7 Questions For: Dream Gardens Podcast Host Jody Lee Mott

Esteemed Reader, you know I love podcasts and audiobooks and I firmly believe that if you're doing dishes or working out or any number of other activities that prevent you from actually sitting down and reading a thing, you can still be taking in useful information to improve you as both a writer and a human being. Dream Gardens is one of my new favorites and I would definitely classify it as "useful." 

I've listened to every episode and I'm a guest this week as Jody and I discuss my favorite middle grade novel, The Witches by Roald Dahl. You can hear the full episode here or below at the bottom of this interview.

Here's an official description of the show: Dream Gardens is a twice monthly audio podcast interview with writers, teachers, librarians, or anyone who share a love of children’s books. In each podcast, I’ll talk to my guests about their favorite children’s book: old favorites and new discoveries; books they shared with students, their own children, or other adults who love to read; stories that have made them laugh, cry, and wonder; words that still speak to them no matter how many times they have read them.

Jody Lee Mott is a former teacher, doting husband and father, intermittently successful cook, would-be writer of and all around geek for great kids’ books. After years of futile resistance, he is engaging at last in the digital world to share his own passion for those stories written specifically for children, but which are really for anyone who still opens the pages of a book with a sense of wonder and joy.

And now Jody Lee Mott faces the 7 Questions:

Question Seven: What are your top three favorite children's books?

1. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo – Not just my favorite children’s book but one of my favorite books period. Here you have a passive, prickly and self-centered china rabbit who bounces from one group of characters to another, never quite finishing their own stories, and whose big climax has Edward sitting on a shelf, collecting dust and brooding. None of it should work, but of course it all does because Kate diCamillo is just that good. A wonderful and moving book that's really about what it means to be a human being.

2. The Bromeliad Trilogy (Truckers, Diggers, Wings) by Terry Pratchett – a terrific set of books in their own right, but they were also my introduction to the fictional worlds of Mr. Pratchett, including his Discworld novels. What’s marvelous about them is how even though they are “children’s books,” they are just are smart and hilarious and insightful as any of his adult books. As it should be.

3. D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths by Ingri d’Aulaire and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire – the first book I remember checking out of the library, and I remember it because I checked it out at least a hundred times. The stories and the illustrations fascinated me, and scared me a little too. And though I did have to return it when the due date came around, it was the first book I felt like I owned. A very special feeling I’ve never gotten over.

Question Six: What attracted you to podcasting?

Along with being a podcaster, I am an aspiring children’s book writer, and in the past few years I’d been considering a way to increase my online profile. But it was while listening to various podcasts like Grammar Girl and Brain Burps that the idea first struck me that podcasting might be fun to do, and that I might be good at it.  There was something about the performative aspects of the podcast that appealed to me as well, like the poems I read at the beginning of the podcast and my role as interviewer, while my introverted nature appreciated that I would be heard but not seen (which is why I doubt I will ever add a video component to Dream Gardens).


Question Five: What are you most hoping listeners will take away from the Dream Gardens podcast?

Two things: One, that there is a wide variety of kids’ books out there, past and present, that are worth looking into. Part of the joy of doing this, for me, is not only re-reading old favorites but having the chance to read books I either had meant to read but hadn’t got around to or to read books I might never have heard of otherwise. If nothing else, I hope the podcasts introduce new books to new readers (and any book is new, no matter how old, if it hasn’t been read yet).


And second, that children’s books are works of art worthy of serious discussion as much as any other book.  Yes, their primary audience is children, but that does not mean there is less craft involved, or that they lack depth or complexity. Children’s books, like kids themselves at times, are too often under-estimated.

Question Four: Has hosting a podcast about children's books changed your view of children's books? What have you learned from your experiences thus far?

I’m not sure it changed so much as confirmed my view that the books we read as kids shape us as readers, and sometimes even affect the paths of our careers, making us teachers or librarians or writers or even podcasters.

What I've also learned is that people who are passionate about kids’ books want to share that with others. When I first started out, I wasn’t sure if anyone would agree to do this. I mean, why should they? I was just a guy no one knew who said he had this podcast no one had heard of.  And after a year and a half of doing this, it still surprises me when people say yes, but I am grateful they do.

