Writer Jon Scieszka lets boys be boys

By Jennifer Miller, Special to the Rocky

Published October 2, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Jon Scieszka's humor has been called wacky, irreverent and subversive, but whatever you call it, one thing is certain: The best-selling author knows what makes kids laugh. Just ask his legions of young fans.

For Scieszka, humor is more than fun, it's a mission. The author of the 1993 Caldecott Honor-winning The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales wants to get kids reading again by showing them that books are as cool to have around as iPods and Wiis.

A former teacher, Scieszka saw early on that boys lag behind girls in reading. In 2001, he founded the nonprofit Web site GuysRead.com to call attention to boys' literacy. Recently, the Library of Congress and Children's Book Council named him the inaugural National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, a two-year appointment to reach hesitant readers.

We caught up with the charismatic 54-year-old as he was promoting his latest book, Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Mostly True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka, a collection of boyhood anecdotes.

Was there a defining moment in childhood when you thought, "I want to be a writer"?

There are a couple of those moments, actually. . . . One was definitely having my mom read books to me like Go, Dog, Go! or Green Eggs and Ham. I just thought those books were so cool and funny and imagined trying to do that myself. And the other is actually a story in Knucklehead about when the nun asked me in religion class, "What's so funny, Mr. Scieszka?" I just thought, "You know, it's really entertaining making people laugh. I'd rather do that than get a good grade in class."

With six boys in your family, there was no shortage of guy humor, and I got the impression that your parents understood that boys will be boys.

Yeah, definitely.

Yet you were educated by nuns and later went to military school, both very strict environments. I'm wondering, how did going from one to the other influence you?

Whoa, that's actually a great question. You know our house was pretty organized just because there were so many of us, and I loved that my parents just really let us be the people we were, and I think I always carried that with me. . . . I think it was just that strength of knowing, "Oh, I can do what they ask me to do. That doesn't change who I am. I can still be Jon." But I think what I learned from being in Catholic school and the military academy is that don't call too much attention to yourself.

Whereas today, you call a lot of attention to yourself.

Yeah, exactly. I think (at home) is where I honed that skill. . . . In a big family like that, you had to kind of count on your talents to survive, like tell a good joke and grab a chicken leg when everyone else was laughing.

How are kids reacting to your book?

They just love it. I love to read my stuff before it's published . . . like The Stinky Cheese Man. I read those stories for years and really honed them because when you read stuff aloud to an audience, it's just dramatically different than when you're sitting in your office writing . . . so I took them around. I was down in North Carolina last year reading to all 3,000 kids in the county over a couple of days. . . . It was just so much fun because the newspapers came, and it was a big deal and one little kid just gave the greatest quote. He said, "I thought the author would be more serious." He was just flabbergasted that I could be up there talking about peeing on electric heaters or crossing swords (dueling with urine streams) with all my brothers.

The subtitle, Tall Tales & Mostly True Stories, suggests not everything is quite as it happened. So I must ask you . . .

Well, you know what, that's the funny (thing). Most of it is not really that exaggerated at all. I did that more to protect myself from my older brother who is a lawyer and my mom who claims none of that happened. She's outnumbered by all the brothers. Actually, all of those are true. The one that's probably a compilation of things is the one my mom claims never happened, the cat puking in the car. She said, "We would never take a cat." But we definitely all crammed in (for) a car trip . . . and there was a time when someone puked in the car and it started this awful chain reaction.

You recall exploding model airplanes with firecrackers. Now those were different times. Today, playing with fire is so taboo.

Definitely. . . . I was talking to a neighbor about this yesterday, just how we grew up. If we did the same things today that our parents did, I think people would take you in for abusing your children or not taking care of them (laughs.) And I think we grew up better for some of that, for not being hovered over and not being watched all the time.

My son noticed that you rarely seemed to get scolded. Did you ever go too far?

I think the only time my brother and I went too far, we were . . . playing around with matches in the park across from our house. And we thought we had put them all out, but they somehow caught part of a tree on fire and we had left and the neighbor had to call the Fire Department. Well, I guess it wasn't that big, but it looked huge to us, and my mom discovered it because we cleverly went home and changed our clothes. We never changed clothes. What 10-year-old boy ever changes his clothes in the middle of the day? She found these smoky clothes in the clothes hamper and said, "What's going on with you guys and what's going on with that fire engine out there?"

With all the Harry Potters and interactive books, there seems to be plenty of great material for kids. Why the decline in reading, especially among boys?

I think a lot of it is just adapting reading to ways that engage boys because our school system is definitely set up in ways that doesn't engage boys right from the beginning. . . . There has been this whole trend of testing and making school more and more academic, younger and younger. . . . Then boys, I think, start to see reading as just a school assignment. . . . I like to recommend to people that they really expand their notion of what reading is because that's another thing I find in school. We assign fiction, fiction, fiction and then tell kids to do a report on something, but nonfiction is not really valued. Humor, hardly ever. Science fiction, not really, though now it's nice with the rise of Harry Potter. . . .

There is that book out there for every kid, I really believe it, that just sparks their interest and really makes them want to become a reader.

Some say your books are too sophisticated for kids, yet you say it's more often adults who don't get them. Why do you think that is?

I get letters from kids explaining jokes in my own books to me. It's that classic boy thing of telling you what's funny to them. Some of it is just a sense of humor that people are born with, but from all the stuff I've ever read, it's just amazing what a sophisticated skill that humor is. I think that's what initially freaked some people out, when I first took around The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. They honestly didn't think kids would understand that. . . . But the kids do get it, especially on a graphic level.

Any theories as to why?

That's the beauty of the kids' mind and why I just love writing and hanging out with them. Anything's possible. They're so fresh to the world. They're just shaping their world. It's entirely possible that there really is a little man made out of cheese.

Jennifer Miller is a freelance writer living in Thornton.

Jon Scieszka

* What: Appears Sunday,noon, at the Tattered Cover, Colfax Ave. and Elizabeth St., and 2:30 p.m. at the Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder.

* Cost: Free

* Information: 303-322-7727 (Tattered Cover) and 303-447-2074 (Boulder Book Store).

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