Jessie was a formidable instructress in every way. The books she read aloud to Joan as a small child, the songs she sang, and her particular style of teaching and day-to-day upbringing had an enduring effect on her daughter. Joan's earliest and indelible literary memories were of sinister scenes not only from traditional children's fare such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit but also from Collodi' s original tale of Pinocchio and Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, which was set amid plague and persecution in fifteenth-century Holland. Before the age of five she knew by heart many of de la Mare's haunting Peacock Pie poems (with their stories of loss and mystery, ghostly visitors and vanished children) and the plaintive ballads of Jessie's Scottish ancestry in which old ladies are robbed by peddlers, damsels elope with gypsies, and lords are poisoned by their lovers. As a twentieth-century upbringing, this may sound extraordinary, but Joan took these subjects as a matter of course, and their stories and styles of writing became the foundation of her literary imagination and formed the common language of her relationship with her mother, which was perhaps the most important of her life.

	Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken and illustrated by Edward Gorey Highly Recommended
	Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken Recommended
	The Cuckoo Tree by Joan Aiken Recommended
	Arabel's Raven by Joan Aiken and illustrated by Quentin Blake Recommended
	Go Saddle the Sea by Joan Aiken Recommended
	Arabel and Mortimer by Joan Aiken and illustrated by Quentin Blake Recommended
	The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken Recommended
	Bridle the Wind by Joan Aiken Recommended
	Teeth of the Gale by Joan Aiken Recommended
	The Witch of Clatteringshaws by Joan Aiken Recommended
	The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken Recommended
	Midnight Is a Place by Joan Aiken Suggested

	Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken Suggested
	Jane Fairfax by Joan Aiken Suggested
	Eliza’s Daughter by Joan Aiken Suggested
	The Watsons and Emma Watson by Jane Austen & Joan Aiken Suggested

To begin with we did not think of making children's books. But one day a wise old lady put the idea into our heads to start making our own books for children.

Till then we had been strictly separated in our work, two absolute individuals, but now we found out that we might make a happy combination of Ingri's knowledge of children and children's psychology, and Edgar's dramatic sense.

To begin with we had quite some difficulties. We had each our distinct way of expression and were as different as the countries we came from. We worked hard and quarreled a lot, and after a while we started to forge the I and You and became one unity with two heads, four hands and one handwriting - when working on our children's books. When we paint, we still manage to be ourselves, and we take care to keep this.

We may rewrite our text ten and twenty times before we are both satisfied, and hundreds of sketches end in the fireplace before the final drawings are executed. In all our work we have used the old techniques of the artist-lithographer who did all his work by hand instead of using a camera, as most modern lithographers do. First, color drawings are sketched on paper in exactly the size needed. Next they are drawn on stone or zinc. The final color separations are combined on the finished stone; many additional tedious processes are still required to complete one lithograph. One's hand must be absolutely sure of every line, for there is no way to erase or go over lines once they are drawn on stone or zinc.

	Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Highly Recommended
	D'Aulaires' Book Of Norse Myths by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire & Michael (INT) Chabon Highly Recommended
	D'Aulaires' Book of Animals by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Suggested
	Too Big by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Suggested
	Foxie, the Singing Dog by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Suggested
	The Two Cars by Ingri Mortenson D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Suggested
	D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls by Ingri D'Aulaire & Edgar Parin D'Aulaire Suggested

Anders Franzen - A marine technician who developed a fascination with maritime history and archaeology and in particular an abiding focus on locating the lost flagship of the Swedish fleet of 1628, the Vasa. He spent lonely years researching contemporary accounts in libraries and scouting the waters of Stockholm, using homemade sensing devices, trying to locate the resting place of the Vasa. Having finally located the Vasa in 1956, he was instrumental in the ultimate salvage and on-going restoration of the ship which can now be seen in its own dry-dock museum in Stockholm.