Question Three: What is your favorite thing about hosting the Dream Gardens podcast? What is your least favorite thing?

My favorite part of hosting is just listening to what others have to say about their favorite books. I have always felt that my role was secondary to just letting others talk about how a particular book has engaged them. And I think the enthusiasm for that book does come through in that conversation.


My least favorite part is the initial invitations I send out asking people to participate in the podcast. As I’ve mentioned, I’m an introvert, and asking complete strangers to join me in a chat goes against all my normal instincts. It is something I have to fight against every single time I do it, and I still cringe a little when I click send.

Question Two: What advice would you give to anyone looking to start their own podcast or otherwise build an online following for their creative work?

My biggest advice is to do the research before you get started. Listen to other podcasts, both to see what is out there and to get an idea of how to format your own. Then research all the pieces involved in getting started and keeping it going--and there are a lot of pieces. Sure, there are ways to get started quickly, but they usually involve giving up some control of either your podcast or its distribution. If you want to do it right, take the time to do it right. Once I decided I wanted to do a podcast, I took nearly a year of figuring things out and getting the right equipment (tip: a high-quality microphone and headphones are essential) before I posted my first podcast.  As for other online ventures, I think the same advice holds true—do your research first.

Question One: If you could have lunch with any writer, living or dead, who would it be? Why?

Robert Louis Stevenson, because he was such a good writer (I’ve always thought The Master of Ballantrae was pretty much a perfect book), a wide traveler, and an all-around interesting human being, and because I know he would have so many stories to tell I could just sit back and listen and eat my lunch.

jleemott.com

Book of the Week: THE WITCHES by Roald Dahl

Happy Halloween, Esteemed Reader! I've got some great writer interviews and interviews with literary agents coming up. I'll begin posting those again as of next week and we’ll return you to your regularly scheduled ninja. But as this week is nearly over, I’m just going to push those interviews back a little longer and focus instead on a very important Book of the Week.

Why so important? The Witches by Roald Dahl is my favorite middle grade book of all time. Yes, you read that correctly, and no, I don’t consider it a slam to the other books I've reviewed. I love all middle grade books, as you know, but this is the one I read when I was in the third grade that completely seized my imagination forever and hooked me on reading for life.

If I ever answer my own 7 Questions, The Witches by Roald Dahl would be one of my top three books and Roald Dahl would probably be my choice for lunch date.

I've got a short rant for you, then we’ll get started. Recently, some smug critics have written off Dahl because a few of his books feature tinges of racism (and some full frontal racism), most notably The B.F.G. and the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is just silly.

Dahl lived in a different time and his views on all subjects do not match our current social norms. If you want to avoid reading The B.F.G. for this reason, I think you’re missing out, but I understand. But to write off the author of James and the Giant Peach, The Twits, Matilda, Fantastic Mr. Fox—the list is too long—because of a disagreement in viewpoint, even on a subject as crucial as should we discriminate, is the height of absurdity.

As we aren't going to lunch—not in this life, anyway— my relationship to Dahl is simply that of reader to writer. Yes, he said some very stupid things, but he said a lot of wise things as well and his craftsmanship is impeccable. To attempt to write middle grade fiction and to ignore studying the work of Dahl would be great folly. 

Put another way, the ancient Greeks held many viewpoints and engaged in activities I could never condone. But should I skip The Odyssey? Shall I ignore Plato and Aristotle? If Roald Dahl were moving in with my black wife and her white husband, we’d probably have to set some ground rules. As that’s not the case, I’m going to continue to study his books to soak up as much of his craft as I can and appreciate him on our common ground: a love a children’s literature.

Whew. 

