Patty Vest:
Welcome to Sagecast the podcast of Â鶹ӰÊÓ. I'm Patty Vest.

Mark Wood:
And I'm Mark Wood.

Patty Vest:
In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes, as we all shelter in place.

Mark Wood:
This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today.

Patty Vest:
Today, our guest is the New York Times bestselling children's author, Mac Barnett, class of 2004.

Mark Wood:
Welcome Mac. It's great to have you with us here in cyberspace.

Mac Barnett:
It's good to be here. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Mark Wood:
How are you adapting in these very weird times?

Mac Barnett:
On like the most basic level, the life of an author is just mostly a life spent at home, driving yourself crazy. In that way, I think I was ready for it. But another big part of it is for my job at least, is going around in the country, visiting schools and reading stories out loud to kids. And I miss doing that. How are you doing?

Patty Vest:
As you can see my virtual background that our listeners can't see. I'm on campus, but I'm not.

Mark Wood:
We're in our sixth month now of working from home. I'm 67, so I'm in a vulnerable population and my wife has had pneumonia twice, so she's in a vulnerable population. We're pretty much homebodies these days. It's looking forward to the day when we can break out of this little prison of ours.

Mac Barnett:
Same here. Absolutely.

Patty Vest:
So Mac let's start from the beginning. What were you like as a child and what was your favorite children's book or books?

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. I was a big reader as a kid, for sure. I grew up just surrounded by books. Those were my favorite things that we owned growing up. It was just me and my mom and I grew up in the Bay Area and she read to me out loud all the time. And then also she just really wanted me to have books around. She bought all of my books at a garage sales and yard sales, so it ended up that I grew up... I was born in 1982, but I grew up with books that were published for the generation before me and the generation before that, which actually was really lucky. Because this was this great golden age in American picture books. Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, Arnold Lobell, the Frog and Toad stories were huge for me, Where The Wild Things Are, but In The Night Kitchen was actually my favorite of Maurice Sendak's.

Mac Barnett:
And Margaret Wise Brown, just all of her books. I loved so much. And then my mom never put my picture books away. I think it's really common, a lot of parents are eager to have their kids graduate out of picture books and then put the chapter books on the shelf and say, "my kindergarten have read a 600 page novel." I think that attitude is probably more common today, but my mom was never like that. So picture books stayed on the bottom shelf. And then when I started reading chapter books, they went on the shelf above that and my mom was just taking out all of her books and I think putting those in the storage and the bookshelf just became gradually mine. But the picture books always stayed out and I never stopped reading them.

Mac Barnett:
So even when I was in upper elementary or middle school, I would sometimes remember a picture book that I loved and pull it down and start reading it. I was an only child too, to talk about what I was like as a kid. I was an only child, just me and my mom. She was great. Like we were around each other all the time though. She definitely needed her privacy at times. And I would just spend time in my room reading or arranging my stuffed animals and talking... This is sounding sad, but it wasn't. Talking to them and having them talk back to me. And I think that that's actually great training for a writer. Getting to know your own voice, but you're always just pretending to talk to other people. At least for me, that's a big part of the composition. It's just still conversations with myself. And I started doing that when I was a kid.

Mark Wood:
Tell us how you found your way to Pomona. And then I've got to ask about your relationship with David Foster Wallace. I know that had to be an important experience in your life.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah, it's true. Pomona overall with such an important experience in my life, I think it was the formative experience for me. How I got there? My high school, college counselor, who I really loved, she recommended Pomona to me. And I had never heard of Pomona. I grew up in California. I still, I had never, she was like, "you seem like a Pomona kid." And I was like, "I don't even know what that means. I don't. I've never heard of this school. I don't understand it." But she kept saying it to me, like she was so determined. And so I was like, "allright I'm going to start reading about this school." And everything that I read, I was like, "I think that I am a Pomona kid."

Mac Barnett:
And for me, I guess what that mean, there was this sort of the combination of academic rigor with... And I mean this in the best way, and I'm talking about myself here too, but attracting odd balls, particular people. Yeah. I was like this is right. The combination of academics and like a West Coast outsideriness. I applied early decision to Pomona. I was like, the more I just did all this research, everything I read about it, I was like, "I love this place. This is where I want to go." I applied and then I hadn't even visited. I just knew I wanted to go there. And then the next four years I was so happy.

