 And they use those research in lots of different ways. One of the ways they use that research is to write books and to illustrate those stories. And so you're going to hear from some authors and illustrators today who have used research in their work. If you haven't already, I hope you take the time today to visit the Rotunda, see the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and explore the amazing documents in the rest of this museum. And before we get started, I want to quickly mention a sampling of our other upcoming programs. Adults, please join us back here in the theater for upcoming noon book talk or an evening lecture. You can also sign up for one of our escape room inspired programs happening this summer. Everyone is invited for family fun on July 4th here at the National Archives. We, of course, have the Declaration of Independence that kicked it all off. Genealogy camp for ages 12 and up will be happening on July 8th through 12th, and you can find out more details on our website. And we will offer family learning labs on July 25th and 26th, where participants get to take on the roles of archivists and researchers work together to help put together a very important press conference. So these are just a few of the very great and exciting programs coming up here, and we hope that you will check our website or calendar of events and see us again. You are able to support great programs like this by joining the National Archives Foundation, and you can find more information about that online. At the conclusion of our program, we invite you to give us feedback by filling out the program evaluation and leaving it in the box in the back of the theater, or by using the QR code at the bottom of your program. Please also join us this afternoon up in the Boeing Learning Center from 1.30 to 4 o'clock for more fun with today's authors and illustrators, hands-on activities, book signings, and a lot more. Now I am honored to introduce Zachary Clark, the Executive Director of H260C, who will be facilitating our conversation this morning and some truly fantastic authors. Please give them a nice warm welcome. Thank you, Amber, for that introduction. I am so honored to be here today to have a conversation with some storytellers and illustrators and researchers about what it is that informs their work as writers. So I have the great privilege of being the least interesting person on this panel, and I'll introduce our panelists in just a moment. But first I want to share with you why I got invited to this party, which is to say I am the Executive Director of H260C. H260C is the DC branch of a national network of writing houses and publishing centers for youth. So we work with youth across the country to help them develop the tools they need to tell their stories. And research often plays a big role in that. So we know pretty intuitively at H260C what it means to incorporate research into storytelling. I am excited to dig into these questions. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce the folks who will be joining me here on this stage. And after we have an opportunity to talk, we'll open it up to questions that you might have. So if anything pops up in your head that you're very curious about, make sure to ask at the end, okay? There's gonna be time for that. I want to introduce Debbie Levy to the stage. Debbie is the author of I Descent. Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes her mark. Come on up. Yes, please come on up. Thank you. And I'd also like to introduce Chris Eliopoulos, who is the author of I Am Sacajawea. Pamela M. Tuck, the author of As Fast As Words Could Fly. And Laura M. Elliot, author of Hamilton and Peggy. We all hopped up on this stage. Hi. Thanks for being here. Hello. Such an honor. I would love to start this conversation off with sort of a general question and see what emerges from there, which is I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why are you drawn to the stories that you write about? So Laura, why don't we start with you? I should say that I was a journal. I call myself an accidental novelist sometimes because I was a journalist for 20 years before having the great fun of becoming a novelist. So I very much think like a journalist. And when I worked for the Washingtonian magazine, I tended to write a lot about women's issues, medical narratives, that kind of thing. And I would be handed broad topics. And the way to make those kinds of stories like, let's talk about depression is finding one person to focus in every man who is representative of that issue. And then it becomes a real story, a beating heart, a real person you can care about and worry about as you go through the process of that narrative. So I took a sidestep and have stayed here for 20 years, which ages me, you can tell, through a story that I had written initially about my father's experiences as a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II. He survived. I exist because of some French teenagers who saved his life. And I had done a factual account of that history of his. And that turned into a novel for young adults, which I have loved doing. So I continue in that vein. I will get like right about the Revolution or right about Hamilton, something about Hamilton. And so I look for the untold story within that larger issue. And with Peggy, she was extraordinary. We'll talk more about her after when we get to other things, but there were only 36 solo words for her that I could count in the musical Hamilton. And Ron Chernow kind of dismisses her with a few cursory sentences. And oh my goodness, you guys, she was extraordinary. So somebody who is an everyman who gives you that beating heart, that real life person, that character that you can think, well, I empathize with that. What would I do in that kind of circumstance within the context of a larger, broad historical period? That's what I like to look for. Fabulous. And I'm curious if studying and writing the story of your father allowed you to know him in a different way. Yes. Like so many World War II veterans, he really didn't want to talk about his experiences. Now, the novel, which is under Warthorne Sky, is highly fictionalized. It's not my dad's story. I took what little he knew and then expanded it by reading a lot of memoirs and talking to a lot of World War II veterans. So the protagonist, Henry Forrester, becomes again that everyman of that young pilot who had to fell out of a burning plane onto a land that was occupied by German-speaking Nazis. And his only hope for survival were French-speaking people he couldn't understand. There are thousands upon thousands of those boys. So I did come to know him better, but I almost came to know him better through the stories of dozens upon dozens of other young boys like him. Fabulous. Thank you. Sure. Pamela, what draws you to the stories you write about? Well, I actually am from Greenville, North Carolina originally, and I grew up in a family of storytellers. My grandfather was the master storyteller in our family. And I was the oldest grandchild of 13. So I was like front and center listening to my grandfather tell these stories. He told a lot of stories to us that were funny. Some were sad. Some stories were about our history because I also came from a family of civil rights activists. And hearing those stories growing up, I guess I didn't really appreciate them growing up because I didn't really understand the fullness of what my family actually went through during that time period. But this is for children and young people, young writers. I want to let them know that I actually started writing when I was in second grade. My school offered a poetry contest. And I wrote a poem about my grandmother in one first place. So that's when I kind of identified as a writer, as a young person, and my teachers, and my family and my friends encouraged me to keep writing. And being a writer and a person who loves stories, I wanted to tap into those elements or interests that I felt passionate about. And so I'm drawn to family stories as inspiration. And I love writing historical fiction now because I love telling stories about ordinary people that, like Laura mentioned, may have gone untold or forgotten stories, but now we can kind of share those stories with across generations and preserve those stories for others to enjoy. What was the title of the poem about your grandmother? Do you remember it? I don't remember the title of the poem. I don't remember the poem. I only remember two lines. Do you want to hear the poem? Yes, I would love to hear it. All right, now remember, this was the eight-year-old. Sure, sure. All right, my grandmother is very sweet. She always has good things to eat. Lovely, wonderful. Well done, well done. Well-deserving of that word. I'm one first place. It's an inflection point for you, right? Yes, it really inspired me as a writer because at eight years old, I just knew I was a poet at eight. A poet didn't know it. A poet didn't know it. Well, actually, I didn't know it. I claimed it at eight years old. Well, thank you very much, Pamela. Thank you. Chris, how about you? What draws you to the stories? You know, it's crazy. Unlike these wonderful people, I grew up reading comic books. So all my heroes were Superman, Batman, Spider-Man. And you learn, especially like Superman, it's not about Superman, it's about Clark Kent. It's about that ordinary person who wishes they could be extraordinary. But I also love history. And I've loved history my whole life. I love coming to Washington, D.C. and experiencing that history and the people behind it. And so I do a series of books with Brad Meltzer where we explore what these icons, so like we look at Lincoln as covered in marble and untouchable. But he was a kid just like the rest of us. He was an ordinary person who at an extraordinary moment did an amazing thing. So we wanna tell those stories and I wanna know what their lives were like before they became marble statues. Like Rosa Parks, we know everything about her and how she sparked a revolution and changed the world. But when she was nine years old, she was playing in the park and a little white boy was coming up on roller skates, knocked her to the ground. Nine years old, she stood up to the bully. She got up in his face and said, stop bothering me. And he went home, guys' mother, the mother comes home. She yells at Rosa Parks, I'm gonna send you to jail if you don't stop. And she said, I was doing nothing wrong. I was just playing, your son bothered me. Leave me alone. And that boy and mother never bothered her again. So even at nine years old, she was a social justice warrior. She was saying these are wrong the way you're being treated and I wanna change it. She was an ordinary person who did