Interview with Mary Brigid Barrett | Sound Authors Radio

November 24, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Its Friday, October 24th and a beautiful crisp day out here in New York and it’s a political show for a political season. I’ve got three guests on the show today. I’ll talk about the second two guests first and then I’ll welcome my first guest. I’ve got David Mendell on the show with his biography of Barack Obama called Obama: From Promise to Power. Now that’s a Washington Post Bestseller. Then I’ve got Nikki Grimes on the show with a book that’s also illustrated by Brian Collier called Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. And then at the beginning we’ll start out by talking about a book called Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. It’s a wonderful collection created by 108 authors and illustrators and has an introduction by famous author and historian David McCullough and it’s my honor to welcome the person who had the idea for the book; Mary Brigid Barrett. Welcome to the show.

Mary Barrett: Well thank you for having me and I’m calling from Franklin, Massachusetts, the home of our country’s first public library.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out.

Mary Barrett: It’s an absolutely beautiful book. I think if you have it in front of you that you can see how absolutely stunning it is. It’s a visual delight, it’s full of poetry, original stories, both historical fiction and non-fiction and absolutely breathtaking art. from the cover that David McCauley did all the way through to the last double page spread in the book where illustrator Bob Kohler has created this incredible presidential timeline that also acts as a game for young people and the adults in their lives to kind of open their eyes to kind of quiz you on presidential facts. So we cover over 200 years of American history looking inside the White House and looking outside into America.

Dr. Kent: Looking at the book, the wonderful front cover shows little people all over the front lawn of the White House dipping their fishing poles in the fountain’s water and running around and having picnics. Tell me about the illustrators and authors that are in the book and what inspired them to do all of this work?

Mary Barrett: The inspiration and original idea came to me from sort of two experiences I’ve had over the last couple of years. I had a wonderful opportunity to have a lunch with the historian you mentioned, David McCullough and his wife Rosalie down in Boston. It was during that conversation we talked about many things. We talked about our joint love as kids of historical fiction, specifically Robert Lawson’s wonderful books Ben & Me and Paul Revere & I, and especially how Lawson’s humorous and provocative pen and ink illustrations pulled us into these stories of Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin.

Also during that conversation, David McCullough raised my awareness to the fact that our founding fathers and mothers adamantly believed that this great experiment of democracy was going to succeed only if all of our citizens young and old were both literate and informed. We discussed the direct link between literacy, historical literacy and civic engagements. Then also during the course of the last couple of years, because I’m head of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance and I’m going to Washington a lot to advocate for kids and literacy and libraries, I found myself at the White House as a tourist, and also there’s the president of the NTDLA advocating for kids.

I had spoken and discussed these issues with both First Lady Clinton’s staff at the time and with Mrs. Bush and I’ve had the opportunity to be able to wander around the first floor of the White House and while you’re there, you do actually kind of hear the echoes of voices and footsteps in the hall. You’re being watched by all those incredible presidential portraits; the eyes of the former first ladies and the presidents looking at you and I kind of had the same feeling walking through the first floor of the White House as I did the first time I walked as a kid going into the main reading room of the Cleveland Public Library that this was my space. And that this was our house, the White House, it’s your house and my house.

It’s our house not just the president’s house. When this idea sort of formulated for the book, I had looked for a book, I had gone out there searching the bookstores in Washington. My three kids were in middle grades and high school at the time and I wanted to show this White House experience, this kind of feeling, the feelings of awe and wonder that you feel wandering through the halls of the White House and I couldn’t find that book. So coming home on the plane on one trip from Washington, putting together that conversation that had occurred with David McCullough and his wife Rosalie and my own experiences as a visitor to the white house sort of morphosized into this idea of Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out.

Of course, I couldn’t do the book alone so I first went to my fabulous NTBLA board of authors and illustrators Kevin Patterson and David McCullough who did the cover for the book. Steven Kellogg, Fred and Pat McKiznic, Patty McLaughlin, Nikki Grimes who you’re going to have on later and we talked about this idea of putting a book together. We wanted to reach out to our colleagues and thankfully they responded and went beyond the call of duty because it was not just a kind of an issue book that you would have with the environment that people would talk about their experiences as a kid loving the environment and could call upon their own experiences solely.

They really had to go out and do research to do these illustrations and to write the pieces in the book; the poetry and the stories for the book. When I started to contact them and Karen Lutz, our editor at Kendalwood Press, we started to call people and ask them to contribute. It was after 9/11 and I think people were very interested to do something to make our country a better place, to make the world a better place and to also start to raise the consciousness that we all have to be informed citizens if we’re going to be making decisions in the future. Why not start with our youngest citizens.

Dr. Kent: Wow and its such a huge book. It has so many illustrations. For grownup people like me, I love paging through it but what was your intention for a child picking this up? Of course, learning about the White House, learning about so many different perspectives on it. What was your take on should we educate our children more about the highest office?

Mary Barrett: I think number one we wanted to draw people into American history especially kids. So the book isn’t just full of serious things, the book is also full of wonderful entertaining moments. For example, Tobin Anderson wrote a great piece about the ghosts in the White House and he talks about Winston Churchill relaxing in a bath with a cigar and a glass of scotch and he steps out of the bathroom naked and begins to wander the halls of the White House and confronts the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.

Churchill startled him; and I’m reading directly from the book. Churchill startled but never at a loss for words tapped the ash of the end of his cigar and said, “Good evening Mr. President you seem to have me at a disadvantage.” I can’t think of what would be actually more startling a vision for the kids and parents and teachers reading the book, whether it would be the vision of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln wandering the halls or the vision of Winston Churchill standing there naked. Isn’t it great? So we want to draw the adults in with the kids, we want this to be a book that adults share with the young people in their lives and read together. We wanted to delight people and there’s a wonderful double page spread that the illustrator Steven Kellogg has done of all the presidential pats with the presidents and he’s even tucked in the corner.

