Encouraging Young Writers with Author Caroline Kusin Pritchard
Caroline is a children's book author whose debut book, Gitty and Kvetch, came out this past September through Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. She has a number of picture books coming out over the next few years, and is excited to share more soon! Caroline is currently an MFA Candidate in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, three kiddos and 120-lb dog.
In this episode, we’ll chat about:
How authors get inspired
Important skills to develop as a young writer
Favourite takeaways from Caroline’s IG series Craft Talk she did with other amazing children's authors
Share about how she looks for what she refers to as "one magical moment"
Tips for educators in encouraging young writers
Episode Transcript
Hanna:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the, My Literacy Space Podcast. I'm so pumped today because I'm talking to an amazing author, Caroline Kusin Pritchard, who has written a fabulous book. If you have not seen it or read it or enjoyed it, you have to do it. It is called Gitty and Kvetch. Welcome, Caroline.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Hi, thank you so much for having me what a joy this is.
Hanna:
It is so fun talking to authors because there's things that we don't know that happen behind the scenes. And even just thinking... Today we're going to talk about authors craft. And I think this also shows sort of a little piece into, maybe a little snippet, a sneak peek into what it's like as an author and those things that we look for in good, enjoyable books that we read aloud with our kids or students. But also I want to make the point about this is a literacy podcast. So how do we sort of transfer that with students that we work with or our own children? And I think a lot of it comes from sharing really good examples. So modeling that. And so we're going to use your book sort of as our mentor text today, but also talk about some other cool things as well. So maybe just give a little introduction about yourself so that my listeners know who you are.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Sure. What a lovely intro. So I am Caroline Kusin Pritchard, I write picture books predominantly, but books for children, I'm working on some chapter books and some middle-grade projects too, which is exciting. I debuted last year and had been just a wild ride, getting to know the rhythms of publishing. I started an Instagram account right at the beginning when I was just starting to take picture book writing seriously, and I'm connected to so many incredible fellow writers and authors and influencers like you and folks who are just shaping the conversation in this space and kind of taking a lens to the inequities that exist in publishing and also the stories that kind of really need to be magnified and centered when we look at children's books as a whole. So those were all kinds of the conversations I was really eager to dive into when starting on this Instagram journey where I met you and it has been a ride and really look forward to the conversation today.
Hanna:
Well, if anyone who's listening right now is not following Caroline, please do that because really great conversations you've had when you've done Instagram lives with other authors and really gives that big picture of what's happening, like you said, in publishing, but also amplifying voices of underrepresented authors and content. So I'm excited because this is probably, I might have to say, this is my first children's picture book that had Jewish representation and the glossary at the back showing all the Yiddish roots that you used throughout the book. That's part of my student's favorite part of the book, because we love kind of finding a book that has sort of bilingual or multilingual, some of those other words, and they didn't know what Yiddish was. And so even just learning those pieces through the funniest read-aloud, it's such a fun read-aloud. So what kind of inspired you to write this picture book?
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Yes. Oh my goodness. So I just could not get enough of these characters, honestly, in my head. I was sitting, I was teaching a creative writing class and I was talking about kind of structuring our thinking when we're at a blank page and we haven't yet come up with a story idea and thinking about a, what if statement? Like what if this hyperbolic kid who nothing could keep them down? What if something in their world flipped on its head and they became suddenly curmudgeonly. That was kind of my, what if statement?