Alright then. Let’s talk about The Witches. I’ve already told you it’s my favorite middle grade book of all time, so we can dispense with the review and get straight to craft. I don’t think any children’s book ever had a greater beginning than The Witches, so I’ve decided to reproduce the first page and a half in its entirety:

A Note About Witches

In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks.
But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.
The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next.
REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.
That is why they are so hard to catch.
A REAL WITCH hates children with a red-hot sizzling hatred that is more sizzling and red-hot than any hatred you could possibly imagine.
A REAL WITCH spends all her time plotting to get rid of the children in her particular territory. Her passion is to do away with them, one by one. It is all she thinks about the whole day long. Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman or driving round in a fancy car (and she could be doing any of these things), her mind will always be plotting and scheming and churning and burning and whizzing and phizzing with murderous bloodthirsty thoughts.
"Which child," she says to herself all day long, "exactly which child shall I choose for my next squelching?"
A REAL WITCH gets the same pleasure from squelching a child as you get from eating a plateful of strawberries and thick cream.
She reckons on doing away with one child a week. Anything less than that and she becomes grumpy.
One child a week is fifty-two a year. Squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear...

...She might even--and this will make you jump--she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness.
I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But--and here comes the big "but"--it it not impossible.

Wow, right? Just wow. I don’t know of a child whose attention this wouldn’t grab. Most young children have not consciously been introduced to conspiracy theories. They’re still learning the way the world officially works—aren’t we all—let alone how some would claim it works in secret. And yet, children are lied to on a regular basis and at some point they begin to pick up on it.

For those children, here is Roald Dahl, an adult willing to say things, metaphorically, it’s true, that reveal the world as it is within the relatively safe context of a story. Children are told that adults are nice, that public officials are just and have their best interest at heart (some do), and that they are safe. Adults tell children this because we wish it were true and we reason that they’ll have plenty of time to worry over the truth in adulthood.

But Dahl says that there are adults, who appear in many ways just like other adults, who want to harm and even murder children. And to be fair, there are. But lest we become morbid, let us focus on harm.

I had a grade school teacher who routinely separated children by class. The children from wealthy families who this teacher wanted to associate with were put into special programs and given preferential treatment. The children, like me, who were not, were made to know their place in society from an early age. This was a woman who meant to harm children, but who received several teaching awards and appeared a normal adult to other adults. My father-in-law could tell you stories about the way his white teachers treated him in Mississippi in the 1960s that would make Dahl’s witches seem harmless by comparison.

In every generation, there are these adults who are bad, and often other adults cannot see it. So long as there are children and adults, there will be this problem, and so The Witches is likely to stay relevant forever. Fortunately, Dahl gives us some clues as to how we can spot witches:

"...a REAL WITCH is certain always to be wearing gloves when you meet her...
"...Because she doesn't have finger-nails. Instead of finger-nails, she was thin curvy claws, like a cat, and she wears the gloves to hide them."


"A REAL WITCH always wears a wig to hide her baldness. She wears a first-class wig. And it is impossible to tell a really first-class wig from ordinary hair unless you give it a pull to see if it comes off... you can't go round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens."


"Witches have slightly larger nose-holes than ordinary people. The rim of each nose-hole is pink and curvy, like the rim of a certain kind of sea-shell... A REAL WITCH has the most amazing powers of smell.. An absolutely clean child give off the most ghastly stench to a witch... The dirtier you are, the less you smell."


"Look carefully at the eyes, because the eyes of a REAL WITCH are different from yours and mine. Look in the middle of each eye where there is normally a little black dot. If she is a witch, the black dot will keep changing colour, and you will see fire and you will see ice dancing right in the very centre of the coloured dot. It will send shivers running all over your skin."


"Witches never have toes... They have just feet... The feet have square ends with no toes on them at all."


"Their spit is blue."

To this day, I do not trust a woman in gloves. I check to see if she has a wig or if her spit is blue or if she has difficulty walking due to a lack of toes. I'm a grown man and I do this.

The main character in The Witches, who is also our narrator, is never given a name—a trick that would certainly not work in every book, but is fantastic here. He is a young boy whose parents die—of course they do, this is Roald Dahl and the man had no patience for parents—and is sent to live with his Grandmamma, a plump old bird who smokes cigars (inspired):

"Would you like a puff on my cigar?" she said.
"I'm only seven, Grandmamma."
"I don't care what age you are," she said. "You'll never catch a cold if you smoke cigars."

