Meet the Phaidon Kids author - Gabrielle Balkan
Faster! Higher! Stronger! We talk to the woman encouraging kids to astound their classmates with incredible animal world facts.
The daughter of an English teacher and a chemist, Gabrielle Balkan was born on an army base in Augusta, Georgia and grew up in Zurich, Switzerland, in a house full of books. The former children’s-book buyer and commissioning editor for Scholastic Reading Clubs, and life-long educator (she studied English and education at Barnard College in New York), now lives in the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn, New York with her husband, daughters, an orange cat, and even more books.
Her best-sellers, Book of Bones: 10 Record-Breaking Animals , Book of Flight: 10 Record-Breaking Animals with Wings and Who's That Dinosaur? An Animal Guessing Game stand out for their blend of informative content and engaging storytelling, fostering curiosity and a love of fascinating animal facts, emphasizing record-breaking traits in the animal kingdom. Book of Bones was recognised as an International Literacy Association pick.
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 Gabrielle, take a look in the Phaidon Kids store and check out more of her work at gabriellebalkan.com.
What were the books you loved as a kid? My family were big readers, we had books everywhere. I was the only child, and I spent a lot of time reading. Most were fiction books. I wasn't a big fact person then. My dad would buy me these really cool, non-fiction books and I loved to look at them, but I hardly ever read the words. I don't know why. I don't know if it was something about the way they were written, but I got a lot of my information from fiction books that took place in a historical setting. Katherine Paterson was a huge prolific author when I was a child. She had a book called Of Nightingales That Weep, which was about the daughter of a Samurai in feudal Japan. I thought that was so interesting. I learned about the world and social status, through books.
What was your route into children’s books? I really wanted to write fiction. I thought that would be the route I went. Then I was hired as an educational consultant for a British company to see how their books would work with an American audience. And it was through that, and through editing some non-fiction, that I got more closely connected to non-fiction. The first big book I did was a story atlas of the United States. And so it allowed me to draw on the things I found interesting in fiction but to connect them to true information.
Your books are full of true information. What are the facts that play best with kids? I think kids want to astound their classmates in the playground. Superlatives such as biggest, fastest, whatever, have such a history with the Guinness Book of World Records or Ripley’s Believe It or Not! The concept for my Phaidon series of books grew from the publisher at the time, Cecily Kaiser. She and I had previously worked together, and we had a lot of sales data on what sold well. Record books sold really well and books about bones sold really, really, well.
Cecily said, “What if we put the two of them together?” That was her loose idea and then Maya [Gartner; Associate Publisher, Children’s Books] and I expanded it. Maya was insistent that every superlative should have a real purpose, not just be something that couldn't be backed up by science or research. Looking back, some of my first superlatives for the bones were a bit wacky and whimsical.
We would play around with how hard we wanted the guessing game part of it to be. We wanted the reader to feel successful, but we didn't want to make it too easy, and you don't want to make the child feel stupid if they can't quite get it. The Montessori teacher of my kids, when they were in nursery school, told me about how when kids learn information, they need to have a hook to attach it to. That's where the idea of comparing an animal to something that the reader might see in their own life came from. As an educator, as a writer, you want to give them as many opportunities to hook on to something as possible. Making these connections gives them something to respond to.
The text in your books features calls to action throughout – e.g.: “I am a velociraptor; pretend you have feathered wings” in Who’s That Dinosaur – how important is this to the narrative? Purposeful movement enhances comprehension and retention. So if you're asking a reader to protect their nest with their arm, it gives them another way to connect to the book, remember the information and, as it's a book about animals, it’s another way to be more empathetic to the animal. It gives them more of a thinking process.
There are many studies on movement and learning. There’s a woman called Annie Murphy Paul, and she has a book called The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. It talks about how low-intensity movement is really good for students with ADHD to help regulate their alertness. So I really try to include some sort of movement or some sort of response, especially for those wiggly kids who find it hard to sit still. It gives them permission to do some slight movements. Maybe that wiggly student is often told to sit on their hands to keep still, and this gives them permission to wiggle, which is what they do best!