Mac Barnett:
It's the geographical space in the world that I feel most attached to for sure. As for David Foster Wallace, it was weird. In between senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I remember I got as a graduation present, a Barnes & Noble gift card and I just went, I was like, "I'm going to pick out a book that I've never heard of. That's what I want to do." And I picked up Brief Interviews with Hideous Men just because I thought that the title and the cover were so funny. And then that turned out to be the first experimental literature I had ever read. It really broke my brain. I hadn't felt that relationship to a book where I felt like, wow! I have to learn how to read this book, how to understand it.

Mac Barnett:
I hadn't really felt that since I was a kid. And the book was really important to me. Halfway through my time there was on the list of possible professors to take the Roy Disney chair. I was flipping out. When he came to visit, I was an English major and he came to visit and he came out of the bathroom in Cruickshank because I was going in and I had no idea it was going to happen. And just flubbed the encounter, and still, I remember I was like, "good luck with your audition. Sorry I'm doing, it's not an audition. I don't know." And then he was like, "don't. I think audition is just the right word for it." I remember that so well.

Mark Wood:
Yeah. Of course.

Mac Barnett:
I wanted to be a writer from the time that I was a little kid. And so having this writer that I so admired in this position, teaching, writing, weirdly, my first impulse was to not take his class, to not apply because I was terrified that if I applied and got turned down, then that would be the confirmation of that deep fear that I knew somewhere was real, that I actually didn't have what it took to be a writer. And then my mom was like, "that's so stupid. What are you thinking? You have to take advantage of the fact that this..."

Mark Wood:
I like your mom already.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. That's very my mom. I remember I went, I was like, all right, I'm going to apply. And then maybe I can work the rough a little bit. I'll use the old trick of just showing up at office hours to finesse the situation a little bit. So I went to his office and then he invited me in and I was like, "I was just wondering, I'm putting together the application. Is there anything I should be paying attention to?" And he just winced. He was a big wincer always. He was always wincing. And it was like the first wince. He just winced and he was like, "I think that the application was really clear."

Mac Barnett:
And it's true, it was. He was always a clear writer. I was like, "yeah. Yeah." And he's like, "what don't you understand about it?" I was like, "is there anything in particular?" Oh, no, no. You could just feel the nose dive happening.

Mac Barnett:
And he said, look like the one thing I would say that's on there, but you should know is, proofread this thing five times, because if there's any air in it, then I'll just use that as an excuse to not let you in the class. So luckily my mom is also an excellent proofreader, so she was signed up for that immediately. But he asked me then, he was like, "what kind of writing do you want to do?" And I said, "I want to write kids books." And then he winced again. And he was like, "I don't know anything about writing for children." And I said, "I know everything I need to know about talking to kids. I know kids really well," what I needed, I just need to know how to write. And that seemed to hit with him a little bit. And then I had my mom proofread that thing five times. And I got in the class.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. So I took intro to fiction with him. And then I did an independent study with nonfiction. And then he was one my two senior oral examiners, which was like the most intellectually exhausting two hours of my life. And afterwards he was like an advisor and somebody who was really helping me figure out how you can exist as an actual working writer, which growing up it's all I wanted to do, but it never seemed like a real option. And in some ways it's still doesn't after like working only as a writer for 10 years. It still doesn't. I can't believe that I got this job.

Patty Vest:
Mac, you knew early on that you wanted to write for children. Why was that? What was that journey-

Mac Barnett:
I worked at a summer camp on my summers off from college. And there was a summer camp that I had actually gone to as a kid in Berkeley, where I grew up in the Bay Area. And it was a sports themed summer camp. I'm not an athlete, as you can tell from my use of the term sports themed. It was sports themed. It was a sports summer camp. And I don't play sports. And so I was put in charge of the four year olds, because four year olds are also terrible at sports.

Mark Wood:
Terrible at sports.

Mac Barnett:
That's right. It was a match made in heaven. And that's where I first started telling stories out loud to kids. And I realized that the stuff that I'm interested in, the stories that I like, which are experimental stories, weird stories, stories that ask the reader to do work, that kids were actually much more willing to do that work than adults were. That a lot of abilities that we cultivate, that we think that we cultivate as adults, as readers, as an openness to new ideas, a bravery when it comes to a challenging text, actually kids have those and we lose it somewhere along the way.

Mac Barnett:
And if we're lucky, we cultivate that again. You hear a lot of artists talk about kids as artists, right? That kids have innately the outlook on the world that artists require, but I think that kids also, they innately are great readers, great art appreciators. A trip to the museum with a child can be so eyeopening. They don't have any of this terror of being wrong of giving a dumb interpretation. They'll just stand in front of a painting, tell you what they see and tell you what they think it means. And that quality, I think makes them such excellent readers. And so I said, this is my audience. This is who I want to write for.

Mark Wood:
It's notoriously hard to get a first book published, in any, of any kind. Walk us through your path from Pomona to actually succeeding as an author.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. So there was a book that I would read to my campers at summer camp over and over again, called the Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. And it was this postmodern take on fairytales. A really groundbreaking picture book. It was so smart, so funny, and I loved it and my campers loved it too. And I think a lot of times, we'll say like their jokes in there for adults and jokes in there for the kids. And I think we flatter ourselves as adults, I was laughing at the same jokes that these kids were, and I was laughing at the lowbrow jokes, but they were also laughing at the highbrow jokes. And I was like, "man, this is amazing." It opened my eyes to how smart kids really were when it came to understanding a difficult text.

Mac Barnett:
So I went back to Pomona and I was telling all my friends, I was like, "I know what I want to do. I want to write picture books. There's this book called the Stinky Cheese Man, that I love." And that was just part of how I... Identically, I was like, this is why I'm coming to this. And one of my friends who went to Pittsburgh, she was like, "you know my dad wrote that book. Right?" And I had no idea. I know it was so wild. His name is Jon Scieszka and it's S-C-I-E-S-Z-K-A, a Polish name. So I never knew how to pronounce his name. I read that book probably 500 times and I would just always skip Jon's name. I would be like, this book is by Jon Sc-

Patty Vest:
By Jon.

Mark Wood:
By Jon.

Mac Barnett:
By Jon and Lane Smith.

Mark Wood:
John C.

Mac Barnett:
John. Yeah. And Casey, we actually called her Scieszka, but I had no idea how to spell her name. I never would've done it that way. And so the next day she said, I told my dad about your book. And he thinks it's really funny. He wants to see it when you're done. And so I got to send my first picture book to Jon Scieszka, who was the reason that I wanted to write a picture book and he wrote me back and was like, "I love this. I'm going to send this to my agent." And his agent became my agent. And that was in 2005. That was 15 years ago.

Patty Vest:
Wow!

Mac Barnett:
Yeah.

Mark Wood:
What book was that?

Mac Barnett:
That was called Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem. Yeah. Its about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet, but it's a punishment and it ruins his life.

Patty Vest:
There's a surprise in the inside cover I think of that book.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah, that's right.

Patty Vest:
Can you tell us about that story?

Mac Barnett:
If you lift up the flap and you take the jacket off, there are all these old tiny advertisements. That's, what's on the case, that's what the part of the book that's under the jacket is called, it's called the case. And a lot of the times, especially in picture books, the case will have a different image from the jacket. So there there's a tiny advertisement that says, you can get a free trial of a blue whale. Just send us a self-addressed stamped envelope, and we will send you a whale in the mail. And then there was an address that you could write to. And any kid who saw that, read it decided they wanted a blue whale and decided to just send a self-addressed stamped envelope, those envelopes would then get sent from the publisher to me, and then they would get a letter back from a Norwegian law firm that said that their whale was stuck in Sonya cured. And there's like a customs SNAFU but the Norwegian legal system is very slow, but lawyers were working around the clock.

Mac Barnett:
Meantime, here's a photograph of your whale and here is a phone number where you can leave your whale a voicemail. He'd love to hear from you. And then kids will call in and leave phone messages for their whales. And they're the best messages.

Mark Wood:
So kids are headed off to college today, still waiting for their whale?

Mac Barnett:
The Norwegian legal system really needs to be streamlined. And I think it's outrageous, but again, as an American, I don't want to come down too hard on any other country's system. I just, yeah, I agree. I think it's outrageous that these kids don't have their way.

Mark Wood:
Well, our postal system has its problems.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. No kidding.

Mark Wood:
So you've talked about, wonder and how children can get there so much more easily than the adults. Can you still get there and what gets you there?

Mac Barnett:
Yeah, that's right. Because I think that willingness to enter a playful liminal world where the rules of reality are a little warped. I think kids are great at that, they're great at make-believe, right? I think that's a great phrase. They make themselves believe something. There's effort involved in pretending that way. And for the kid who wanted to take that risk to send that envelope off, I wanted to reward that impulse to say, if that kid was willing to reach out and say, like, "I want to make believe," then I wanted be like, "cool, we can make this world. We can flesh out this world a little more. We can play." I think that adults have more trouble getting to that place, but they do get to that place.

