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Sept. 6, 2025 02:11-02:59 - CSPAN
47:55
2025 National Book Festival Opening Ceremony
Participants
Main
d
david rubenstein
09:30
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Henry Louis Gates, chronicler of race, identity, and the American experience.
The books, the voices, the places that preserve our past, and spark the ideas that will shape our future.
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Up next, the opening ceremony for the 2025 National Book Festival with remarks from Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newland.
The event is hosted by the Library of Congress here in Washington, D.C. Good evening.
Please welcome the Acting Librarian of Congress, Robert R. Newland.
Thank you all so much.
It's the 25th National Book Festival, and the acting librarian feels like acting up.
Can you believe it's been 25 years?
I was at the first one.
Okay, be honest, who was at the first one?
Wow!
Fantastic!
So for those of you that were not at the first one, it was on the mall, which was wonderful.
They had tents.
When the weather was nice, it was fabulous.
When it rained, it was a big mud pie.
And we finally decided that bathrooms and air conditioning went out over them all.
So that's why we moved to the convention center.
And I hope to see all of you there tomorrow.
It's a fabulous facility.
Our staff has been planning for months and months and months, literally since the last one was over.
And you probably know that this year the festival is appropriately called Uniting Book Lovers for 25 years.
The National Book Festival remains the preeminent literary event in the nation.
As the largest library in the world, take that British Library.
We have a special opportunity to champion reading and literacy.
This weekend, we welcome an acclaimed group of authors to our nation's capitals to celebrate the importance of books in our lives.
We're excited to be with you and the tens of thousands of book lovers who will join us in person and those who will participate virtually.
For 25 years, the Book Festival has gathered lovers of reading and the authors who inspire them for a day of conversation, conversations, and discovery.
Festival goers will learn about the hidden gems, historic treasures, and innovative work happening at the nation's library.
They'll also participate in a range of interactive family-friendly activities.
Take a literary trip around the country by visiting the Roadmap to Reading.
Are any of our Roadmap to Reading folks here tonight?
Oh.
They are a fabulous group.
I hope you'll stop by and see them tomorrow at the Roadmap to Reading.
And when I was with them this afternoon, the Georgia contingent gave me a pin and it says, Reading is peachy.
So thank you very much.
They're just a really great crowd.
Tomorrow at the festival, we'll hear from more than 85 distinguished writers for readers of all ages.
And this evening, we're going to be treated to presentations from five of our renowned authors.
Assembled in this auditorium tonight is an extraordinary gathering of talent.
But before we begin, we have many to thank.
First and foremost, the United States Congress, the library's chief benefactor since it was established in 1800.
No library in history has enjoyed such long-lasting and generous support.
I often like to say that the Library of Congress is the best gift that the Congress ever gave the people of the United States.
It is our cultural patrimony, and there's no other institution on earth that has the creative output of the American people like the Library of Congress.
Without private sector support, the National Book Festival would not exist.
Our most generous supporter is Festival Co-Chairman David M. Rubenstein.
David often speaks of his belief that books and reading are the keys to success in life.
David has never forgotten the key role that libraries played in his life, and he demonstrates this through his support of the Library of Congress.
David, I want to thank you personally for all you do for this institution.
Not just the financial resources, but the time and energy that you give us.
Nobody else does it like you, and I am so grateful to you.
So, please join me in welcoming our festival co-chair and the chairman of the library's James Madison Council, David M. Rubenstein.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼
So how many of you are at the Book Festival for the first time?
unidentified
Wow.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼
How many of you are in this Library of Congress for the first time?
Oh my God.
Okay.
And how many of you would like to be Librarian of Congress someday?
Anybody?
So when the Congress was, the idea for the Library of Congress was created, was suggested by James Madison in 1783 at the Articles of Confederation Congress.
Congress got around to it under the Constitution in 1800, so it took 17 years for Congress to do it, and they appropriated $5,000.
That's it.
It bought 600 books, three maps.
And that was the Library of Congress, and it worked, it was in the library, it was in the Congress.
