Editor and author David Levithan’s conversation with Caldecott Medal winner Brian Selznick began with an introduction by PEN Children’s Committee chair Susanna Reich. Reich invited the 50 attendees to join the Children’s Committee and help with its valuable work of organizing presentations and panels, sponsoring authors to speak in schools and prisons, publishing conversations with notable authors on the PEN blog, and administering two awards.
The conversation itself and the audience questions afterward focused on three themes: 1) Selznick’s attraction to history and technology, 2) the ground-breaking interaction of pictures, text, and film in The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, and 3) his openness about being a gay children’s book creator. Addressing the place of history in his books, Selznick said that what most fascinates him is how his characters can make their way through the world without the technology on which we have come to depend today. That doesn’t mean he has banished technology from his stories; rather, he has sought to explore the technology that existed at the time his characters lived. Like writers of steampunk, Selznick is especially interested in the technology of the early 20th century, “where you could make everything…with your own hands.” Many of those inventions that were made by hand were also given ornate decorations, which showed the care that went into them and the personalities of their inventors. Selznick also talked about his decision to set part of Wonderstruck in the 1970s, when he was a child living in suburban New Jersey. That part of the novel is set in New York City at a particularly difficult time (a time that included the financial crisis, the blackout and riots, and a serial killer on the loose), and he said that “If you can fall in love with a place at the worst time, you can fall in love with it at any time.”
At that point, I realized the source of my husband’s attraction to New York City, in spite of all rational arguments in favor of living anywhere else.
Levithan asked Selznick about the placement of period details in historical fiction, and Selznick offered valuable advice to anyone contemplating that genre. He uses his drawings as subtle markers of the period but only as much as necessary. He used as a model those books written in that period and asked himself how much detail those authors placed in their stories. Too much period detail distances the reader, he observed, and sometimes dates as chapter titles can “do the work.”
The discussion moved on to Selznick’s career path. He began as an illustrator, with acclaimed works such as The Houdini Box but eventually felt he’d stopped growing as an illustrator. After a time in which he tried puppeteering, he started writing stories. The Invention of Hugo Cabret began as a 100-page novella inspired by a French silent film he’d seen 20 years earlier. He talked about his fascination with silent films and how the early films tried to use sound in innovative ways. He showed slides of films that inspired the novel, and then showed his own illustrations and how they in turn were incorporated into Hugo, the film adaptation directed by Martin Scorsese. One slide showed his dummies; another, his illustrations on the walls of his home. He described the interaction of story and picture in Wonderstruck, a novel with two deaf characters living nearly a hundred years apart. One character tells her story in pictures; the other tells his mainly in words. Selznick observed that in the long picture sequences, “It felt like it [the novel] got quiet,” much like the experience of someone who has become deaf.
Levithan began the conversation by joking about “Curly-haired Gay Jew Day” and the final question, from Hunter College professor Sandra Wilde, focused on Selznick’s openness about being gay. When he started as a children’s book creator in 1991 he was “cagey,” but his friends encouraged him to think about how being gay has made him the writer he is, even though his fiction is not about that issue in the way much of Levithan’s is. Nowadays, he mentions his partner casually in his speaking engagements to audiences in middle school and up. He said that nearly every time, someone comes up afterward to thank him. Wilde then stood and said to him and Levithan, “Bravo to both of you for helping to change the climate.”
Following a round of applause from an appreciative audience at The New School, both Selznick and Levithan signed books and spoke informally to audience members. The line to meet the two authors still snaked through the lobby ten minutes later when I left to catch a nearby panel on children’s rights.
–Lyn Miller-Lachmann