Gerald Durrell - The youngest son in an Anglo-Irish family of five children in the British Raj, who lost their father at an early age. Raised in Greece and the UK, he finished his schooling in his early teens with an abiding passion for animals and there welfare. One of the earliest advocates for ecological and nature conservancy before those terms even had any currency, he argued that the mission of zoos ought not to be solely public entertainment but should serve as arks for the temporary protection and preservation of species endangered in the wild. In particular he argued for protecting those species not natively cuddly and attractive. Through his wonderful writing he brought the special charm and character of the most prickly and unlikely animals to a broader public. As importantly, he established the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo, supported with the proceeds from his writings, to fulfill that mission of protecting the ignored.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau - Naval officer, early innovator and developer of the aqualung, maritime researcher and underwater film documentarian. For three decades he advanced the technologies necessary to explore the submarine world and communicated about that world to the public through his films and books. Underwater archaeological expeditions, maritime ecology, diving in extreme environments such as the Antarctic - all were grist to his mill. He provided an entrée into the 70% of the globe beyond the horizons of most people.

Helge Ingstad - A Norwegian explorer and writer, he set about finding evidence of Viking habitation in North America which he finally located at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1960 and which he and his wife, Anne Stine excavated in the 1960's.

Louis and Mary Leakey - The persistent, peripatetic discoverers of some of the earliest ancestors of man in the 1960's despite repeated brushes against established paleontological views. .

Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl and translated by F. H. Lyon Highly Recommended

I looked forward to starting school, but unfortunately the transition from a carefree life on a farm to a city classroom of forty children (yes, really!) was too much. The teacher was harsh, I had had little contact with other children, and I was ill much of that dreadful year. I begged to stay home from school and wept when my anxious mother tried to help me with reading. Fortunately a beautiful, kind second-grade teacher soothed my fears and taught me to read, but by then I was disillusioned. I no longer wanted to read, and no one could make me. So there!

Mother, horrified at the thought of an illiterate daughter, continued to read aloud. I recall enjoying The Blue Bird by Maurice Materlinck and The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. She also supplied easy books, which I sulkily ignored until one rainy Sunday afternoon when I was so bored I looked at the pictures in The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins and discovered that in spite of myself I was actually reading and enjoying what I read. That moment changed my life.

My first grade was sorted into three reading groups - Bluebirds, Redbirds, and Blackbirds. I was a Blackbird, the only girl Blackbird among the boy Blackbirds, who had to sit in the row by the blackboard. Perhaps this was the beginning of my sympathy for the problems of boys. How I envied the bright, self-confident Bluebirds, most of them girls, who got to sit by the windows and who, unlike myself, pleased the teacher by remembering to write with their right hands - a ridiculous thing to do in my six-year-old opinion. Anyone could see that both hands were alike. One should simply use the hand nearer the task.

To be a Blackbird was to be disgraced. I wanted to read, but somehow I could not. I wept at home while my puzzled mother tried to drill me on the dreaded word charts. “But reading is fun,” insisted my mother. I stomped my feet and threw the book on the floor. Reading was not fun.

By second grade I was able to plod through my reader a step or two ahead of disgrace. Although I could read if I wanted to, I no longer wanted to. Reading was not fun. It was boring. Most of the stories were simplified versions of folktales that had been read to me many times. There were no surprises left.

Then, in third grade, the miracle happened. It was a dull rainy Portland Sunday afternoon when there was nothing to do but thumb through two books from the Sunday school library. After looking at the pictures, I began out of boredom to read The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins. Twins had always fascinated me. As a small child, I had searched through magazines - my only picture books - for pictures of the Campbell Soup twins. To me, a solitary child, the idea of twins was fascinating. A twin would never be lonely. Here was a whole book about twins, a boy and girl who lived in Holland but who had experiences a girl in Portland, Oregon, could share. I could laugh when the boy fell into the Zuyder Zee because I had once fallen into the Yamhill River. In this story, something happened. With rising elation, I read on. I read all afternoon and evening, and by bedtime I had read not only The Dutch Twins but The Swiss Twins as well. It was one of the most exciting days of my life. Shame and guilt dropped away from the ex-Blackbird, who had at last taken wing. I could read and read with pleasure! Grown-ups were right after all. Reading was fun.

