Helen Zelon

Jon Scieszka came to Brooklyn — like so many ambitious scribblers– to write the great American novel. Enrolled in Brooklyn College’s writing program bck in 1977, Scieszka admits he was “a real pretentious twit.” For a good while, he supported his Serious Work by painting apartments. But when he found a steadier gig in a primary-school classroom, he also finally found his audience. Long days of wrangling fidgety second-graders were followed by nights crafting stories aimed at that same wildly demanding and imaginative age group. He realized he was on to something.

Sciezxka, along with illustrator Lane Smith, forged ahead, to create irreverent classics like The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Stinky Cheese Man. It may not be the path his grad-school self had in mind, but countless children, and their parents, are glad he found his calling.

Everyone knows that Brooklyn is crawling with writers and other artistic types these days. What may be surprising is how many of these creative people are making children’s books–and how deep the roots of children’s literature run under the brownstone-lined streets. “There’s a multigenerational history of writers and artists working in Brooklyn,” says New York Times children’s books editor Eden Ross Lipson. Think of Margaret Wise Brown, Norton Juster, Jules Feiffer, Barbara Cooney, Eleanor Estes, and Donald Crews, to name a few.

Today those venerable names have been joined by the next generation, many of whom have come from other media. Former “club kid” and spoken-word artists Blake Nelson has attracted a cult following for his young-adult novels; painter Paul O. Zelinsky’s lavish illustrations of traditional tales have won him fans and numerous awards; and animoator Mo Willems has transferred his crisp graphic skills from the screen to the page.

Brooklyn’s history as a haven for contrarian thinkers makes it fertile ground for a genre that appeals to the most brutally onest group of readers there is. “Really good children’s writers are naturally subversive,” says Lisa Holton, Park Slope local and publisher of Hyperion/Disney Global Children’s Books. “There’s the adult truth that everyone wants to hear and the real truth — the kids’ truth.”

Longtime Cobble Hill residents Leo and Diane Dillon were pioneers in the nart of subersive charm that characterizes the best of children’s literature. Married 47 years, the biracial couple became acutely aware of the absence of mixed-race children in storyboods back in the ’60s, when their son was small. “It was all Dick and Jane then,” says Leo. To counter this “bigotry of omission,” Diane says, they hand-tinted the pictures in their son’s Mother Goose anthologies.

After years of working in advertising and designing album covers, they were offered their first kids’ book. Leo says, “We had never done a picture book before — but we had ideas.” Ideas that became books like Rap a Tap Tap: Here’s Bojangles and To Every Thing There is a Season. Considered radical at first, this couple’s work has earned them honors like the Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award. And they have influenced legions of contemporary writers and illustrators.

But publishers are still wary of ruffling features, and for writers like Scieszka, the road from inspiration to popular acceptance has had plenty of bumps. When he was getting started, his stories were rejected as too edgy, too dark, too complicated for tender minds. Finally, an editor at Penguin agreed to take a chance on The True Story of the Three Little Pigs — Scieszka and Lane’s mischevious retelling of the familiar tale from the beleaguered wolf’s pooint of view.

Scieszka finds that everyday life in Park Slope helps to fuel his imaginative world. “I’ve thought about moving,” says Scieszka. “But the more I travel, and I travel a lot, the more I love Brooklyn. The number of people you meet on a given day, being thrown into the stew or whatever happens when you ride the subways, that multilingual mishmash.”

Blake Nelson, author of the teen favorite Girl: A Novel, says life in the city turns up the volume on his ambition and his healthy sense of creative competition. “You’ve got to be in New York to make connections, to get stuff done,” he says. “Manhattan’s not as interesting as it used to be. Brooklyn is more like normal life, but it has this added thing: Everyone’s smart in Brooklyn, even the guy who drives a truck. You gotta be articulate, you gotta be fast. There are a lot of good writers here — you don’t wanna suck.”

Of course, the proximity leads as often to collaboration as it does to competition. Rising picture-book star Mo Willems feld the Lower East Side for cheaper digs in preboom Williamsburg, long before he established his animation studio, Curious Pictures, and built a solid reputation making short films for Sesame Street. (He now develops television projects television projects and creates two kids’ books a year, including the 2004 Caldecott honoree Don’t Let the Penguin Drive the Bus!.) His newest work, Knuffle Bunny, is his “love letter to the idea of neighborhood,” and his neighborhood in particular. Being in a community of people doing similar work is key, he says.

“My publisher lives a couple of blocks a way. And it’s New York, so no one’s impressed — there’s somebody who does it better right down the block.” This may seem like reflexive modesty, until you realize that Jon Scieszka lives a couple of streets over from Willems’s new home in Park Slope. When Scieszka put together an anthology for his boys’ literacy program, Guys Read (www.guysread.com), he tapped Willems’s graphic talents. “I did my comic,” says Willems, “and then I walked it over.”

Emily Jenkins, whose picture books, stories, and chapter books have won prizes and deep loyalties from readers tiny and adult, says that easy access to local collaborators turned out to be an unexpected benefit of living in Boerum Hill, where she moved in 2001, after a decade-plus in Manhattan, to start a family. Ordinarily, writers and artists of working ‘together’ on children’s books don’t meet; editors broker the deal between words and images. But when illustrators Tomek Bogacki invited Jenkins to his Williamsburg studio, they came up with a new project on the spot, inspired by looking at his work.

“It’s what people imagine when they think about kids’ books,” she says, “but it only happened because the artist had a studio here, in Brooklyn.” Similarly serendipitous connections can happen on the business side; two weeks after Jenkins gave birth, editor Anne Schwartz called about a picture-book proposal she had submitted. (Schwartz’s name surfaces often. A longtime editor, she now heads her own imprint at Atheneum Books for Young Readers.) “She said that the characters deserved a longer story,” says Jenkins. “She made me a big offer, a huge leap of faith. I was a writer she believed in. She knew that a contract for a bigger book in the year I had a baby would make a difference.”

The beauty part is that all the negotiations happened right here in Brooklyn. “I didn’t even have to go into New York to seal the deal,” Jenkins says. “I sat with her at home, with the baby nursing on my lap. We walked in Prospect Park with her big dog and my baby. That was our business meeting.”

In the cozy milieu of Brooklyn’s kids’ books, it’s a way of doing business that makes all the sense in the world.

Originally appeared in BKLYN magazine.

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