I was listening to NPR, and I heard a review of Carolina Clay [The Life and Legend of Slave Potter Dave] by Leonard Todd. I thought, this is just an incredible story. It’s hard for me to know why it affected me so much, but my daughter’s a potter, and I’ve worked with clay all my life. He was a writer and I’m a writer, but I’m not heroic like Dave.

What made him heroic?

He dared to write on pots at a time when he could have been killed for that, and he signed his name. That’s just an amazingly courageous act—and subversive. But it’s also quiet, because he wasn’t saying anything—he was writing it. His ability and his talent gave him that kind of confidence and power, because he knew that if he was killed, who was going to make the 40-gallon jars?

You grew up in Cincinnati during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Did that help draw you to Dave’s story?

Oh, absolutely. I grew up in a neighborhood where I still live, close to downtown Cincinnati, which was predominantly African American at the time. All my friends were African American. We all remember the race riots, which happened about a block away from where we lived. I remember hearing things breaking and being with my African-American friends, and their parents being super-nervous and coming out all the time and telling us to stay on the grass and not to leave the yard.

Not much is known about Dave. How’d you find so many details about him?

It’s funny, I was talking to a friend of mine who writes biographies, and she doesn’t put anything in them that isn’t a fact. My biography really crosses that line and some people may not consider it a biography, which is fine with me.

The Library of Congress calls it a biography.

I couldn’t write the story of Dave without putting in things that I didn’t know he said or anyone else said, because there isn’t any record of that. There isn’t really another way to write the story, because all you have are bills of sale [of slaves] and these cryptic couplets [that he etched] on pots.

Your book feels so incredibly personal.

It’s interesting that you said that. When I worked on this book, I spent a lot of time feeling choked up and I couldn’t talk, or if the phone rang, I choked up.

What touched you the most?

It was the separation, the scenes where people are separated from people they love.

So many children and spouses—including Dave’s—were sold at the drop of a hat, and they never saw one another again.

That’s what really choked me up more than any sort of physical violence.

Do today’s kids understand how dehumanizing slavery is?

In a lot of ways, we’re failing our kids. Just recently, I went to a school to talk to a group of fourth graders, and one asked what I was working on.

I told her a little bit about Dave, and I showed her a slide of the woodcut of him on the auction block that’s in the book, and she said, “You mean he was being sold?” They’d done a whole unit on slavery, but she didn’t know that. And I said, “Yeah, slaves were bought and sold,” and she was stunned. Then she looked at me, and said, “Well, I hope the people that bought him were nice.”

What do you hope kids take away from the book?

I just want kids to realize there are a lot of ways to do what you believe is the right thing to do, and it doesn’t have to be screaming and yelling and fighting, or in any way violent.

There’s a woman who saved my mother during the Holocaust. She was a very quiet person and nobody’s ever heard of her. If I had to pick somebody, she’s the hero of my life. But she did what she did because she thought it was the most ordinary thing to do.

It’s very ordinary to want to write and read and express yourself. But because of the times, Dave couldn’t do that. So he became a quiet hero. If more kids knew about things like that, maybe they’d feel stronger themselves—and they could also do the right thing.

To read a starred review of Etched in Clay (Lee & Low), turn to page 117.

Photograph by Tallulah Photography.

In The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen, his older brother brings a hunting rifle to school to kill his merciless tormentor—and then takes his own life. Where’d that idea come from?

There were two books of Wally Lamb’s that I pulled little things from. But in The Hour I First Believed, the protagonist’s wife is at Columbine when the boys open fire. There was a line in that book about the fact that one of these boys had an older brother and for some reason it just kind of punched me in the gut, and I thought, “Oh, my god, I never thought about the fact that these people—and in that case, one of them actually was a monster—but these people have their own families. They have siblings. What would it be like for the surviving brother?

Why is there so much humor in such a troubling story?

I can’t write a book without humor, and this was certainly as dark as I have gone in any of my books. What really worked for me is that the story is told in first person. When you’re dealing with a 13-year-old boy and his perspective on life, at that age, we tend to be very self-centered, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. There are going to be things that make readers laugh in terms of his interactions with other people, his impressions of other people, because they’re his private thoughts. So when Henry is first meeting his neighbors and Farley and Alberta, that’s a very natural way to bring humor into the story, even though Henry never thinks he’s being funny, of course.

Did you use humor to deal with the world while growing up with a single parent in Ontario, Canada?

