WEBVTT

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Hi everybody. So my name is Mac.

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My job is that I lie to children,

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but they're honest lies.

NOTE Paragraph

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I write children's books,

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and there's a quote from Pablo Picasso,

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"We all know that Art is not truth.

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Art is a lie that makes us realize truth

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or at least the truth that is 
given us to understand.

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The artist must know the manner whereby

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to convince others of the 
truthfulness of his lies."

NOTE Paragraph

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I first heard this when I was a kid,

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and I loved it,

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but I had no idea what it meant.

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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So I thought, you know what, it's what I'm here

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to talk to you today about, though,

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truth and lies, fiction and reality.

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So how could I untangle

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this knotted bunch of sentences?

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And I said, I've got PowerPoint.
Let's do a Venn diagram.

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["Truth. Lies."]
(Laughter)

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So there it is, right there, boom.

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We've got truth and lies

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and then there's this little space,

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the edge, in the middle.

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That liminal space, that's art.

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All right. Venn diagram. (Laughter) (Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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But that's actually not very helpful either.

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The thing that made me understand

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that quote and really kind of what art,

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at least the art of fiction, was,

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was working with kids.

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I used to be a summer camp counselor.

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I would do it on my summers off from college,

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and I loved it.

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It was a sports summer camp

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for four- to six-year-olds.

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I was in charge of the four-year-olds,

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which is good, because

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four-year-olds can't play 
sports, and neither can I.

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(Laughter)

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I play sports at a four-year-old level,

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so what would happen is the kids would

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dribble around some cones, and then got hot,

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and then they would go sit underneath the tree

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where I was already sitting — (Laughter) —

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and I would just make up stories and tell them to them

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and I would tell them stories about my life.

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I would tell them about how, on the weekends,

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I would go home and I would
spy for the Queen of England.

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And soon, other kids

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who weren't even in my group of kids,

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they would come up to me, and they would say,

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"You're Mac Barnett, right?

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You're the guy who spies for the Queen of England."

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And I had been waiting my whole life for strangers

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to come up and ask me that question.

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In my fantasy, they were svelte Russian women,

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but, you know, four-year-olds —

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you take what you can get in Berkeley, California.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I realized that the stories that I was telling

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were real in this way that was familiar to me

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and really exciting.

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I think the pinnacle of this for 
me — I'll never forget this —

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there was this little girl 
named Riley. She was tiny,

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and she used to always take 
out her lunch every day

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and she would throw out her fruit.

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She would just take her fruit,

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her mom packed her a melon every day,

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and she would just throw it in the ivy

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and then she would eat fruit snacks

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and pudding cups, and I was like, "Riley,

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you can't do that, you 
have to eat the fruit."

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And she was like, "Why?"

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And I was like, "Well, when
you throw the fruit in the ivy,

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pretty soon, it's going to be overgrown with melons,"

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which is why I think I ended up

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telling stories to children and not
being a nutritionist for children.

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And so Riley was like, "That will never happen.

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That's not going to happen."

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And so, on the last day of camp,

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I got up early and I got a big cantaloupe

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from the grocery store

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and I hid it in the ivy,

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and then at lunchtime, I was like,

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"Riley, why don't you go over
there and see what you've done."

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And — (Laughter) —

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she went trudging through 
the ivy, and then her eyes

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just got so wide, and she pointed out this melon

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that was bigger than her head,

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and then all the kids ran over 
there and rushed around her,

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and one of the kids was like, "Hey,

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why is there a sticker on this?"

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(Laughter)

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And I was like, "That is also why I say

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do not throw your stickers in the ivy.

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Put them in the trash can. It
ruins nature when you do this."

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And Riley carried that melon around with her all day,

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and she was so proud.

NOTE Paragraph

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And Riley knew she didn't 
grow a melon in seven days,

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but she also knew that she did,

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and it's a weird place,

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but it's not just a place that kids can get to.

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It's anything. Art can get us to that place.

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She was right in that place in the middle,

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that place which you could call art or fiction.

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I'm going to call it wonder.

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It's what Coleridge called the
willing suspension of disbelief

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or poetic faith,

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for those moments where a
story, no matter how strange,

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has some semblance of the truth,

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and then you're able to believe it.

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It's not just kids who can get there.

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Adults can too, and we get there when we read.

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It's why in two days, people will be

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descending on Dublin to take the walking tour

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of Bloomsday and see everything
that happened in "Ulysses,"

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even though none of that happened.

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Or people go to London and they visit Baker Street

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to see Sherlock Holmes' apartment,

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even though 221B is just a number that was painted

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on a building that never 
actually had that address.

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We know these characters aren't real,

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but we have real feelings about them,

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and we're able to do that.

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We know these characters aren't real,

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and yet we also know that they are.

NOTE Paragraph

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Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can,

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and that's why I love writing for kids.

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I think kids are the best audience

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for serious literary fiction.

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When I was a kid,

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I was obsessed with secret door novels,

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things like "Narnia,"

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where you would open a wardrobe
and go through to a magical land.

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And I was convinced that secret doors really did exist

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and I would look for them and try to go through them.

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I wanted to live and cross over into 
that fictional world, which is —

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I would always just open people's closet doors. 
(Laughter)

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I would just go through my mom's boyfriend's closet,

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and there was not a secret magical land there.

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There was some other weird stuff that
I think my mom should know about.

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(Laughter)

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And I was happy to tell her all about it.

NOTE Paragraph

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After college, my first job was working

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behind one of these secret doors.

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This is a place called 826 Valencia.

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It's at 826 Valencia Street

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in the Mission in San Francisco,

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and when I worked there, there
was a publishing company

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headquartered there called McSweeney's,

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a nonprofit writing center called 826 Valencia,

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but then the front of it

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was a strange shop.

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You see, this place was zoned retail,

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and in San Francisco, they were
not going to give us a variance,

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and so the writer who founded
it, a writer named Dave Eggers,

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to come into compliance 
with code, he said, "Fine,

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I'm just going to build a pirate supply store."

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And that's what he did. (Laughter)

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And it's beautiful. It's all wood.

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There's drawers you can pull out and get citrus

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so you don't get scurvy.

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They have eyepatches in lots of colors,

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because when it's springtime, pirates want to go wild.

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You don't know. Black is boring. Pastel.

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Or eyes, also in lots of colors,

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just glass eyes, depending on how you want

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to deal with that situation.

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And the store, strangely,

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people came to them and bought things,

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and they ended up paying the rent

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for our tutoring center, which was behind it,

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but to me, more important was the fact

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that I think the quality of work you do,

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kids would come and get instruction in writing,

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and when you have to walk this weird, liminal,
fictional space like this to go do your writing,

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it's going to affect the kind of work that you make.

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It's a secret door that you can walk through.

NOTE Paragraph

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So I ran the 826 in Los Angeles,

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and it was my job to build the store down there.

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So we have The Echo Park Time Travel Mart.

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That's our motto: "Whenever
you are, we're already then."

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(Laughter)

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And it's on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

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Our friendly staff is ready to help you.

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They're from all eras,

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including just the 1980s, that guy on the end,

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he's from the very recent past.

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There's our Employees of the Month,

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including Genghis Khan, Charles Dickens.

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Some great people have come up through our ranks.

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This is our kind of pharmacy section.

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We have some patent medicines,

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Canopic jars for your organs,

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communist soap that says,

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"This is your soap for the year."
(Laughter)

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Our slushy machine broke

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on the opening night and 
we didn't know what to do.

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Our architect was covered in red syrup.

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It looked like he had just murdered somebody,

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which it was not out of the question

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for this particular architect,

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and we didn't know what to do.

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It was going to be the highlight of our store.

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So we just put that sign on it that said,

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"Out of order. Come back yesterday."
(Laughter)

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And that ended up being a better joke than slushies,

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so we just left it there forever.

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Mammoth Chunks. These things
weigh, like, seven pounds each.

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Barbarian repellent. It's full of salad

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and potpourri — things that barbarians hate.

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Dead languages.

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(Laughter)

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Leeches, nature's tiny doctors.

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And Viking Odorant, which
comes in lots of great scents:

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toenails, sweat and rotten vegetables, pyre ash.

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Because we believe that Axe Body Spray

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is something that you should
only find on the battlefield,

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not under your arms.
(Laughter)

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And these are robot emotion chips,

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so robots can feel love or fear.

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Our biggest seller is Schadenfreude,

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which we did not expect.

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(Laughter)

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We did not think that was going to happen.

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But there's a nonprofit behind it,

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and kids go through a door
that says "Employees Only"

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and they end up in this space

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where they do homework and write stories

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and make films and this is a book release party

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where kids will read.

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There's a quarterly that's published

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with just writing that's done by the kids

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who come every day after school,

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and we have release parties

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and they eat cake and read for their parents

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and drink milk out of champagne glasses.

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And it's a very special space,

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because it's this weird space in the front.

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The joke isn't a joke.

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You can't find the seams on the fiction,

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and I love that. It's this little bit of fiction

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that's colonized the real world.

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I see it as kind of a book in three dimensions.

NOTE Paragraph

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There's a term called metafiction,

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and that's just stories about stories,

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and meta's having a moment now.

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Its last big moment was probably in the 1960s

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with novelists like John Barth and William Gaddis,

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but it's been around.

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It's almost as old as storytelling itself.

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And one metafictive technique

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is breaking the fourth wall. Right?

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It's when an actor will turn to the audience

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and say, "I am an actor,

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these are just rafters."

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And even that supposedly honest moment,

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I would argue, is in service of the lie,

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but it's supposed to foreground the artificiality

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of the fiction.

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For me, I kind of prefer the opposite.

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If I'm going to break down the fourth wall,

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I want fiction to escape

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and come into the real world.

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I want a book to be a secret door that opens

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and lets the stories out into reality.

NOTE Paragraph

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And so I try to do this in my books.

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And here's just one example.

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This is the first book that I ever made.

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It's called "Billy Twitters
and his Blue Whale Problem."

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And it's about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet

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but it's a punishment

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and it ruins his life.

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So it's delivered overnight by FedUp.

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(Laughter)

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And he has to take it to school with him.

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He lives in San Francisco —

00:12:01.454 --> 00:12:03.985
very tough city to own a blue whale in.

00:12:03.985 --> 00:12:08.419
A lot of hills, real estate is at a premium.

00:12:08.419 --> 00:12:10.927
This market's crazy, everybody.

00:12:10.927 --> 00:12:14.718
But underneath the jacket is this case,

00:12:14.718 --> 00:12:18.904
and that's the cover underneath the book, the jacket,

00:12:18.904 --> 00:12:20.284
and there's an ad

00:12:20.284 --> 00:12:23.527
that offers a free 30-day risk-free trial

00:12:23.527 --> 00:12:25.426
for a blue whale.

00:12:25.426 --> 00:12:28.420
And you can just send in a
self-addressed stamped envelope

00:12:28.420 --> 00:12:32.270
and we'll send you a whale.

00:12:32.270 --> 00:12:36.610
And kids do write in.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:36.610 --> 00:12:40.018
So here's a letter. It says, "Dear people,

00:12:40.018 --> 00:12:43.199
I bet you 10 bucks you won't send me a blue whale.

00:12:43.199 --> 00:12:45.676
Eliot Gannon (age 6)."

00:12:45.676 --> 00:12:49.350
(Laughter) (Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:50.838 --> 00:12:52.960
So what Eliot and the other kids

00:12:52.960 --> 00:12:55.451
who send these in get back

00:12:55.451 --> 00:12:58.376
is a letter in very small print
from a Norwegian law firm —

00:12:58.376 --> 00:13:02.337
(Laughter) —

00:13:02.337 --> 00:13:05.698
that says that due to a change in customs laws,

00:13:05.698 --> 00:13:07.905
their whale has been held up in Sognefjord,

00:13:07.905 --> 00:13:09.129
which is a very lovely fjord,

00:13:09.129 --> 00:13:10.593
and then it just kind of talks about Sognefjord

00:13:10.593 --> 00:13:13.073
and Norwegian food for 
a little while. It digresses.

00:13:13.073 --> 00:13:14.855
(Laughter)

00:13:16.767 --> 00:13:18.680
But it finishes off by saying that

00:13:18.680 --> 00:13:21.414
your whale would love to hear from you.

00:13:21.414 --> 00:13:23.000
He's got a phone number,

00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:27.714
and you can call and leave him a message.

00:13:27.714 --> 00:13:30.290
And when you call and leave him a message,

00:13:30.290 --> 00:13:32.281
you just, on the outgoing message,

00:13:32.281 --> 00:13:37.399
it's just whale sounds and then a beep,

00:13:37.399 --> 00:13:40.954
which actually sounds a lot like a whale sound.

00:13:40.954 --> 00:13:42.934
And they get a picture of their whale too.

