Barry Yourgrau

It’s been getting up early and whatever but it’s been fun because I don’t usually go to kid’s bookstores. They’ve been taking me to schools. I did my shtick to 200 seventh graders.

No but it’s not that different. What was interesting was that I had some of these stories that I thought were delightful such as the one about the boy who picks his nose and it turns into this monstrous worm and stuff. I say the opening line and all the teachers kind of grin “Ooh, yuck!” So it’s been interesting.

Absolutely! That’s what it is! It’s for everyone and it’ll be a series. The next one comes out as a novel next spring. But it will be a short novel. It will also have some pages in it that’ll turn to Manga Comics for a bit. They told me, “You just keep going. You go as far as you want and we’ll call you back.”

Exactly, it’s like beyond Roald Dahl. The amazing thing is that I thought that boys would get this particularly but people bring their little eight year-old daughters with them and they love it too. They like all the nasty stuff. Someone said, “What’s the difference between writing for an adult and writing for a kid?” An adult author also writes for kids said, “The difference is this: I write the same way I write for kids as I write for adults except better.”

Indeed, the book is upside down when you open it. It’s covered with fingerprints so it looks nasty and grubby. It’s got the spine the wrong way around so it’s quite an object. I sometimes go into bookstores and say to people, “Hey wait a minute! This book is upside down!” We have fun in the ways as we can.

Haven’t had time for that but that’s something to do. I sometimes hand the book to people and say “Tell me if you figure out what’s wrong with this.” Some people say, “I can’t figure out how to open this book!” The problem of dyslexia never leaves us.

It was the publisher’s idea to do it and I thought it might have been a little gimmicky and they said, “No, we want to communicate to people that the book is not a normal book. That there’s something special going on here, something strange.” People get it right away. Kids like authors to just be themselves. They don’t like kids’ books where authors write down to kids. Some things are obviously inappropriate for kids but people would rather push the envelope than not push the envelope and they really respond to a sense of authenticity.” Maurice Sendak said something that rang really interesting. He said, “I just write what I write. They can call it kids stuff, they can call it whatever. This is just what reflects my mind.” The guy who translates my books in Japanese said it was a real interesting challenge in translating one of my books, Wearing Dad’s Head, because the narrator’s in the first person but keeps switching between child and adult sort of seamlessly and in Japanese the word for “I” for a kid and the word for “I” for an adult are two different words. He had to figure out how to do it and he finally just stuck with adult.

Lemony Snicket had an immense effect on all this stuff but don’t forget Lemony Snicket works out of a tradition and I’ve always been a part of that. People have always been bringing up Roald Dahl’s name for my adult work, which is great. Quite honestly, I’ve never read any Roald Dahl until finally my editor said, “Look, you got to read Roald Dahl.”

The Twilight Zone was a big influence on this book. It’s like Twilight Zone for kids and there’s a writer who really influenced The Twilight Zone besides Roald Dahl called John Collier, an adult author. It’s all part of the same fantastical funny thing and Lemony Snicket just really pushed that through and opened it up hugely.

I would love to. One of the things I want to do is work up like a little one man show of it. I’d love to see something like a kids’ Twilight Zone. I think the next book; The Curse of the Tweakies would make a terrific movie.

They all come out of a similar world but they’re not. Some kid asked me yesterday, “Does the book finally get to a point?” Yeah the book finally gets to the point where it tells a self-referential story about an impoverished writer of exquisite literary fiction who decides “What the heck, I’ll start writing for kids strictly for money.” It goes on from there. It comes together quite nicely in the end.

No and what’s great when you work short is that you get to really fiddle around with how a narrative works. Sometimes they do the three act thing, sometimes they end right at the beginning, sometimes they end right in the middle and what’s good about that is it strikes a gong and your own mind fills in the resonances.

The opening story is about a kid whose parents announce that they’re really just too cool for him and they’re not his parents because he’s just a schlub so out the door he goes. When they hear my voice reading the stuff, then they understand where it’s coming from. When they see the wink in the eye, then they know what it’s about. If they just read it flat, it looks horrendous. There’s this one story I wrote about a little panda bear that is actually an axe murderer, it’s a trained assassin and the kids are clamming for that story. “Will you read the panda story?” I said, “Well, why do you like that story? It’s kind of nasty and violent” and they said, “Oh yeah it’s because it’s so strange!”

They approached Neil and I think he knew my work so he was generous and supportive. Patrick I’ve known for a long time. Patrick and I both came out of sort of the same circles in Manhattan in the mid 80’s.

Well that’s the one thing you have to back away from. I said to my editor, “I should leave sex out, right?” They said, “Do whatever you want and we’ll tell you if it’s too much but my sense is that if the book is for 9-12 year-olds.” I love writing about sex but it’s not appropriate for kids. I have a story about two people who are brace wearers and fall in love and their braces lock together when they kiss and they decide to stay that way until something terrible happens. So I get into “smoochy smoochy” stuff but nothing more substantial.

I developed this one project which is strictly in Japan where there are stories I wrote that are broadcast over cell phones. When I was over there a couple of years ago I noticed that everyone was surfing the internet on their cell phones. It’s a super evolved internet cell phone culture and I said to my editors over there, “Why don’t we serialize stories over cell phones?”

No they’re text stories. It was great. People loved it and my editor thought they were spectacular and they were really short but again allowing you to monkey with how a narrative works.

No but for a while I worked on this project with [Monster’s Ball director] Mark Forster. I knew Mark just when he was making Monster’s Ball and so we decided we’d work on a movie together because he liked my stuff. We both realized we really love gangster films. So I wrote up this gangster film but it was my first script ever so it suffered but I thought it was terrific I think Mark looked at it and thought “What the hell is this thing!?” It’s just too much. But what’s interesting is this next NASTYbook I wrote called The Curse of the Tweedies in a certain way, is a better of version of that script. It’s a more effective, better written, clearer version. It’s as whacky as that script. The script is called Toothache and it’s about a gangster who has a bad tooth and he goes to get it treated and all hell breaks loose.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck