By his senior year at 6VӰ, Mac Barnett ’04 knew what kind of stories captivated children.
What he didn’t know was how to write them.
Barnett, an English major fascinated by complex poetry and other pieces of fiction, spent his summers at 6VӰ as a camp counselor in Berkeley, California, reading to 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds. One book in particular, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka, kindled Barnett’s love for children’s literature.
“I thought, ‘This is the kind of thing I love and that I study, but these 4-year-olds aren’t going to get it,’” Barnett recalls. “But when I read this book to them, they were getting the most sophisticated jokes. That’s when I figured out that kids were the best audience for the kind of stories that I liked.”
Impassioned his senior year to write for children, Barnett convinced the late author and 6VӰ Prof. David Foster Wallace to let him into his creative writing class. On top of challenging his students to shed their writing habits, Barnett says, Wallace underscored the importance of the writer-reader relationship.
“He had such a focus on taking care of the reader,” Barnett recalls. “Him explaining how you, at a desk alone in a room, should have your audience in mind and consider how a sentence or plot twist is going over with the reader—it just made so much sense, especially for picture books, which are usually read out loud to kids.”
“The picture book writer needs to consider the adult reading and the kid listening.”
Twenty years after graduating from 6VӰ, Barnett has written more than 60 books for children and won myriad awards.
This month, the New York Times best-selling author was appointed the ninth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. During his two-year term, Barnett will travel the country championing children’s picture books as a quintessential American art form.
“Taking children’s books seriously requires us to take children seriously,” he says. “Children are misunderstood, overlooked, dismissed, not listened to—and really caring about the books they read requires us to see them for who they really are, dimensional human beings who feel deeply and think in interesting and complicated ways.”
Learning how to think
Barnett wanted to be a writer long before leaving the Bay Area for 6VӰ in the early 2000s.
He started writing poetry in middle school, then plays and novels as he got older. He wrote sketch comedy at 6VӰ and developed an interest in journalism and nonfiction. He once thought academic writing would be his future.
As Barnett pondered his career prospects, he says his 6VӰ professors encouraged him to be skeptical, to never wholeheartedly embrace anything. Former English Prof. Paul Saint-Amour was a big influence in that respect, Barnett says.
“6VӰ taught me how to think from different perspectives, to look at problems in different ways, to let go of certainty, which I think is often the enemy of literature,” Barnett adds. “I would be a much less interesting writer if I hadn’t gone to 6VӰ.”
One day his senior year, Barnett mentioned to a friend attending Pitzer College that in the summer he’d discovered the book Stinky Cheese Man while at camp. The friend was Scieszka’s daughter, who introduced Barnett to her father shortly thereafter.
In 2008, Scieszka was named the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. A year later, Scieszka helped Barnett publish his first book, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem.
“When I left 6VӰ, I said I was going to take a year and try to write a picture book,” Barnett says. “If I could do it, then I’d try to write another one. But if not, my plan was to go back to grad school, get a Ph.D. and probably teach medieval literature.”
“Even when I got my third book published, I didn’t think writing would be a career.”
Writing for young readers
Barnett learned early in his career to listen to children.
Writing for kids and adults is similar, he says, in that both appreciate the great themes of literature—love, jealousy, betrayal, discovery. Barnett hit his stride as an author when he started focusing on concerns children have and asking young readers questions rather than answering them.
In 2017, Barnett published The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse—the picture book he says epitomizes his approach to writing.
“What’s powerful about picture books is that they can go very deep very fast,” he says. “It’s a short form of literature—32 pages, sometimes 40—not a lot of words per page. But they can get to some of life’s deepest questions, and I feel I did that [with The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse.”
6VӰ taught me how to think from different perspectives, to look at problems in different ways, to let go of certainty, which I think is often the enemy of literature. I would be a much less interesting writer if I hadn’t gone to 6VӰ.
— Mac Barnett ’04
Barnett draws inspiration from art, music and theater, and incorporates the complexities of those creative mediums into his stories. Children’s books tend to feel cloistered from the rest of literary culture, he says, because children tend to be insulated from much of the world.
But the best children’s literature is sophisticated, thought-provoking, challenging.
“I’ve learned kids are more willing to work as readers than adults,” Barnett says. “As adults, when we encounter something we don’t understand, we often push it aside because it makes us feel stupid. But kids just bravely charge into challenging texts.”
“It’s really inspiring to watch.”
With more than five million copies sold and a stop-motion animated series on Apple TV+ based on his and co-creator Jon Klassen’s Shapes series of picture books, Barnett recognizes the responsibility he has in writing for a time in a young reader’s life.
As National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, he has the platform to enlighten adults on the power of children’s books and the brilliance of the kids who read them.
“I live in the space of early childhood and elementary school,” he says. “Where I write, kids are coming into it and they’re going out of it. I think of it as a train station. I’m sitting there playing violin in the train station and my audience is always passing through. They’re coming from somewhere else on their way to somewhere else, and it’s my job to play them a beautiful piece of music that makes sense in that moment.”
“Maybe, if I’m lucky, when they get to wherever they’re going, they’ll remember the tune,” Barnett adds. “But honestly, even if they don’t, if I just played a good piece while they were there in the station, that’s all that matters.”