Marissa Moss: Empowering Young Minds Through Storytelling and Illustration

Ever wondered how to blend art, history, and storytelling? 🎨📖 Don't miss our latest podcast episode featuring the incredible Marissa Moss! Discover her secrets behind beloved series like Amelia's Notebook and more. Listen today! In this extensive interview, Marissa Moss, a prolific author and illustrator, discusses her diverse body of work, including narrative prose, graphic novels, a hybrid between the two, historical fiction, and biographies, spanning from picture books to young adult literature. She shares her journey from starting as an illustrator to becoming an accomplished writer, her interest in history, and her mission to highlight lesser-known but heroic figures, particularly women, in her books. Moss delves into specific series like Amelia's Notebook and Max Disaster, explaining their origins and themes. She discusses the ways in which her life is reflected in a lot of her work. She also talks about her research process, the challenges of writing and illustrating, and her future projects. The conversation touches on the importance of persistence for budding authors and illustrators, the need for better math and science education for girls, and her passion for encouraging kids to be creative and think critically 

You can find information about Dr. Elisabeth Paige at www.mindfulhappykids.com.

Transcript

Conversation: Marissa Moss and Elisabeth Paige

Elisabeth: Great. Hi, Marissa Moss. Welcome. 

Marissa: Thank you. Welcome. I'm glad to be able to meet with you. 

Elisabeth: Yeah. Ever since I saw you, um, present at the, what was the Berkeley 

Book Festival? 

Marissa: Yes. I think you're supposed to say Bay Area Book Festival, but it was in Berkeley. Yes. Once upon a time it was in San Francisco, but now it's moved to Berkeley.

Absolutely. 

Elisabeth: Yes, I've been waiting to have you on the podcast. This is fantastic. Now you write a whole host of different kinds of books. You write, uh, +narrative, [00:01:00] prose, you know, just typical prose. You write graphic novels. You write hybrid. You write historical fiction. You write historical novels. You just write the whole gamut of stuff.

Marissa: Picture books. 

Yeah, 

picture books to YA. I, I span.

Elisabeth: Yeah, it's just, it's fantastic. It's just, um, being immersed in your work for the last month has been really fascinating. So, Why don't you take a few minutes to introduce yourself. 

Marissa: Well, um, you can probably see behind me, that's my drafting table because I started basically wanting to be an illustrator.

Long, long time ago, I was, I thought, I didn't think I could write. I thought writing was too hard. I thought I could illustrate, although illustrating is very hard. And this was back in the medieval times when there was no internet and I would take my portfolio to New York twice a year to meet with art directors and show them [00:02:00] my work.

And they would say, Oh, we like this, but we don't have the right story for you yet. And so I finally thought, Okay, I'm just going to write my own story. And that's how I actually got my first book. When a publisher that I'd never bothered to visit because they weren't in New York, they were in Boston, but I'd sent them samples again, the old fashioned way through the mail, and they approached me about illustrating a book.

And I said, yes. And while I was illustrating it, I sold them my first picture book. And that's how I got started writing and illustrating. So started my first book was something I illustrated written by somebody else. Then I was writing and illustrating. And from there I moved on into middle grade, um, exploring all different kinds of genres.

So some books are completely fiction. Some books are based on my life. Like the Amelia's notebook series. And the new Talia's Codebook from mathlete series. And then some are historical, completely non fiction, for which I do a ton of research. So it's, I, it's, I like that it uses different parts of my brain, and I get to do different kinds of travel in a way, historical and personal.

[00:03:00] And discover different things as I'm, as I'm writing. The, the point is that you're always growing, you're always learning, you're always I hope getting better. That's what I want. 

Elisabeth: And you have such an energetic brain.

Just reading your stuff gave me energy. So I can just imagine how your, your brain just must be so energetic. 

So can 

you talk a little bit about the different genres for the different age groups? Like when would a, for example, when would a hybrid book be good for chapter kids, chapter book kids? 

Marissa: Well, um, the hybrid books, like Spying on Spies, these are, these are basically middle grade or The Woman Who Split the Atom.