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
And so Gitty just popped up in my head and lo and behold, Gitty's this really effervescent little girl. And I just kind of imagined like, "What in the world would it take for this kid to have to win [inaudible 00:03:52]?" I'm like, "There emerged to this Kvetch-like character, which happens to be a ton like my dad and my grandfather. And so in Yiddish, she started spewing out of him.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
And so initially, when I sent this manuscript to my would be editor, it had about three or four Yiddish words and she wrote back a bunch of notes and she said, "Listen, I really like this story. I think you need to crank up the volume on the Yiddish by a 100%." Which felt like such a remarkable permission and invitation to just lean into the pieces of the story I was already so excited to tell. And I think that kind of kicked me off on this whole journey of diving in.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Yiddish is just kind of part of the water I was in, growing up, growing up in a big Jewish family, but in Texas. So we've got that kind of resistance already in your macro-culture. But the warmth of my Jewish spaces, Yiddish was such an important part. And so leading into like, "What is Yiddish? What are the roots? Who's talking about it today?" Realizing it's certainly not a dead language. It doesn't belong with our great grandparents. It's something that passing it down to our kids and making it feel like they have ownership over it. All kids not just Ashkenazi Jewish kid.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
So anyway, really started this journey. And yeah, I tripled the amount of of Yiddish and had so much fun with that glossary and keeping it in the voice of Kvetch, I think was the unlock. So when I do school visits, I love getting to pick and choose certain ones, and that always gets the biggest set of giggles, which I love.
Hanna:
One of the things I like about it is when I'm reading it with students, we will kind of take the parts, one person you get to be one character. And hearing how they hear the voices. And I think the voice for those characters is what makes a really good read-aloud for me. And this book is perfect. [inaudible 00:05:31] about that, use it. What do you think Gitty sounds like? What do you think Kvetch sounds like? What do you hear in your mind? It's so good. It's just [inaudible 00:05:41].
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
You know what's so funny about that, is I actually... First of all, thank you. What a compliment. And secondly, I realized when I read it out loud for the first time, I reverted to this lower east side, New York [inaudible 00:05:53] stereotypical Yiddish Kvetch. And it cracked me up because I am from Texas, the [inaudible 00:06:00] character is based on have a syrupy thick Texas accent. So my dad talks like this, when he's saying oy vay, he's saying it like this. And I realize like, "Oh my gosh, I'm doing that thing for this authentic ideal of what Jewish means [inaudible 00:06:13] this classic New York stereotype. And I can't believe I even internalized that. So now I make a really clear point to say like, "No, Kvetch is a Texan." And this is how he sounds in my head. And everyone gets to have their own layer of their voice. But I hope everyone sounds very different from one another.
Hanna:
Yeah. It's quite interesting to hear how kids interpret the language of a book or a character's thoughts or the way that they talk. Okay. So some really important skills that we need to develop in young writers, we often start talking to our students or our own children about author's craft. So explicitly teaching parts of speech and figures of speech, those similes or metaphors really interesting juicy vocabulary, or really thinking about onomatopoeia, personification, but also skills like punctuation and placement of words on the page, really show mood, and show character feeling, show characters perspective. So that's something that I think your book that I've used as a mentor text.
Hanna:
And I don't want people to think that a mentor text is this rigid like, "I'm pulling out a textbook and we're going to be..." It's literally the joyful pages of a picture book showing, modeling what an author did. And how did that make you feel? What did you notice? Why did they do that? And thinking sort about their purpose, but also tying it in with the craft.
Hanna:
So one of the things that I've been focusing on lately is mood, and how authors really show a shift in mood, or even, I think a lot of kids write quite linear, so they have the same mood throughout the whole thing. And even though we have a problem occurs in a story and then we have this solution and maybe some elements of trying to solve the problem. Kids, they're not always great at expressing the shift in the mood or the shift in explaining how characters are feeling and that rise and flow in that emotion.
Hanna:
So I want to read a little bit of your book. I hope that's okay if I read it [inaudible 00:08:22]. It's okay. And I wanted to show how we've been using this particular part in the book to show the shift in character perspective and talking about what you did as an author and a little bit of what the illustrator did to really bring this point across.
Hanna:
So in the middle of this story, what's happening is she's made this picture for her little friend because they were injured. They got a little bandaid on there. You can see this little bandaid. But her point of view is always just like be cheerful and she's very happy and she's made this beautiful picture. And so this one point in the book, the author, you... I was like, "The author." And I'm like, "I'm talking to the author." You write, "The perfect drizzle from the perfect clouds, covering the perfect sun on the perfect day to hang the perfect..." "Excuse me, cloud family, this is so lovely, but it's just a tiny bit wetter than I... Can we take a rain check?" "See, Kvetch, we made it just in time. I'm sure everything is totally, completely..." "Please don't say ruined." "Ruined."