the right thing at the right time. So I love those stories. So what we do with these books is bring, as they're saying, the ordinary people out of the extraordinary people who create wonderful changes in this world. That's fantastic. I love what you said, an ordinary person at an extraordinary moment doing an amazing thing. So is that a framework for you when you're trying to find these stories? Yeah, you know, because I think all of us could be those people. The books, the takeaway from these books is the characters are always portrayed as children. Because we want the children to realize that they could be just like Abraham Lincoln and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. You just have to have the character and the qualities and have the right moment and stand up and do the right thing. So that is a big, big part of this whole thing. We're doing a TV show this November on PBS called Xavier Riddle and the Sugar Museum. And every episode is about our characters going back and meeting these people who help them solve those everyday problems in their life. So they'll go back and they'll meet Albert Einstein and learn that it's okay to be weird and different and not be like everybody else and come home and take that apply to their lives. So we can all learn from extraordinary people and apply it to our ordinary everyday lives. There is certainly a thread across these three answers. Maybe Debbie will go in a completely different direction but I'm curious how you respond to this question. Well, I think it's a trick question. Tell me why. Because I feel like answering by saying, I'm drawn to the stories that I'm drawn to because I'm drawn to the stories that I'm drawn to. Okay, that's it. I'm interested in a way that is my answer because I am interested in people and have written about people who rise above. And who make change, you know? But sometimes I don't write about that. Sometimes I just write about things that I'm drawn to and I guess I only think about why am I drawn to them afterwards when I do a presentation about the book or sitting here with something like this. Like Laura, I really started writing nonfiction like this and I also write poetry and fiction but mostly nonfiction. I started with my mother's story and which also dates back to the same era as Laura's World War II story. My book was about my mom's last year living in Nazi Germany as an 11 and 12 year old in 1938. That last year, which was a very dramatic year, like Laura's dad, my mom never wanted to talk about it. The whole family that came from Germany or the few people that came from Germany who weren't killed in the Holocaust, like many didn't wanna talk about it, eventually mostly because of the development of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. People like my mom who were refugees and so they were lucky, they got out in 1938, realized that their stories, her story mattered too and I was really lucky because, and this relates to why we're here today, I was really lucky because my mom had an artifact, something called her Poesy Album, a poetry album, like a friendship book or an autograph book and I had actually tried four years, four years, to write something about my mom's experience in that last year and for years, I didn't know about the existence of this Poesy Album except one day she sort of half-casually showed it to me. Oh, and it was the perfect thing to create a framework for my book about my mom and I'll just close my answer by mentioning another book that I did about somebody who also rose above but of course who you all know about and is famous and that's Ruth Bader Ginsburg and we think of her as the, now, I mean she's, she rose above, I mean she's in the same category as your mom. Well, well yes, she did rise above, humble beginnings and I also feel like my mom was a way paver for Ruth Bader Ginsburg for all of us in her feminism and my mom at least for me. So that's my answer to your trick question. I appreciate you dodging the trick but I do have a follow-up question which may or may not be a trick. I'm curious, my assumption is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn't going to half-casually show you this book of poetry, right, as your mother did and although maybe and I'm curious about how that changes how you approach the story, understanding the story, when you have access to this trove of firsthand documents versus when you're studying someone from a little bit more distance. Well, that actually gets us to the subject as everything will today of research because it's true, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Ginsburg didn't give me her personal papers that maybe she keeps in her nightstand at home but she did open up her archive which is held not here but as all justices archives at the Library of Congress, 150 boxes and they are personal and professional papers. Some of them are closed, the papers relating to her time on the court are closed but just oodles of papers about her career earlier as a lawyer with the ACLU and as a judge, not as a child. So of course it changes what you're doing when you're writing about somebody who's not your mother and who can't just give you stuff but this was a lot of stuff, that's a lot of boxes and documents shed light on the people that you're writing about, of course so do in-person interviews. So I don't know if that, that was not a trick question. Thank you. You can call out all of my questions all day. I will. But it does lead me to a broader curiosity I have about the work that you all do which is specifically that you write about people and events that existed in this world and I'm curious what obligations you feel, what responsibilities you feel to these people in places in telling their story. What is the ethics of storytelling in the way that you approach it? Chris, do you wanna take that? Yeah, with us, even though they're children's books we feel like we have a duty to get history right. If we're gonna do George Washington we're not doing the cherry tree. So for example, we wanna get it right because we want the kids to get it right and we want the future to get it right. In certain cases we actually have living people like you guys do and it's unnerving. We get something wrong with George Washington's book he's not coming back to get us. But Billy Jean King or Jane Goodall are gonna come up and tell me I'm an idiot. But you wanna do these things accurately because again you feel like I'm feeling like we're helping the next generation learn their history. We've sort of gotten to a point where people aren't learning from their history and we need to get those kids back again. But silly stuff, so quick example. We're doing the George Washington book, we're talking about crossing the Delaware and you know that giant painting that everybody sees and thinks it's true. It's totally apocryphal, it's daytime, he's out on the bow of the boat and it wasn't like that at all. It was at night, it was snowing, there was ice in the water, he was sitting down on the boat, actually wasn't sitting. Turns out the boat was more of an ironworks boat so it was like a deep boat and I had to do this research. I was researching research and I found this information out and I drew it that way and Brad who's my partner said is this accurate? We have to get it right. And I said it is, it is, it is. And then he tweeted that out of course, thank you social media and everybody jumped on it and said no, you've got it wrong. So then he got nervous and sent me back to get information. And the only person that he thought of that we could talk to was Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize winning writer of George Washington. So he's the guy that knows George Washington and he pointed me towards a book, we both looked at it like, I literally had to call him up and as a history nerd, I turned into a 12-year-old girl. I was like Joseph Ellis! And he got on the phone and we talked about it and he was no, you're right, they were ironworks boats, you're right. And so there's a feeling of joy in getting it right for not just the kids today but the memories of the past we don't gloss over the actual facts. So that's my big moment. I don't know about you guys. I want to make sure that their stories are told correctly. Yeah? Even though my story is about my dad and the people who don't know him wouldn't know what was correct or what wasn't correct. But just the mere fact that he is still alive and I struggled with, I knew the story. So the advantage of telling someone else's story is the storytelling elements, some of the storytelling elements are already there. You already have the voice, you already have the character, you already have the plot, so to speak. My struggle was giving the story justice. Listening to my father tell the story, I was able to hear his fears, I was able to hear his determination, his sadness and in listening to my father tell his story, as a writer I was able to understand the emotion and give my story the emotion that was needed. I still rely on research however, because sometimes they don't have everything just right, they can't remember all the details. And I kind of went through a similar thing with you with the manual typewriter. Yeah. I described the electric typewriter in my book a certain way and my editor researched it or looked that up and she said, no, the way you described that, that was not the way that they were presented in the 1960s. And I'm pretty sure. I said, well, that's what daddy told me. That's what daddy told me, right? Whoa, please. And so I did the same thing. I did my own research and I reached out to an expert, a typewriter expert who happened to be on the work for IBM for 35 years and he was one of the first, he was on a team that created this electric typewriters. And so I was so happy to run across him. And I asked him, is this correct the way that I described it with this? He said, oh yeah, that was right. So I emailed my editor and let her know that this man is an expert. He said I was correct and that's all she needed. And dad was right. And dad was right. Most importantly. Yes. So it is very important to get the facts. I mean, even when writing in historical fiction, you still have to keep the historical elements of the story accurate and correct. Okay, you ready to get scared? Yes. This is the fun part though. I'm really obsessed with getting everything absolutely correct. Part of that's from being a reporter. I also am writing 60 to 90,000 word books for YA for teenagers who are often studying this time period. And I report it as much as I would have as a journalist. Now I'm just gonna stick to two books as an example. I was given the wonderful assignment by my editor, Catherine Teagan, to do something about