>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:05 [ Pause ] ^M00:00:10 >> I'm Tracy Grant, I'm the editor of KidsPost at the Washington Post. ^M00:00:14 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:18 The Post is a proud charter sponsor of this event and I'm a veteran of this festival. I've done introductions for most of the years that the festival has been in existence and so I've meet, introduced and heard many-many authors over the years. By enlarge they've been wonderful, generous of spirit, engaging, funny. But some years, something special happens. And in 2005, I fell in love at the National Book Festival with this man. ^M00:00:56 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:04 Not at all in the romantic sense or anything [laughter] but in the sense that hearing this man to talk about life and learning about over coming adversity and what the gift of story telling can help you achieve. It gave me goose bumps that I can still feel today. Walter Dean Myers is the author of more than a 100 books and has won more awards and honors than I could possibly name. But when he has named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress-- ^M00:01:41 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:48 I remember thinking that this was the job that this man was born for and that this country was uniquely lucky to call him our own. It is my distinct honor to present an amazing author and a true national treasure, Walter Dean Myers. ^M00:02:09 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:31 >> So, is this a good life or what? [Laughter] Is this a good life? The thing that amazes me, I was in--no, let me start. I was going to prisons--I was going-- [Laughter] I was going to prisons and talking to you people in jail and I was asking myself what brought this young people to jail? What, how did they get here and I've been thinking about that and worrying about it for years and years and trying to understand and asking myself what could I do to help some of this young people. And I was thinking, as very descent ideas and I said to myself, "Walter, you're pretty smart." And I said, "Oh really? Yeah." [Laughter] So--but then one day, I was--I just got very early in the morning and followed my morning routine which I get up at 5 o'clock every morning, come down stairs, negotiate my cat's breakfast [laughs] and I fed the cat and I did my five pages, I do five pages a day. And I said to myself as I watch the snow falling and real people going to work. How did I get here? How did I get here? You know, my foster parents, I was raise in a foster home, right? My mom read on the third grade level. My dad could not read at all. So, how did I get here? Here I am now I'm 75 years old, who knew you can have a 75-- [Laughter] I use to think would I ever make 30 [laughs]? And I've written 105 books-- [Applause] A 105 books. Okay. I've published a 105 books. [Laughter] I've written a 115 to 120. I got about 10 books, I can't publish, see me later, we'll talk if you have-- [Laughter] You know. So how did I get here? Where did the journey start with me? And I believe I have an answer. As my journey started, I had no clue what was going on in my life. I had no idea. I was not the brightest kid in the world. I got to be smart about two years ago, you know, but-- [Laughter] I had no idea. I believe my journey started in Harlem. I left West Virginia 2 years old and I was taken to Harlem and there is a strange woman and a strange man who are now going raise me. The woman when she wasn't doing what we call day's work, day's work means--meaning you go out and clean someone's apartment, you know. When she wasn't doing that, she would be home and she would read what she--the only thing she ever read was True Romance magazines and she loved True Romance magazines. This tiny little woman she was about 5 feet tall and she would read this True Romance magazines and she will allow me to sit on her lap and I love sitting on mama's lap. I was a mama's boy. I was a mama's boy and her finger would go across the page and I didn't understand what was going on with True Romance. I could never--I could never give my bosom to heave-- [Laughter] I never looked into someone's eyes and saw stars, my heart never beat faster. What was going on? I did not have a clue but what I did have was sitting there with my mother and I would sit there with her and I enjoyed that going back and forth. I enjoyed the sound of her voice. And I watch that finger move slowly across the page and I began to recognize a few of the words. I began to recognize words like handsome [laughs], beautiful and I began to recognize some of the words and I also recognize something else that this was somehow important to my mother. She liked it. But my sisters, my foster sisters came home they had comic books and sometimes my mother would read the comic books. Again, the finger across the page, her darling son on her lap and I was a very cute. [Laughter] You can't tell now, but when I was--all right. So, now I'm watching my mom I'm beginning to pick out a few words. And now I think there's a few words, she likes that idea. And eventually, while my mother was doing the ironing or the washing, I could read to her. I could read the words and sometimes I would not know the words meant, but I learned to pronounce the words. By the time I started school. I could read. Did I know what the words meant? No. Did they bother me? No [laughs]. It didn't bother me. When this young people are reading they would come across words and ideas that they don't understand. It doesn't make that much of a difference. And so I moved on, I moved on to the first grade, Mrs. [inaudible], she was as small as my mother and I loved her and she loved me. With the second grade, Mrs. Bauers [phonetic] who introduced me to Laura and the big woods, I loved Laura and the big woods. ^M00:10:01 What people don't understand that when Laura was being concerned about what was going on outside of her cabin, I was also concerned. I was concerned too and I was rather nervous. Laura never