And it's hybrid because the first, A couple of pages of each chapter is prefaced with a graphic novel page, and then it goes on to prose with short chapters. Um, the, the, I have [00:04:00] done, I have to say some books I have done two versions of. I've done a picture book version, and then I've done an older middle grade or YA version.

Because it's a nonfiction person that I think is such a juicy subject. I wanted to get their story out in both ways so I can pick one event for the picture book version and then the whole bigger life for the middle grade or YA. So it depends on my audience, what story I'm trying to tell, what method I'll use.

And for example, right now I'm working on another, I thought it was going to be like this. Um, it's about a woman astronomer from the early 20th century. And I thought it would be graphic novel pages. Um, with short prose chapters, but I think it's going to have more art, even within the chapter, some line art, so that I can bring more art into it because, uh, I was just at Children's Institute, this big, Conference and middle grade kids are struggling right now because they, the pandemic [00:05:00] was not good for their reading skills and they're wanting shorter books and books with more art.

And for that, I say, hooray, I love drawing. I'm happy to put more art in a book and any excuse I can get to put more art in a book I will take so. Cause I think we, We comprehend the world differently, both in words and in pictures. And I don't think words are more valuable than pictures. Although as a culture, we tend to prioritize words.

I think kids are smart and they know images matter. And ancient cultures knew images matter and believe me, advertising and the internet know that images matter. So I happy to convey a lot of information visually. You can say a lot in a picture that takes tons of words to describe when one picture can do it in an instant.

So I like being able to use both tools. It's amazing. 

Elisabeth: It is just, I mean, the way that you were able to take each of these different kinds of books and portray them in specific ways, which it was just [00:06:00] incredible. And we'll go through what we're going to do for the interview. I think I think because. It's such a mishmash of stuff that you do.

I know, I know. There's a lot of it. We're going to go through each kind of book that you did, one by one, and talk about them. And then we'll sort of go back and talk about it overall. Okay. So let's start with the Amelia series. I'm going 

Marissa: to grab some Amelia books then. Great.

Elisabeth: Or you started with picture books. You want to start with picture books? 

Marissa: Well, it's okay. I mean, uh, we can do whatever, but okay. So here's the Amelia books started out because they're based on my notebook that I had when I was a kid. So that composition book feel. I wanted kids to have the feeling as if they were looking at a real kid's notebook.

And when I did the first Amelia's [00:07:00] Notebook, this was way back. The first one came out in 1995, way before Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Dork Diaries. And, and when I sent it to publishers, because I was a published author by then, they all said, What is this? What's this weirdo format? It's not a picture book. It's not a chapter book.

Librarians aren't going to know where to shelve it. Booksellers aren't going to know how to sell it. And they all turned it down because it was just too weirdo. It was a weirdo format. And it took a small press in Berkeley, which was just starting up. Ten Speed Press did adult books. They did cookbooks.

They did Molly Katzen's cookbooks and they did White Cat's Paint. They did kind of Good gift books. And they just started a children's imprint, tricycle books, and they didn't know any better. They bought this book, the first Amelia's notebook, and the series just took off. And I think there are now 25 books in the series because it turns out that the way I think, which is sometimes in words, and sometimes it's picture in pictures is the way a lot of kids think.

And it was, it had a lot of resonance for [00:08:00] kids and, uh, was taken over by American girl, American girl bought the backlist and started doing the new books and. I just had this vast readership of kids, boys included. I would go to do school visits and I would say, do you mind that it says American girl on the spine?

And they'd say, Oh, it says that. I didn't even notice that I then they loved it because boys especially tended want art. And have pictures in their books to interrupt the text. And they love the humor. Amelia's funny. And if you have a funny book, you've got your boy readers. As well as your girl readers.

So, um, it just hit a audience then. And the notebook format is now a thing. And I'm very proud that I introduced that to reading. Because I think that's how so many of us think. 

Elisabeth: Well, I also think it's great that you brought kids, you engaged kids through pictures, but you included words for them to read.

Right. They were getting they were getting both parts of their brain enacted. Exactly. [00:09:00] 

Marissa: And with Amelia, one of the things I wanted to show kids is I mean, Amelia is a perfectly ordinary kid, nothing extraordinary at all happens to her. It's just her point of view that makes it an interesting story. And that was a model I was hoping and from the letters and um, Emails I've gotten from young women who grew up with Amelia, that worked.