Hamilton. Now, I want to be really careful about that because Hamilton is sacrosanct now, right? And when you go to schools and you say I'm doing something about Hamilton, there'll be this wave of students starting to sing the Skyler's Sister's Song, which is extraordinary. So I thought, well, I'm not touching Hamilton and I'm not gonna get into Angelica and everybody's doing Eliza. So what's this about Peggy? Now, Peggy, oh, I have so many things to tell you about Peggy, but she's nothing written in her own hand. I had to research all around her. I am incredibly blessed to have two adult children who are creative artists themselves and they help me research, they keep me in line. And I got the assignment, I researched and I wrote this book 90,000 words in 10 months. It was insane. But, and what I did is I actually counted before I came to see you all today. Between the three of us, we read or skimmed and highlighted 87 books. Then you follow the bibliography, you follow the footnotes and I watched 14 documentaries constantly. I did my kind of Daniel Day Lewis thing. I just completely absorbed myself in it. And with Peggy, for instance, I needed to, the way I work is that I do all this research because I wanted to, because there's nothing in her own hand, I had to learn who she was. She was called a wicket wit. She was in doubt with a superior mind and a rare accuracy of judge and men and things. Benjamin Franklin called her wild. She was fluent in French. This all I learned by reading those 87 books and memoirs and letters from other people. And the greatest source, by the way, you can find them here in the National Archives. Every single one of Hamilton's letters are here online at founders.archives.org. If you look at the back of my book you'll get, or go to my website, you get it exactly right, the link. So I started reading all these letters and in it, mainly because Hamilton immediately had this great affinity for Peggy. He actually, within a few days of meeting, Eliza basically sent a letter to Peggy, asking her to be his wingman in his courtship of Peggy. I mean, Eliza, I'm sorry. And that as a nymph of equal sway which she please come to Morristown and distract all the other aides to camp so that he could monopolize Eliza to himself. And those letters not only give this amazing window into Hamilton who was poetic and angsty and so young and all this braggadocio and actually incredibly vulnerable, but he would drop all these little bits and pieces of gossip about Peggy. So I could literally find, oh, she was in Albany and would have seen her father running the spy ring that was going out of the house. Oh, she would have met Burgoyne. Oh, all these things. So my research completely dictates what I do. And if you read my dialogue, I was listening actually to the audio bulk of this to get myself back into it. But the dialogue that I use is actually pulled from all those letters. I found delightful things like the fact that her uncle was from Ireland and he called people when he was really aggravated with them for being idiots. They called them ninkum poopas. So dialogue like that and things that Hamilton would actually say or some of the conversations that they would have, I just used and pulled as my dialogue. I won't put my characters where they're not. Now for this kind of novel specifically, it's what I, there's a new tag for me which I'm really grateful for. It's called biographical fiction. And that's really more of what I'm doing with something like Hamilton and Peggy. You'll learn a lot about her and Lafayette and all the other skylers in the book because of everything that was here in the archives that you can read. And it's like they're sitting down and talking to you. You know, it's an extraordinary experience. There's also one other thing which is to tell you really quickly, another book that I did like that was just across the road here at the National Gallery of Art, the only Leonardo and all of the Americas is permanently housed there. And it's a portrait. His first portrait, his first solo commission and it is a young poet. And I became, it's just circling around to your initial thing about the questions that you have and sense of responsibility. I very much because I was dealing with the Leonardo painting, felt like I was sort of creating legend about this young poet. And so I wanted to be, you know, I double-checked everything a thousand times before I would go forward. I have questions about that when I come back to you for sure. But Debbie, what's your response to this question about the ethics? I think we all feel a sense of deep responsibility to people we're writing about alive or no longer with us. And something tangential but not really to this sense of responsibility. Trick question again. But I mean everybody's answered in ways that I just want to sit here and say, yeah, that, yeah, that, yeah, that. And I think it's important always for us and for readers and for people who want to be writers to know that research is fallible and that documents are wrong. Memories, as Pam said, are wrong. And you cannot always reconcile everything in writing about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example. I have the highest respect for newspapers, journalists, worked in newspapers at one point. But somebody coined the phrase more than one person, coined the phrase that newspapers are the first draft of history for a reason because writers are working on deadline and things are wrong. And I rely on archival newspapers a lot in my research. But I have to always be aware that they get stuff wrong. Other documents are wrong. You know, if you were to research the March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, if you were to look at the program for that day and say, aha, I have an original document, I have a primary resource for this day, you look at the program and you would see it was wrong because an important person was late so she couldn't do what she was supposed to do at the time she was called upon to do it. So documents, newspapers can be wrong. So can official documents be wrong? What do you do to reconcile that? I think the answer really is just that we do the best we can when we're writing history. And I'm not writing biographical novels or historical fiction. I'm attempting to write something that I can say, well, this is true and it's as true as we can make it. And I think that's the obligation that we have. How do others respond to that, this notion of as true as we can make it? We're all infallible. We make mistakes, everybody does. You do the best you can and I hope there's a reissue of the book that you can fix the mistakes later. But it's not only about us being fallible. It's also about that life is not neat and that sources will conflict and people's recollections will conflict. Can I give one example? Please. So in a book that I did that came out this year, I co-wrote it with Joanne Allen Boyce. It's called This Promise of Change. It's the story of Joanne and 11 other high school students, they were known as the Clinton 12. They integrated, well, they thought they were integrating the first high school in the South in Clinton, Tennessee in 1956. Firsts are a funny thing. I think another high school or two might have integrated or desegregated, I should say, in Arkansas, but they kept it under wraps, it was secret. And what happened in Clinton was front page news that we, I mean, I defy anybody here who hasn't read my book to say that they know about what happened in Clinton, Tennessee, because it's one of those huge stories. It was on the Edward R. Murrow show at the time that's been lost to history. So what happened in Clinton in 1956? What happened in that high school? Well, Joanne and her fellow students recall once things got ugly in the school because the white students, most of them did turn on them. They remember nobody coming to their defense, nobody protecting them. I talked to a gentleman now in his 70s as they all are who was prominent as Joanne was at that time, both interviewed on TV and in newspapers, who was the high school football captain. And he has said, and he told me that we, the high school team, we were charged by the principal with making sure that nothing happened to these students. And we were there patrolling the halls to make sure that nothing terrible happened. And it is true that nobody ended up, I don't think, in a hospital as a result of any assaults, but really bad things happened. And when I talked to Joanne and her and the fellow students who are still with us about it, what about what Jerry said? Did you see the football players? I didn't see the football players. Did you see the football players? No, they were completely unaware. And of course, his answer is, well, they wouldn't have known what we were doing because we were preventing things from happening. I guess both of these things are true. So it's not an error, it's a perspective. Yeah, exactly. And I would like to add a little to that. Just in my form of writing, historical fiction, you're right, it's the perspective in which you're getting the story because they say there's your side, three sides to every story. There's one side, the second side in the truth. So with me, I feel that we kind of reconcile that with authors notes. Authors notes at the end of the book gives us a platform to at least let the reader know this is where I got the information and a little bit more detail of what we portray inside the story because you can't put all your information in the story. So the authors note, I use that as an avenue to let my readers know that this is a story, this is based on my dad's journey, my dad's experiences. So if anyone questions anything, well, that was his perspective. And anybody else's perspective was not considered in writing this particular book. Different things could have happened during that time period, but this is his perspective. So the authors note, for me, kind of gives me clarification for the reader to understand that this is a certain perspective and if there are other perspectives or information out there, it wasn't included in this particular book. Being upfront about the relationship between perspective and truth. Exactly. One thing that struck me when you all were talking was this funny realization I had that to research in this way is not just to retell the facts to an indifferent audience, but that in some instances, you're actually challenging our collective cultural imaginations, right? And I think that is clear, right? And so I'm wondering, you get pushback from that, I'm sure. What's the role of that pushback and where does it come from, right? Does it come from your editors? Does it come from Twitter? Does it come from your readers? And how does that shape your