Going Inside the Board Book with Jon Klassen

Jon Klassen’s books stay with kids. Maybe because they watch you saucer-eyed as you’re reading them. His latest, The House With Nobody In It, is a board book shaped like a house, with cutouts for doors and a classic stitchup between text and image: the words point out the objects in each room while stating there is “nobody” in the house. A ghost looks on. My kids, reared on This Is Not My Hat and the Shapes series, loved it, even though they’re now 9 and 11. I suspect many adults have a hankering for a good board book, too.

Klassen recently won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, receiving the life-changing news one morning quite by surprise (highly recommend listening to the phone call between Klassen and the entire jury). His work feels like it exists in its own space, allowing a darkness and dry wit that aren’t always allowed in the gates of kidlit. He kindly answered some of LitHub’s biggest questions about what becoming a parent confirmed about his ideas of childhood, the Swedish view of children’s literature, and his process as a whole. It’s a delight.

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​Janet Manley:​ This book’s format is just so satisfying. How did you make it happen? Was the publisher like oh NO he wants die cut and doors in the pages? Did you have to build a new (house-shaped) publishing factory? How big a deal is it to put out a book/object like this?

​Jon Klassen: If the publisher did have an oh NO moment, they kept it well-hidden. Board books, from what I’ve seen, have all sorts of tricks they can do. I wasn’t sure, and still am not quite sure, how ambitious something like this is. I kind of hope I never find out.

​JM: Moving through the book from room to room, the doorway of course takes you forward — this is so satisfying in The Very Hungry Caterpillar—was it inspired by anything in particular, and how did you figure out the 3-dimensional side of the story?

​JK: The movement from room to room was kind of inspired by very early video games, like the first iterations of Zelda, or going back further there was a game for Atari called “Adventure” about a castle. In these games, you see kind of a top down view of rooms or areas, and you go to the edge of the screen to where you see a door or a break in the forest or something, and then you choose to go through it and the screen changes and you’re in the next room or area. I remember as a kid being so scared by the idea that your character onscreen is standing in an open doorway, but you don’t get to see what’s in the next room until you’re in it on the next screen. Not only that, but anything IN the next room can see you in the doorway before you see it. This book doesn’t use that idea too much, but moving from room to room like that is in there for sure.

​JM: The other cardinal rule of a children’s book (if you’re attending conferences or listening to agents) is that they must have a character the reader can relate to, like them. The character/voice in this book is very free floating. How did you pin it down?

I think having kids just really reaffirmed the validity of that time for me. They are having real days, as important as mine or anyone else’s. I had suspected it, but it’s amazing to watch for real.

​JK: Another touchstone for this book, and a lot of the board book work I’ve been doing recently, is guided meditation. I don’t have tons of experience in it, but they put us in a few sessions in high school and I remember them really well. Those sessions, and these books, are told more in real-time, as opposed to hearing a story in the past tense. I really love the sound and feeling of present-tense writing, and the delivery of the person hosting those meditation sessions was always so flat and calm, even if something exciting might be happening. It’s almost like they’re in a trance and the neutrality in their voice is part of the whole thing. I think also there’s an academic quality to it in this book. If you did actually remove the ghost, it turns into a simple object-learning exercise, and a weird one at that. I like the idea of this book, if you can’t see the ghost, being a not-very-entertaining book that just thinks it is teaching you what a chair is.

JM: Perhaps the meta reading was intended; perhaps not, but the house has no one in it* when the book isn’t being read. It ceases to be a story unless the child is turning the pages. Am I right or wrong?

*i.e., you can either count the ghost or the reader themselves as the wink wink exception to “this house is empty”

JK: That wasn’t intended, but I do like the idea that, say there was no ghost on the page in this book—we as the viewer are still moving through it, unseen, in kind of a strange detached way, going through walls, and seeing the same day over and over. A reader of the book would feel a little like a ghost in there themselves. This ties into the idea that the narrator can’t see the ghost at all. Why can we, the viewer, see him if the narrator/adult can’t? Can ghosts only see each other? What does that mean about us?

JM: Did you have any rules for yourself when writing or illustrating this one?