It’s a delight for children from age six all the way to 20 will love it, but it’s also a delight for parents. Steven Kellogg has snuck in there that little bunny. do you remember that episode in President Jimmy Carters administration where a bunny kind of ran out to a boat that he was fishing on and he sort of like we’ll just say did something to the bunny as it was coming across the river and a lot of us older folk can remember that incident. Then when a child or young person finds that bunny in there and that illustration says, “What’s that bunny there for?” It allows the adult reader to share some of their memories of past presidents with the kids. There’s some really serious things in the book too.

One of the things we did was we purposely included in the book primary and secondary sources that contradict each other. So that in the beginning of the book we have a whole section about the War of 1812 and we were somewhat surprised when we gave the initial contributors of the book very large choices in what they were going to write and illustrate because we felt we were asking for such a major contribution of time that things work better when people are uploading some points of what their interest is and their passion. Kind of surprisingly many people wanted to address the War of 1812 and at first it was somewhat shocking because the war of 1812 is not one of the prominent areas of American history we all discuss in school but it was post September 11 and it was also sort of an interesting comment on the historical literacy level of our punditry class because after September 11 many of the news people on television would say that the only other time that our country had been attacked was at Pearl Harbor in World War II.

But our country had been attacked long before that during the War of 1812 when the British burned down both the White House and the Capital Building. If you go back and read primary sources at that time, the effect on the nation was just as profound as the effect that was on us after the twin towers came down. So I kind of wondered if there was a sort of subconscious recycling of history with so many contributors being interested in the War of 1812.

In the book there is a regular straight history piece on what happened during the War of 1812 by a Madison scholar and then there is a wonderful imagined letter, a creative letter written by Susan Cooper who was originally from the united kingdom and I asked her if she would write a letter giving us the perspective of the British soldier who set the white house on fire. We wanted to show those contradictory perspectives and then on doing research because I had to do a great deal of research for the book even before we asked contributors to come on board so we had an idea of the ebb and flow and where we were going with the book.

When all these contributors were intersected in doing pieces on the War of 1812 I did more research and come across a journal by a slave of the Madison Paul Jennings, who actually contradicts the Dolly Madison story of Dolly Madison saving the great Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington; actually sort of the legend has us visualizing her grabbing the portrait and running out of the house while its on fire. Paul Jennings actually witnessed what happened at the white house during that bad day and contradicts that legend of Dolly Madison. So we also included the legend of Dolly Madison so you have a wide variety of perspectives in primary and secondary sources.

We hope that parents and teachers use that in the book as a learning opportunity to talk about the fact that if we are going to look for an objective truth both in our history and contemporary history that we search, that we seek these different opinions, that we investigate these different stories and discuss these things out loud with each other in that search for objective truth. In the contemporary section of our White House, we also juxtapose some contradictory sources. We have an excerpt from Tim Russert’s Meet The Press interview of Vice President Chaney as to what enfolded on September 11 in the White House.

We also have an excerpt from the 9/11 commission report that contradicts some of the testimony and that Vice President Chaney shared during that Tim Russert interview. Again, we put it in the book and we have a website, ourwhitehouse.org that we just actually launched the first stage of and there we will have discussion questions and activities so that people cannot only use these two sections of the book, but the entire book and use it as a learning opportunity for the young people in their lives.

Dr. Kent: This book is made possible by your organization, the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. Tell me a little bit more about that organization, where we can find out about that as well.

Mary Barrett: We have a home webpage at www.thencbla.org, and we’ve been established for about ten years. We’re an education advocacy organization. We believe that literacy is intrinsic to a healthy democracy and basically what we do is the website itself is an educational tool; we have all kinds of ideas and activities for parents, for teachers to get kids reading. Also get kids reading books and we also believe that you don’t fight the internet.

There are reading materials in abundance out there and it should be a part of all of our daily lives. The other thing we do is go to Washington, we speak to the congress and whoever is in that White House right now and tell them how much we care about reading and literacy with young people; how important education is to our nation’s future. How we need to keep funding school and public libraries and one of the things we’re going to be working on in the future is that in 47 states right now literature is not mandatory for elementary certification for teachers and it should be. So those are some of the other things that we work for besides being education advocates.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Mary Brigid Barrett and the book is called Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. Has wonderful contributions from 108 authors and illustrators. It’s really a gorgeous book. We can go to ourwhitehouse.org and it’s been an honor having you on the show.

Mary Barrett: Thank you so much. It’s been a wonderful opportunity.

Dr. Kent: At the very end of the book there’s a picture by Leona Gore that has a picture of an empty chair and it says “The Big Chair to Fill” and it’s a great place to end the book and a great place to find out in a couple weeks how everything continues here in the elections.

Mary Barrett: You might want to check our website next week because at the end of the book I mentioned Bob Kohler’s double page spread where there’s a presidential timeline. In it you will see that there is a blank space next to our current President Bush. On our website to promote this engagement we are going to have two presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, where kids and parents and teachers will be able to download those stickers and we are going to encourage families and teachers to have young people read about the election in the newspapers next week and watch for the results and they will have the opportunity to finish Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out by placing the appropriate winning candidates sticker at the end of the presidential timeline in our book.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful. So ourwhitehouse.org. It’s been a real pleasure and we will check it all out.

Mary Barrett: Thanks so much!

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is David Mendell and he is the author of the biography of Barack Obama called Obama: From Promise to Power. We’ll talk to him in one minute, don’t miss it.

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