Oh, my God, that’s such a great question! Nobody’s ever asked me that before. Yeah, I did. I was a performer from a very early age. We would try to get parents to sit down and watch a play that I had made the neighborhood kids rehearse and memorize. I think I actually had a little book of kids’ plays that my mom had given me. And so I would force all the other kids into participating, and we would put on performances, and they would involve really bad jokes.

Henry’s family and his friend Farley are huge pro wrestling fans. How’d you write so sympathetically about a sport that you’re not really into?

I was having lunch with a writer friend, and he said—and I think Alberta says this in the book—that wrestling is “like a soap opera for guys.” Suddenly, the penny dropped for me. I thought, OK, that makes a certain amount of sense. Now I understand why people might enjoy watching this.

You got your first break writing TV screenplays after serving snacks to the cast of Degrassi Junior High. Were your muffins any good, or were you a lousy baker like Henry’s sassy girlfriend, Alberta?

That’s really weird that you asked me that, because I don’t think I’ve ever made that connection before. I didn’t make the muffins, I bought them. But the kids on Degrassi wrote a poem to me at the end of the first season. It goes like this: “An ode to Susin, the Brand Muffin Queen, we eat them, we die, then we turn green.”

Sadly enough, after we first spoke, there was another school shooting.

I was devastated by the news. I got a message from a woman who lives in Connecticut that moved me beyond words. Here’s what she wrote: The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen has really had me thinking after these recent horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary. One big problem I had prior to reading this book was that I was ignorant of the feelings of a shooter’s family members. It has helped me to pray for the members of the Lanza family who are also suffering at this terrible time.

Photograph by Brian Davis. Illustration by Jon Klassen

In This Is Not My Hat, a minnow steals a big fish’s bowler hat while he’s asleep. Part of what makes your art so striking is that the water, or background, is black instead of blue.

Initially, it was more of a mid-tone, like a teal, or a green. But I was fighting it value-wise. Also, since the fishes’ eyes are such a big part of the storytelling, the darker you can get behind them, the more their eyes are going to pop. And I just like the simplicity of using black. Black has problems as far as printing goes, but it’s just much simpler as far as color goes. And I just liked the moodiness of it. It felt quiet.

You’ve said this isn’t a sequel to your bestseller, I Want My Hat Back. But given the similar titles, people are bound to see it that way.

I don’t think I could have done this book without having done the first one. So in that respect, I think it is that. The biggest goal we had was to make it a book that you could read on its own and still get as much out of it as anybody else would have who had seen the first book—and I think we pulled that off.

How’d you come up with the idea for the fish book?

It was a really round-about process. I didn’t want the new one to look like we were riding on our coattails, but I wanted to keep the same tone, because I really enjoyed writing it. There were a lot of stories that I got halfway through, before realizing they didn’t work. We also talked about changing the object into a different thing to avoid some of that [sequel] talk. But the more I got into it, the more I really liked the idea of using the hat again.

What other objects did you consider using?

I was thinking of a scarf for a second, just because fish can’t wear very much. [Laughter] I also considered making a pointy hat, but that looks like a dorsal fin on a fish. And anyone who hadn’t seen my first book wouldn’t really know it was a hat. It would look like a silly triangle.

You’ve worked on major animated movies, including Coraline and Kung Fu Panda 2, and on an animated music video for U2. Did it stress you out knowing it was for Bono and the Edge?

Not especially. I was working at DreamWorks at the time, and you finish these films that you’ve had in your office for a couple of years, and then they go out and you realize, “Oh, yeah, it’s number two in Russia.” You just don’t think of the scale when things go out—you just can’t comprehend it—especially when things get spread around like these music videos with the kind of reach that U2 has. You just have to hunker down and focus on making the thing OK as far as you’re concerned and hope it translates well. There are moments when you sort of panic, and you realize, “Oh man, if this thing looks bad, it really is going to get seen by a lot of people.”

Is making kids’ books less nerve-racking?

With books, there’s so much pressure, too. With film, at least there’s a separation. You do the paintings and no one ever sees them—they see the film. But when it’s a book, it’s on paper and every line you’re making is every line in the book, and that’s just terrifying. That’s the scary stuff. I was much more scared doing my first book than I was ever doing videos or films.

Read the SLJ‘s starred review of “This is Not My Hat” (Candlewick).

Photograph by David Ho

Your novel Code Name Verity begins after a British plane piloted by Maddie crashes into Nazi-occupied France. It’s tough to talk about the story without giving too much away.

When I’m trying to sell it to people who know nothing about it, I just say, “It’s a spies-and-pilots thriller. It’s about the Air Transport Auxiliary and women who worked as pilots and spies in this little-known world of the Special Operations Executive. It’s about a friendship between these two women.” But I really don’t go into detail. I may tell them that they’re going to need a box of Kleenex.