I also think it’s so important to encourage questions within a book, especially on an easy topic such as animals, because that stimulates conversation and gets children comfortable with the idea of questions before they get to a more difficult book, say about slavery, or something where you need to question the subject. You need those questioning muscles in place on a kind of safe topic before you get to some of the complicated ones.
There is also a high level of specificity in what you write. In the Book of Flight for instance we find the white-throated needletail – not just a needletail – and the Philippine eagle – not just an eagle. What attracts you to this level of informative detail? When you mention a Philippine eagle, you are learning two pieces of information instead of one – there's more than one type of eagle. My experience growing up was, I thought all birds were the same, all frogs were the same. When I grew up all animals were “he” or “it.” It really wasn't until working on these books that I started to realise that there are so many species of bats out there. But a lot of information presented to children is just “bats.” And you don't know that they look different. It’s very important to me to be a socially conscious writer, and even though these books are about animals, not humans, I still want to show diversity of life. I have a spreadsheet where I say where in the world each animal is coming from. Is this a male or female bird? Because they do have different attributes.
I tried to show the breadth of the world as much as I can, but without beating someone over the head with it. My hope is that this isn't the last book on the subject a kid is going to read. They're going to be, “Oh my God, birds are so amazing. Animals that fly are amazing. How can I find out more?” I think the readers who are drawn to information books are reading so many on the subject that they always want to have a new piece of information to share. So I think having that specificity respects the child’s intelligence and curiosity and also makes it more interesting for the grown up reading it.
Also, and this is an important point: for everything you do, there is more than one way to do it. Every kid in the world knows that the peregrine falcon is the fastest bird. But it's only fastest if you're measuring it one specific way. Each of these aviators flies differently from the other, and it all depends on their unique attributes: for instance, the size of their feet, or the size of their wings compared to the size of their body.
The animal that flies the fastest while diving is not the same as the animal that flies the fastest while soaring. So readers can, and should, identify their own accomplishments as record breakers in different settings. I’m certainly not the fastest sand runner, but I have a talent for speed when getting to the chocolate station.
What's a common misconception about writing for children? A lot of people think it's easy because it's less words or it's somehow less complicated, and a lot of people think that it has to be simple for a child to be able to read it.
Do you have a favourite part of your work? One of my favourite parts is visiting classrooms. I wanted to be a teacher, but I chickened out. It was too hard. It's so much work. But this part is fun. You pop in, and you pop out and you don’t have to deal with the parents! I was touring for the Book of Flight, and I asked one of the readers which animal [he was] most interested in. And he said, “The Philippine eagle, because my family is from there.” It just gave me such a good feeling to hear that this kid felt represented, in a book about animals. I find that the readers who really respond to my work are huge fact hounds. They just love information.
Do you have your own, or friends, or family’s kids in mind when you write? Not my own kids, not myself, but a reader who really likes information and really likes to share that information with other people. I find I have a lot of readers on the autism spectrum who enjoy the work. And I think that's because it's very information-based, just letting the information about our world shine. I would say they are the kinds of readers who might pursue a career in some sort of science or in the natural world eventually.
What does a working day look for you? I do my best work in the morning, when I am full of hope and when anything seems possible. The early morning hours are key to me. I live and breathe by a deadline and so it’s nice having the perfect editor who does just the right amount of checking in. Usually, I'm working on three books at a time. One may be in the early drafting stages, where I'm just doing a lot of research. I could do research forever because collecting information is fun.
The horrible part is actually getting the first draft down, but once I'm in the editing phase it's fantastic. It’s nice again because you're able to answer relatively easy queries from a copy editor or just make sure something is working really well on the page. I like to be at different stages in different projects. Most of my books are a collaboration between the editor and me. My dream way to work is where we're both invested, because it can be lonely writing on your own. The going back and forth is fun. It's exciting.
GABRIELLE BALKAN BOOKS TO BUY NOW
Book of Bones: 10 Record-Breaking Animals
Book of Flight: 10 Record-Breaking Animals with Wings
Who's That Dinosaur? An Animal Guessing Game