The Hullabaloo ABC by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Ted Rand Suggested

	Ramona Quimby, Age 8 by Beverly Cleary Highly Recommended
	Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary Highly Recommended
	Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Louis Darling Recommended
	Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	Henry and Ribsy by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Tracy Dockray Recommended
	The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Louis Darling Recommended
	Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Louis Darling Recommended
	Ramona and Her Father by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	Ellen Tebbits by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Otis Spofford by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Louis Darling Suggested
	Henry and the Paper Route by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Emilys Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Henry and the Clubhouse by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Louis Darling Suggested
	Ribsy by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Mitch and Amy by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Socks by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Beatrice Darwin Suggested
	Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Ramona and Her Mother by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Ramona Forever by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Janet's Thingamajigs by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Muggie Maggie by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Strider by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Ramona's World by Beverly Cleary and illustrated by Alan Tiegreen Suggested

	A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary Recommended
	Fifteen by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	The Luckiest Girl by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Jean and Johnny by Beverly Cleary Suggested
	Sister of the Bride by Beverly Cleary Suggested

On stories and teaching

But when we're children, we are the odd man out. Some of the reason for this is that we don't know how to communicate our feelings very well, except through actions, but our actions are very often misinterpreted, and we are not very often treated like people. We are treated mostly like lumps of clay to be molded, blank pages to be written on, unformed and in continual need of being taught.

Ah, there's the rub. In continual need of being taught. If there is one thing wrong with books written for children -- most from the nineteenth century and too many written since -- it is exactly that: too many adults saying to themselves that a children's book is a tool for teaching.
When I was a child, I hated stories that tried to teach me things. Mostly those things were moral things: "You'd better be good or else." This is one reason why I loved Alice in Wonderland so much. It didn't --and doesn't -- have anything to teach except, maybe, that adults are extremely silly.

Books that are too nice

Another thing I've brought out of my childhood into this strange little island called Children's Book Land is an impatience with a story that presents an all-pink world. My life, and the lives of all the children I knew, was never all pink. Mine was free of genuine grief in that no one I loved died until I was well into my teens. But I knew about grief from observing it in less lucky friends, and I knew about poverty and disabilities, too, in the same way. I had, if not grief, certainly sorrows of my own, and plenty of unsolvable problems. And more than anything else, I had all the frustrations of being powerless. So did we all. And then, since World War II began for the United States when I was in the fourth grade, I also knew about nationally sanctioned hatred of other countries and fear of enemy bombers. Our grammar school was a testing place for air-raid sirens, and so we all knew about that particular fear. We dealt with it, one way or another, but we knew the world wasn't all pink. I resented books that tried to tell me it was, and if I came across one, I wouldn't finish it.

But as adults we seem to be afraid, some of us, of telling the truth. We seem to feel we need to protect children from anything that will show that their all-pink world has a lumpy underbelly with discolored spots on it. We'd rather tell them that everything's perfect and keep the truth for later, when they're teenagers, maybe, at which point we seem to think it's time to throw despair at them as a kind of rite of passage. I like to call it the "last chance for gas before the thruway" syndrome.

And yet, if we can look back at our child selves, honestly and openly, we find every time that we knew the hard stuff, the bad stuff, was there. There wasn't any way to protect us from it. So perky little stories with cute little pictures were very often anathema. At least they were to me. I insisted on happy endings, but they had to be happy endings that followed logically from the action of the story. Anything else was irritating.

On earnestness in writing

Earnestness to me means solemn, humorless sincerity; whereas seriousness means honesty -- and honesty, in this case, means showing as many sides of life as you can. There is always a humorous side, even if the humor is rueful. . . .

Earnestness doesn't get us very far. At its worst it only increases a feeling of being pressed, stressed, and driven. But humor can take us a long way. It doesn't have to be a pie-in-the-face kind of humor, though there's certainly a place for that. What it does have to be, for me, anyway, is an acknowledgment, rueful or otherwise, of the craziness of humanity. Lewis Carroll understood it perfectly, and expressed it in ways that made me laugh out loud when I was nine years old. Nine-year-olds don't have a lot of rue in their natures. That comes later. I wouldn't have been especially moved and amused by a quote from Mark Twain which I now keep nearby at all times: "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

On her rules for writing

Here are three things, then, that my own inner child keeps reminding me to be careful about: don't preach, don't be dishonest, and don't be earnest. Maybe that sounds as if there isn't a lot that you can do in a story for children. But yes, there is one thing that is the single most important thing of all: you can tell an entertaining story. I don't seem to have any more ideas for entertaining stories, I'm sorry to say. Not stories, anyway, for those very special people who are in what is clearly the last, best, greatest year of childhood -- the fifth grade. After the age of ten or eleven, if you ask me, things don't get really good again until you're thirty. So I'm concentrating on picture books now. I always liked picture-making better than story-making, anyway. When I was picture-book age, I never thought about growing up to be a book illustrator, the way I did in fifth grade. No, as I recall, when I was four years old I wanted to be a pirate. But I was just as demanding then, where books were concerned, as I was six or seven years later. I disliked The Little Engine That Could and loved Millions of Cats (both Putnam). Which is to say that I loved books that didn't preach, weren't dishonest, and never sounded earnest.