00:13:42.934 --> 00:13:45.465
So this is Randolph,

00:13:45.465 --> 00:13:48.806
and Randolph belongs to a kid named Nico

00:13:48.806 --> 00:13:53.088
who was one of the first kids to ever call in,

00:13:53.088 --> 00:13:55.398
and I'll play you some of Nico's message.

00:13:55.398 --> 00:13:59.530
This is the first message I ever got from Nico.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:59.530 --> 00:14:01.769
(Audio) Nico: Hello, this is Nico.

00:14:01.769 --> 00:14:05.803
I am your owner, Randolph. Hello.

00:14:05.803 --> 00:14:09.279
So this is the first time I can ever talk to you,

00:14:09.279 --> 00:14:15.523
and I might talk to you soon another day. Bye.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:15.523 --> 00:14:18.110
Mac Barnett: So Nico called back, like, an hour later.

00:14:18.110 --> 00:14:20.360
(Laughter)

00:14:20.360 --> 00:14:24.297
And here's another one of Nico's messages.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:24.297 --> 00:14:27.840
(Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, this is Nico.

00:14:27.840 --> 00:14:32.993
I haven't talked to you for a long time,

00:14:32.993 --> 00:14:37.688
but I talked to you on Saturday or Sunday,

00:14:37.688 --> 00:14:39.938
yeah, Saturday or Sunday,

00:14:39.938 --> 00:14:42.953
so now I'm calling you again

00:14:42.953 --> 00:14:47.869
to say hello and I wonder what you're doing right now,

00:14:47.869 --> 00:14:50.805
and I'm going to probably call you again

00:14:50.805 --> 00:14:52.988
tomorrow or today,

00:14:52.988 --> 00:14:57.184
so I'll talk to you later. Bye.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:57.184 --> 00:15:01.492
MB: So he did, he called back that day again.

00:15:01.492 --> 00:15:05.373
He's left over 25 messages for Randolph

00:15:05.373 --> 00:15:08.125
over four years.

00:15:08.125 --> 00:15:10.216
You find out all about him

00:15:10.216 --> 00:15:11.852
and the grandma that he loves

00:15:11.852 --> 00:15:14.207
and the grandma that 
he likes a little bit less —

00:15:14.207 --> 00:15:16.400
(Laughter) —

00:15:16.400 --> 00:15:18.827
and the crossword puzzles that he does,

00:15:18.827 --> 00:15:22.607
and this is — I'll play you one 
more message from Nico.

00:15:22.607 --> 00:15:25.910
This is the Christmas message from Nico.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:25.910 --> 00:15:28.273
[Beep] (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph,

00:15:28.273 --> 00:15:31.528
sorry I haven't talked to you in a long time.

00:15:31.528 --> 00:15:34.194
It's just that I've been so busy

00:15:34.194 --> 00:15:36.893
because school started,

00:15:36.893 --> 00:15:39.926
as you might not know, probably,

00:15:39.926 --> 00:15:43.807
since you're a whale, you don't know,

00:15:43.807 --> 00:15:48.487
and I'm calling you to just say,

00:15:48.487 --> 00:15:52.177
to wish you a merry Christmas.

00:15:52.177 --> 00:15:56.778
So have a nice Christmas,

00:15:56.778 --> 00:16:03.651
and bye-bye, Randolph. Goodbye.

00:16:03.651 --> 00:16:05.175
MB: I actually got Nico,

00:16:05.175 --> 00:16:08.306
I hadn't heard from in 18 months,

00:16:08.306 --> 00:16:12.424
and he just left a message two days ago.

00:16:12.424 --> 00:16:14.850
His voice is completely different,

00:16:14.850 --> 00:16:18.350
but he put his babysitter on the phone,

00:16:18.350 --> 00:16:22.211
and she was very nice to Randolph as well.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:22.211 --> 00:16:26.561
But Nico's the best reader I could hope for.

00:16:26.561 --> 00:16:30.287
I would want anyone I was writing for

00:16:30.287 --> 00:16:32.428
to be in that place emotionally

00:16:32.428 --> 00:16:34.664
with the things that I create.

00:16:34.664 --> 00:16:38.365
I feel lucky. Kids like Nico are the best readers,

00:16:38.365 --> 00:16:41.960
and they deserve the best stories we can give them.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:41.960 --> 00:16:44.162
Thank you very much.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:44.162 --> 00:16:46.817
(Applause)