Hanna:
So we see this, and if you can see the pages in the book, here's some of the things that we've noticed about just the text on the page, you've used ellipsis marks to kind of make us pause a little bit extra and you see the sort of internal piece, even in the character of like, "Oh no, this is ruined, right?" And all of a sudden the mood shifts of like, now you got to watch, is the friend going to come along and help bolster their emotions. Right?
Hanna:
Even the text placement on the page. So when it was like, "Can we take a rain check?" The letters are cascading down the page. Things like that draw attention for a child to really take part of the feeling, the emotion and that mood that's happening right in that, it pulls you in because you're really having to pay attention. It's not this linear, "can we take a rain check?" You have to really formulate how you're going to read that for that fluency, that expression on that page.
Hanna:
And even the illustrations, we notice where the flowers are beginning to wilt. Or when it's like, "Ruined!" It's huge capital letters with an exclamation mark. And then the little text, "Ruined?" With the question mark. So even how they're talking with each other, that was just such a great way to look at facial expressions, body language. And now see the big shift in character perspective, because now the friend is going to come along and support. So tell me sort of your thoughts on those little pieces that my students and I have noticed and what intentionality you had behind that.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. I love the visualizing, your kids, diving into this way. It's so beautiful. You're such a great educator. I think you named so many of the pieces, the ellipses, even when you were reading it, one thing, my editor, this part that says, "It's just a tiny bit weather than I originally had expected." The word expected. So tiny the weather than I expected. And she's like, "No, let's pull that and make it even more of this kind of tension [inaudible 00:11:48], interrupting. And I thought, "Oh, like." I kind of felt uncomfortable because I wanted it there. But I thought that was really clever.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I think one other, when you talk about the illustrations matching the text and how do you build tension and anticipation and then in this case chaos, right. You're going into chaos. And one moment I love is if you look, her hair is matted down wet, and then as it gets closer, it becomes this giant, poof. And it's like this giant chaotic wild. She's trying to keep it in. She's trying. And it's like, "Girl, it is so far past [inaudible 00:12:19]. You have no control over anything." And I think that, Ariel Landy, the illustrator just was masterful in how she captured emotion and the inanimate objects and in the characters.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
So yeah, I think one thing you're hitting on, which is unique to the picture book form is you're talking about page breaks. And I know with kids it's exciting to think about how they could do this in their own picture books, but so much of, I think the craft in such a tight form is what's not being said. And you know the illustrations help so much, but you're talking about whole spread with this big welled over eyes saying, ruined. And what's not being said, she's heartbroken, right? It's not saying she cried and was so sad and everything was... It wasn't.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I think another bit, if you keep going in that scene, you said craft-wise, what's a way to communicate. Interrupting, I think is a really big, whether we're interrupting ourselves or the characters are interrupting one another and how that gets mirrored from the beginning to the end. So you could see, when she's perceiving the world and reframing it so positively, Kvetch is mimicking, she sees a symphony of buzzes. He interjects, "Mosquitoes." She said that world's most spectacularly stinky stack. He says, "Cow poop, it's cow poop." So having people interrupt each other.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Unfortunately, my husband reminds me all the time. We don't need to interrupt each other, but I'm like, "No, no, this is my nature." Maybe it's my Jewish nature. I don't know what it is. But if humans interrupt and your characters are characters, that might be that way. Let them interrupt each other. That is a way to carry impatience, enthusiasm, the scene, "Kvetch, can you even believe our luck? That isn't the brightest? "Not for long." "Biggest." "Same size as yesterday." "Gloriest? Oy vay." That carries this, you don't have to say, you don't have to put the words to how they're different. You can feel it through the dialogue. So I think some of those, what is, and isn't said are fun to play with as kids.