approach to telling the story? I'm sorry, just to clarify your question, do you mean that we're telling history in a different way than it's generally accepted to be? The examples that are popping into my head are the boat or the typewriter, for example, which are, this is based on my research, how that typewriter looked. But the feedback is, well, that can't be right. That's not what we thought we knew, right? Right, I'll answer this briefly. I had kind of a double-edged sword to deal with in that I was dealing with history and this extraordinary, brilliant musical that has created the legend of Hamilton and the Skyler Sisters. There were some differences in his needing to, he had 90 minutes, for instance, of 90 minutes of this brilliant musical, but you can really shove so much into 90 millions even with his hip-hop lyrics, which are extraordinary because you'll learn everything you need to know about New York during the revolution because of him. So I need it to push back, not push back, I need it to acknowledge and try to keep the relationship with Angelica, for instance, but add what I was learning was truth from these letters, which put Peggy very much into kind of his life. I had a, I'm sure you all spent a lot of time in schools. I am so lucky and honored to go to school groups often. And there's a legend that has kind of grown if you all have seen the Skyler Mansion, which I would really encourage you to do because the docents and the historical interpreters there, so they're so steeped in this family and they love telling the stories. There's a gash in the banister that one of the many things Peggy did is that in the middle of an attempted kidnapping of her father by 20 loyalists, she dashed into the fray when everybody else had gone running upstairs because they'd forgotten the baby in the cradle. The littlest Skyler sister was still down there. And she literally went running back down through this fight that was going on and scooped up the baby and went running back through these people and back to save that baby's life potentially. Now legend grew, however, that some of the Iroquois, there were six nations, six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy for the tribes with the British, two were allied with us, that in her escape up there, that they had thrown a tomahawk at her and it left this huge gash in the banister that's still there. Now, I couldn't find in any of the readings that I did confirmation of that, so I didn't use it. There have been some young patriots concerned about why I didn't do that, but you have to make the judgment. Everybody here, I can tell, you look for corroborating sources, you read different aspects of things and then you present the best that you can from what you've gained from these multiple sources and you always do a log afterwards. After, did that answer the question? Yes, yeah, any other responses to that? Yeah, I mean, well, you tend to leave things out. I try to change people's minds a little bit. Brad and I, we tend to wanna show people beyond what we think they are. So in September, we have a new book coming out called I Am Marie Curie. If you ever go and do research on her, every picture she looks, like she's just about to kill somebody. She just dour horrible, you think it's so serious, and then you do research and you discover that she used to party like nobody's business. When she was a teenager, they would dance like crazy. She went through a pair of shoes in one night, she destroyed them, because she was dancing. I don't know how many people think of Marie Curie as a person who is dancing like that, but we want our kids to know that they are human beings and that they had fun and they had dreams and hopes just like we do, and they didn't just get born that. And so part of our job is to maybe take, see opposite for you, I would steal that and use it as a moment, because it maybe says a little something about the character of the person. Well, I use the fact that I have the, that she rushed down and grabbed the baby, I just left out the gash and the banister. But it's so dramatic. That's what I'm, see I'm from comic books. Like it has to be dramatic. You have to burst through the wall and save the day. Well, I just, I don't know. I mean, there were other things too that I discovered like I'm sure you guys have done this too. One of the things that was so delightful is I'm reading all of Hamilton's, he started immediately calling her my Peggy, my little sister, and he wasn't above goosing Eliza. Like you don't write me enough, but you know, Peggy says. And at one point he referred, and I have young kids here, so I won't quite use the language because it's a little off color. And Hamilton's, he basically said, you better watch it. Peggy may beat you to the, to the marriage if you're not careful. You know, and have you heard about Fleury? And I thought, who the heck's Fleury? Well, y'all, it took a lot of digging to find the Machida Fleury, but he's one of only eight people during the Revolution who was honored with a Congressional Medal of Honor for his extraordinary valor and bravery at the Battle of Stony Point. It took forever to dig up all this stuff about him, so I took great delight in sticking Fleury out there. Please read about him. He was in many ways not as important as Lafayette, whom we all love, but he was of that caliber at that time. And going to your thing about his being so human. One of the amazing letters, and you can find it here, the archives, at foundersarchives.org. He writes this letter to George Washington, who, by the way, loves to dance. Anyway. We got that too. Yeah. I have him dancing on the cover. Oh, wait, yeah, he's dancing. But anyway, it's basically a letter to George in broken English. It's like, George, George, I've got this great idea because he was an engineer. I can make these exploding self-propelled boats and we'll take down the British fleet, right? And when you read this letter, it's like, well, and there's actually still a medal with the Corps of Engineers. It's a flurry medal. Anyway, so. So you have an, do you feel an obligation to bring these guys forward? Yes, I just, I do. Right. Because, yeah. Yeah, you want to just say, here's somebody special we're not looking at. Yeah. Yes. But you won't do that in your books too, I'm sure. Yeah. But it's nice that you're able to just stick somebody out there for people to, and say, charge the next person. Go learn about this guy and write about him. Well, yeah, please do because, but he worked so nicely. Get busy. Yeah. He worked so nicely into the narrative because there clearly was a little bit of a romance between the two of them, and then he kind of vaporizes. But he was, I really, the great thing about historical fiction with all of you all is that, history, God bless the social studies teachers and the librarians out there, you guys, because they're teaching you everything from cavemen through to today, sometimes in one year for SOL tests. It is a very daunting mission that they go on, right? I mean, the great thing about, I think, historical fiction, while you're having to learn all these dates and treaties and battles and yada, yada, yada, is that you've got a human story. It's like Homer, right? We go all the way back to Homer and we know about the Trojan War because he was telling us about all the tragedies and choices and crises of these individual people. So kids learn a lot about history through osmosis. You're gonna learn about Fareed, you're gonna learn about Stony Point, you're gonna learn about those exploding boats. I hope just in a good story. I remember where you were gonna add something. I think it depends on your genre that you're writing about. Like Laura, she's biographical fiction. Some of it. Some of it. So I can see why she would want to leave out certain elements if it couldn't be proven, or if you just have one source of information. I would probably do the same thing in historical fiction. Like you said, there's a little bit more play with that and sometimes when I find an interesting fact that I would like to add to the story to introduce to children, there's a way to do it. There's a way to add it to the story, not as the character's journey, but just to throw, you know, people say, you know, you can word things so that they know in the story it's gossip or it's just a legend, it's just a tale. So it's a way to get it in the book without actually making it historical fact. So that's one reason why I like writing historical fiction. Because you can play with fiction, but still keep the historical elements of it, you know, accurate. And I also, I have to add too, with throwing in someone interesting, a key player, a key person in my dad's journey was Golden Frinks, who was a field secretary for the SCLC. He was personally selected by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but in our town in North Carolina. And so he was a historical character that I never heard of before. And growing up, you know, and even in the history books, I've never seen his name mentioned, but he was a historical figure. And so that offered me an opportunity to research him a little bit further than what my dad told me, to be able to add his character, his voice, his personality to my story. But in researching, I have some photos to show at the presentations later. I noticed that the illustrator is not obligated. My illustrator was not obligated to draw my dad accurately. But, well, he had that freedom. He's in there, but he's not, I mean, it doesn't look exactly like my dad, but I guess because Golden Frinks was a historical character, he tried to make sure that he was drawn accurately. So he had that artistic freedom to draw my dad's ordinary person, you know, nobody would know that that. We are. Well, yeah, you're right, you're right. As far as looking up information on him online, well, there are pictures of my dad now because of the book, but there was no pushback as far as how my dad would have looked at that age. I should say, I provided pictures, but I understood that the illustrator had that creative freedom. He wasn't obligated to draw my dad exactly the way he looked at age 15, which I was fine with that. But Golden Frinks, I appreciate the fact that he kept his character as accurate as possible in the illustrations, being that he was a historical character. But that gave me an opportunity, like I was saying, to introduce him to readers who now they can go and research Golden Frinks because his information is actually in the North Carolina Archives, you know, so. That's a good way to get information out to young readers. Doesn't make you feel good that you... Yes, it does. It does. Debbie, any thoughts on anything that's been said in this section? Is he tricking you again? I