As I said before, I know now that I was not unique. So when I remember myself as the kind of child I really was, I know I am describing, to a very large extent, all children. I will conclude with a quote about the child within, from The Rebel Angels by Canadian writer Robertson Davies, which says it better than anyone else ever said it.

'What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you -- that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, "Doesn't he look peaceful?" It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.'

On writing and celebrity
The point I'm trying to make is that storytellers and picture-makers had better not get themselves confused with their product.

We'd better not believe that we ourselves are some kind of beacon to readers. If something we have created somehow becomes a beacon, then we'd better remember it didn't do that all by itself. It had a whole lot of help from teachers and librarians. It would not, in fact, have attracted even a dimwitted night moth, let alone a bright fifth-grader, if someone hadn't held it up to be seen. People say a lot of nice things to me about Tuck Everlasting (Farrar), and I'm grateful for every word. But the fact is that I know perfectly well, from the letters I get from the children themselves, that very few of them would ever get past chapter two without a gentle but firm push from their teachers.

So here's where I stand on all this: Pictures and stories can be wonderful, and life would be very dreary without them. We are lucky to be living at a moment in time when there is a great accumulated wealth of good books for our children. But so great is the accumulated wealth, that, finally, those of us who are making the new stories and the new pictures don't matter. I will repeat that: we don't matter. Childhood is so brief — so achingly brief and there isn't nearly enough time for the children to get around to what's already there for them to look at and to read. If there were no new pictures and stories for the next fifty years, children would notice no lack at all. Think about it. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is still going strong after 128 years; Treasure Island after 110. The Wind in the Willows is eighty-five years old; Winnie-the-Pooh is sixty-seven; Millions of Cats (Putnam) is sixty-five; and Mary Poppins is fifty-nine. Even Charlotte's Web (Harper), which somehow seems new, is forty-one years old this year, and Where the Wild Things Are (Harper) is thirty. I'm not saying that we want the children to know only the older, proven books, but on the other hand we don't want them to miss those books, either. So we don't need the four or five thousand new books that make their appearance every year. We simply don't need them.

So no one should try to make celebrities out of us.

On using children's books for moral instruction
I don't believe in using fiction to teach anything except the appreciation of fiction. At least, not to children. It seems to me that there is enough difficulty getting them to read in the first place, and the more lessons you clog up reading with, the more of a lesson you make of it. Book discussions are a good thing because everyone needs help in learning to read critically -- or, perhaps I should say, in learning to .think critically. And if a given piece of fiction deals with a particular problem of being human, then it is only natural that the problem be dealt with in the discussion. I know that Tuck Everlasting suggests some moral problems, and it's perfectly reasonable to talk about those in a book discussion. But, you know, it's interesting to see, from the letters I get, which of those problems really interest the children. Curiously, no child has ever written to me about whether or not Mae Tuck should have killed the man in the yellow suit. They always write about whether or not Winnie Foster should have drunk the spring water and gone off with the fascinating Jesse Tuck. I suppose they feel that the man in the yellow suit, like the Wicked Witch of the West, needed killing, and so it's all right. The killing has bothered some grownups, but the children don't seem to turn a hair over it. They also do not write to me about whether Winnie did the right thing in helping Mae Tuck escape from jail. . . .

I think the single most attractive quality to the stories that have lasted is that their heroes and heroines defy authority and not only get away with it but also create positive and happy endings thereby. To defy authority is to be socially irresponsible, isn't it? But, you see, children are small and surrounded by rules and restrictions and caveats and coercion. Their longing for independence and self-determination is very strong. So is their passion for justice, which they see little enough of, by their lights, in the world around them. If we leave them alone to identify with Alice and with Peter, and with Mary and Colin, and with all the other storybook rebels, we are allowing the books to work the magic of identification, and spread the balm of good therapy on their bruises. A good children's book says to the reader, "Yes, Virginia, you can escape the pinches of your life and, for a little time, make a difference in the world, even if it is only vicarious." If we turn children's stories into handbooks for proper behavior, we will subvert their purpose and destroy their magic, and do the one other thing which is the saddest of all: make of reading a chore, a drag, just another lesson. And when that happens, the joy of reading evaporates. . . .