Hanna:
Yeah. And it's great. Inferencing is a huge part of daily life that we're doing in all of our body language, facial expressions, like we'll do these weird pauses and you're kind of thinking, is somebody going to finish it? And you are having to kind of finish the thought for them. So I love that because it really is a great way to work on those kinds of inferencing skills and realizing that it's those story books really kind of give us a little sneak peek of real life too.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
[inaudible 00:14:48].
Hanna:
I think that's what I really loved about this one too. You can feel, when you first brought it out, lots of bookstagrammers, we were talking about who is Gitty? Who is Kvetch? And I was like, "Well, I know who I am. I know who my husband is." Right away, you can be like, "Mm-hmm, I'm the positive sunshiny."
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Totally. First of all, that makes me so happy. But I love too, I think was something that my editor helped... Her name is Alexa Pastor from Simon & Schuster, The Atheneum Imprint, helped me really see is, if you're going to establish a structural dynamic between characters like interrupting or positive/negative. And then in this story, you see how it flips, right? You say how Gitty becomes discouraged. If you're going to have the characterization flip, then you want the structure to flip too, to help that mirror. So now we're seeing "Kvetch at the end, presenting these new positive possibilities and Gitty being the one interjecting negatively and saying oy vay. So if you're establishing a pattern, continue that pattern through and inverting it can kind of delight because you developed an expectation with your reader. And now they're in on the joke when it's inverted.
Hanna:
Right? So even thinking about the wonderful author's craft and the purpose and all the things, it also had this lovely sort of friendship moment as well. And realizing that even if I can identify with a certain character, I also realize that there's sort of multi pieces of our personality and our character traits that we need to kind of have this, like a flip sometimes in being empathetic and realizing, not everybody sees it as sunshine and rainbows. And sometimes we need to maybe tone it down a little, or realizing that they're not necessarily being negative Nellies, they're often quite logical in a lot of their things. So we've even talked about that, like what do you think about, and I love how you started about the, what if, that's a real good or I often use with my students, what are you wondering about?
Hanna:
And that's a really great way to also start their imagination and start their creativity. And I think what are you wondering? And you can pause in a story like this at those amazing ellipsis marks and even the one where you were saying where you didn't finish the word, we noticed that right away. "Is a word missing? [inaudible 00:17:11] miss-print. And we were kind of thinking about what do you think she would've said, what would that word have been that the character would've said in that moment? Or what are you wondering? And so that gets them really thinking more in depth rather than a real surface understanding of a picture book. Okay.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Well, one quick note, just about something you'd mentioned, you'd mentioned that, I love what you said about there's good reason to have a different perspective. And I think I, in an earlier job talked to my brother who Kvetch is loosely based on. And he described, "I think you need to amp up his backstory a little bit more because he is not just cranky to be cranky. He's a practical realist." And he's actually doing it out of love. He sees these clouds, he's trying to protect Gitty. That's what, he was right all along. He's doing it out of love. So I think having that perspective, taking moment of like, [inaudible 00:18:04] dismiss and write off people who are so different than us, but take a beat. Where are they coming from? He's had personal experience of getting injured before, he's carrying real anxiety, so.
Hanna:
Yeah, no, I love those pieces just to be able to bring out a different depth from a picture book that is both a really funny read and it's got these wonderful friendship moments and language, it just all around is so rich to read a book like that. And as a mentor text, we don't read it just once. We're coming back to that piece and we're looking at different ways, the author did a certain thing. So it's funny to now see my students add in like, "Can I add in oy vay here?" And I'm like, ""Yes, please add an oy vay." "And why is the character saying oy vay?" That's really quite [inaudible 00:18:55].
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I love that
Hanna:
"I used a Yiddish word." You know what, and I'm like? "Yes, you did."
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
[inaudible 00:18:59] love it.