They realized that they had a story to tell. They were keeping their own notebooks. That their lives were worth talking about. That they had something to say. And that's what I wanted. I wanted kids to feel empowered. Because nobody, I mean, kids are powerless in so many ways. Adults are telling them what to do at home and at school.

But nobody's the boss of your notebook except for you. You have complete control over what happens on the page. Which is why I love telling stories, and I wanted kids to feel that same, that magic. 

Elisabeth: Exactly. Great. Well, they're super fun. 

Marissa: I had a lot of fun doing them, yes. And like, if you look closely, if you look [00:10:00] closely at the composition paper, This is not composition paper that you buy.

I had to draw the composition paper. So if you look closely at the splotches, I tell this to kids when I do school visits, you'll see tiny pictures hidden in there so I wouldn't get bored out of my skull. Because the first thing, this is long before there was a digital anything. There was no digital art to help me with this.

It was all hand drawn. And the first thing I would do was spend a couple of weeks drawing notebook paper, you know, the blue lines with the ruler and the pink line on the side, and then I would paint on it and then I would hand letter. So old fashioned bookmaking. And drawing. So you can actually find little pictures in the, uh, blotches?

Yep, if you look closely at those blotches, you will see like a dragon, or fat man, or a hamburger. Yeah, you look closely, you'll find them. Kids always can find them. Oh, I'm gonna go look. I wish I had known. The bat somewhere, there's a goat. Yep, you gotta look closely, you'll find them. That's great. [00:11:00] There's an apple core, 

Elisabeth: an ice cream cone.

That's great. 

How creative. 

No one could ever accuse you of not being creative. Okay, let's go on to the Max Disaster Series. Now the Max Disaster Series is one of your only main characters 

that are boys. 

Marissa: Yes, and in fact, um, I have three sons and the reason why I did the Max Disaster Books is because they said, why don't you ever have boy characters?

And the reason, to be honest, I didn't have boy characters when I started out is because when I started out back in the dark ages, children's books primarily had boy characters. And there were very few girl characters, and I felt, um, there's certainly very few girl characters of color, or there's nobody of color.

And I felt very unseen and invisible. So I wanted my characters, [00:12:00] um, my early books have, some of them are mouse characters, so I could just get rid of thinking about different racial whatever, but early books have Latina, Black characters. And this was again way before diversity was a thing just because I felt that was important.

But because I had three sons, I wrote Max and, um, very much used their interests. So Max is like Amelia, only he's doing experiments and inventions, some of which are inventions that you could never actually make, like robot parents. And some of them are experiments you actually could do, like what happens when you microwave a marshmallow.

So it's a blend, and it's also his life. So it's like Amelia, it's a kid putting down his thoughts in a notebook and trying to control things that are uncontrollable, but adding fun experiments and inventions, and um, a lot of humor as well. 

Elisabeth: Yes. It's super funny. I was like, where did she [00:13:00] get this from? 

Marissa: Well, alien erasers, because there are the alien erasers that are part of Max.

I have to give my son credit for that. My middle son came up with those and he wanted to get the royalties. And I said, you know, you're getting fed and housed. You're getting, you're making your money off these books other ways. So don't worry.

Elisabeth: I bring my, my dog into petitations, which is my pet centered meditations that I do online. And I always say, you know what, you want to earn your keep? You still want to be a fed farmer's dog, stop looking bored, stop looking bored. Look 

calm. At rest. 

Calm and excited, not bored. He can't get the, he's just like, uh.

There you go.

Okay, now we're going to move from the chapter books. Oh, you want to talk a little bit about the picture books. 

Marissa: Well, I mean, again, there are often things like this. Mighty Jackie, the [00:14:00] strikeout queen. These are, these are, the picture books are, um, almost all non fiction, and they're all about women that you should know about, but don't.

This is Jackie Mitchell was the only woman to ever pitch on an official men's baseball team. She's on the Chattanooga Lookouts. And she was probably hired as a stunt, a media stunt. But she ends up Um, in her first game, which is against the New York Yankees. It's a great photo I have to show you. She knows how to pitch.

