One thing that I love about Enchanted Lion’s books is that it feels like you’re treating children as “adult” enough to deal with serious topics, but on the flip side, also giving teens and adults permission to enjoy the levity and the joy of a picture book, which I think is a rare perspective.
I think we are definitely trying to do that, taking kids seriously enough, and respecting them and their complexity as human beings enough to give them really rich fare, but also knowing and understanding that we as human beings need to play and need to express in all kinds of open and free ways as we do in play throughout our lives.
I’m interested in what your philosophy is on the stories we tell, and read, and listen to over the course of our lives, and how that evolves, and how you think it should evolve.
That’s something we talk a lot about in this office and as a collective. Of course, like any publisher, we’re going to say that we think you have to tell good and well thought out stories. But I think beyond that, we do have a working philosophy of child development that frames our ideas around children and childhood, and that while children are obviously full fledged human beings, with big antennas, and very aware of everything that’s around them and capable of complexity, they are in no way adults and in no way capable of adult understanding. And a lot of our ability to process and fathom and consider what happens to us as adults is because we’ve had the life experience to get us to that point, to conceptualize and think in certain ways, and children don’t have that life experience to draw on.
So when we think about telling stories to children, we think about really reaching them where they are. We talk about how if you’re seven years old, you’ve been on the planet for 84 months, and that’s not a very long time. And so you don’t have all these programmed-in ideas as to what a good story is, or what a suitable subject matter is, or what good content is.
As adults, we can get all hung up and think, “Is this a good book for kids?” Or, “Oh, it’s such an unusual style of illustration,” or, “It doesn’t look like all this other illustration.” But kids aren’t thinking that way because everything is new to them, and they’re open to the newness of things, and just full of wonder about stuff. They’re just looking at it and they’re feeling their way into it. And if they like it, they like it, and if they don’t, they don’t.
I think children have to be invited into wonder, and a sense of possibility, and really given a sense of the goodness of the world, because that is what makes us want to claim our autonomy and become actors in the world. If from the youngest age you’re fed problems and issues, and the world seems to be a place that is dark and limiting and problematic, and nothing works, and you have to go out and be an activist and change it all, I don’t actually believe that that’s how you become an activist.
I think kids need a huge supply of beauty and wonder and engagement, and being invited into curiosity, and being invited to think about things, and being invited into ethical frameworks where they have to really begin to sort out what is good and what isn’t good, and how do we judge that, and how do we negotiate feelings we have about things that are different or unfamiliar. And if kids do that over the first many years of their life, they will become positive actors in the world, and they will have a compass for knowing what is good and not good, and being able to make judgements, and being able to go out and fight for things and defend things. But I would say as a publisher, we really try to envelop kids in beautiful books and ideas that are not just programmatic or pedantic about the role they should be playing in the world, but about being curious and open and expressive, and witnessing stuff.
Whereas with adults, like in our Unruly books, we would be offering material in a way that reaches the kind of experience we have had by the time we’re in our teens or twenties, and with broken hearts, and love affairs, and maybe the deep darkness of existence in a certain profound way that we can think through as adults.
What benefit do you see in offering a picture book format to older audiences?
Yeah, I guess that’s the question of Unruly, really: If we’re given so much rich fare to read as adults, why do we need illustrated books? I guess our contention is that stories told in part through pictures engage us in a completely different way. When we’re given a story that invites us into a visual narrative, we will linger over that and we will engage with that in a way that is much more emotionally toned, much more intuitive, and we can’t settle on our interpretation quite as quickly. And every time we go back to the book, we may look at that image and actually have another feeling or idea about it, and that’s going to then inform our reading of the story. We’re just immediately caught up in nuance and ambiguity.
And life is a lot like that, where you can’t always string things together, and you’re just living in the presence of all kinds of things that you maybe can’t make immediate meaning of, and yet they’re presented to you in a way that makes you feel something, and maybe intuit or understand something, but you can’t even put it into words. I think when we stop engaging with images in that way, we actually are cutting ourselves off from something that speaks to us in a whole other language from words alone. I think adults need that material to play with and engage with, and to move along some different feeling paths and creative paths in our own lives.
I’m curious what the most unexpected or challenging part of making content for children has been for you?
I think the most challenging part is working with the creators of the books. We all are blocked in certain ways, and we’re all open in certain ways, and sometimes I might see some shape to a story, or feel like something has to plumb the depths of something in a certain way, but the author or the illustrator doesn’t see it the same way.