Grandmamma is a witch expert and tells our hero all he needs to know to spot witches and comforts him after a near witch attack. And then the story takes a seemingly unrelated turn. The two are looking forward to a vacation in Norway when Grandmamma contracts pneumonia, so they have to settle for a more subdued trip to Hotel Magnificent. It is imperative to the plot that our protagonists travel there, but why doesn't Dahl just have them head there in the first place? Wouldn't that save time? 

Perhaps, but Dahl is a master, as I've said, and he is focused on two things: character development and misdirection.

Thanks to the pneumonia subplot, we feel more for this nameless boy who has already lost his parents and now might lose his Grandmamma as well. But more important is the misdirection. Roger Ebert once said in a review of The Exorcist that the reason that film is so scary is that it does not want to be a horror movie, meaning that the characters were so well-rounded and so focused on their individual lives that even if the scary stuff never came in, they could still have a fascinating story on their own. The detective in The Exorcist was also the basis for Colombo, and he was interesting for season after season without a single possession case to investigate.

Horror doesn't work when the characters are nothing more than monster bait waiting around with no purpose except to be menaced at the appropriate time. In order to be effective, a writer must compel us to care for their characters and their situation before the monsters come.

We care about Grandmamma and her ward and their journey to The Hotel Magnificent is interesting on its own without need of any witches. They get into a scuffle with the hotel manager and the boy trains white mice for a future circus and it's interesting. Just when we would be content to read a story about a boy and his Grandmamma and their travels with a mouse circus, just when things are interesting enough on their own and the reader is comfortable and enjoying a nice story, that's when Dahl and his monsters attack.

While our hero is training his mice at the back of a ball room, hidden lest he be discovered with mice by management, the room fills up with a meeting for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Our hero is unable to get out and so must sit through their meeting. 

And all of those in the meeting are women. 

Women wearing gloves and hats with slightly irregular nostrils. 

And do those women eventually smell our hero at the back of the room? I won’t say, but I must tell you that this sequence is the most scared I've ever been when reading a book as it was my first real brush with true horror.

And that’s where we’ll leave it. If you’re looking for a scary book to read this Halloween, this is the one for you. If you’re just looking for a great book for anytime, this is the one for you. I have one more point to make, but I’m going to finish the review here as I have to spoil the book to make it. Check back next week when we’ll discuss What Happened on Fox Street, we’ll have an interview with author Tricia Springstubb, and an interview with literary agent John Rudolph.

And now, my last point, which is filled with spoilers. If you haven’t read The Witches, stop reading now. Seriously. I’m going to ruin it. 

Okay, I warned you.

My most frequent complaint with horror fiction for kids as a kid was that much of it was condescending. The monsters weren’t really scary, they were just lonely. Or the vampire bunny sucked the juice out of veggies instead of people (I love that book, but it isn't scary). No one in those books every really got hurt, and so whatever the monster, it was an empty threat. 

And even as a child, I knew people did sometimes get hurt and to say otherwise was a lie. Not so with Dahl. He told a great truth within the lie of fiction.

The children in this story do get hurt and hurt bad. Several are murdered—in fantastical ways, sure, but still. One boy is drowned by his own father (again, under fantastical circumstances, but still). If I hadn't already talked for so long, we’d explore that event more in depth, but I believe it is one of Dahl’s sharpest critiques of parenting. 

And finally, the protagonist does not come away unscathed. If you've seen the movie version where he gets made into a real boy again, well, that’s Hollywood. But Dahl’s tale ends with him accepting his impending death within a few years. Harsh, but, but, BUT, true.

This is the point that will forever divide readers, I suppose. Some adults will think including these elements in a children’s story to be reprehensible. If I read the book for the first time now, I might even agree with them. But when I read this book as a child it endeared Dahl to me forever. Here was a writer brave enough to write the truth and I hung to his every word thereafter because adults lie, but I knew I could trust him.

I'll leave you with some videos. Most writers can only dream of inspiring this sort of enthusiasm in a reader:

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Book of the Week is simply the best book I happened to read in a given week. There are likely other books as good or better that I just didn’t happen to read that week. Also, all reviews here will be written to highlight a book’s positive qualities. It is my policy that if I don’t have something nice to say online, I won’t say anything at all (usually). I’ll leave you to discover the negative qualities of each week’s book on your own.