The Stinky Interview

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, and Math Curse are the two latest books to come out of the author/artist team Jon Sciezka and Lane Smith. Both books are hilarious to read and the illustrations are simply amazing. After reading the books I had the chance to interview Jon Sciezka over the phone. He has to be the greatest guy in the world to talk to on the phone, and luckily enough, I managed to record the conversation using old KGB surveillance equipment.

Peak: I read out The Stinky Cheese Man to a bunch of people who grew up on Muppets and too much TV, and they thoroughly enjoyed every story.

Jon: I think that's a good thing

Peak: And I think the favorite was "The Really Ugly Duckling."

Jon: Actually, it's funny but that's the favorite with the little kids too. More often the parents will go "Hmm, I don't know if we should read that one." and they go "Nah, we want that one!"

Peak: I tried to read it to a friend's little girl, she's about three, and she just stared at me. I don't think she had heard the original stories yet.

Jon: Actually, up until about kindergarten, they just listen to it and take it all in saying, "Well, he doesn't seem to know too much, but I'll let him read it."

Peak: Did you have any test groups that you tried these on?

Jon: I think it comes out of teaching Elementary School for about 10 years, and it wasn't exactly out of the teaching, but I was definitely reading that stuff to them. I would go back and bug classes at the school where I used to teach, and my own two kids I always try them out on. I think it's more from hanging out with kids and remembering what they think like.

Peak: So did you plan to put them together as a book, or were they stories that came upon you?

Jon: I had taken a year off from teaching and was just concentrating on getting something, anything published. In fact, they were probably some of the first fairy tales I was goofing around with. But no publishers wanted to touch those when I sent them out.

Peak: I can't see it coming out in any other form than how it was done. The art is excellent.

Jon: Yeah, and I think that was in the design too, and I think that's the tough thing, because if you just read those things in text it's lacking. "The Three Little Pigs: The True Story" was the first one that actually got published, even though it was written afterwards. But it worked out nice that way, since it got our audience up to speed. Publishers included.

Peak: As far as the art goes, how do you think it meshed with stories?

Jon: I'm just thrilled with how perfect it is, because I come out of a more literary, storytelling tradition, where I'd think of the stories as how they'd sound read aloud. Lane, as an artist, is such a great compliment. We're fortunate too in that our designer works really close to us, it's Molly Beach, who's Lane's girlfriend. In fact, that's how we met, because my wife and his girlfriend worked together on magazines as art directors. There's a lot of books in the industry where authors never even meet their illustrators, and just have a passing acquaintance with the designer. They just hand it in and only see the final product, and don't have much input. What's really cool is that Lane and I and Molly hang out and all take turns forming the thing until it works the best it can.

Peak: This looks like it was as much fun to write as anything.

Jon: Yeah, the Stinky Cheese in particular we set up in Lane's studio as a story board for a film, and just stuck papers all over his studio walls. We just fit things together like a puzzle.

Peak: So why the "Stinky Cheese" man?

Jon: I don't know, it's just such a great line. In fact, it got such a great reaction out of kids. My editor saw the whole collection of stories and said "you know what, we've got to have that guy in the title." I had gone out and read it to a bunch of kids while I was visiting schools, and it was the one they always remembered. Or their parents would call up later and ask what was up with this story about the smelly cheese guy. So, we figured we better keep him in the title.

Peak: It's just such a perfect picture too, with the slice of bacon and the olives.

Jon: Yeah, originally we had him in another corner of the page, we wanted to have him melt the entire page and actually cut out the corner of the page. Once the publishers found out they thought "Woo, too expensive."

Peak: You've said before that you disapprove of people "fixing" fairy tales, putting in a politically correct content, or bringing it up to a modern time.

Jon: Not so much the bringing it to modern times, I think the really annoying ones are the people who think that they're doing kids a favor by sanitizing fairy tales. They really end up taking the heart and meaning out of the tales by messing them up. Especially when the take that cloak of righteousness. I thought Stinky Cheese was a good effort just to smash all those conventions, and let kids realize that people have always retold fairy tales, and that everybody changes them to fit their own agenda.

Peak: I read some of the original forms in the Brothers Grimm tales, and they seem, well, pretty grim compared to how I thought they were supposed to go.

Jon: Yeah, they're great tales, and even those are a little altered by the Grimm brothers. They fudged them a little for their sensibilities. Those are just powerful tales that have hung around for a long time. I think that it's nice to get people back to fairy tales, though I thought we might get more of a backlash from teachers and librarians, but there really hasn't been that much. They are way more encouraging, I think that actually, teachers are our best audience because they realize it's a great way to connect kids with those tales.

Peak: Do you see Stinky Cheese Man as a 'modern tales.' or do you see modern fairy tales in a different form?

Jon: It always seems to be just the old tales cloaked in a new guise. The more I read, the stuff I end up reading are the really old tales like the Decameron, and Canterbury Tales, Arabian Knights. It's funny how the stories that really stick around seem like they've been around forever. you rediscover what you thought was really happening modern fiction, and you come to find out it's been done hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Peak: A friend of mine is reading fables from all different cultures, and some of those are amazing for taking the same sort of magical setting and going off in different routes.

Jon: Oh absolutely, that's a gold-mine. That's one of my favorite things to read, along with mathematical and scientific stuff.

Peak: For Math Curse, we tried to read it out loud, but it seems more like something you sit down with and flip to the answers on the back by yourself.