Yes, our society is messy; yes, our children need to learn to care for each other and to be, in short, socially responsible. But in all our zeal, I hope we can find a way to teach them without destroying more than we create. I hope our teachers will find a way to keep on reading great children's stories aloud in their classrooms for no other reason than the joy those stories will bring. I hope the subsequent book discussions will stick to the questions raised by the stories themselves and not get guided, uncomfortably, down other paths. Because if we weigh the stories down with the baggage of unrelated lessons, they will sink and disappear. And then there will be a lot of lamentation in the children's book section of that great library up in heaven, where, I like to imagine, Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie and E. B. White and Beatrix Potter and Arnold Lobel and Arthur Rackham and Margot Zemach and all the others who have added so much to our lives meet every morning for milk and cookies and have a good time talking shop. A good story is sufficient unto the day. It is complete as it stands. If it has something to teach, let it teach in its own sufficiency. Let it keep its magic and fulfill its purpose. In other words, let it be.

On investing effort

It was . . . the best lesson I learned in four years of college: to wit, you have to work hard to do good work. I had always done what came easily, and what came easily had always been good enough. It was not good enough at Smith, and would never be good enough again.

	All the Small Poems and Fourteen More by Valerie Worth and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Suggested
	Peacock and Other Poems by Valerie Worth and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Suggested

	Tuck Everlasting written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Highly Recommended
	Devil's Storybook written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Recommended
	The Eyes of the Amaryllis written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Recommended
	Jack Plank Tells Tales written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Recommended
	The Search for Delicious written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Suggested
	Kneeknock Rise written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Suggested
	Goody Hall written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt Suggested

It was during the Great War, and my children at home wanted letters from me - and they wanted them with illustrations rather than without. There seemed very little of interest to write to youngsters from the front; the news was either too horrible or too dull. And it was all censored. One thing, however, that kept forcing itself more and more on my attention was the very considerable part the animals were playing in the World War and that as time went on they, too, seemed to become Fatalists.

Oftentimes you would see a cat stalking along the ruins throughout a heavy bombardment, in a town that had been shelled more than once before in that same cat's recollection. She was taking her chances with the rest of us. And the horses, too, learned to accept resignedly and unperturbed the falling of high explosives in their immediate neighborhood. But their fate was different from the men's. However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired of; all the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.

This did not seem quite fair. If we made the animals take the same chances as we did ourselves, why did we not give them similar attention when wounded? But obviously to develop a horse-surgery as good as that of our Casualty Clearing Stations would necessitate a knowledge of horse language.

That was the beginning of the idea: an eccentric country physician with a bent for natural history and a great love of pets, who finally decides to give up his human practice for the more difficult, more sincere, and for him, more attractive therapy of the animal kingdom. He is challenged by the difficulty of the work - for obviously it requires a much cleverer brain to become a good animal doctor (who must first acquire all animal languages and physiologies) than it does to take care of the mere human hypochondriac.

I would like to make it quite clear that I make no claims to be an authority on writing or illustrating for children. The fact that I have been successful merely means that I can write and illustrate in my own way. Whereas, I have always maintained that there is no end to the variety of ways there should be. This would indicate that no one is a real authority, which I think is probably true.

There has always been a tendency to classify children almost as a distinct species. For many years it was a constant source of shock for me to find my writings amongst "Latest Juveniles" or "Leading Juveniles" or some such category.

It does not bother me any more now, but I still do feel that there should be a category of "Seniles" to offset the epithet.

There are two points which I wish to bring out as of primary importance in writing for children.

First, the writing must be entertaining and nothing may be allowed to interfere with or sacrifice that entertainment. There is never any excuse for "putting over" a preachment under the guise of entertainment. The main trouble with children's books is that many writers and many publishers feel that because they are catering to young minds that pretty much anything will do. They don't admit that, of course, but it's true just the same.

Another trouble with the average writing for children is that authors always seem to think they must "write down" to them. I have found that the intelligent children (and I am afraid that the intelligent children are the only kind I am interested in) resent nothing so much as being written down to. Which, of course, is very natural. We adults resent also, if we think a superior intellect is patronizing us. What the intelligent child likes is being "written up" to. He wants promotion; he wants to get into the adult world; he wants progress; and I have always maintained and always will maintain that there is no idea too subtle, no picture too difficult to be conveyed to a child's mind, if the author will but find the proper language to put it in.

