A New Sendak Book

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Fans of the children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, myself included, are eagerly awaiting his new book.

Now, of course, he died in 2012, but the director of the Maurice Sendak Foundation was going through some of his old files last year and found an unpublished manuscript that Sendak had worked on with his longtime collaborator, Arthur Yorinks.

And the book is called Presto and Zesto in Limbo Land.

And it’s illustrated.

How great is that, right?

So the book itself was in limbo land for about 30 years, and it was just tucked in a drawer and forgotten.

But the great news is it’s coming out next year.

It’s going to be published.

Nice.

And, you know, in Sendak’s last televised interview, he was asked about writing for children.

And what he said was, I don’t write for children. I write and somebody says, that’s for children.

And that reminded me of a quotation that I saw from E.B. White, the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web.

E.B. White said on the topic of writing for children, anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time.

You have to write up, not down.

Children are demanding.

They’re the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.

They accept almost without question anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.

I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse boy, and they accepted it without a quiver.

In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.

And I’m sure that you can appreciate that as well, right, Grant?

I mean, you read a lot of children’s literature.

We do.

And my son is very accepting of things.

And that honesty part in there, that’s the most important thing to him.

There have been some books that we’ve read, and I won’t tell you the title because I don’t want to ruin it for you.

But there was one where 99% of it was a pretty great story about a bunch of kids in New York City having typical kid dramas and kind of conflicts with parents in school and so forth.

And then at the very end, it turns out it’s all about time travel.

And he was so angry at that book.

Oh, yeah.

He felt so cheated that the signs weren’t there for him.

There wasn’t the signal that this was going to be that kind of book.

I think you have to leave the trail for them.

Right.

I think it’s about respecting your reader, right?

Presenting it honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.

Clearly.

Yeah.

White was also asked, do you change gears?

Do you shift gears to write for children?

He said, if you shift gears, you’re going to strip your gears writing for children.

You’ve got to be honest.

So the books we enjoy, for example, we’re currently reading the third book in the Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials series.

This is a hard book.

It’s a lot of big words.

It’s stuff that we don’t necessarily understand on the first read.

But my son’s into it.

Oh, really?

Because he feels like, it’s the taste of the world to come where I will be an adult and people will challenge me like this all the time.

Oh, super cool.

Well, speaking of to come, I can’t wait for the new Marty Sendak book.

Outstanding.

Tell us about the books that you’re reading, what you like about them, and share the particularly wonderful passages.

Send them to words@waywordradio.org or call the voicemail 877-929-9673.