Meet the Phaidon Kids author - Joshua David Stein

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Guardian writer on the rhythm of words, why his book Brick is akin to a Dharmic text, and how he finds comfort in the darkness of Tomi Ungerer.

The writer, editor, and cultural commentator Joshua David Stein views the children’s book as an art form in itself. And he would know. The Brooklyn based writer’s diverse body of work spans journalism, food criticism, and cookbooks, as well as children's literature, and each of these outlets for his prodigious literary talent reflects both a deep curiosity and a distinctive narrative voice.

Stein has held high profile editorial roles including editor-at-large at Fatherly and Out magazines, and senior editor at Departures. He has also served as a restaurant critic for the Village Voice and the New York Observer, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, and Food & Wine.

Among other talents he has a great feel for audience. When he wrote his imaginative, educational Phaidon Kids books, Can I Eat That? and What's Cooking? he imagined his younger self and how he would have liked to have been talked to about food.

His most recent book for Phaidon, Brick: Who Found Herself In Architecture takes young readers along a more spiritual path, via some of the world’s most iconic architectural monuments and a curious protagonist - Brick - who is eager for life's learnings. Stein refers to the story as a human path to enlightenment.

His versatility extends also to podcasting. He hosted The Fatherly Podcast, discussing topics related to modern fatherhood and in 2020, he published To Me, He Was Just Dad: Stories of Growing Up with Famous Fathers, a collection of highly personal essays, written by the children of actors, musicians, authors, inventors, sporting heroes, and scientists. Stein has a BA in ethnomusicology from New York University and lives in Brooklyn with his two sons, Augustus and Achilles.

To celebrate 20 years of Phaidon Kids, we’re talking to a number of the illustrators and authors behind our brilliant children’s books. Once you've read our interview with Joshua, take a look in the Phaidon Kids store.

What makes a great children’s book? One that speaks to children directly, not above their heads, not under their heads, but leaves enough space for the reader to participate. That means the message is not so explicit that it's just an object for a reader to gaze at but is open enough that it is a work of art with which a reader can engage.

Are there techniques and tricks you use in your writing for adults that you employ for kids? Technically, there's a lot of differences in how you write, but fundamentally, there's not. Even four- to seven-year-olds can appreciate lit or can appreciate word play, which I do, of course, for adults as well.

The rhythm of words and shapes of words play a big role in your work. Can you tell us about that? The rhythm is a really good point. I have a band called The Band Books where we perform a lot of children’s books, including mine, set to music. As you do this, you hear the rhythm of the words and see the words, so yes, I do try to do that. One of the big differences, I think, between adult and children's literature is that a lot of children's literature is read out loud. That's important because it is an oral art form in a way.

How much of ‘yourself’ can you bring into a kid’s book, that has to be structured in a particular way? All of yourself! It's like saying, “Can you bring all of yourself to a haiku?” It’s an art form in itself. There are only three lines and it's structured, but sometimes that structure, that constriction, forces you to be more inventive, and to distil what is important to you. In terms of deeper connections, I feel I have the same message in all my books and in everything I write, for myself, for adults and children.

Do you have a child in mind when you write? I think I have little me in mind. Which I think is what any artist has in mind, really.

What's the part of ‘little you’ that's in there? In terms of the earlier books Can I Eat That? and What's Cooking?, it’s how I would have liked to have been talked to about food, as opposed to, “Eat this, don't eat that; this is good for you; that's bad for you; this hot dog has a face and a personality.” That approach doesn't appeal to me.

We love the wordplay in Can I Eat That? Was that always something you did in the playground as a kid? Yes, and it explains why I wasn’t very popular! I like word play, I like curiosity, I like silly jokes – that sort of thing – but in terms of my more recent Phaidon book, Brick: Who Found Herself In Architecture (in which a young brick goes on a journey to find her place in the world by visiting 10 celebrated brick structures around the world), it’s a little bit more complicated.

On one level the book is about architecture, of course. On the other level it's about the feeling when you're a kid of not knowing how to get from point A, from being a little kid, to being an adult, and building something bigger. And then the last part is knowing that wherever you are on your path is where you're supposed to be. In Brick's case, it is more about the Bodhisattva Path. That book is basically a Dharmic text.

Brick starts with things that are familiar to kids, then moves to visually and historically important structures and eventually comes back to apartments and homes. I think another children's book would be like, “Oh, home is made out of brick.” And that's nice, and that's where it can end, but for me, it's important for Brick (the character of the book) to understand the nature of impermanence, which is a prerequisite for enlightenment, so she has to understand that homes also don't last.

And so, what does she do with that? What she does with that is she becomes a Bodhisattva; she becomes part of the path through which others achieve enlightenment. But I think no kid probably understands that on a conscious level. I think that it’s important to me to leave some of that unsaid.