Hanna:
It's really awesome. Okay. So on your Instagram account, you also did a series where you called it craft talk. And you were talking with some different, amazing children's authors. And can you tailor me, maybe two or three highlights of, because to me, that really got me thinking about some specific ways, even to bring those pieces out, hearing the author talk about the book is like, "Ooh, I can bring that out with the students." Because sometimes you read a picture book and I receive lots of picture books. So sometimes I forget to take the time to really soak in a picture book and really paying attention to, you call them those one magical moments [inaudible 00:19:44], in the book. That was one magical moment that I just shared of noticing this shift in perspective between the characters. So tell me what maybe two or three tips from your Craft Talk series that you just loved.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Okay. Great. So, well, one that came right off to bat and that I think will be much easier for your child students and harder for the adults in the room.
Hanna:
Great.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Erin Entrada Kelly, the one and only brilliant Newberry award winning genius author. Every time I pick up anything she's written, I just, well, my heart. And so I was so grateful to get to talk with her. And she has this grounded, beautiful way of talking about voice, and voice being, what are the words you choose, the syntax, why do you choose to tell the story from this angle and not that, why is it this perspective and how does your character see the world? So voice is like a little bit fuzzy, but it's all the choices you're making to communicate tone, like you talked about.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
And she talks about as a writer, the importance when you're telling a child story is to recapture magical thinking that you had when you were a kid and to kind of snap out of the autopilot, we're socialized into as adults. And to really, really think in that worldview. And so I think about different ways to do that. Again, easier for a kid. And this is something that Anne Wynter talked about when she does board books and finding the right words, right? What are the exact right words?
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
And Anne will list out, never ending list of verbs. If we're talking about something popping, I'm going to write every single word that comes to my mind about popping. And I'm not even going to pick the top five words that come to mind because that's all crust and we're used to it. We're going to throw it away. So what's that 89th word that it's like, "Whoa, that is kind of popping."
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
And this idea of capturing magical thinking. One other thing I like to do is, and it sounds very creepy. So you have to give me benefit of the doubt here, but I'm the queen of eavesdropping. My friends tease me about it relentlessly because my favorite thing to do is go to public spaces with a notebook and listen to people talking and write down literal, verbatim dialogue between them, topics they're talking about, the words they're using, the phrases. And to me, that helps me. And whether I'm at a playground and overhearing kids or whatever it is, that magical world that we live in, that we sometimes put to the side when we get to a page, that's not the proper way to tell a story, or that's not how characters talk.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
For me, I just think that misses the point altogether, the humanity, the wonder, the excitement, it exists all around us. We're just maybe coding it as other than what we're writing on the page. So anyway, those are some things, anything that can help me when I'm thinking about craft kind of recapture magic in the why of what we're doing, we're trying to create worlds and characters that connect in a visceral real way. And how can I see the real world around us to kind of have open channel where creativity could just flow through.
Hanna:
Right. And I think, well, one thing that I've actually picked up from my students is their worlds are dynamic. Their writing is quite dynamic and we kind of quickly stifle it into this very formal structured, which yes, we have to teach those pieces to it. But I just love if you just put on... In the olden days we would put on a tape recorder. We used to do that with our kids, we would just hit record on a video machine or whatever. Now we're just using our phones. And you hear those, they interrupt their own thoughts, right? They're telling a story and all of a sudden they think of the next, this flashy part over here. And sometimes they never come back to the main pieces, but that's the dynamic piece of the world in that [inaudible 00:23:39] sometimes is really hard to capture in a picture book or in a written story, even if it's just a short one page short story. So I love that you're paying attention to what's really happening and trying to incorporate those little tiny pieces to make it seem [inaudible 00:23:57].
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I love what you're saying too, because I think one of the fun moments when you're kind of listening to other folks and you're kind of trying to pick up on the unspokens that we have is, what are the times that we say something that we don't at all mean? And how can our characters do that too? So I'm thinking about like Kvetch says, "Oh, the whole... She says, "Oh, look, the whole cloud family's here." And he says, "One big happy mishpachah." If you're reading that out of context, you're like, "Oh, one big happy mishpachah." But you know because we've established his sarcasm and his eyes that Ariel drew. That we know he does not at all mean the words he says. And how often do we say things we don't mean? And how do we know we don't mean them? Is it our shoulders? Is it our eyes? Is it the way that we quickly change the subject? And how can we have our characters near that and their own scene work?