Mac Barnett:
To some extent we all do, especially when we... It's something art is great for, it's something stories are great for that we will cry about a character that we know is fake, because our feelings about that character are real. And in fact, in June 16th, people from around the world visit Dublin to retrace the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, a man who never existed. People spend real money, get on real planes and walk around a real city to trace a fictional character, because that character means something to us. I think it's harder. Kids can get there so easily. And the way that they interact socially, I think has a lot of play and make-believe in it. And they're just open to seeing what's fresh and new about the world in that way. Adults I think we need to be knocked off our game a little bit to get to that place, we get are [inaudible 00:22:02].

Mac Barnett:
We can conflate being uncertain with being dumb. If we don't know the answer that that's a referendum on our intelligence, if we don't immediately understand something, that means there's something wrong with the way that we think. And so we cling to certainty because it makes us feel better about who we are in the world. I really tried to live in a place that's comfortable with discomfort with ambiguity, with not knowing. But I think that art has always been a way that I can take a shortcut into that place to say like, "oh, man, I've never thought of it that way. I've never seen the world through that person's perspective." Or "I don't understand this, but it's making me feel something." Those spaces, those uncertain spaces, that's where change is possible. That's where growth is possible. That's where we can connect with somebody else in the middle, in these liminal spaces. And I think we'd be better off being comfortable in those uncomfortable places, just as individuals and as a society, as a culture.

Patty Vest:
You talked about being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Is that how you seek to understand how to write for children? Or do you spend a lot of time with them or are you writing for your own self as a child?

Mac Barnett:
That's a good question. I spend lot of time talking to kids and I think that's the motivation for me. It's always been like, my first stories were told out loud to kids. I still love talking to kids. They say things to me all the time, that just blows my mind. I think that's why those four-year-olds were perfect because four year olds are so verbal, you can have a conversation with them, but their perspective is so foreign to an adult. It's wild, it's like talking to a space alien, but you're able to have this conversation. I love talking to kids and their freshness, their openness to big questions, the way they wrestle with huge questions, that's what inspires me. If you spend any time around kids, you know they ask so many hard questions, huge questions, "What is love? What is life? What happens after we die?"

Mac Barnett:
These are questions that artists sit down and try to answer too. I think that kids and artists have a lot in common. They're both just trying to understand what it means to be a person in the world. And that feeling of being an adult, that's asked a question by a kid and you don't really know how to answer. Oh man, that's wild. When you're like, "Oh, I used to wonder the same thing. And then I just decided not to figure it out. And now I'm being exposed." I think that I am inspired to... And then not go back and find the answers. I don't have the answers, but to say like, "I'm wondering the same thing." Here's some of the things that I think about when I ask this question. I think that's how I like to approach a book. And I think that there's comfort in that, I don't like to teach lessons. I don't feel like I have just a pile of wisdom to share or morals to inscribe on kids' brains. I just want to say like, "Hey, I'm wondering the same stuff you are. This is a wild world." Yeah.

Mark Wood:
So going in, I know this is an unanswerable question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because I want to hear how you tackle it. And that is, how do you go about finding your new ideas for books? And how many of your ideas actually work, become and work out as books?

Mac Barnett:
Yeah, I think that it's where ideas come from just... I can't sit down on my desk and come up with an idea. It never works that way. Being a writer is just a way of existing in the world I think. It's a way of reading, it's a way of watching, it's a way of interacting with other people. I think you have to be aware, not just the world around you, but of your own attention, the things that make you feel excited or that make you feel angry, the things that you care about, those are the things that you write about and writing is a craft that you can get good at, but it doesn't mean anything until you connect it to something that you're passionate about. And that doesn't even mean in broad terms... It could mean I love baseball and I'm going to write about baseball.

Mac Barnett:
I don't love baseball by the way. But it can also just be the jokes that you laugh at, the things that people do that you find incredibly annoying, noticing those things, keeping track of them, that is the fodder for writing. It's a way of always paying attention. That's the first step. And I think the ideas come from there, it comes from just the daily practice of being a noticer, inward and outward.

Patty Vest:
When you're write, do you have already a vision of illustrations for your books or what does that collaboration look like?