Jon: You know you aren't supposed to look at the answers. Actually, that was a funny book because I had an idea for quite a while. I was trying to think of a way to make a funny math book. I taught a couple years of Elementary school math, and I always really enjoyed math myself, but I saw so many kids who were just tortured by it.

Peak: It always seemed to depend on how good the teacher was.

Jon: Yeah, and that was my experience too. I had some spectacular teachers who would love it when you asked a question like "Why do we need to learn this." They knew their subject so well they could explain how it intertwined with a million other things, and I was just amazed with what a great web it is. So I tried to communicate some of that, just how much fun you can have with math.

Peak: So do you see Math Curse as a textbook or a preliminary math book?

Jon: I was hoping more just to give kids a chance to really goof around with math in a Zen way. I think that's the important part of math, not the answers but the questions. And the great mathematicians have been those guys who were miserable calculators, like Einstein was always known as a real dork in his math classes. He wasn't as terrible as some people say, he got fair grades, but he just had that way of thinking in new ways while other people would keep approaching problems in the same old way. I hope to just shake kids sensibility up, and instead of counting all the people on a bus trying to figure out what the bus drivers name is.

Peak: Do you see any distinction between making something fun and making fun of something?

Jon: That's actually a real fine line. The people who are offended by our stuff always seem to take that pose kind of mindlessly. They just think "Oh my god, these guys are wrecking fairy tales." I heard from a bookstore owner just this last week that this woman came up to him and said she wouldn't buy that book because it's just terrible, it makes fun of math. He told her "not really there's a bunch of math in it, did you read it?" She hadn't even read the thing. It's that kind of knee-jerk thing that really upsets me, and I always ran into that sort of thing in teaching, other teachers would think that I was just having too much fun in my classes. And I think that's how kids learn, they're not going to learn if it's drudgery.

Peak: What ages did you teach?

Jon: I started out as an assistant teacher for first grade, and then over a period of ten years I ranged through all the grades up through eighth, and then I went back to Columbia where I got my Masters in fiction writing. They asked me to return as a sort of guest professor teaching writing for children. Grad students are a lot like second graders, I think. There's not much difference.

Peak: If you were to write a textbook for math, how would you approach it? More like a normal textbook or more like Math Curse?

Jon: That would be a tough one. I think I'd just go hire a bunch of people to write it for me. It's a very tough thing to communicate, just how much entertainment there is in math. In fact, one guy I worked with who was just a great math teacher worked on doing a couple textbooks, and it's funny how it just sucks the life out of the subject when you have to worry about trying to cover every topic and put in drills.

Peak: The way Math Curse seems to work is that it's a whole bunch of little pieces of information, and it seems almost trivia with true facts in the middle of a joke.

Jon: That's what I hoped, that my stuff will always plant little seeds of knowledge, and who knows what they might grow into. If somebody knows about Fibbonacci they might just take off on that or find Fermat's last theorem just hanging out on the chalkboard. They don't have to, but if they notice it that's a great thing.

Peak: What's the worst book you've ever read?

Jon: Ooh, that's a good one. Kid's book or adult book? I think one of the best examples was when I was teaching second grade I was in the middle of some dreadful young adult novel thing we all read together. I had them stop in the middle and said "This is garbage, we can't go on with this," and they were all horrified, all the little guys went "You can't do that!" I told sure, if you don't like it just dump it. You should know why it's not good, but get rid of it. What else... I read bits of Bridges of Madison County, which frightened me to no end. And any children's books where some animal or kid finds that they're "special," and that's the end. That's a whole genre, it's beyond a single book.

Peak: Like all those Disney movies with the "come from behind" sports team?

Jon: That's the equivalent. Gee, do you think they're going to win at the end? Or find themselves?

Peak: So you've done math now, and fairy tales, are you going to try something new for your next one?

Jon: It's kind of funny, Lane and I work great together because we do always hang around and wait to see what comes to us next. We definitely do fight against peoples expectations of whatever else we should do next, because after the "Three Little Pigs" took off, our publisher of course wanted us to retell every fairy tale as a "true story"; the true story of Cinderella, the true story of Snow White, the true story of you name it. They would have had us doing that for the rest of our lives. That's when we did Stinky Cheese and thought "Yeah, we'll really blow then up" and the same thing with Math Curse. We thought it would be nice to break everyone out of the fairy tale expectation. But now, as soon as I finish reading it at a conference people start asking when the Science Curse will be coming out. I haven't really thought of that yet. I ended Math Curse hoping the kids would take off. I get all kinds of mail, and at least once a week I get a Science Curse book that some kid has written, which I think is spectacular.

Peak: There seems to be a difference between these two books, in that Stinky Cheese Man is something for kids who have already seen the original stories, and Math Curse is something kids will read first, be amused by the jokes, and then come across the real math later on and want to learn them that much more.

Jon: Yeah, in some ways though they both work the same, since the more you know the funnier it is. I'm never quite sure about the fairy tales but the older kids definitely get a bigger kick out of it. I think I may have even seen all the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons before I ever read the original Grimm. Those are an influence, along with the Mad magazines and anything with a goofball sense of humor approach. I think that's the market they found unexpectedly, that humor market that transcends all those ages. It surprised us at first that older kids, college kids, or just people with no kids in particular but who liked funny books were picking them up and writing us. These books are for anybody who thinks it's funny. We'll take our laughs wherever we can get them.

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