Hanna:
Yeah. And one thing that I love too, is when books don't have dialogue tags, then you really are having to infer, that character, what was the tone of their voice? Right? So sometimes kids miss out on that. So I do use books. One of my favorite is Crickwing by Janell Cannon. And she has so many dialogue takes that she uses, which I use as a springboard to say, like, how would we read it if they grunted? How would we read it if they chortled, how would we read it if they guffled, all those rich, rich language.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Love them.
Hanna:
And they've never heard some of these words. So they just write, said. "So and so said." And I keep saying, "I'm going to close my eyes. You tell me how your character said that. And then we're going to find a dialogue tag. And now that we found a dialogue tag, we don't always have to write that, in your picture [inaudible 00:25:36]. Right? We don't have to literally say, "George told Gitty," "George told Kvetch," we don't have to say that, we can see it on the facial expression or the word choice that is picked that demonstrates that tone of voice.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I love that. I love that exercise starting there and ending there because so many editors, now that I'm exploring writing for an older age group. So often what you, especially if it's a lot of dialogue to say [inaudible 00:26:07], right. Because you can take you out of the moment if you're having too many. And so if you're forced to say said, what are other ways you can communicate that emotion that isn't in a dialogue tag. So both sides of that coin are such good exercises, I think.
Hanna:
Yeah. Yeah. And it has to be explicitly taught first.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
A 100%.
Hanna:
Because they don't understand some of the, especially our younger kids, if they haven't had exposure to some of those things, it is kind of a black and white, like a script almost that you would read it as a script rather than this joyful storytelling. And again, you're having to kind of show rather than explicitly tell how that character is moving through the world. And that's real craft. That can be really tricky.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Absolutely.
Hanna:
So what's one magical moment, out of a book that you really love, you can either pick your own book or another book that you're really thinking a magical moment that really [inaudible 00:27:03] because love listening when you've done some of your reels [inaudible 00:27:07].
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
So many I like looking around because... Oh, okay. I'm just going to say, I wish I brought it. I think the title is When We Say Black Lives Matter. And that is a book that is stunning. I feel like it belongs on every single bookshelf. And it's about what we're talking about with this word choice and a tag. So what they do, that's so brilliant with the refrain, when we say black lives matter is simply changing one word, when we screen black lives matter, when we cry black lives matter, and the tone shifts drastically every time, just by changing that one word choice. And again, because the author is established an expectation, especially with younger readers, they're in on it, they know what's coming next. They're they're ready for that page turn. It shocks your system of it. And it sets the tone, not by overdoing it, saturating with a million words, but by just one. And I think there's so much to take away from that subtle force and word choice, especially [inaudible 00:28:12] power theme that they're tackling in that book.
Hanna:
Love it. Any other tips then that as a parent or as an educator, that we can look for those little magical moments inside of a book and then have kids kind of take part in, because there's this one part of, we could just say, "What's your favorite part of the book?" That's sort of to me, now that I've delved into more, I need more. Yes, that's a starting point and four and five year olds, that's what they're going to give us, the favorite part. "I loved when Gitty did this." "I loved when Kvetch did this." Right? Love it. Perfect. Great. But how do we teach them to sort of move from that surface level, thinking to a deeper level and those magical moments, do you have ways that you do it?
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
So this might be a bit of a fuzzy answer, but it's resonant for my little family. I have three kids. And so I'll read a book whenever I get a new one and I'll kind of do that, that exercise like, "Oh, I love this." Or, "This is what resonates for me." But I can truly never know until I read it with the kids and kind of recognize what it is for them. And it's always about the second read. And for me, what I'm trying to pick up on is a moment of a shift. It's never what they say or sometimes it's what they say, but it's a physical shift, it's a stillness or a caught breath or a reaching for the next page or a [inaudible 00:29:38], and so that, something's happening in our body then. And that's the moment.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Maybe it is, or isn't the thing we'll point to later, but with 500 words or less, we are trying to find something that reaches out from the book and grabs our heart in some way, shape or form and voluntarily. [inaudible 00:29:55]. When I see that happen with the kids, it slows my role a bit like, "Oh, what was that? Was it the pacing? Was it the page turn? Was it the anticipation built? Was it inverting an expectation? Was it a simple word choice? Was it a wordless spread? And now we're just getting the moment to sit with the characters." And it helps me be thinking about that too. And so that kind of influences me to say like, "Oh kiddo, what's going on here?"