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. So I like to write novels and picture books. I do write novels and picture books. I prefer to write picture books. I can't draw, but I think it's so interesting to write just a piece of what will be the finished whole. I think that writing a picture book, it has a lot in common with playwriting. You're just making a structure for a number of other collaborators to come in and make the thing real. And so I'll have an idea for maybe an illustrative mood in my head, but mainly what I'm trying to do is leave big spaces. To leave spaces in my story for an illustrator to come in and to tell the story, to decide what a character looks like or what the room in a house looks like, or even what's happening in the background or what emotions that character is feeling when a certain thing is happening.

Mac Barnett:
There's a lot of information that if I were writing a novel, I would include in a manuscript that when I'm writing a picture book, you're deliberately leaving out. Then an illustrator comes in and fills in some of those stories. Sorry, an illustrator comes in and fills in some of those gaps. But then an adult will come in who will read the story out loud, because that's one of the weird things about picture books is they're not read by kids, they're mostly read to kids. And if you've read a picture book out loud to a kid, you know that there are a million different ways to do it. Maybe you choose to have like fun voices for the characters, maybe that makes you uncomfortable and you don't do that. Maybe you like to take a break and talk about what you see in the picture.

Mac Barnett:
Maybe you just plow through with the text. Maybe you think of a joke that isn't in the text, but you just add that in there and it gets a laugh. Thank you. You're making me the author look good when you do that. The adult who reads the story out loud is making an interpretation too. And finally, if a book is really good, there are still gaps in it, still holes, still things left to figure out for the kid who's listening to the story to come in and make an interpretation of their own. And so it's this process of re-interpretation, that's so exciting to write words that are interpreted by an artist that are then interpreted by an adult who's adding voices and movements and facial expressions, and then interpreted by a kid who's taking this all in. It's a really magical process that way. And there's nothing like it.

Mark Wood:
In a lot of cases, authors and illustrators don't even know each other or talk to each other.

Mac Barnett:
That's right.

Mark Wood:
They're connected just through a publisher and maybe an editor working with the writer and an art director working with an illustrator, in your most recent books, you've worked with one illustrator Jon Klassen, and it's a really effective collaboration. I'll reveal here, I have a five-year-old grandson and Mac is his favorite author. Can you tell us a little bit about that collaboration, is it a collaboration or is it two separate paths?

Mac Barnett:
No, you're right Mark. When you make a picture book with an illustrator, if you're just writing the words, what you end up selling to the publisher is usually just a manuscript, there's not an artist attached. And then the publisher will usually assign you an artist. And if you're lucky, you might get to see sketches, but it's very common for an author not to see the artwork until it's all finished. And during the process, the author and illustrator are not supposed to talk to each other. But Jon and I were friends before we started making books together and we grew up loving the same books. And I think we're similar in a lot of ways and probably different in just enough ways to make the partnership really work. And so the first time we made a book, a book called Extra Yarn, we were sneaking behind the editors back and talking all the time about not making this thing.

Mac Barnett:
Then the secret got out. And so now we do it. It is a real collaborate. We talk all the time when we're working on a book. And he has influence over the words, I have influence over the pictures. It's really unusual. And even other illustrators who I might be in touch with during the process, it's not like with Jon. Every book for us is a little bit different, but every book I think is a document of our friendship too. And I think that it's integral to the way that those books come out. And those are very special books to me, the ones that I've made with John.

Patty Vest:
If someone would have told you 20 years ago, as an incoming student at Pomona, that your books would be translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than two million copies worldwide, what would Mac have said?

Mac Barnett:
Coming into Pomona, I didn't even have any conception of what it can mean to be a person who had a life in the arts or the humanities in some way. My mom was a nurse, she dated pretty much exclusively firefighters. And that was what I knew. I remember I had a lunch with my advisor, the intro lunch with my faculty advisor, who is an English professor named Dan Berkowitz. And he was a younger professor, and I don't know who I expected to be teaching me in English but I was just flabbergasted that there were adult. He was a medievalist. And I was like, "you just read medieval literature and think about it for a living, but you don't have like a giant beard, that like an owl lives in, you're just like a normal, cool guy. This is unreal. This is unreal."

Mac Barnett:
I couldn't believe it. It was so eye opening to me. If you asked me just what I would think of that as I was entering Pomona, I wouldn't even believe you. There's no way. I didn't have my eyes open to all the possibilities that were in front of somebody.