think you are tricking me again. No. And I think we started this series of answers with the question of do you get pushback or do you hear back from people who you are surprising with what you're writing? And I mean, sometimes I get pushback. It's not so much that they're surprised, but I mean, there are people who disagree with my perspective on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I don't arrive at my perspective on her awesomeness by making things up. So I'm perfectly comfortable with that if somebody wants to disagree. Throw down. No, and of course, very rewarding is when you get a very different type of feedback, which is, so for example, with the year of goodbyes. I'll hear from people. My mother and I, years ago when the book first came out, did a, there was an all town or all, I think an all city read of, organized by the public library in Spencer, Ohio of the year of goodbyes. And it was the middle of winter, so we couldn't go there for the big event, but we did a Skype with them. And we did hear from people who said, I didn't know what bad things happened in the Holocaust. And if like me, you're steeped in that because I'm Jewish, because it's from my family, also because, you know, we're here on the East Coast, it's just, we focus on certain history, we prioritize. That was really important feedback. I appreciated the openness of those people, and I also appreciated the opportunity to open their minds up to history, to what happened. And similarly, I'll add one more thing. I mentioned the football captain in Clinton, Tennessee, with respect to the book, This Promise of Change with Joanne Boyce. I had interviewed him, he and Joanne had had some written communication. And just a couple of weeks ago, he called up, and he called Joanne and me both separately. And to me, he said, you know, getting her perspective, I didn't really, you know, we couldn't really understand how hurtful it was to those 12 students. We really didn't get it. And now, reading this book, I get it. Well, you know, my work here is done, right? Exactly. A practice in empathy. Yes, yes, it's never too late also. This is how many years after this 1956 event. Not that he was ever a bad guy. He was trying, and certainly, this is borne out by history, he was trying to be as good a guy as he could be as a high school football captain. But if you were there, and if you were one of the black students you would have thought, or a thinking white student you would have thought, well, nobody's doing nearly enough because of what's going on here. And so, his being able to read the story, and all these years later, you know, say, ah, I see the hurt. Yep. I have one more question before I'd like to open it up and questions that might be out here in the audience. And that's to circle back to something we talked about at the beginning, that Pamela mentioned, that poem. I mentioned earlier that I work with an organization that serves young writers. And the identity of a writer, that can be really weighty. It's hard to access writing as a practice because it feels like to do so. You have to first call yourself a writer. And that can be a real roadblock. How did you overcome that? Or have you ever overcome that? This idea of, I have become a writer. Looking at it? Any, anyone? I will quote Meryl Streep, who I- Oh, perfect. I just so adore, who I think is, you know, just is a quintessential artist, right? She was receiving an award for one of her thousand awards and she very quietly said, I would remind you that I just portray interested people, the implication being I'm really not that interested in portraying. And I try to sometimes keep to stop that kind of overwhelming. I think of myself as a reporter and a storyteller and that life has all these moving, enlightening, infuriating stories waiting there. And if I just look and listen and absorb, I'll be able to find them. I don't think I really thought about myself as being a writer specifically until my children started calling me that and have become such amazing creative artists themselves. One's a theater director and the other's a screenwriter. And I could own it with them. Yeah, yeah. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I claimed being a writer at eight years old. I didn't struggle with acknowledging the fact that I was a writer. Actually, my teachers and my family encouraged that, encouraged me to embrace that as a gift, as a talent. I didn't really see it as a gift. I just thought it was something I enjoyed doing as a young person and their encouragement just made me feel like, oh, I'm a writer, I'm a writer. So I was able to accept the title of writer for years. The title of author is something that was a challenge for me. Even after writing for so many years and having my works even in elementary school and maybe not elementary school, maybe it was high school, some of my works up here in like the local newspaper, it was published. Yeah. So when you publish something, you become an author. Yeah. So, but I think even after publishing my first book, I still struggle with embracing the title author. I think I became semen and people calling me an author because I like to remain humble, you know how we do. When I received my first award, I think when I submitted my dad's story to Lee and Low Book, actually kind of share a little story. First of all, I wanna let you know I'm the mother of 11 children. Yes, I am the mother of 11 children. And so I had my audience before I started writing. But nevertheless, I went to the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators is a writing organization. I went to my first conference in June 2007 and I only had eight children at that time. But I went to the conference and I listened to so many keynote authors and editors and agents speak on how to write for children because I went there to learn how to write for children. And this one author was, she told her writing routine, how she woke up every morning at five o'clock and she wrote for hours. And she probably had the privilege of opening up her window and looking at beautiful mountains. The closest thing I had to a mountain in my house was the laundry. So I left that, I left that conference feeling like, I told my husband, I said, I can't be a writer. And he said, why not? I said, because I don't have time. And my husband looked at me and he said, you are a writer. You don't have to write on someone else's time. You can write on your own time. So that was June 2007. And so he was the one who pushed me into writing my dad's story for Lee and Low Books because they had a new voices award contest open for new writers. And so I said, that's too complicated because my dad was one of the first blacks to desegregate the school system back in the 1960s. I said, it's too complicated. He said, try. So I wrote my dad's story in September 2007, submitted it to Lee and Low. And in December, I won the award. And so I said, I'm an author. I'm an author. I'm an award-winning author. And pendulum swung so quickly. Yeah, yeah, so I think that's when it really cemented with me, but the real joy is the readers. That's the readers, the teachers, the librarians, the students, the parents who read your work and give you feedback, that's the reward. That's fabulous. Thank you. Man, how do you follow that one? You know what? I'm a cartoonist. When I was five years old, I discovered a copy of Peanuts by Charles Schultz. That's all I wanted to be was being him. I wanted to be a cartoonist. My agent who probably will be watching this at some point always calls me an author and illustrator and I say, no, I'm a cartoonist because if you see me as my family does, I sit in a little room by myself, hiding from the world and create there and that's my world. This stuff like coming here or going to the PBS Annual Meeting or going to school visits, I feel like an astronaut going to the moon. Like it has nothing to do with what I do and I'm even loath to say that I'm a cartoonist. I just sit around and tell stories and that's what I do. Can I ask what's the distinction for you between those two identifiers, cartoonist and writer? Is it context, like just this space? As a kid I just wanted to be a cartoonist. Charles Schultz was a cartoonist. I wanted to be a cartoonist. Author and illustrator just sounds so highfalutin. It sounds so much more important than what I do. I sit and draw Albert Einstein as a 10 year old with a giant mustache. This is not high art. It's just me trying to engage children into stories that can help better the world. That's it. That's the high end of my thought process. In the reality, I just want to be left alone in my pajamas and draw some pictures. So that's my life. Like a storyteller. I'm trying to be a storyteller. No, I think that you've hit on something very important that you are an author when you sit at home in your pajamas not having to engage with anybody for hours on end because that's what you're doing. So if I thought about it, maybe I would realize that I would say that I thought of myself as an author when I kept my pajamas on in the morning. That's possible. There's the marker. There we go. It all comes down to pajamas. I just want you all to know, not all day. Not all day. I think we're all getting dressed eventually. We need to do pajamas now that say I am a writer. Onesies. But I'm sure that that writer who said that they got up at 5 a.m. was fully dressed. It was her career. Well, I started out as a lawyer and I was a lawyer for quite a few years and it did actually take me a long time to think of myself as a writer not because I thought it was something highfalutin just because I thought it was something out of reach because I thought, well, I'm trying to be a writer. I'm trying. I'm trying. And then when I remember, this was many years ago because I'm that old. So it would have been in the 1980s when a lawyer named, well, his name I'm forgetting. I wanna say Ken Ludwig, but I might be wrong. And I would read about how this lawyer also at a large law firm, and I was at a large law firm, would get up at, you know, in the fours in the morning and I am not an early morning person. And that is how he became an award-winning playwright. And I thought, well, it's, I mean, that's never gonna happen. Never gonna happen. Coffee helps. Well, no, I didn't become an award-winning playwright and that's okay. Eventually became a writer who wears pajamas. Award-winning writer. Well, go ahead, are you gonna? No, no, she was offering me courage. Yes, she's an award-winning writer. I think that's a really interesting note to end this on before we open it up, which is this idea of I'm trying to be versus I am. Which in some ways is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy for, like, the writing communities