Hanna:
Yeah. What are you wondering? Yeah. What do you thinking?
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
[inaudible 00:30:23] Yeah. Yeah. I think picking up on those clues and following their lead in terms of responding to the moment and that stillness and that beat and leaning in there has been helpful for me as a parent.
Hanna:
Yeah. And I love that too, because what you said, it's often on the second read, or the next read, right? This is why kids have a favorite book. It makes them feel a certain way and it does have to be your favorite book, but you can be then thinking like, "Oh, they really liked..." I don't know. My kids were obsessed with Goodnight Moon. And it was like, after a while I was like, "I don't want to read with them. I can't read it." But I loved what they loved about it. They liked the sort of the predictability. They loved that every little person and every little character in this story was said goodnight too. So there was that sense of [inaudible 00:31:10]. Right. So there was that like, "Oh, it's things are precious to you."
Hanna:
So then you start pulling off of that and you're like, "Oh, I get it. I get what kind of book makes you feel a certain way. So let's find another book that kind of maybe touches on some of those same feelings."
Hanna:
So I love that you said it is that, you feel it in your body, you can end watching and observing a student or your own child, how they respond to a book is really, I think that's quite magical. That's the magical moment.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Oh, I love that.
Hanna:
It is, that's the magical moment. Okay. I have just loved chatting with you about books specifically, but also as an author from just those points of really stopping to take a moment and look at the pages, see our reactions. And I think that that just makes for a really rich picture book moment.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
[inaudible 00:32:01].
Hanna:
So thank you so much for spending some time with me today.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Can I just say one thing too, before [inaudible 00:32:06].
Hanna:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
I just want to provide some high-level context around the publishing world and why I want to say thank you to you specifically, is because learning, I feel there's only so much you can do as a first-time author to kind of wrap your head around what the experience is going to be like. And it totally depends on who you're lucky enough to get to publish with and what their processes are around PR and marketing. But one takeaway from my experience is there was nothing more valuable and affirming and just so beautiful for me as a human, but also as an author to connect with people who spend so much of their own lives, sharing stories and connecting the right book with the right kid and getting on a mountaintop and shouting out to all their friends in the community. Like "You all, you've got to get this book."
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Because to me stories are everything. That's what breaks through all this noise that exists around us. And that's what actually connects us. And so to see these voices connecting the dots for other folks. And for me, as someone who knew, I wasn't going to have a ton of marketing support and spend from the publishers, I cannot tell you what it's meant for your support and the whole Bookstagang and learning from you and being in community with you has been such an unexpected gift and has made such a huge difference on the books experience in the world, and my experience kind of shepherding it along the way. So thank you so much for all the work you do.
Hanna:
Oh, I love it. And I do. I love that we have connected. I've not met mostly anybody that are in our Bookstagang community, I've never met people in life, but there's these rich conversations that people don't understand, we have outside of the world in our DMs. And I wanted to bring that conversation here today. So thank you so much for sharing your time with us.
Caroline Kusin Pritchard:
Thank you for inviting me. It was a joy.
Connect with Caroline
Instagram @carolinepritchardwrites
Twitter @CarolinePritch
Facebook: Caroline Kusin Pritchard
Books Mentioned in the Episode:
Gitty and Kvetch by Caroline Kusin Pritchard
Amazon Canada affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3xsbH8A
Amazon US affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NVeGx3
When We Say Black Lives Matter by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Amazon Canada affiliate link:https://amzn.to/3b4Qfin
Amazon US affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3MWJLzl