful. At any rate, as the years went on, I found that reading reviews became less and less meaningful for me, as well. I had a meeting with Jean Feiwel, who hired me to work at Scholastic, and I asked for her permission to stop reading the journals. In addition to taking up too much of my time, I didn’t think they helped my work, either. Would it be acceptable if I only read the reviews of the books I was publishing, rather than entire journals? She took it lightly and laughed. Then she told me that so many people at our company were glued to those journals that she didn’t think the editorial group would be losing anything if I wasn’t staying on top of them. And that gave me permission to drop all my subscriptions. Although I read every review I can find of the books I publish, I have not read a review journal in at least ten years, probably longer. Reading them doesn’t improve my work, it just makes me anxious–in an unnecessary way. And I don’t think it’s arrogance on my part, either, because I have a very, very heavy workload these days and almost no help. I’m told this is the case with most editors in book publishing now. It has been years since I’ve had a full-time assistant, and that means I do all the FedXing and photocopying and mailing myself along with all the other things an assistant used to do–so the end result is I publish fewer books and also have far more difficulty staying on top of the ones I’m doing. Again, I am told this is a result of our economic times, and as Arnold Adoff once remarked, “New York publishing is filled with empty offices.” I have enormous gratitude that unlike so much of the U.S., I am still able to do what I love and still get a paycheck, at least for now. Reading review journals isn’t high on the priority list.
The larger, and more painful issue about book reviews is how difficult it is when a reviewer misses the point of the book. I am finding this to be increasingly true, not only for the books I publish but for the books published by friends and colleagues where reviews are passed along to me, and I am often astonished at the lack of perception and education on the part of the reviewer. All of us who have been around for a while can talk about stacks of reviews we vividly remember that were insulting, rude, trivial, and completely missed the boat. In retrospect, when a book has become enormously popular and loved over many years, it can even be fun and funny to go back to those reviews that absolutely trashed the book when it was initially published. The first review of David Shannon’s beloved bestseller A Bad Case of Stripes warned readers not to order the book because it was psychedelic and would give children nightmares. Having published 29 of Dav Pilkey’s books, including The Adventures of Captain Underpants and The Dumb Bunnies, you can only imagine the book banning incidents across the country as well as the punishment individual children have had to endure at the hands of teachers who strongly dislike those books. With regard to reviews, the sharp, dire criticisms expressed often fade into the mist, although–as it is with most writers and illustrators–we do tend to remember the nasty ones, don’t we?
I was profoundly affected by the two TED talks given by Texas researcher Brene Brown about human connection, vulnerability, and shame. In her second talk (available on YouTube), she quotes Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech that has come to be called “The Man in the Arena.” It is an excerpt from a speech given in 1910 in Paris, and this past season I emailed it to all the writers and illustrators on my list who had books coming out in the fall. It explains, better than I can, my attitude about critics and reviewers, and what I hope writers and illustrators will feel about their own work and its inherent value–which is not diminished by what people say. “Do people understand how much time and work goes into making these books?” a very seasoned writer/illustrator asked me at lunch last week. “Do they understand how many decisions we make, and how much thought we put into everything we do?” This particular person has been creating bestselling, award-winning books for decades, yet it’s rare that a book comes out that does not get completely misread by somebody in a very public way. And that’s true about everyone I publish–and has been the truth these past three decades. I’m not forgetting the critics and reviewers and bloggers who enthusiastically do understand the beauty of a book or it’s enormous contribution to the world of children’s literature. Those people and their good spirit far outweigh the lone librarian off in Connecticut somewhere who misses the point so completely you think she could only be getting review assignments because her sister works at one of the journals, right? We’ve all had a review from that misguided soul, wherever he or she is located.
Anyway, here is “The Man in the Arena” by Theodore Roosevelt, an excerpt from the speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France, on 23 April, 1910:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly….
Thinking about this makes me want to thank some of the great supporters of the writers and illustrators I’ve published: Ginny Moore Kruse, K.T. Horning, Michael Cart, Rudine Sims Bishop, Ron Jobe, Amy Kalman…. It’s a long list, but the encouragement has made all the difference in the lives and careers of so many people. You know who you are. Thank you, from all of us.
everything grows with love 