And then in 1814, the British came along and they burned the Capitol and they burned the Library of Congress.
Thomas Jefferson then sold his collection of books, which is the largest owned by a private citizen in the United States, to the Library of Congress, and it became the basis for the Library of Congress's collection, which, as Robert had mentioned, is the largest in the world.
And we're all beneficiaries of this great act that Congress has come forward with.
But I just want to mention a couple other things.
Robert Newland, you might wonder, how does somebody become the acting Librarian of Congress?
You ever wonder?
Well, the Library of Congress, the Librarian of Congress has traditionally been a lifetime appointment, but the law was changed after James Billington.
James Billington was the 13th Library in Congress.
It was a lifetime appointment.
And many people who were librarians of Congress stayed for many, many years.
I think Jim did it for about 28 years or so.
And when he retired, ultimately, he was succeeded by Carla Hayden.
Carla Hayden was an unusual choice to be the 14th Librarian of Congress because she was a woman.
There had never been a female Library in Congress.
She was black.
There had never been a black person who had been Library of Congress.
And she was a librarian.
And there hadn't been that many librarians either.
So she did a spectacular job.
And for nine years, I was on this stage with her.
And she supported the National Book Festival relentlessly.
And I'm sorry that she isn't here tonight.
I'm sorry she's not able to complete her 10-year term, but we have to move forward.
And I think one of the best decisions she made was this.
There was a man who joined the Library of Congress in 1975, 1975.
And he was trained in the arts and trained in library sciences.
And he joined the Library of Congress, and he was here for about 47 years before he retired.
And then when he retired, there was an opening, and we needed somebody to head up the Congressional Research Service, and Carla Hayden asked Robert to come back, and he did.
He came back, and he did a great job at the Congressional Research Service, which answers questions for members of Congress.
And then later, she asked him to serve as the deputy librarian of Congress, and he did.
And so when she was forced to leave, the library was fortunate to have Robert, and he's done a great job because it hasn't been that easy to be the acting librarian of Congress in this situation.
Without going through details, it's been very, very difficult.
And Robert has done a great job standing up for the library, standing up for all the employees, about 3,300 employees, and making certain that the Library of Congress continues to serve its mission.
So, Robert, thank you for what you've done.
So 25 years ago, when the library had its first national book festival, the idea, you might say to yourself, why was there no book festival before?
A good question.
There were book festivals all over the United States.
So on the night before the inauguration, George W. Bush is married to a librarian.
Jim Billington was at a reception the night before the inauguration, and Laura Bush said to Jim Billington, oh, you're the Library of Congress.
Do you have a National Book Festival here?
And he said, we will.
And so in September that year, the National Book Festival had its first session on the mall, as you heard.
And sadly, just a couple days later, we went through 9-11.
But the National Book Festival has thrived and prospered, and it's thrived and prospered because people love to read books.
And it's an incredible thing that all of us are blessed with, which is the ability to read.
Sadly, sadly, many people in this country cannot read.
And let me just describe, without going through great detail to bore all of you, roughly 21% of adult Americans are functionally illiterate, 21%, which means they can't read past a fourth grade level, fourth grade level.
About half of adult Americans can only read at a sixth grade level.
Now, that's not considered functionally illiterate, but think about this.
If you could only read a sixth grade level, how much success would you have in life?
So those of us here tonight, we're very fortunate.
The Library of Congress has literacy awards.
We give literacy awards out to people who promote the idea of literacy and trying to help people learn how to read more.
And it's an incredible opportunity that we have to do that.
But I don't want to say we're going to solve literacy problems.
We're not tonight, certainly.
But think about this.
This country, which is the wealthiest country in the world, we are 38th in the world in literacy, 38th.
And North Korea is ahead of us.
So I just want you to all think about how fortunate you are that you have discovered the importance of reading and you love reading and you no doubt have taught your children, if you have children, how to read.
It turns out that most people who learn how to read learn really initially from their parents reading to them.
And think about this.
If you're functionally illiterate, you cannot read to your children.
And so a lot of this is continuing generation after generation after generation.
It's a very sad situation.