After Queenie, a spy for the French Resistance and Maddie’s best friend, bails out of the burning plane, we slowly find out more about their past as her captors torture her to confess. Was it emotionally draining to write the story?

I took out shares in Kleenex. I have never cried so much over a book that I’ve read or that I’ve written. Even though I knew what was going to happen, every time I’d write a particular scene it would hit me as though it were the first time I knew about it. Then when it was over, just anything could set me off. You know, mentions of songs in the book. I went to one of my kids’ band concerts, and they had this jazz band that was playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and I burst into tears. And I’d look at a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and I’d burst into tears. I was really very emotionally traumatized by writing it.

Did being a pilot yourself help the story?

I couldn’t have written the story if I hadn’t become a pilot. I don’t know if I’d have had the inspiration. I certainly wouldn’t have had the knowledge. And I really enjoy sticking in little bits of my own experience. When Queenie describes Maddie’s flight in Scotland, where she’s looking at the snow-covered Highlands and it’s snowing in the cockpit, that’s actually a pretty straightforward description of many of my own flights.

What else did you sneak in?

I sneaked in a lot of personal stuff, but a really good example is the slimy Resistance guy.

You mean Paul, the letch with the roving hands whom you’ve graciously given some heroic qualities?

Yeah. He is a conglomeration of all the passes that have ever been made at me. Every slimy thing he does to Maddie has been done to me.

Maddie and Queenie exchange a list of their biggest fears. What are yours?

In no particular order: nuclear war, global warming, forgetting things (maybe this is why I write historical fiction, “Lest we forget”), the cat (I worry about him biting people or blinding my daughter by jumping on her head and accidentally scratching her in the eye. No, really), and the Yellow Bolt. That’s how my grandmother refers to a lightning strike that came in her bedroom window and exploded an electric fan standing at the foot of her bed. It’s a catchall term I use for the Big Disaster that hasn’t happened, but is lurking around the corner.

Does your novel have a message for readers?

The message is that if you are a girl, you can do anything. I really didn’t want my female characters to feel stopped by the fact that they were female. I wanted them to be able to control their lives, to do what they were good at, and what they wanted to do regardless of what society’s expectations were. I think that’s a good message for modern girls, as well, and that they need reminding about.

That’s true. I remember when I was in library school, I had a colleague who said, “Wales! That’s even a place?!”—and another associate, who said, “Your story is about medieval Wales. Really? They were different back then?”

How’d you get hooked on the Middle Ages?

It was kind of by accident. When I was in the sixth grade, I was in the gifted-enrichment program, and we did a unit on medieval culture. Our teacher had a bunch of books for us to look through, and one of them was David Macaulay’s Castle, which made the Middle Ages feel very approachable and lively. The castle that’s featured in that book is a fictional castle in Wales.

I went home from school that day, and I asked my mom to take me to the library. I went right to the nine-whatever’s in the Dewey Decimal system and just started pulling books off the shelf, and I started reading. When I read through all of those, I moved on to all the other books that they had about medieval culture. Then I started asking mom, “Can you get me books on interlibrary loan?” I just kept reading and reading, and I have never really left.

Did kids think you were a real geek?

Yes. I still had friends and hung out and did normal things but, really, there was nobody who appreciated the same things that I did. Other kids ran track and went to the prom, but I read Táin Bó Cúailnge and made a complicated list of medieval recipes for fun. Plenty of people looked at that and said, “Yeah, that’s weird.”

What’s the biggest misconception about people who lived in medieval times?

That they were very straitlaced and proper, just because their lives were really hard or religion played such an important part in their world. But medieval people were really raunchy. They loved dirty jokes. They loved toilet humor, and they were really big fans of slapstick.

Your story is based on the violent and bloody 1293 Welsh rebellion. How did a mild-mannered person like yourself get in touch with those emotions?

[Laughs] Gosh, that’s a really good question. I think a lot of it is in my own imagination about how unfair the world is. In some ways, I’m still five years old and getting angry that the world is unfair.

Is either of the main characters like you?

Gwenhwyfar has my probably wrong-headed conviction of finding it really hard to let go of the way I think things should be, as opposed to just accepting the way life is. She’s very backward-looking, and that is something that I’m trying to unlearn. Cecily has less of me, because she’s so much more bold and in-your-face. Whereas I try to be way nicer than she is—it’s not always successful.

Ever wish you were born centuries ago?

Oh, good Lord, no! I love representative democracy and flush toilets and antibiotics. [Laughs] I like the past right where it is!