mentioned me in the books, you know. [Laughter] But I was there. I was there. And what was that doing to me. That was taking me out of Harlem that I loved and putting me into the big woods. Third grade, teacher hated me, I hated her. [Laughter] Fourth grade Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Parker, white hair, the war was going on and she will send me to super market to buy sugar. Sugar was rations, and Mrs. Parker read stories about kids riding a train and I didn't know much about trains, but I rode the train with the kids, you know. It was rather laborious. [Laughter] You know. Fifth grade, I got bored with school and I brought my comic books home. I brought my comic books to school and Mrs. Conway, fifth grade, Mrs. Conway found me reading a comic during a math class and she came up and tore my comic book up. [Noise] But, she said, if you are very quiet, if you are very quiet 'cause I spoke a lot in school. [Laughter] I had--I answered every question, you know. So, she will let me sit in the back of the classroom and read and she brought in books from her library and the book, the first book she brought in was East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Oh my God, you know. This was the most wonderful experience I ever had. So, now I'm having all of these experiences. I'm reading all the books Mrs. Convey brought in. She brought in lots of books because she wanted me to sit in the back of the room and be quiet, you know. [Laughter] And I don't what was wrong, why she wanted me because I was very good in school. I answer all the questions. I advice her what to do everyday. [Laughter] If any kid was a problem, I will hit the kid. [Laughter] How could you go wrong with a kid like me in school and I have perfect attendance. [Laughter] How could you go wrong with a kid like me in school? Now, by the time I got to seventh grade, I was developing problems because my family became dysfunctional. My family became dysfunctional. My uncle was murdered. My father went to depression. My lovely mother who drank too much to begin with became an alcoholic. My family fall apart and the only thing I had left in my life were the books, I had the books. I could escape into a different world with these books. So, I took these books very seriously. I stopped going to school most of the time, but I had the books. And then I began to write and my writing--I looked at back at my first published piece of work. It was so bad. I was hope--I was hopping it was going to be this little gem that I could share with the world. It was so bad. I know this is my first published poem. I know a lady oh so fair. To me she gives such loving care. I love that lady like no other because that lady-- >> Is your mother! >>You read it? [Laughter] I'm--I'm shocked. You read the poem after all this years. So, I began--I went to the books, I loved the books, my school career went down. I was once considered a bright kid, when my family fell apart, I dropped out of school at 15 years old, got caught, put back into school, dropped out at 16 and joined the army on my 17th birthday. Good idea? Yeah, for a kid who was very immature to begin with and I was very immature to begin with. It sounded like a good idea. I got out of the army a few years later. No high school diploma. I had nothing going on whatsoever. But I remembered a teacher in high school and the teacher said, "Walter, you write well--you write well." Continue your writing. So, now I'm 20. I'm a veteran at 20, right? 20 years old, a veteran, still fairly immature, still a book lover and I began writing again. And I wrote anything. My mom started off--studied me off with True Romance, I began writing for the National Inquirer. [Laughter] You know. I wrote anything not because I thought I was going to make a living at this but because it made me feel good about myself. And I had two things going on. I love of story--I love stories and I had experiences that other kids from my neighborhood did not have. I had--I was with Laura and Big Woods. I was [inaudible] Vikings. Did you know that when David fought Goliath, I was David's backup. [Laughter] If Goliath had beat David, I was up next. [Laughter] Did you know that? No. Did you know that when a read the Song of Solomon and The Shulamite Woman, that was my first affair. [Laughter] Did you know that? Did you know that when I read the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Dedalus had a disagreement with his mother and [inaudible] street that he was with me? These experiences have shaped my life. The experiences you see me here, but you don't know all the things I've been through in my life. When I read The Red Badge of Courage, I ran with Henry through the Woods in Virginia. When I read Buddenbrooks, I was with that family in Germany. When I read the story of Diary of Anne Frank, I have lived a thousand--a thousand lives. And now what I do is I write. I write six days a week. I write five pages a day. I tell stories. I tell stories primarily about the era that I grow up in that troubled era. I joined back to that era over and over again. I write about troubled teens because I was a troubled teens. I write about worlds of the imagination 'cause that was the truest world that I know. This is what I do. Everyday I'm up at 5 o'clock, negotiate with the cats, put its breakfast, I feed this little cat and I write five pages a day. Five pages a day comes to what? A 100--five days a week, 100 pages a month--month after month after month. I write. I've written 105 books. ^M00:20:01 Am I successful at this? I asked myself, how do I measure success? Do I measure success in books published? Do I measure success in the money that I make? Do I make a lot of money? Say yes. >> Yes. >> Yeah, I make a lot of money, [laughs] I'm shocked--I'm shocked. [Laughter] I live in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey 10 months or 10 and half months a year. The rest was, I live in London the rest of the time. I'm leaving for London, I go home tonight. My wife will pack. Tomorrow we leave for London on Monday. I