So just thank your blessings that you can read and that you enjoy the pleasures of reading.
And you're going to have a great time at the National Book Festival.
And there are many people here who deserve to be recognized as being sponsors.
I won't call them all out, but I would like to mention the Madison Council.
The Madison Council people, can you raise your hands?
So for those of you who don't know, Jim Billington had a great idea.
The richest man in the United States at the time was John Kluge.
And he gave, I think it was $60 million to the Library of Congress, the biggest gift the Library had ever had.
The library got all of its money from the Congress, but there were some things that Congress didn't fund.
And so John Kluge gave $60 million, I think, was the initial gift.
And they created the Madison Council that John Kluge chaired.
I now chair it and succeeded some other people who've chaired it.
And what the Madison Council members do is they are very, very philanthropic towards the Library of Congress because not everything we want to do is funded by the Congress.
In fact, right now we're working at the Library of Congress to have parts of the Library of Congress more friendly to people who come here.
We have many visitors every year, but we haven't really had a welcoming center and we're going to build that.
And with the help of Congress and with the Madison Council and other people, we're getting that done.
And also a children's center, which where children, they come with their teachers.
They have a place to learn how to read and to learn more about the Library of Congress.
A lot of these things are getting done, and it's really a great thing.
And I want to thank everybody, the Library of Congress, and all the employees.
Robert has been here 47 years.
He's not the most senior person at the Library of Congress.
There are people here who have been here for 50 years because a Library Congress is almost a religious calling.
People love books and people love reading.
And all of you who are fortunate enough to love books and to love reading should thank your many blessings.
And tomorrow, those of you who go to the National Book Festival, we're going to have, for the first time, if you haven't been there before, the time of your life, you're going to see at least 100,000 people who love books.
You're going to see children trying to get their books signed.
You're going to see children being read to by great authors.
You're going to see some great authors reading from their books.
And you're going to see some great interviews tomorrow.
And so, thank you all for your coming here.
Thank you for supporting the Library of Congress.
And thanks, Robert, and all the Library of Congress employees for making this a really annual event that is, I think, one of the most enjoyable for citizens who come here.
And it's going to be a great event tomorrow.
A lot of it will be on C-SPAN.
And I want to thank C-SPAN as well for one other project that we're doing.
The Library of Congress is working with C-SPAN to have a program at the Library of Congress where once a week we will have interviews of great authors, the greatest authors in our country, will talk about the importance of writing and reading.
And we'll start in about a week or so with John Grisham.
And I want to thank Maria Rana here, who's the producer of it, for getting that done.
And so, thank you all, and now on with the show.
unidentified
Please welcome to the stage Scott Turow, an accomplished attorney and the author of 14 New York Times best-selling books of fiction.
His latest novel is Presumed Guilty.
In 1987, I boarded a rocket ship that took me to locales that I'd never even dreamed of going to.
That rocket ship, figurative, of course, was Presumed Innocent, a novel that I had started on the morning commuter train and finished in my basement during a brief respite from the practice of law.
A book which magically, amazingly, went on to become a number one bestseller around the world.
As I tell people now and then, if someone offers you the chance to become the author of a worldwide number one bestseller, you should definitely do it.
You should do it because I've had a lot of fun both in 1987 and in the years since.
Chief among my thrills has been sharing the company of other authors, people whose books I've read with amazement, like the other speakers you're going to be hearing from this evening, and who I feel honored to stand beside.
To me, since I was a kid, and it's always remained the case, authors are the real rock stars.
I first concocted the notion of being a novelist when I was 10 years old, and it still seems somewhat bizarre to me that my life has been governed by the passions of a 10-year-old.
I also cherished this event in that show of hands before.
I was lucky enough to be at the first National Book Festival.
And what stands out in my mind is a somewhat idiosyncratic memory, not only of the it was just extraordinary to see all these readers and authors together on the mall, but the dinner that we're going to go to was held that year on the second floor of the Jefferson Building.
And it was attended not only by President and Mrs. Bush, but also by every member of the cabinet save one.