JK: For illustrating, it wasn’t so much a rule, but I leaned heavier than I ever have before on the book as an object filling its own space on this one. The rooms are all solid click-filled colors—besides the drawn things IN the rooms, I didn’t generate any art in the usual way. The cut out doors and windows, and what they frame, became just as much my “drawing” as the actual drawings, and that was really exciting. Letting the physicality of the book do a lot of the lifting was really fun.

JM: “Nobody”—Margaret Wise Brown-informed?

JK: Probably! For a long time it was called “The Empty House,” but that didn’t really work because the house isn’t empty. It has things in it. And “The House With Nobody In It” is such a conspicuously odd thing to say if you really don’t think there’s anybody in there—it nails the joke more clearly. But yeah, how could “Goodnight nobody” not inform it, right? That page is so ghostly.

JM: You and buddy/collaborator Mac Barnett have talked about the importance of being able to “access your childhood” when writing or illustration for kids. Has having your own kids changed this for you?

JK: It should be said that I think for both of us, Mac and I, accessing our memories of childhood is an important part of it, but I don’t think it’s the only way people do this work, necessarily. I would totally believe some authors or illustrators wouldn’t put it like that, and that they get in there another way. But it’s been big for us, and for me on my own. So much so that I didn’t really think having kids was going to change the work, because it had been all about just going back and remembering. I think with the boys around, it just serves as an amazing deep reminder of the speed of those days, and how carefully they look at things, and also how different they are even from one another. It sounds strange but I still don’t think I’d say I make the books for them, exactly. It’s nice if they like them, but it’s still coming from the same place it always was. I think having kids just really reaffirmed the validity of that time for me. They are having real days, as important as mine or anyone else’s. I had suspected it, but it’s amazing to watch for real.

JM: You use “let’s” a lot in this book, and it strikes me as an instruction kids are used to and will acquiesce to. Thinking about misreadings and good faith readings from adult vs young readers, are children the more ideal audience?

JK: The “let’s” thing comes, I think, from working in a board book format, as opposed to a picture book. In picture books, you’re less sure of what the reading experience is going to eventually be. Is the work going to be read aloud to the audience by someone else? Is it going to be read alone by the reader to themselves? You don’t know. But board books are understood more clearly to be for a younger audience, often one that can’t read themselves. The more I worked in this format, the more comfortable I got with a kind of group speak, or a parental / authoritative voice that I knew was going to be involved. It’s kind of leading more than one person through the book in a way that sounds inclusive, but also kind of commanding. “Let’s do this.” “Let’s go over here.” The reader doesn’t have any more agency than the kid you’re saying “Let’s get in the car” to, but it hopefully sounds gentle anyway. I think that kids are maybe more likely to get a kick out of this sound because, like you said, they are familiar with it, but also because, here in this book, this instructional voice is wrong, or at least unaware of the main idea, and hopefully that’s fun and cathartic for the kid to experience.

JM: I can’t think of a more delightful phone call than the one you received by surprise one morning with the entire jury of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award committee on the other end. What did the honor mean to you, and what do the Swedes know about good literature?

JK: I’m honestly still getting my head around it. It was and is a huge honor. The best way I’ve found to try and understand it for myself is to think about the past winners whose work I like so much and who I’ve looked up to for years. To kind of conceive of it that way, that I’ve been asked to go and stand with them, is no less daunting and unexpected, but at least it feels more real than what felt like an entire country telling you that you’re great.

I’d been traveling to Sweden for their conference in Lund the last few years, and those trips and the one recently for the award always showed a place with this very straightforward understanding of children’s literature as a valid form of expression and communication. The awards staff and everyone connected to it is very matter-of-fact about the importance of children and things that are made for them. They’re not overly proud of themselves for recognizing it, they just treat it as the truth. You don’t have to start a talk about your work with a little prologue about how you really can and should take this field seriously. The Swedes seem to, as an entire country and culture, already be there, and in that position they are able to have it hold complexity and nuance and sadness and anything else you might want to make stories about. It’s extremely encouraging and inspiring.

JM: What shape is your house?

JK: I live in a part of Los Angeles where they were excited about weird little flourishes like rounded doors and turrets for no reason, so our house has a turret that holds the front door, which is rounded. The rest of the house, besides the turret, is just a regular peaked-roof stucco place. But have a turret.