that I've been a part of because we talk about writing as a practice. We're never quite there. We're always trying to be there. And so that spectrum just sort of is at the bedrock of what we do generally, I think. Which maybe makes for unsteady ground, but a lot of introspection, I think. I am wondering if you all are comfortable with this. If anyone here in our audience has any questions for our panel here. The first person is always difficult. It's always the first person that you ask a question. Oh, we have one. Oh, we got one. No, they're just leaving, right? So I believe there are microphones. Do they have to be on the microphone? So if you don't mind walking up that way. Here's our next Supreme Court Justice. Here you go. Yes. I did Sonia Sotomayor. We did her. So we're justices of alike. Yes. You and I. Yes. And what's your name? Renata. Nice to meet you. What's your question? Well, it's actually for Christopher L. Anopoulos. Yeah. I read one of your books called Cosmic Commando. And I was wondering how long it took you to make that book. Well, I'm going to give you a little secret right now. So I wrote a graphic novel, which is sort of like a novel, but with pictures. And in this one, so it's a comic book. It's about identical twin boys who fight over video games and then become a part of a real video game. Those identical boys are sitting right there. So those are the stars. My son's Jeremy and Justin. And in the book, Jeremy was kind of a little bit of a jerk to his brother. They've both learned to love each other and take care of each other. But so when the book first came out, all the reviews came in and would start off with, Jeremy is a jerk. So he got a complex. And so when the book got released, we had an event and they asked my sons to sign the book and Jeremy would sign, I'm not this bad in real life. So I want the world to know that Jeremy is not that bad in real life. But they can attest to you probably 20 years because they're 20 years old. That's how long it's taken me to do the book. But in actual writing and drawing it, it took about eight or nine months. I wrote it, did a second draft, did a third draft, and then I drew it, I penciled it, inked it and colored it. So it takes a while. My suggestion, if you want to be a cartoonist, is start small, maybe do a page at a time. Don't take six months, take a day. It doesn't take long, just tell your story. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other advice? Thank you. For aspiring writers, from this panel, any other advice for aspiring young writers in the vein of what Chris was saying? Coffee. Coffee for young writers. Young writers. Well, I would say I'm still practicing as well. I'm still practicing. I told you I had 11 children, right? So, I started as a hobby. I'm trying to make it into more of a career. But I would suggest, I know that reading has a lot of, a lot of hand in writing. And what I like to do is read the genre that I like to write. And actually, in writing, as fast as words could fly, I use Paula Yu's 16 Years and 16 Seconds, the Sammy Lee story. She had actually won the 2003 New Voices Award from the L.O. And I wanted to win it in 2007. So, I checked her book out and I read her book. And you can learn from other authors from their works, their character development, their plot development. So, I would suggest reading, if you want to be a writer, reading the genre that you like to write in and other genres too. And get in the habit of just writing something every day, even if it's a journal, maybe something that happened. Interesting that day, blogging. Something to get you writing every day. Because the more you write, the more your ideas come and the more your words increase. And then you'll be able to just discipline yourself in a habit of writing. And then maybe you can get up at five o'clock in the morning and write all day in your pajamas. When I talk to kids, I tell them very much that Pam's talking about too. But I add a little bit of kind of journalistic reporting stuff which is keep a notebook or whatever it is that you use, you know, your phones. Have your eyes open and your ears open at all times watching because of the little snippets of this, a little snippet of that character, of that event, the way they talk. I actually tell students I get in trouble with parents for this sometimes. But I say go to a mall or go somewhere, sit on the steps, listen to what people are saying to one another and try to write it down word for word. Because, you know, one of a great character reveal is not only the words that your character uses but how they say it, what kind of rhythms they use. You know, and if you spend years or some time being a reporter and writing things down, hopefully verbatim the way people say them, you know, you're gonna learn about how different people speak and how you learn about who they are by the way that they speak. So we call that saving string too, is that you write a little bit of this, a little bit of that, keeping, you know, little notes. I also tell students, and I think this is for my musicians, they always read their writing aloud to themselves when they're in their editing process because, you know, words are such a gift to you all. They are music, right? Like poems, we celebrate people, we eulogize, we do all sorts of things with words and they have a rhythm. And if you read them out loud and you find yourself stumbling, then you need to go back down into it and redo it a little bit. But it's really, I tell them, you know, just have your antenna, but just listen, listen, listen at all times because life will drop all sorts of amazing stories right there from you. That's great advice. Anything to add, Debbie? I'm working on a graphic novel style biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It'll come out this fall. Welcome to my world. Yeah, well, of course I am not the, thank you. I'm not the artist. It's hard, man. I haven't said that for years and no one's living it. Yes, all respect. And so, of course, it's a much more complete picture of RBG, especially as a student and when she was in college, she took a class from at Cornell from Professor Vladimir Nabokov. Of course, we all know him now as an incredibly famous novelist and what she learned from him and what she practiced was reading her words aloud so she would write her papers and then we have a panel in which she's reading them aloud because he taught his students that that is how you make your, one way that you make your writing better, you want to hear it. And I bet, I mean, I know that I read my work aloud as well. Another question. Come on, somebody. You can do it. Nobody, everybody's just gonna sit. Well, you know, I'll even keep it going and speaking of, there's self-doubt in everything you do. And I will say on the books that we've worked on, I find that's true with everybody. Whether you declare yourself an author or a civil rights pioneer or president, everybody has that nugget of self-doubt and not believing they are what they are. Like, I come here and do this and go, there's no way anybody wants to hear what I have to say to this day. And I think we all have it and I think we've just mastered the fine art of pretending for a few minutes that we're not that little kid who is eating dirt on the playground at five years old and that we're worthy of being heard. I think that's at the end of all of these stories and for all of us, I think it's just believing that you have something to say and worthy of being heard. Right or wrong, if we get the details slightly wrong or right, we're worthy of being heard. Yep. Everybody has a board and a story. Whether they choose to tell it or not. Is there ever a time where you're writing a story and then you don't know what else to do and you just stop writing? Like you just drop the story? Yes, yes. All the time. And often you put it aside for, it could be months, then you'll come back to it and you'll have an aha moment that, oh, now I know where it should go or you put it away forever. And I can speak for myself. There are things that I didn't put away, that I didn't really know where it was going and yet I went ahead and finished anyway and even submitted, even like gave it to, gave something to my agent to read or before I had an agent would send it out to a publisher and now when I look at those things, I look at them and I say, well, I should have put them in a drawer, I should have come back to them months later because they weren't worthy. Not everything that writers write ought to be published and just because I finished something and I can say I finished something, aren't I fine? It doesn't mean that piece of writing ought to turn into anything and sometimes that can be hard to acknowledge because you worked so darn hard on it but that's just part of the writing life. I can relate. I can relate. I wrote middle grade novel. I usually specialize in picture books but I was going to be adventurous and I wrote a middle grade novel and I received feedback from agents because I would send them so much and then they were wanting to see 50 pages. Everybody wanted to see 50 more pages and then they would pass. So I knew something was wrong with something within those 50 pages and so I did have the opportunity of submitting the entire work to an editor for critique just to find out I didn't have a plot. I had just had a lot of series of events and they said, well, what does your character want? He's doing a lot of things but what does he want? And I didn't know the answer. So it's resting right now. You'll find us, yeah. One way I try to avoid that happening because it all comes to us at some point but one way that's helped me avoid that is to know my ending. If I know my beginning and I know my ending it's a little less likely that I'm gonna get sort of lost as I go and kids will always groan and say, oh, are you talking about an outline? And it's, yes I am. But not a hard and fast one but if you can think of it more like, if you've ever crossed, had to get over a creek you're going to have gone from stone to stone to stone to get from this side to that side. You know that that's where you're going this is where you're starting then try to locate the stepping stones that'll get you there. It'll help you keep your path as you go. So are you just, why do you stop writing? You're just like done with the story or are you just bored? Yeah, that's the thing with me is when I get bored, it was funny my wife and I were going through some stuff I found files, I'd written like 30 pages of a picture book and I had stopped and I don't know why and I'd shown it to my wife and she's like, this is really good I wanna know how it ends and I'm like, yeah me too I had stopped and I put it away and I forgot why I put