And As Mr. Rubenstein mentioned, that was the weekend immediately before 9-11.
And what I realized is there was never going to be again that kind of assemblage of American governmental officials.
But be that as it may, the book festival has gone on, and I've been fortunate enough to be invited back periodically.
I cannot overstate the significance in my own mind of having a national book festival, a moment when our country as a whole recognizes writers and readers and the importance of books in American life.
I want to thank Librarian Newland for continuing the tradition, David Rubenstein, who's been a moving force for years now in maintaining this event.
As for me, it's been nearly 40 years since that rocket ship lifted off, and my inner 10-year-old still loves what I do.
The chance, as I periodically tell Adrian, to go upstairs each morning and play with my imaginary friends.
In January of this year, I published a novel, Presumed Guilty, in which the protagonist of Presumed Innocent returns.
A former prosecutor, judge, and criminal defendant, my character takes on the only role he has not previously played in a murder trial as the defense lawyer or his stepson to be.
As somebody who was once falsely charged himself, Rusty, the character, knows that this idealized system we call the law is often undermined by the follies and vanities of the human beings who operate it.
But he, like me, remains convinced that law and respect for the law is fundamental to a civilized society and that the law can be a noble institution when it adheres to its paramount obligation to protect not only the powerful, but the powerless as well.
Again, I am grateful for the honor to be here and to speak to you tonight.
Thank you.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning author whose work has been translated into more than 55 languages.
Her latest novel is Dream Count.
Good evening.
I don't have an inner 10-year-old, unfortunately.
Scott, it was lovely listening to you.
I read your first novel when I was slightly younger than I am now.
What an honor it is to be here at the Library of Congress in this secret place.
I want to first tell you of this abiding memory from my childhood.
I was sitting in the back seat of my mother's car as we drove down the sloping road that led from the quiet University of Nigeria campus where we lived to the gentle chaos of the market.
I was looking out of the window and suddenly I felt an intense pang of melancholy because what I saw through the window as we drove were stories.
So many stories waiting to be told, and I knew that I would not be able to tell them all.
Writing is my vocation.
I'm grateful to be part of this utterly necessary tradition of storytelling.
But I could not be a writer without also being a reader.
All art forms explore the beautiful strangeness of being a human being, but literature does it with the most intimacy because it takes us inside.
We become characters, we become alive in bodies not our own.
One of the most magical things for me about reading a good novel is that sometimes I stop and think, ah, I see.
Literature gives me new eyes.
Because I read stories, it is easy for me to understand what people resent, what wounds their pride, but also what they aspire to, and what lights up their hearts with joy.
It is through literature that I have come to understand how different we are as human beings, and yet also how wondrously alike.
How we might love in different ways, but we all love.
And how you do not ever treat recklessly that which you love, whether it be a person or a nation.
It is because I read novels that I have come to believe in being empathetic, in seeing the world through eyes that are not mine.
I do not always succeed at empathy, but it is reading that makes me want to keep trying.
Because reading above all else reminds us over and over again that there are multiple points of view.
A reminder that is needed now in today's world more than ever: that to be a human being is to be part of a project of plurality.
All literature has as its core the idea of what is good.
Even the darkest of novels are in dialogue with the good.
An old-fashioned word, good, used also in this rather old-fashioned context.
But perhaps it is time to embrace more old-fashioned words: honor, truth, compassion, justice.
With so much upheaval in the world today, to think of literature is to think of what we are called to do, and we are called to courage.
Courage means refusing to make the abnormal normal, even if only to whisper to ourselves while turning the page of a book.
Because when we stay silent as abnormal things happen day after day, month after month, then they start to feel normal.
To think of reading in today's world is to remember always the power of books.
The banning of books speaks to the power of books.
You do not ban a thing which does not have power.
Free people, indeed, read freely.
To be denied of the ability to read what you want to read is also to be denied some branches of your tree of dreams.
Because reading teaches us how to dream.
By dreaming, I don't mean a passive act, but an active act of the imagination, where we marshal our moral courage and actively imagine the world we want to live in.
How should it be?
What should it be?