It really does become a deep question as to, well, what is our idea of children and childhood? What do we think it is to make a book for kid readers? What is your philosophy of life? And it’s completely fascinating and always eye-opening, and, of course, my role is to make space for those who are creating the books. I don’t try to legislate that or over art direct. But to negotiate all of that complex material can be very challenging sometimes. And sometimes it’s possible to end up working with someone incredibly talented, and someone who has a wonderful vision, but their sense of what it is to tell a story to children, and our sense as a team in this office might depart from each other. And that’s something that we then have to really try to mine and navigate, and then embrace. It’s always a journey of discovery, and it can get complicated at times.
How do you choose which writers and illustrators to collaborate with?
For many of the early years of Enchanted Lion, we were doing a lot of books in translation. And so that was acquiring books that were already made in other countries and languages. I would go to the Bologna Book Fair, or go to the Frankfurt Book Fair, or look at publisher catalogs, look online, do research. And in a way, that was a matter of my own taste or curiosity. And then through that, slowly but surely, people would submit stuff to us or agents would start contacting us, and we started originating books.
Our door is pretty open, and we’re always looking to do books that are suitably complex and nuanced for kids, and respectful of kids and their intelligence. We also have a very strong point of view on the physical book and its materiality, and not making books to be—as part of our vast consumer society—just consumed and lost and destroyed, but books that manifest the kind of material qualities that we think are important, that we think belong to books, that we think add value to the reading experience, and benefit the art and the story.
Can you talk a little bit more about how that materiality influences the reading experience, and what kinds of things you’re thinking about when you’re dealing with the physical size, shape, and paper for a book?
Yeah. I think if you have a book that has really thin paper, or shiny, or if the colors are pretty dull, and it’s not tactile, and it doesn’t really assert itself as a material object that you’re curious about in its own right, then I don’t think you’re going to engage with it as thoughtfully or with as much pleasure as you will if it does have those aspects. I’m not saying that I think kids need those to love a book, but we’re not just doing it for the kid reader; I think it also communicates to all of the adults, the book buyers at independent bookstores, the parents, the caretakers, the teachers, the librarians, and to the society at large, that books are valuable, that books are precious, that books are something that should be cared for, and that actually we should be thoughtful about the materials that make them, and maybe not make endless numbers of them, make fewer and smaller numbers of them, but to have some regard to the materials from our very beautiful world that we’re using to make these books.
You mentioned books in translation and I know you publish books from around the world. How does that impact the types of stories you tell?
I think by publishing books in translation and from other countries that we actually end up sharing very different kinds of stories that are a different kind of narrative and reading experience, offering different ideas to kids because the narrative conventions and the picture book conventions that we have here are not the conventions of many other countries. So, for example, whether it’s Mexico or France, you’ll see in both those countries that the narrative tradition is not our beginning, middle, and end, that they tend to tell much more open-ended stories for kids, or they tell stories that are much more episodic, where it’s just moving through experience and observation, but it doesn’t have a dramatic moment. It doesn’t have a climax. It doesn’t open and close in the way a story here typically would.
And then other countries definitely can tend to have a more open attitude to sexuality or to, if not quite sexuality, a kind of physical eros in books for kids, or will just take up topics such as death and loss, or abandonment, or migration, or homelessness in ways in that we don’t, or we’re not that comfortable taking up.
It’s not that kids need to even know, “Oh, this is a book in translation,” which is nice if they do, because then they can think about that factor. But even if that’s not shared with the child reader, they still will be getting a different kind of narrative structure, often a very different kind of visual mark making and composition than they would be getting if their entire experience were around mainstream American picture books.
Claudia Bedrock Recommends:
Walking: I walk everyday; walk in all weathers; walk when I’m tired and when I’m not; I walk without my phone; I pay attention, but also allow myself to go blank. The motion sets my mind free and stuff flows. Even if the body is only walking, not flying, there is a kind of flight!
I give myself over to thinking about complexity. When I remember how complex I am, and how true that is for every other person alive and for the world as a whole, it becomes almost impossible to be reactive, reductive, and flattening.
I find that life feels more spacious, full, and satisfying when I keep it analog in a thousand small ways and don’t allow everything to be reduced to the digital flatline.
Poetry! Rilke, Elizabeth Alexander, Paul Celan, Mary Oliver. I love starting the day with a poem. The ritual is a shower that’s very hot, then very, very cold, then dark, strong coffee and a poem, and this keeps me on course even when true trouble abounds.
Beethoven’s late work is so incredible and so out there, it’s always astonishing. The blues! So many different voices and people. Why do so many of the things that break our hearts remind us of joy?
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Kate Silzer.
Kate Silzer | Radio Free (2023-03-31T07:00:00+00:00) Publisher Claudia Zoe Bedrick on holding onto wonder. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/31/publisher-claudia-zoe-bedrick-on-holding-onto-wonder/
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