I think kids are the best audience for serious literary fiction.” “Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can, and that’s why I love writing for kids. It’s this little bit of fiction that’s colonized the real world.”Īs he spoke, I found myself transported to an old, forgotten doorway.Ī good book is a secret door, Mac explained. “You can’t find the seams on the fiction and I love that. “The joke isn’t a joke,” Mac said of these created writing spaces of 825 National. Not his cleverness but quite the opposite: the seriousness of his pursuit. Something about his manner was remarkable. With my infant daughter asleep in my arms, I listened to Mac talk about making books for children and drawing the fictional world into his early work at the writing nonprofit 826 Valencia (where classes famously take place in a room behind their Pirate Supply Store).
I learned about the hidden life of giant sunfish, befriending stress, book cover design, power poses, anything to distract myself and it was in that endless parade of ideas that I stumbled upon a 2014 TEDx Talk by Mac Barnett entitled “Why a Good Book is a Secret Door.” To escape the loneliness, I immersed myself in TED Talks. The strangeness of both experiences left me feeling isolated, lost in a persistent figurative and literal fog that rolled through the city each afternoon. I was first introduced to children’s book author Mac Barnett six years ago when I was a new mother and a new transplant to the Bay Area.
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