There is a profundity that hits when you have kids, did having your two children impact how you expressed yourself in your writing? I think having kids made me contemplate old age, sickness, and dying. It made me contemplate grief and spurred me to being more awake. Brick started with one of my sons’ questions: “How does the brick become all of these other things?”

I paired that with my own path. I think for all of my books, beginning with Brick, I wanted to have an A level which was nonfiction, and a B level, which was profound. I think if you look directly at the B level, it's too intense for children to relate to. As an adult, you want to pick up a book that says you’re lonely, or something like that. But I think that's too much for a kid. It's too on the nose, it's too painful. So better to have a book about shapes which also has an undercurrent of something going on that’s more profound.

Getting back to your food books, particularly, Can I Eat That?: Is there is there an age when kids become aware of food as a thing rather than something that just appears on a fork in front of their nose?

I think that kids have definite thoughts about food from a very early age. I'm a restaurant critic and a food writer. I really love exploring food, but I found that when I was at home, I ended up fighting with my older son about it. So, I wanted to create a book that was playful, and wasn't didactic, and had no agenda other than like, “Hey, this is fun.”

So, with that book, you can think of it as exposing a child to this idea of food, maybe being something that's not laden with conflict. There's no expectation. If I eat fish and I eat jelly, can I eat jellyfish?

The challenge with children's books for me is that my inner child wants a direct portal to my child readers, but there are all of these other different apertures that I have to go through, and every one of those has their own agenda. A publisher wants to sell books, booksellers want to sell books, parents want books that make themselves feel virtuous, and sometimes all of those things are appealing to things that aren't genuine to a child. There's a lot of really good-looking books out there that I think adorn bookshelves more than they're read to or by children.

All my books that I worked on at Phaidon were with a publisher named Cecily Kaiser. We had an extremely good rapport, she trusted me, and I trusted her. We both pushed back at times, but generally, I know that she has a child's best interests in mind, and she knows that I do too.

As a writer and journalist, do you have a certain thing that gets your ‘child's creative mind’ working? How does it work? I really value doing all the different things I do – cookbooks, journalism, children's books. I just put it all into my subconscious and then leave enough space that if something bubbles up, I capture it. But I think they all inform each other.

Your kids are 11 and 13 now. Does your writing change as your experience grows and your own children get older? Now that my kids are slightly older, my creativity is taking the form of young adult novels. I’m just figuring out where to express those thoughts. And of course, the medium affects the content. The issues I'm exploring in a young adult novel are much more complex than those I would explore in a children's book. But still, if I had an idea that I felt was best expressed in that form, I would try to pursue it.

What were the books from your childhood that had a profound influence on you, and inspired your desire to write? I remember Maurice Sendak. But really the books that inspired me came later and were by Tomi Ungerer, who I learned about through Phaidon when I was older. Tomi's and Maurice Sendak's books had an element of darkness and unease about them. Likewise, the books by Shel Silverstein, Leo Lionni, Clement Hurd, and Margaret Wise Brown.

Something that I really liked about Tomi Ungerer's work and Maurice Sendak's work was that there wasn't a moral to it. In Tomi's work specifically, you always had the spectre of violence underpinning everything. To me it's almost comforting to see that as a child, and it stays with you. It gives you credit that you can deal with it. I think as children, all of us have sadness and darkness and loneliness in our lives and we need to see those things in the world as well, or else we feel even more alienated and isolated.

But, as an author, there are all these different agendas you have to get through because, at the end of the day, children's books are a product that you're selling. So, you need to find the right publisher who understands that kids also need to see the subtleties and textures of life. And not in a sort of, “Oh, I'm sad and sad is bad, be happy” kind of way.

Is that a common mistake when writing for children? One of the major mistakes people make is they don't give kids enough credit that they can handle seeing. They don't give kids enough credit for critical thought. There’s a balance that has to be struck. Tomi Ungerer's Moon Man, for instance, is a great story. Right? And it's not about sadness or isolation. It's about this really fun adventure with the moon.

However, those elements are there, but you're not looking at them directly. I think there's a lot of kids' literature that, even if it’s dealing with sadness or whatever, it’s overtly about that. And when you make something overt, I guess it's art, but it's more propaganda, there's no space for the reader. Everything's explicit and cheery. There's a space for that, too, for sure. I don't want a bookshelf just of sad books.

Great authors have an ability to frame difficult feelings in a 360-degree way. What else do they do? I think some of those great authors think about things in a 360 way, but they're talented enough to remove enough elements to simplify it. They think about it in a complex way, but simplify it enough so that it’s not overwhelming.

You have this big, complicated equation. If you just shrink it down, you still have this very complicated equation. It's just too complex to see. If you cut it unwisely, it becomes distorted. So, you have to draw elements out of it that are still intelligible and still coherent, but just much simpler. And that's a really difficult thing. I think what I realised at the end of doing Brick is basically I just wanted to tell kids you are loved, and you are enough.

Take a look at Can I Eat That?, The Ball Book, What's Cooking?, and Brick: Who Found Herself In Architecture.