Mark Wood:
So we're getting close to the end here. I'm going to ask you about your next book. What are you working on? What can you tell us about what you're working on?

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. So during quarantine, it was wild. So the week before, the Bay Area shut down and a lot of the country did. The second week in March, I was in Central California doing school visits like I normally do. I was talking to a thousand kids a day in a gymnasium reading books out loud to them. We knew COVID was coming, we had no idea what it really meant, we had no idea that really it was already here. I came back up to the Bay Area where I live on a Friday. That Saturday, school in the Bay Area was canceled. That Sunday, word was going out at school was going to be canceled across the country in so many school districts. And so on that Sunday, I said, "you know what, I'm just going to go on to Instagram and I'm going to read books out loud, and I'm just going to do this every day during quarantine until we run out of books. And by then, I'm sure COVID will be over." That didn't work out that way. I ran out of books.

Mark Wood:
You have to go into reruns.

Mac Barnett:
We did. We are now in reruns. I read some other people's books, pushing at the edges of copyright law. I'm reading my books again for the fourth time. I had this moment where we reached the end again. And it's called Mac's Book Club Show. And I don't know, it's a show, but I'm in a chair in my office. I'm just talking out into the void. And when we were round in the corner again of starting out with Billy Twitters, I had this moment where I felt like I was going to lose it, I was losing it. Why? Where I was just like, "and what are we doing? Will we just go through and read all of my books in a circle forever? Maybe." But-

Mark Wood:
You're not writing them fast enough.

Mac Barnett:
That is true. That is true. But one thing that came out of that, we did this weird thing, a friend of mine, since I was a kid, since we were eight, we were friends together, he's an illustrator and an artist. And as a segment on the Book Club Show, I was like, what if we do a live cartoon? What if on Zoom, you move your camera across a piece of paper. And we just do voices and sound effects and stuff. And so we ended up every Saturday for 12 weeks on Zoom recording a live cartoon. And it's called the First Cat in Space Ate Pizza. That's a sci-fi epic. And it's just like, it was the weirdest thing. It was just like, it's just him doing basically paper puppetry while we do voices in Zoom. And really my memory of the first three months or four months, I guess... We have a three, division is not my strong suit. Avoid it.

Mac Barnett:
It's just making these cartoons. We're making a graphic novel of the First Cat in Space Ate Pizza and that's what we're working on now. We are adapting the live cartoon classic, the world's first and only live cartoon into a comic. And so that is what I'm working on right now.

Patty Vest:
I'm going to look that up.

Mac Barnett:
Yeah. Check it out. Yeah, they're all up on YouTube now.

Mark Wood:
So if people want to find them, they just need to type your name into YouTube search?

Mac Barnett:
If they type in The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza, I'm pretty sure we're the only hit [inaudible 00:39:03]. They're all on Instagram too. It's so weird, Instagram was the worst platform to do a weekly read aloud for, it's just the one I ended up using, but like everything just gets buried so deep in this they just put it into YouTube. You can check them out.

Patty Vest:
And where can readers, find your books?

Mac Barnett:
You can find my books at any bookshop. That's where I always encourage people to buy books, at their local books shop if they can. Of course, if you can't buy books, you can find them at the library. That's where I read books all the time. Especially right now, I think we're thinking about the businesses we support right now, that's the world we're going to emerge into. Those are the neighborhoods that when we go outside again, we need to think about the neighborhoods we want to walk around and then the places we want to live. So support your bookstores, support your libraries, that's where I say find my books.

Mark Wood:
So on that note, we're going to have to wrap this up. We've been talking with Author Mac Barnett, the class of 2004 [inaudible 00:40:13].

Mac Barnett:
Oh, thanks for having me. It was great to visit campus back in my mind. And then also Patty in your background.

Patty Vest:
That's right. And that was great to chat with you from your closet studio.

Mac Barnett:
You exposed me. Oh, no.

Patty Vest:
But the quality of the audio is great.

Mac Barnett:
Fantastic.

Patty Vest:
I've just been trying to figure out what that thing is, that's hanging right [crosstalk 00:40:40].

Mac Barnett:
I know it's like a shrouded ghost like uninvited guests in our podcast.

Patty Vest:
It's a next step during his books.

Mac Barnett:
That's right.

Patty Vest:
And to all who stuck with us as far. Thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast at Â鶹ӰÊÓ. Stay safe, and until next time.