Children Will Listen

Tony Johnston has faith in people’s ears.

More specifically, she has faith in children’s ears. As the author of roughly 120 books for children—who can keep count after a certain point?—she comes by her faith honestly. Johnston, ’63, MA ’64, is known for witty tellings of traditional tales (like Alice Nizzy Nazzy: The Witch of Santa Fe, a reworking of the Russian Baba Yaga story; The Cowboy and the Black-Eyed Pea, after the Andersen fairy tale; and The Ghost of Nicholas Greebe) and for lyrical evocations of family life and lore (The Quilt Story, Yonder and Day of the Dead). “Kids always know what’s a good book,” she says. “There’s quality, and then there’s quality. You can tell. Kids can tell. It’s like the difference between brownies made at home and those bought from the grocery store.”

The quality of children’s literature is on her mind because she recently donated her collection of 2,000 kids’ books for a new children’s literature archive at the Huntington, a scholarly research institution set in splendid public gardens in Johnston’s hometown of San Marino, Calif. The collection includes prized first editions by Margaret Wise Brown and Barbara Cooney as well as her own childhood books and her grandmother’s Mother Goose.

Along with her beloved books, Johnston donated her own manuscripts and papers relating to her 40-year publishing career—which is what the Huntington initially asked her about as it sought to expand its programs for children. Making the archives available, she explains, will allow students and scholars interested in children’s literature to see what goes into the creation of children’s books, from the first scribbles—Johnston drafts books on sticky little Post-its—to the final manuscript. “You can see frustration on paper,” she says. People should know that a well-written children’s book is “not something God whispers in your ear. It’s a struggle, and I’m glad I do it.”

Many people have a hard time identifying quality in children’s books, Johnston suggests, and need expert guidance to hear what children hear. It all gets back to the ear. “People aren’t book lovers any more,” Johnston laments. “Even many editors and publishers, they’re not literary people. Everything has to be ‘edgy.’ . . . You know the books I mean. They’re busting with attitude, in your face.” She prefers books that come “from the heart,” that have the authenticity that seems to define the divide between homemade and store-bought. It’s hard to say what the difference is, but you know it when you taste it, or hear it read aloud.

Johnston began her publishing career in another era, when publishing children’s books seemed an evangelical activity rather than an exercise in marketing skills. After Tony Taylor married Roger Johnston, ’63 (they met at Stanford, where their mothers had been sorority sisters), they moved to New York. She took publisher McGraw-Hill’s editing course for a year, a training that “made me manic forever—I correct everything I get my hands on.”

She worked as private secretary to legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who nurtured such authors as Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), E.B. White (Charlotte’s Web) and Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon). “It was a wild and woolly time,” Johnston remembers. “That’s where I learned everything about writing for children.” In a book of her letters, critic Leonard Marcus described Nordstrom’s work as a “quest for originality and honesty in books for young people, a readership she believed had long been ill served by the sentimental illusions and false pieties of their elders.”

Johnston’s opinions on children’s publishing are similarly fierce. She decries a contemporary tendency to dumb down books, to rely on “edgy” rather than rich language. “One thing that gets me is when editors get nervous about words with more than four letters.” It’s a mistake to worry about language being too complicated, she says. “Kids understand. There is context, and they can always pick up my good friend, Dictionary. In the end, we cheat the child if we don’t give them good words.”

Not that she is a purist about “bad” language—the curse words, anatomically correct body parts or graphic slang that make some adults squeamish. “If the language fits, wear it,” she says. “You can’t cheat a child out of an experience because someone, somewhere, will be offended.” When her book, Bone by Bone by Bone, is published in August (Roaring Brook Press), she foresees “people fainting and asking for smelling salts.” The novel is aimed at young-adult readers, teens older than her usual audience. Written from memories about her father, though set in 1950s Tennessee rather than his native Texas, it’s about growing up with a racist parent. The language is ferocious, both lyrical and harsh in the best tradition of Southern storytelling, and the daddy uses the “n” word freely.

Johnston’s move from picture books to novels began as an accident. People think writing a novel is harder, but for her it offered an unaccustomed freedom after the terseness of picture books. “A picture book is a straitjacket,” she says, whereas “a novel has elbow room. You can throw in all those words you’ve been holding back.” Her first novel, Any Small Goodness, published in 2001, actually started as a picture book. It was afflicted by what Johnston calls “Cinderella syndrome”—trying to squeeze into the wrong size slipper. She finally realized the slipper was too small, and let the book stretch into a 128-page novel.

Any Small Goodness is set in a Los Angeles barrio and uses a lot of Spanish, a language Johnston is comfortable with from the 15 years she and her banker husband spent in Mexico. Their daughters, Jennifer, ’93, Samantha, ’96, and Ashley, were born there. Many of her books concern Mexican or Southwestern culture and use Spanish phrases, worked into the text in ways that make the meaning clear. Day of the Dead, one of about a dozen of her books illustrated by Tomie dePaola, uses the preparations for the Mexican feast day to show the unbearable excitement children feel at the approach of a holiday.

Johnston says raising her children partly in Mexico was a blessing. She never feared her children watched too much television, for example. “Mexican culture is very focused on the family. The television was always there, but we were too busy to watch. We were always out doing things as a family.” One of their activities was collecting textiles, specifically sashes. Their house is filled with beautiful wooden chests of drawers, standing in places where other houses might have other sorts of furniture, and all those drawers are filled with neatly labeled belts woven in extraordinary colors and patterns. Hunting items for a collection “is such a way to see a country,” Johnston says, emphasizing the word “see” to mean “really see” rather than “pass through unobserving.”

When the family returned to San Marino, they did the same sorts of activities, going to museums, going out everywhere as a family. “American culture is very anti-family,” Johnston observes. The attitude about raising children here seems to be “keep the kids busy so we can do something else. But that’s not the point of having kids, I think. I stayed home and baked cookies. Well, we usually didn’t get around to baking them; we just ate the dough. That’s why, when my daughters went off to school, I sent them dough. Writing for me was a gift that came along. But I wouldn’t choose work over family. I would give writing up in a minute if it were a choice between the kids and that.”