“A book is a series of pages held together at one edge, and these pages can be moved on their hinges like a swinging door. They could also be half-doors, doors with windows, double doors, like fold-outs, doors with attachments, pop-ups, textures or moving parts, and shaped doors.”- Remy Charlip
Kyo Maclear, Canadian children’s book author, essayist, and novelist, is beloved by many. Her work is profound, beautiful yet leaves room for play and lots of imagination.
Thinker, friend, ally, a beautiful soul that radiates beauty. We were so lucky to catch up with her chat about her new book, the original philosophers and finding inspiration when times feel heavy.
Doors are such ordinary objects, but this book approaches them philosophically and metaphysically. When writing for children, do you consciously think about how naturally they accept big ideas?
Kyo – Children are the original philosophers. Before they have the language to articulate it, they’re already grappling with the biggest questions the
universe has to offer: presence and absence, here and gone, the self and the other. Freud noticed this with his fort/da observation. That’s not
so different from what we’re doing with a door, really. Open. Closed. Gone. Here.
As a child, I was a huge fan of Charles Schulz. The Peanuts are essentially a group of small children conducting metaphysical seminars.
(Recently, I’ve been thinking about what happens to our childhood questions. Where do they go? Can we bring them back?)
So no, I don’t think I’m bringing big ideas to children. I think I’m meeting them where they already are. You’re right, a door is a perfectly ordinary object, and children know this. But they also know it’s something more, a threshold, a portal, a TARDIS, etc. To a child with a penchant for fantasy or the surreal, the same door that leads to the garden could really lead anywhere. I like to tell stories that play with that imaginative doubling, the literal and the fantastical.
When I read the title, Ruth Krauss came to mind right away. How did this idea come to you — did the connection to the door come first, or the inspiration from “A Hole is To Dig”? Or somewhere else entirely?
Kyo – This book had a few seeds but I was definitely thinking of Ruth Krauss and Remy Charlip. They’re both named on the book’s dedication page as creative “door-openers.” The title of our book is actually a direct Krauss quote. As for Charlip, he inspired me with his book Fortunately and his essay “A Page is a Door,” both of which showed me the magic of page-turns. “A book is a series of pages held together at one edge, and these pages can be moved on their hinges like a swinging door,” writes Charlip. “Of course if a door has something completely different behind it, it is much more exciting.”
I love books that play with a book’s physical form (I especially love Bruno Munari, my Munari collection grew thanks to Collage Collage.) Julie and I thought it would be fun to build a sequential narrative that worked with what Charlip calls “that momentous moment: the turning of the page.” Our amazing editor Tara Walker and our art director, John Martz, helped us pull it all together.
After collaborating with Julie Morstad across several books, do you find her visual world entering your writing process?
Kyo – Absolutely.
In this case, Julie shared a few drawings from her sketchbook a few years ago and we discovered a shared love of doors. Because we have an off-the-page friendship, there’s a lot of prefigurative, pre-story conversation.
Do you have a favourite door in the book, or one that stayed with you emotionally while making it?
Kyo –There’s a spread that shows a child, who we’ve just seen quietly reading alone in a closet transported to a psychedelic universe. I have big love for that child.
Do you have a favourite Ruth Krauss book, or one that particularly shaped you as a reader?
Kyo –A Hole is to Dig. How to Make an Earthquake.
What continues to encourage you to keep making books, especially in moments when literature itself can feel contested?
Kyo – “If I had the strength to do nothing, I would do nothing. It is because I do not have the strength to take care of nothing that I make films.”
—Marguerite Duras
More books by Kyo and Julie:
It Began With A Page
Bloom
Julia, Child
and
A Door Is To Open
A past interview and more books by Kyo here.
Instagram: @kyomaclear
Website: https://www.kyomaclear.com
“Some doors are made of words and bring you to places you’ve never imagined.”