What is the greatest good?
What do we value?
There are remarkable Americans who have lived this tradition of humane ideals and intellectual curiosity.
And one of them is Carla Hayden.
She's a woman of intelligence and of the most exquisite grace.
And I salute her.
And finally, I'd like to end by reading the last words of a poem called Song by Louise Gluck.
Ah, he says, you are dreaming again.
And I say, then, I'm glad I dream.
The fire is still alive.
Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage best-selling and award-winning author John Green.
John's latest book is Everything is Tuberculosis: the history and persistence of our deadliest infection.
I'd like you to imagine, if you could for a moment, what it would be like for you to go after that.
In 2019, I'm just going to go into my spiel.
In 2019, I had the opportunity to visit Sierra Leone with my wife to learn about the maternal health care system there.
Our family has been supporting the Sierra Leonean government's efforts to improve maternal and infant health over the last decade.
And we were there for that reason.
But on the last day that we were there, some of the doctors we were traveling with, including the great Sierra Leonean physician, Dr. Byler Berry, asked if we could visit a tuberculosis hospital in order to consult on some cases.
And I was like, is tuberculosis still a thing?
That was my initial response.
It turns out that not only is tuberculosis still a thing, it's the deadliest infectious disease in the world.
It kills over a million people every year.
It's responsible for one in seven deaths of humans in history.
And in the last 200 years alone, it's killed over a billion people, including my great uncle Stokes Goodrich, who died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina in 1930.
But I didn't know any of that.
All I knew is that we were on our way to the airport and now we were going to not go to the airport, which was a little frustrating for me.
When we got to this hospital, I was immediately literally grabbed by the shirt by a young child named Henry.
Henry is also my son's name, and this young boy looked to be about the same age as my son, who was nine at the time.
And Henry took me all around the hospital.
He took me to the wards where patients were lying, often with their hands on their elbows as a way to try to get more air into their lungs.
He took me to the kitchens where everybody rubbed his head and gave him high fives.
He took me all around the hospital, took me to the labs, and then eventually we made our way back to the doctors.
And I said, whose kid is that?
Is that one of y'all's kids?
And they said, no, he's a patient.
And it turned out that Henry wasn't nine years old.
He was 17.
And he'd been living in the hospital for over a year receiving treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis.
During the course of his treatment, Henry would take over 20,000 pills to be cured of tuberculosis, a disease that we have known how to cure since 1958.
This is a disease that no one should be dying of, a disease that no one should have to take 20,000 pills in order to get better.
And yet, for Henry and for millions of people like him, it isn't that disease.
What does that say about the social order?
What does that say about the world we share?
And I came home wondering, what does it say about my own ignorance?
That I had no idea that people like Henry, to Chimamanda's point, one of the great things about reading is the gift of empathy, the ability to inhabit another character, to live inside of another life, to be someone other than yourself for a moment, to escape what I call the skin-encased bacterial colony of oneself.
And that is a magical, magical thing that reading gives us through its incredible intimacy.
And yet I wasn't able to imagine Henry's life with any clarity because of my own ignorance, because I hadn't been listening to voices like his and others like him.
And so I came home obsessed with tuberculosis and wanting to understand how I could change my own understanding of the universe.
And that eventually became a book called Everything is Tuberculosis, which makes the argument that essentially everything is tuberculosis, from our history to our geography, from our histories of colonial extraction, from the world that we now inhabit.
Everything is embodied by this disease that we've known how to cure since the 1950s and still let over a million people die of every year.
And so that's why I guess I've been invited here today.
I'm very grateful to have been invited.
And it is really a magical thing to be here with so many authors I admire so much and to be here with all of you because I really do believe that reading is the great gift of a human life, that the ability to ingest and share stories is kind of what we're here to do.
It's one of the first things we ever did and one of the greatest gifts that we give ourselves and each other.
So thank you so much for having me.
Christina Enriquez has been long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Her latest novel, The Great Divide, is a Today Show read with Jenna Book Club Pick.
In 1904, the United States officially started building what would come to be known as the greatest engineering feat in the world.