will back in the fall sometime. Is this a good life? Say yes. >> Yes. >> Definitely. All right. So, now you know what I do, I outline every book that I write. I spend, you know, my [inaudible] my five pages which is normally about 8:30 in the morning, 80:30 to 9 o'clock. I finish my five pages for the day. What do I do for the rest of the day? Well, I have a wife and a cat. I go [inaudible] both of them, you know. [Laughter] I take turns, sometimes I aggravate the cats, sometimes I aggravate the wife both are good. If you have nothing to do, you can come to my house aggravate either one which is fine. So, what I would like to do now is open the floor for questions. Anything you like to know about me, about my wife, the cat, writing. Anything that you would like to know you like to ask me, now is the time to do it. ^M00:22:01 [ Pause ] ^M00:22:06 >> Yes. Good afternoon. My question for you is was it your personal experience in visiting prisons that inspired Monster or some other event? >> It was my visiting prisons. What happens with Monster? I realized that most teenagers don't do a lot of thinking. What they do is to organize their day dreams. They organize their day dreams into viable actions and many of the kids who are good kids are in jails. And what I wanted to do was to stop the idea of them organizing day dreams and engage rational thinking. I was in a trial one day and there's one kid by himself with the defense attorney of the trial, one spectator and this kid was facing jail for the rest of his life and all of a sudden there was a--it's a noise outside, a high school across the street was letting out. And I knew this kid was the same age as those high school kids, at that moment Monster was born. >> What inspire you to write Shooter? >> What inspired me? After the shooting in Colorado, I went out to Colorado and began talking to the kids and I saw something that was devastating. I saw an entire classrooms of kids whose family had guns and I saw a bullying going on. You put the two together, its explosive condition. >> In the Fallen Angels at the end when Peewee and Perry are flying out and that--of course it's really hard for the story because you just left it there if their going to make it and Peewee who has been so strong to the entire novel he breaks down and I find it very moving. Why did you write in that way? >> You know, I wrote Fallen Angels, my brothers--one of the brothers told me going to the army and he went in to the army and he went to Vietnam and he was killed the very first day he arrived in the country. And dealing with that idea of people dying, dealing with the idea of how do you cope with that. How do you cope with the idea of you killing and how--how do you take that killing experience home to your family and your community? That was what--was the inspiration with that scene. >> I love the character. He is marvelous. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I was wondering what was growing up in Harlem like and was that the inspiration for some of your books? >> Growing up in Harlem was fine, was wonderful for me. Again, going back to the prison experience I would see--I saw--I spoke to a defense attorney and the defense attorney was talking to me about a case and I said to him, "It must be very difficult to get the funds to defend these young boys." He said, "No, that's not my biggest problem. My problem is not getting the funds. My problem is to humanize them in the eyes of the jury and to humanize them in the eyes of a judge." And so, what I want to do with my books is to humanize my characters. So, I put them in Harlem and I give them families. I give them mothers and fathers and food to eat which is typical with what they doing. I'm trying to humanize them. So, what I want my readers to do is to recognize these kids, although they're poor and although they may be troubled to human. >> How do you feel being the kind of author's hero for the protagonist in Sharon Creech's Love That Dog? ^M00:26:50 [ Applause ] ^M00:26:56 >> Love that book. [Laughter] Love that book like Rita loves to read. [Laughter] >> I want to ask exactly what is the job of the Library of Congress as ambassador to children's literature. >> Okay. As my meadow you can come-- [Applause] You can come up to me and touch my meadow anytime you choose too, that is fine. I am trying to promote literacy around the country. I'm trying to do three things. One, to let people know that literacy is growing in this country. It's not getting smaller as growing and there are pockets of young people who cannot read, not who not--[inaudible] choose to read is a growing problem. A growth in proportion to you present population, all right, so now--so, one job that I have is trying to tell people that books are not just a pleasant or mature in your life, it's not like music or opera that you may enjoy. It's essential to your life. The second thing I want to do is to try to teach parents, grandparents, great-grandparents to have dialogic reading with their children, you know. So, it's celebrating books, but celebrating books in a different way if you don't read, you can't--my dad could not read. My dad could not read. His pride was that he could always support his family. If my dad or young man today, he could not support his family. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I was wondering if you can sign my book "Bad Boy" 'cause your my favorite author and-- >> Well, I'll be signing books later. >> Okay. And what's the best book you ever published? >> The what? >> The best book you ever published? >> Is always going to be the next book. Its like--you know--it's like what's your best girl friend? The one I got now. [Laughter] >> All right. Thank you. >> In my eight grade class we are reading 145th Street and I wanted to know how much of that was inspired by your childhood and-- >> Most of it was inspired by either my childhood or by people I've seen, people that I've known. If I meet you and talk to you for more than 10 minutes, you might be in a book. [Laughter] It's true, you know. So, we'll talk later. [Laughter] >> Thank you. ^M00:30:01 >> Hi. First, I just wanted to say thank you so much for writing. We're very honored to have you as our ambassador and we're all very proud to continually see you recognized. But I was wondering if you could please expand a little bit on what comic books meant to you. Why you think they might be an important link to literacy and why they might be an embedded part of our culture. >> I love comic books because they were accessible, you know, they were accessible. They were easy for me to read. They had comic--you know, comic books have a wider variation of language than Prime Time News. People don't understand that. Comic books have a wider variation of language. Comic books, okay there's a tendency to add violence in comic books which, you know, something newer ones don't have as much but comic books are accessible and comic books had easy answers and I think that when I get old one day I may go back to writing comic books. I like--I like comic books. I think they are literacy tool that can be used. >> Hello. I'm from West Virginia and we studied your book Fallen Angels in class and I was always shocked by the friendship among the soldiers there. Did you experience something like that when you were in war? >> Yeah. You know, the first time you see a dead body, you cling to the life once more. The first time you see a dead body, you cling to the life once more. Life has a couple of different meaning at that point, you know. The camaraderie that you--that people acquire sometimes it's so difficult to talk about that for years later guys won't talk about it. >> Well, I sort of have two questions just like two huge questions that I have and I'm like debating which one to ask. Is it okay if I ask both? >> Go ahead. >> Okay. The first one, me personally, I am currently on a crusade to become the greatest writer ever. [Laughter] And you're one of the greatest writers ever so I wanted to ask you for someone who is probably looking into a career to writing and looking to be very successful on writing. I know you was talking about the five pages a day. But what other advice would you give to say young writer who is looking to have a successful career in writing. >> What I would suggest to you is to get my--get my card, you know, and e-mail me. >> Wow. Yes sir. >> Yeah. [Applause] >> I-- >> I get to e-mail Walter Dean Myers like [laughs]-- >> I worked with--you know, you see if it's possible. I worked for the 14-year-old. A 14-year-old wrote to me and he was a soccer player and he played sax and he went to write and we worked together for a three years, putting together a story. I was telling him how to do it and the book was published about a year and a half ago. And--so, and I wrote with sometimes middle school kids by Skype and stuff like that. So, you know, its so--you know, e-mail me. >> Yes sir, gladly. And my second question I'm constantly surrounded by a lot of people who don't necessarily believe in education or reading. Like I talks with my dad and he is just like, "Yeah, you know, the book smart and stuff that's whatever but you got to have real hands on experience." >> Okay. >> And like that's sort of thing I completely agree with, you know what I'm saying like being able to have life experience and the things of that nature you do need to have. But whenever I get into like the explanation of why reading is essential to life, like, help me out. [Laughter] >> Okay. All right. Number one, I've read--I just finished a book about this same subject, its called Darius and Twig. But it will be out in another year. But the point of the thing is that the world has change since you father was young. Its change since I was young, you know. When I was young I could go out--I was strong, I was like bigger than I am now. I could make a living because I had willingness to work. Those jobs, the same jobs now in China, and other places in the world and their not going to come back, their not going to come back. It's a different world. Life experience is fine but the modern world is going to be the world of information. You will use, manipulate and learn about everything that's going on through reading--through reading, through reading. You know-- [Applause] And when I--when I hear someone saying that reading is boring, I say, "Rita failed that child, Rita failed that human." And then you think that someone says, someone did not brought you enough read, that person is failing that. >> Thank you. [Applause] >> And this is--this is the last question because my keeper gives me dirty looks. Yes. [Laughter] >> As a teacher, I wait for April to teach--to teach Love that Dog to my students because of the accessibility brings for poetry and things and I'm just wondering if this were tentful of just teachers. What would you say to them one thing that you would say to them to help them to inspire children to want to write. I know the reading part of it is so essential because they're so connected, but just the writing part of it. >> Okay. I'll tell you one last little thing and then I'll leave. [Laughter] I worked with a group kids in Texas, you know, and I gave them a 15 page project. I love this project so much. The first 10 pages, I asked them to do a family history. I gave them family [inaudible] questions to ask and they could use the answers to the questions. They could use photographs, you know 10 pages of family history. Those kids was shocked to find out what their parents were like and the last five pages, 10 pages of family history and five pages of how they fit into a family history. I did not think much of it, I mean I work with young people. I think so much of it when I began by the time I ended those kids were writing to me the families are writing to me is the best thing that ever happened to them and they was an award winning program and it was a great program, you know, if you do family histories, that's where to start. Thank you. ^M00:38:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:38:21 >>This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.