Another thing I have always maintained is that there should be just as many kinds of stories and books for children as there are for grown-ups. I have often quoted my daughter's interest when at the age of five, she learned her mother had just returned from an employment bureau, where she had gone to hire a cook. Elizabeth wanted to know all about it. She was looking forward, no doubt, to the time when she would hire a cook (the poor child did not realize, of course, that by the time she would be grown up, there would not be any more cooks, but that's neither here nor there). Well, I have never seen a story for children about an employment agency, but after all, why not? It is really pathetic that the majority of writers for children feel that the only material children are interested in is pussy-cats and puppy-dogs. When really there is nothing in the whole wide world that they are not interested in.

This is proved by the fact that, when ever a book is a real success for children, it is also a success and an enjoyment for grown-ups. If writers would only get away from this classifying of children as a separate species, we would get very much better books for the younger generation. For who shall say where the dividing line lies, that separates the child from the adult? Practically all children want to be grown up and practically all grown-ups want to be children, and God help us, the adults, when we have no vestige of childhood in our hearts.

	The Story of Dr. Dolittle by Hugh Lofting Highly Recommended
	The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting Highly Recommended
	Porridge Poetry by Hugh Lofting Suggested

Diane Dillon on seeing a new work "It was realistic - the subtle shadows of the pins in the cloth and the way the folds were done gave it an extraordinary three-dimensional quality. I was immediately overcome by two feelings: 'I'm in over my head,' and 'Here's a challenge I must meet.' The painting was Leo's , and to this day, his work sets a standard for me."

Leo Dillon: "One day I noticed a painting hanging on the wall at a student exhibition. It was a painting of a chair - an Eames chair - and I knew it had to be by a new student because nobody in our class at the time could paint like that. . . . This artist knew perspective, which is one of the most difficult things a beginner has to learn. . . . This artist was a whole lot better than I. I figured I'd better find out who he was. He was Diane."

We believe in magic. To sit down with a blank piece of paper and see scenes and characters take form . . . it is magic. There's a voice inside guiding, saying "no, that's not right . . .change that line . . . add a bit here . . . take away there . . . ."

Children accept these things. As adults we lose the faith. The best things come when we let go and accept the guidance from that voice. Maybe that's why we love children's books . . . knowing that they (the children) will understand the zany logic and eagerly accept the impossible.

We came to children's books after many years of adult book jackets, album covers, and advertising art, and found a freedom we didn't know before. When doing a book or record cover, everything must be summed up in a single picture. In a children's book there are pages and pages to build an idea - to add nuances and visual comments.

There are many levels of recognition and understanding. A book can be read again and again with new discoveries: expressions and details that were missed the first time will be discovered the second or third or fourth time.

It has been a form of magic in working together as one artist, and we created a third artist. What takes form on paper is a surprise to both of us and something neither of us would have come up with individually.

	Why Mosquitoes Buzz in Peoples Ears by Verna Aardema and illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon Recommended
	Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions by Margaret Musgrove and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Recommended
	Switch on the Night by Ray Bradbury and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Recommended
	To Every Thing There Is a Season illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Recommended
	The Hundred-penny Box by Sharon Bell Mathis and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Who's in Rabbit's House? by Verna Aardema and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Honey, I Love, and Other Love Poems by Eloise Greenfield and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Aida by Leontyne Price and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks by Katherine Paterson and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	The Girl Who Spun Gold by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Two Little Trains by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Dream by Susan V. Bosak and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Where Have You Been? by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Mansa Musa by Khephra Burns and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Jazz on a Saturday Night written and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Mother Goose Numbers on the Loose illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Rap a Tap Tap written and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Earth Mother by Ellen Jackson and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested

	20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Recommended
	The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Many Thousand Gone by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Her Stories by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested
	Between Heaven and Earth by Norman Howard and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Suggested

Mommy Mantras by Bethany E. Casarjian and Diane Dillon Possible

Writers of my kind try to unriddle the world through fantasy. In the childhood of mankind, this was the job of myth. Once we human beings began to think, we tried to make sense of this beautiful puzzling perilous place we live in, and so we began to invent stories. . .