Despite rampant disease and technological hurdles and enormous costs, they would persevere.
And in 1914, 10 years after the project began, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were united by a waterway that transformed the world.
That's the story of the Panama Canal.
Or at least, that's the story as it's usually told.
The problem with that story is that it leaves so many people out.
People came from all over the world to help build the canal, and yet we rarely hear about the tens of thousands of laborers from throughout the Caribbean who day after day stood knee-deep in mud, swinging pickaxes as they cut through the mountains.
We don't hear about the women who cooked food for the workforce and did laundry and nursed the infirm.
Nor do we hear about Panamanians, many of whom were displaced from their homes by an endeavor that split their country in two.
I wanted to tell a different story, one that wrote these people in.
My father is from Panama, and every summer my family and I went there to visit.
I have memories of helping my grandmother hang the laundry and watching the roosters in the backyard and sitting on the front patio drinking warm strawberry soda in the sun.
My parents would take my brother and sister and I on outings, and one of the places they frequently took us was to the Panama Canal.
This was before the canal was a tourist destination, when it was still a U.S. military base, and we would go through a checkpoint to get to the concrete platforms that ran alongside the locks.
And in the blistering heat, we would watch as ships very slowly inched their way through.
As a kid, I found these excursions boring, but as an adult, I became fascinated by the canal, and eventually I decided I wanted to write a novel about it.
I wanted to understand its significance, not in the broad ways, but in the specific, and what it was like to be an ordinary person living through a moment that would quite literally reshape the earth.
I spent the next five years researching, and at every step along the way, libraries were instrumental.
I went to Panama and worked with a librarian who helped me access rare artifacts like commissary booklets and ID tags and vintage maps.
Online, I plumbed the treasure trove that is the University of Florida digital collections with its postcards and newspapers and oral histories relating to both Panama and the canal.
Back at home, I was constantly pestering my local librarians for source material, everything from the lyrics to work songs to illustrations of fishing equipment to manuals about sugar cane.
They got me everything I needed and more.
There's a reason that in the acknowledgments I call them my heroes.
And here, in fact, right here where we are, the Library of Congress houses no fewer than 12,700 items about the Panama Canal.
That's 18.4 linear feet of shelf space, in case you are wondering.
But of all the small details I was able to uncover and weave into a novel, it was notable what I wasn't able to find, what either had never been recorded in the first place or else had been erased.
The voices of everyday Panamanians, maps of entire regions, obituaries, photographs, street names, all of it lost to us now.
Sometimes when people ask me what I want them to take away from my novel, it's this.
The way we tell history is important.
The way we document and hold the truth up to the light.
The way we decide what gets captured and what doesn't.
The best way I know to honor the past is by telling it all, by telling the fullest, most complete stories we can, not by writing people and events and experiences out, but by writing them in.
This is an extraordinary place to be standing tonight, although I would like to argue that every library, by virtue of its very existence, is extraordinary.
Libraries hold the world, but only if we take care to write that world and hold on to it.
Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Mac Barnett.
He is a New York Times best-selling author on stories for children, whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.
That's right.
Hi, everybody.
All right, it's the kids' book guy.
Here we go.
So every ambassador is asked to choose a specific focus for their term.
And my focus is on the picture book.
We also have to have a slogan.
Mine is: Behold the picture book.
Thanks so much.
I love picture books.
32 pages or so of text and art written for some of our youngest readers, usually read aloud to those readers because those readers can't read.
I believe the picture book is one of our great literary forms, one that deserves a place alongside the novel, poetry, and drama.
Some of the best books published in the last 100 years are picture books, children's picture books.
But there are some people who dismiss the picture book.
I don't want to alarm you, but some of those people may be in the room right now.
They think picture books are simply cute, or sweet, or simple, or silly, shallow, or even kind of stupid.
We underestimate picture books, I think, for two reasons.
One, we don't understand how they work, what distinguishes them as a way of telling stories, the sort of intricate interplay between text and image, the reliance on the human voice, the adult who's reading the story out loud, those mechanisms that make the picture book unique.