it away cause probably like you, I just got bored and I didn't know where I was gonna go with the story. That's the best time to get up and go for a run or a walk or write something different, draw a picture, play volleyball, do something other. I've always found when I hit an impasse with a story my wife and I run a lot I found physical activity gets the brain moving so go for a run, put on some jogging shoes and run around the block. Another suggestion, if you don't mind, this is just a technique you don't have to do you don't have to try it but if you feel passionate about what you wrote and you feel like you put so much time and energy in it and you just hit a stumbling block and you stopped writing try to write it from a different perspective and try to, for instance, if you're writing it from one character's perspective try to write it from another character's perspective or try to tell it from a different angle or pick another focal point to see if you can get a little bit further with the story or at least think about it. Sometimes I talk to writers or people who want to write, I should say who don't like to write or type and but they have stories that they want to tell and so one suggestion and this is what I used to do before I started writing when I was young that there used to be something called a tape recorder and so I would actually tell stories, just my voice and I would get so engaged in telling the story because I wasn't writing anything I didn't have to think about it, it was just coming out and then I would go back and listen to it so dictation, if you have something to record and you just get carried away with the story and it sounds silly and it's gonna be all jumbled and everything but there are elements in that because it's just coming out of you if you wanna try that, take one of your characters and just be that character, talk about that character talk from that character's point of view and record it and then when you go back to your writing you feel like, oh I know more about my character I know what my character will do now sometimes that helps if you just wanna dictate it instead of writing because writing can be tiresome especially for a young person so just dictate it, just record it and then maybe you can capture some of my ideas or something will come to you and you can go back and apply it to your writing Text it to your friends because God knows my kids are always on their phone and they could write a billion words a year if it were a tweet or a text so oh and that's another thing, yeah share it with someone else that you have confidence in get their feedback because I have gotten so many ideas from fellow writers, I wrote a story and thought I was done and my friends, she said you did an excellent job of showing how your children messed up this was my latest book, Mother of Many and she said, but you didn't show where they cleaned up oh, so I went back and it brought the story full circle you just, just that feedback encouraged me to write more to bring the story full circle so, you know, share it with fellow writers or friends to get feedback anything to add, no? no okay, we have another question over this way books that are so long books that are so long so long I guess that comes to you if the story's good, hopefully it won't seem long, right and I also think of it as chapter by chapter so that, or like, you know, verses of a song so that I don't see it as like, oh my God, I'm writing a tweet chapter book, you know, I do it instead of, it's like by sections and different character growth meetings at that particular time, does that make sense? And, you know, the other thing too is that I get in the zone, I do kind of have a routine where I am gonna write and I try not to answer the phone or doing it so that I can keep going and again, I keep harking back to this journalistic background, but because I started writing for school newspapers when I was, I don't know, fourth grade, you know I've been writing for publications like that always and that's always really helped me like, you know, I have a business attitude about it that I've gotta get through it so I don't think about, oh my goodness there's this huge thing to do but instead like individual scenes does that make sense, does that help? Have you ever had the chance of doing a drip sand castle? I hope, yeah, perfect. And so for those of y'all who haven't had that great pleasure in drip sand castle, you do it, you know, at the beach or in a playground, it's just wet, mucky sand, right? And you just stick your hands in it and you just go drip, drip, drip like that and it builds the lifetime, is that the right, anyway, castle that comes up. If you think about writing like that, that it's just, you know, drip, drip, detail up and detail up and detail builds a sense of paragraph page, chapter, book, no sweat. If you think about it that way. Little steps. Good luck with it. You don't start out wanting to do a big story, you start a little bit, like we run marathons, I always equate it to running a mile at a time, I'm only running a mile and then when I'm done with that mile, I'm like, yeah, I'll do another one. So you do like a little page and then you do another one and then do another one. And you know, you've got a 580 page book and an editor who wants to kill you. So. Thank you for your question. I have one too. Several of you do these books that are about important history and in some ways reinterpreting or bringing to life things that we haven't explored enough. And I think it's so amazing. It's intimidating to even think about taking on some of the subjects. Have you ever, like, how do you deal with that? Have you ever backed away from something like that's not my story to tell or have you overcome? I mean, I can say for us, so we do a number of books about very important people, like I guess it like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. I'm a straight white guy and Brad is a straight white guy. Who are we to have the authority to tell their story? We've been very lucky and blessed to talk to people and get feedback from very smart, very engaged people, people at the archives or people who've been there. Like you had your father, which I said to her offstage is a great resource. So, you know, we've been lucky enough to get people that help us tell that story. So it's not as intimidating, but yeah, it is. It's really intimidating to stand out and say I have the definitive Martin Luther King Jr. story. Like, I would get laughed off the stage. So yeah, it is intimidating up front, you know, but then also we do Billy Jean King and who comes back and says, I look really awesome as a cartoon character. So that's a great bit of feeling at the back end. But yeah, there is some nagging thing in the back of your head. It's as I don't deserve to be doing this, but. But for, I mean, another way to look at it is that we actually, and I think in your book, you're also not saying this is the definitive story of anybody. I haven't written the definitive story in two books about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In one of them, it's, each of them has a through line. So in the picture book, it's about how dissent makes change and disagreement doesn't have to make you disagreeable. And that's that story. In the graphic novel, it's more about step by step, how she moved toward the person that she became. And I think that helps with the feeling of do I have too much hubris to do this work. But I, and also in the end, I have never felt like, oh, I'm an expert on Ruth Bader Ginsburg or I'm an expert on desegregation of schools in the South. No, I learned what I could in order to write the book with the angle that I've developed. And I have become comfortable with that knowing that I'm not the expert. The expert of some is a whole lot of other people. In my case, hopefully answer your question. My, I asked myself, what's the purpose of me wanting to write this story? Once you realize your purpose, my purpose is to inspire young people, to enlighten young people, to introduce them into another character's world, so they could see what someone else may have gone through perseverance, determination, how to stand up for what's right. And when I'm presented a story that I feel like will present that type of story to young people, I feel as though this is something that's worthy of sharing. Not necessarily taking it as my own, but this is something to share with young people that will inspire them. That's important to me. And if that story will do that, then my challenge is how can I do this right? That's mainly, that's the approach I tried to take and I just do my research and I try my best to get it as right, as close to right as I possibly can. I did have the advantage of reading the story to my dad before I sent it to my editor or the publishers. And so, and listening to my dad, his feedback, he was like, oh, that sounds, of course he's gonna say it. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah, that's right, I like that. And so that encouraged me, all right, I wanna share your story. And what I really, really like is the fact that I've taken raw harsh realities of his story and presented it to young people. And the ending is not what some people may have desired to see or read. However, what he didn't receive in his day, the applause, the recognition that he deserved, he didn't get that. But when I go to school visits or I present the book now, he's getting applauded across the country. And so I relate that back to him and I realized I did right by taking that step forward and sharing his story with young people and with readers because that's the reward. They're getting out of the story with the takeaway that I wanted them to get when I first desired to write it. Hopefully that answers your question. Actually, if I can add one really quick thing, one way that, one of the hardest books that I've done actually was right before Hamilton and Peggy, which was, it's called Suspect Written. And it's about McCarthyism. And McCarthyism is about the red scare and when this country was gripped in a paranoia and a mob mentality and a xenophobia and a labeling and a name calling, a very, very difficult topic. And what I wanted to talk about was how that filters down to teenagers and how it affects what they think and say and the kind of suspicions that they might have about one another. McCarthyism was born of a legitimate fear of the communist threat and the Soviets. That then became hysterical given fanaticism. And this one, the dogma of one particularly fanatical, I mean this is a term, man. So the way that I dealt with something that's a difficult issue is that I very purposefully, I don't always design my books this way, that carefully, but I took