In all cultures of the earth the myths developed, to deal with the five great mysteries that we still try to understand today: life, death, time, good, and evil. The myths are the archetypal stories, the basis for everything that's come after them. You learned about them in grade school: all the earliest beliefs, that great splendid stew of Greek and Roman, Norse and Celtic, Apollo and Zeus and Venus and Mars and Thor and Loki, and on, and on. And you were taught to use the word mythical to mean unreal. But though myth, like its grandchild fantasy, may not be real, it is true.

Today's educated adult doesn't give a great deal of thought to the myths. He or she may have religious beliefs, depending on faith rather than on reason, but in general prefer fact to metaphor. The last two hundred years have seen such an explosion of discovery and knowledge that we've come to feel science and technology will solve all the riddles, in the end. Problem-solving and unriddling, however, are not quite the same thing. . . .

. . . If you ask yourself rational straightforward questions about a story or an image, you can find yourself facing a blank wall. A storyteller has to be irrational, indirect, in order to help young readers cope with this eternally puzzling world – because facts alone are not going to resolve the riddles for them, not without the help of the imagination.

. . . The riddle of good and evil is at the heart of nearly all the fantasy novels read by children not only in this middle range, but on into adolescence; we aren't thinking about sex all the time even when we're sixteen. These are times when story is particularly valuable, to stretch the muscles of the imagination. It teaches without intending to. God forbid that it should be consciously didactic; a lot of the Victorians wrote perfectly terrible didactic books that must have bored children rigid. But inevitably in writing fantasy we show good, we show evil, we show the powers of each – and, I suppose, we show how to choose. And the young reader is paying attention simply because he – or she – is, like us, inside the story. He's more completely inside this kind of story than an adult can be. It's not that we lose touch with our imaginations when we grow up, but by then experience has hardened our opinions, assumptions, beliefs, and to some extent they get in the way. The young reader hasn't any of these; he's still looking, questing. And inside the story, the quest of the hero is a metaphor for the reader's quest for adulthood.

The Magician's Boy by Susan Cooper and illustrated by Serena Riglietti Suggested

	Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper Highly Recommended
	The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper Highly Recommended
	Greenwitch by Susan Cooper Highly Recommended
	The Grey King by Susan Cooper Highly Recommended
	Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper Recommended
	Dawn of Fear by Susan Cooper and illustrated by Margery Gill Suggested
	The Boggart by Susan Cooper Suggested
	The Boggart and the Monster by Susan Cooper and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman Suggested
	King of Shadows by Susan Cooper Suggested
	Green Boy by Susan Cooper Suggested
	Victory by Susan Cooper Suggested
	The Seeker by Susan Cooper Suggested

I would like to remind adults of joy, now obsolete, and I would like to encourage children to use and trust their senses for themselves at first hand - their ears, eyes and noses, their fingers and soles of their feet, their skins and their breathing, their muscular joy and rhythms and heartbeats, their instinctive loves and pity and awe of the unknown.

	The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston and illustrated by Peter Boston Highly Recommended
	Treasure of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston and illustrated by Peter Boston Recommended
	The River at Green Knowe by L. M. Boston and illustrated by Peter Boston Recommended
	A Stranger at Green Knowe by L. M. Boston and illustrated by Peter Boston Recommended
	An Enemy at Green Knowe by L. M. Boston Recommended
	The Stones Of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston and illustrated by Peter Boston Recommended

As a child, reading meant more to me than drawing, and when I grew older, reading became my favorite pastime.

When I was ten, we moved back to Toronto where I went to the Saturday morning classes at the art gallery. There we were never told how to draw, but were encouraged to draw things as we felt them. While in high school, I went to art classes taught by a sympathetic and encouraging teacher, and, as a result, my interest in sketching and painting grew.

After high school I went to the University of Toronto and majored in art history, with the vague idea of museum work or teaching as a career. I never considered I might become an artist until one summer when I worked in the display department of a large store. The artists working there were encouraged to paint freely and expressively. It was exciting to do big canvases and for the first time I began to think of myself as a creative artist.

	Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Highly Recommended
	The Storm Book by Charlotte Zolotow and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Recommended
	Harry and the Lady Next Door by Gene Zion and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Recommended
	Harry by the Sea by Gene Zion and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Recommended
	Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham Recommended