But the other reason we underestimate picture books is because we underestimate children.
We think that they are cute or sweet, simple, or silly, shallow, or even kind of stupid.
I want to help people better understand picture books, the counterpoint between words and pictures, their relationship to other arts like theater, because the picture book is performed, the book acts like a stage, to dance the human body is so important, the relationship between face and book and arm, the rhythm of the turning of the page, their relationship to the oldest tradition, Literary tradition,
telling stories out loud to people.
But I also want to help people better understand kids.
What a sophisticated audience they are for fiction.
This is something I learned when I was in college.
My summers off from college, I worked at a summer camp.
It was a sports-themed summer camp for four to six-year-olds.
And I was in charge of the four-year-olds.
Nobody wanted to be in charge of the four-year-olds.
But I loved it because four-year-olds can't really play sports, and neither can I. Which is like now, I see, is evident from the fact I called it a sports-themed summer camp, which is not really what sports people call.
And they're not called sports people either.
But the way it would go is, so like we'd head to soccer, and I'd be in charge of 14 kids.
They'd follow me like little ducklings, and we would go to the soccer field, and there'd be these cones set up beautifully, just very, very regularly.
And the soccer coaches would be like, All right, here we go, four-year-olds, you're gonna just like dribble these balls around and just like unleash all these balls onto the field.
And like five kids would just run off with their balls across the field to the parking lot.
Other kids would just like kick the ball as hard as they could.
Kids would knock over cones.
Pretty soon, everybody was crying.
And the soccer instructor would just be like, Just go under that shady tree where Mac is sitting, and he'll tell you a story.
And so that was my first audience, these sort of like hot, sweaty, crying, hysterical four-year-olds who just had their dreams of being professional soccer players crushed.
And it's a tough crew.
It's a tough crew, and you have to get good at telling stories.
And I did.
They taught me to tell stories.
I would tell stories to them out loud.
And I remember there was this one little girl, her name was Riley.
And she was, her mom would pack her these beautiful, very thoughtful lunches every day.
And then Riley would immediately, she would open her lunchbox and then she would take out her melon, the fresh fruit that her mom had provided, and just throw it in the ivy.
And then just like eat her fruit snack and little Twinkie and all the stuff that I'm sure her mom did not really want her to eat, but Riley made her pack in the lunch.
And I was like, Riley, Riley, you can't do this.
You can't just throw your melon away in the ivy.
And Riley was like, why not?
And I was like, well, because if you throw melon into the ivy, then pretty soon the seeds are going to sprout and our entire camp is going to be overtaken by melons and that would be bad.
Which I think that's the road where I like, I did not, like, I became a children's writer and not a nutritionist.
And Riley was like, that's not going to happen.
I was like, unbelievable.
She's four.
She can't contradict me like that.
So I'll show Riley.
So on the last day of camp, I woke up early, which is a sacrifice for me.
And went to the grocery store and I bought a giant cantaloupe and I hid it in the ivy.
All day I was waiting for lunch.
I was like, I cannot wait for lunch.
Here we go.
Here we go.
We got to lunchtime.
Riley takes out her melon.
She has the ivy.
I said, oh, before you do that, Riley, take a look at that melon.
Let's see what happened.
So she sort of trudges in there and she's like looking all around.
And then her eyes get huge.
And she pulls up this melon.
She can't believe it.
And all the kids run over and they're like, whoa, I can't believe it happened.
Look at that melon.
That's so cool.
Oh, Riley, you did it.
And then one kid was like, hey, why is there a sticker on it?
And I was like, this is also why I tell you to throw your fruit stickers in the trash.
Because when you throw them in the ivy, it ruins nature.
And they were like, oh, okay, that's a good point.
That's true.
That's true.
And the whole rest of the day, soccer and all the other things, Riley took this giant melon that was bigger than her own head.
She took it with her everywhere.
She loved this melon.
She was so proud.
This amazing thing had happened.
And I was watching her do it and show it off to people.
And there was this amazing way where I was like, Riley knew that she hadn't grown a cantaloupe in five days.
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