the two polar extremes of that experience and had two characters. One who was the son of an FBI and government worker who believed in the American way, believed in protecting American freedom, but who was working for Hoover, right? How did that filter down onto this very devoted patriot kind of family? And then I created a young boy who was the son of a diplomat in an Eastern European country whose mother was the Czechoslovakian artist. Okay, the people who tended to be targeted because they were liberals and artists and had a lot of potentially communist friends. And seemed un-American because of some of the things that they said that were very liberal or they might have been involved in civil rights movement which became tagged during McCarthy's time as being dangerous and subversive. So I'm hoping that, and actually ended up being a difficult writing thing for me because I wrote it chapter by chapter and I'm about to do this again with the Berlin Wall of month by month from 1953 to 1954 from when finally Joseph Welch said that resounding line of having no sense of decency, sir, which finally seemed to break our attitudes. But it's very much told through the two perspectives of these two families and the effects on one another. And that allowed me to, I hope, give both and a complete version of what it was like to live in that time period. We have time for one more question. Go ahead. Good morning. Mr. Jimich, Mr. Guerrero, I'm the librarian here in Washington DC, DC Public Schools. Great to have you here. I wanted to, I have an ask and some advice. My ask to you guys is that you're doing wonderful work as writers, so please stop being humble. I need you to be out there on social media. I need you to wear crazy outfits. And do all this stuff that my kids was, my kids, they're what I look up to. And they look basketball players, football players, and they, what am I gonna show them? Oh, this is a writer, I don't wanna do that. That's been my worst day as a librarian when a kid comes to me and say, no, I don't go there because I don't wanna be a nerd. I don't want people to call me a nerd. Please, you know, just step it up for my kids. That's my ask. I draw pictures for them, so they all come running to me. And then I tell them I'm an author and they run away. Cool. I try. And the second is having a writing club for my kids and doing biography. It's so hard because they just go to Wikipedia, boom, and they wanna put it out there. So I'm like, come on, give me some gossip. So I love what you were saying. Give me those little details. That's what really, so you have any more suggestions like that to get them into interesting stuff and not just repeat what they just said? Well, just since I was talking about suspect, but I'll just tell you that I very purposely made 14, 15-year-old book reader boys, the cool kids. So I think all of us have done that at some point that try to encourage, because it's an interesting time that boys, and I know this, but boys might potentially give up reading, which is too bad because it just isn't seen as cool. So first off, thank you for what you're doing to encourage them and to create readers. I always tell them, what would you tell your best friend? What was most surprising to you about this? What's something you wouldn't tell your parents about what just happened? If you're looking for the kind of gossip kind of things, try to get them to do a conversation. Like, tell me, what did it smell like? What did it sound like? What did it taste like? What made you mad about it? Who didn't seem particularly bright to you about that occasion? As much like a little specific details will help them kind of flesh that out. Well, I used to homeschool my children before I had sent them to public school, and because I wanted to be a writer, I kind of worked in little writing exercises for them so I could write too. One thing that I tried, and particularly, I think older students would enjoy this as well. What we used to do, we used to do just random, children like challenges, at least my children, they like challenges, they like competition, and they're surprised when they can produce something in a short period of time. So what I did, what we did, my dad's my daughter and my daughter's up there, she probably remembers this. We used to pick one word and write it on a piece of paper, and it could be ice cream, it could be potato, it could be whatever, just one word that comes to their mind, and I would put it in a little basket and shake it up, and I would give it to them, and you had to pick a word out of the basket, and I would put a timer on for three to five minutes and say, now you have to write something about whatever, oh, I didn't want that, that's too bad. And it could be a poem, it could be a nonfiction piece, it could be creative, your ice cream could be the main character, just make it fun. So I set the timer, and they took the challenge, and they just started writing for whatever time period I set, and once the timer went off, some of them were like, oh no, no, no, no, I need more time. And then they were so surprised, the one who didn't want to write about ice cream, they were surprised at what they produced in that short period of time, and then I just did this type of workshop at a school, and some of the students came back up to me later and said, you know, I took that home, and I can't write, they were inspired because it was just random, it's not like you have to sit down and think about what am I gonna write about. You're forced to write about a certain thing, and you're challenged, and if they're interested in being writers, that's a fun way to spur that creativity, so that's something you could try. In our books, I don't know if you've seen them, I'm sort of like the candy giver outer. The kids get sucked in by the cute cartoons, and then by the time they're done looking at the cartoons, they've learned something. But I also, when I do school visits, I usually get 500 kids in an auditorium, and I talk to them about these different heroes, and I draw with them, and when they start to engage in an activity where it's not just being told something, and then they're actually doing something, they get more into it, and then I tell them at the end that if you look at all these books, we actually hide things throughout the books. So my identical twin boys are in every book, I draw Brad in, we draw the number 27, Superman appears in every book, and then the next hero of the next book. And so I tell them that, the kids all grab the books and start rifling through them. You've challenged them, you've said, here's something fun to do, and then by the end, they're like, I didn't know Rosa Parks did this, or I didn't know George Washington liked to dance, and that's kind of cool, and maybe they pick up and move on to something else. We are so used to these days, our kids are on YouTube and Twitter, and we have to provide them something better to get them away from the screens, and hopefully if you make it fun and engaging, we'll have no problems, so that's what we're trying to do. And people like you who throw the books in front of their faces and say, read this. Thank you. So thank you. And to the extent you're asking how in my writing club can I get these kids interested in writing, about writing nonfiction, writing biography, the first answer is kind of disappointing to the kids, I'm sure, which is that well, step away from the screens because you are not gonna find the information that's gonna make a great story, or at least not enough of it in your Wikipedia articles. There are hands-on things they can do, I don't know if your school has the kids do so-called wisdom interviews where they're interviewing either their own ancestor, something that seems old to them, but we all know isn't really old, about their life or some experience they had field trips, I know they can be difficult, but I mean just coming to the archives today, for example, I looked at something upstairs in the rotunda that made me think, wow, that would be a great book. And I've gotten other ideas just by going to the American Art Museum and seeing some little, just some little, little thing mentioned on a placard describing the work of art I was looking at by Winslow Homer. And that sparks ideas. So I know it is hard to say step away from the screen, but there are the interviews, the field trips, the word play, you can also do it with, when you're not just trying to encourage creative writing, but also trying to encourage thinking about real people or real events, just things to get them more in their heads and also in the world and not just thinking, okay, I'm gonna read this on the screen and I'm gonna write something about it. Let's always remember to be inserting the thought process in between the screen time or even the research time and the writing time. Actually, Debbie's bringing up a really good point too, which is if you're doing biographies, the other thing, have them call the historical interpreters at some, like the people that Skyler imagined, I cannot thank them enough for everything they shared with me. And they're the wonderful little anecdotes that they know because they're immersed in that family, for instance. There's another character in Hamilton and Peggy I won't go into, but he may have saved us, you guys. Anyway, seriously, anyway, he turned into a double agent for Skyler. The people at Mount Vernon were so wonderful about tracking him down for me and then they literally found a magazine from the 1830s that he had shared his memories with. But I didn't do it online, I didn't email them, I called them, and then I went to see them. And so much of what they can learn and get excited about, if it's possible, they don't have to go, but they can call. There's a telephone. It's an engagement, it's a conversation and it's in conversation that we tend to share our stories. So, I mean, I would just really encourage them to be brave enough to call, because honestly, and I've never met more generous people than these historical interpreters because they love their topic. Thank you very much for this question. And we have to wrap up this portion of the day and I love that we're wrapping up with what feels like the most radical no and that's just pick up the phone and call someone. It does feel radical, but I think that's a perfect note to end on. I want to thank all of you for being so thoughtful and engaging in this conversation with me and all of you for asking such wonderful questions of our panel here and stick around because if you're curious about this work, you can engage more with our authors this afternoon here. And in the meantime, I will say goodbye and thank you for being here with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.