Klassen, Jon
Jon Klassen’s Dark Side
It seems that the somewhat spare and often shadowed work of Jon Klassen has been with us for many years but it was only with the release of I Want My Hat Back in 2011 that young readers first experienced his work. Fans of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place might have spared a thought or two to the enticing covers but it was when Jon Klassen asked his now immortal question that he really arrived in the picture book world.
Perhaps his willingness to look on the dark side explains part of his appeal. When reading his Caldecott-winning This Is Not My Hat to children, “I toggle between telling exactly what happens and not telling them,” he explains. “After we finish, I canvas the room asking for hands to go up if you think the little fish is okay. Inevitably, a few kids put their hands up and then you see them look around. When I ask how many think the fish is not okay, 98% raise their hands and then, slowly, the kids who raised their hands at first, put up their hands yet again as they realize what probably happened.” As much as Jon marvels at the moment when the dots are connected, he admits to a certain ambivalence when he sees their optimism give way to probability: “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
Jon Klassen’s books work on many levels. While kindergarteners and first graders may be secure in the outcome of I Want My Hat Back, older kids “get really giggly about it.” Perhaps it is Klassen’s background in animation that has prepared him so well for storytelling through picture books. Storyboarding his ideas helped him learn about what can happen off screen: “Your page turns are your cuts.” He revels in the way the page turn allows the storyteller to play with time and pacing. “The more I get into books, the more I realize the power of the page turn.”
Not every idea will make a good book. “I’ve been surprised by ideas I thought were really good but they did not work in the end because the idea has to be the motor to turn the page,” he recalls.
Turning pages in books has always been part of the future author/artist’s frame of reference. As a child, Jon’s bedroom was where his father kept his books. “We had a ton of books–I went to sleep looking at the books.” He has always found the physical format of a book intriguing. Even spine design has a certain allure: “How often do you get to design for that kind of space and say something unusual and interesting?” he gleefully asks.
Jon Klassen looks back with special fondness at a certain English lit class in high school. The teacher traveled every summer to South America, became ill, and took months to recover. “He would send in his reading lists with his notes on each book,” he recounts. While there was not anything unusual in his notes, they alluded to the fact that these books were about more than what was just happening on the surface. “Books were about broader thoughts that the author was not always even aware of–this particular form and story were just his best way of telling this story.” This was an epiphany for the future author. “I had never thought of it that way–that these things were describing abstraction.”
This was a very freeing revelation for him. The fact that you could convey abstract ideas with anything makes you less nervous about doing it. Jon’s experience is that “If everything all leans together to make this abstract point, then you don’t worry about the technical execution in the same way.” At the same time, the former animator notes that “Books are so permanent. This line will be on this piece of paper for fifty years, God willing.” And if children keep reading.
It is what the children bring to the story that makes the magic. Just as the page turn gives a sense of what is happening off the page, what each kid brings to the story makes it his or her own. “You want the stories to be universal but you also have to have your own internal logic to it.” The author adds, “Once it’s done, it’s finished, but seeing the response to what you have created is addictive.”
In addition to his own works, Jon Klassen has also illustrated texts by others. Both Mac Barnett (Extra Yarn) and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket of The Dark) write “with so much heart. I feel lucky that I have been paired up with authors who do that so well,” he affirms. He doesn’t have a wish list of authors he would like to work with. Jon acknowledges that “I like to be surprised. I wouldn’t have pictured Extra Yarn or The Dark in my future but they happened and they were great.”
It’s hard to imagine what the next chapter of Jon Klassen’s story will be so we’ll just have to turn the page and find out, confident that we won’t be disappointed.
Interviewed by Ellen Myrick, December 2013
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