And the first person she strikes out is Babe Ruth. He is not happy about it. Believe me. He says he'll never play for a woman again. They can never do this to him again. Um, and this is somebody she should be in the baseball hall of fame. She's just basically unknown. Um, and women, I mean, baseball does not take a lot of muscle.

Women could certainly be on a baseball team. And I thought this was. Too good a story not to write. So this is a lot of my picture books about women like her. I [00:15:00] have a book about Harry Quimby, the first woman to fly across the English channel way early in aviation. So I'm looking for stories like that.

People you should know, but probably don't because they're not white men. They're not, they're kind of written out of history. They're on the edges and you have to dig for them to find them. 

Elisabeth: Interesting. Okay, how about your middle grade books starting with Mira's Diary? 

Marissa: So Mira's Diary, um, what is based on basically my passion for history.

I mean, I think history is amazing because it's stories, but they're true. What could be better than that? And I was looking for a way to make history Come alive for kids. So Mira's a time traveler because so if I take a contemporary kid going back into the past, I can make it more accessible to contemporary kids.

That was my idea with those. And I started with bits of history, um, that I think are just great. simply not taught. The First Mira's Diary [00:16:00] takes place in Paris and deals with the Dreyfus affair, which is something nobody studies in school, um, but had a huge effect on human rights. And Albert Dreyfus was a, a Jewish man in the French military.

And he's accused of being a traitor and a spy when he was not, but when they find out that there's a traitor, they assume it's got to be the Jew, because who else would it be? And he is punished horribly for this. And the person who comes to his defense is a famous novelist, Emile Zola, who writes this great headline, J'accuse, where he's accusing French society, the whole judicial system, of, scapegoating a Jew and not looking at the real villain.

He's absolutely right. I mean, so law becomes actually, he has to flee France. I mean, it's just stories that are too juicy to not do. And because of the aftermath of the Dreyfus [00:17:00] affair, their humans, citizens were given rights that they didn't have before, because as a citizen, when he's stripped of everything, Dreyfus has zero rights.

And the idea that people have a right to fight their government, that the government can't. throw them away, was developed because of the, the, the Dreyfus situation. So I thought it was a fascinating piece of history I wanted to make kids aware of. Because like I said, it's not taught in history. I don't think it's taught in, it's not taught in elementary school, middle school, college, or anywhere.

I mean, you have to be a French, you have to be studying French history before you learn about it. Or maybe I hadn't 

Elisabeth: heard of it before that book. 

Marissa: Yes, exactly. You know, my point exactly. No one's heard of the Dreyfus affair, and you should have. I mean, if you were a French kid, you would know about it because it's part of their history.

But it should be, as citizens of the world, we should know about these things. 

Elisabeth: How about London? 

Marissa: And for London, that's a lot of the history of the women who are fighting for the vote and for equal rights. And again, that's not history. We are [00:18:00] taught a little bit about suffragettes in America, nothing about them in England.

And it's astonishing how late America was to grant women suffrage. Not quite as late as, you know, Paris. I think some, Sweden or Switzerland were super late, but still we were not very egalitarian to women for a very, very, very, very, very long time. How about Rome? And Rome, because, um, Well, I love Rome, and I, I find, I actually wrote a book about Caravaggio, who makes an appearance in Rome.

But, uh, Giordano Bruno is another person nobody knows about. Everybody knows about, um, Galileo, but they don't know about other, I mean, Bruno is the only other important heretic who's burned at the stake for suggesting that there are other worlds, other lives out there. And it's again, just too juicy a [00:19:00] story not to let people know about.

It was astonishing. Like I said, what is not taught in world history. And one 

Elisabeth: more in the series, 

Marissa: this San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, exactly. And I had a lot of fun because I live in the Bay Area and I've been wanting to write about Mark Twain, or use him in a book for a long time. I had so much fun doing research for that.

It was just a blast. And I live in Berkeley and University of California, Berkeley has Mark Twain's whole collection. It's astonishing. It's just, uh, I mean, you take this deep dive into research. And the problem is any historical writer or nonfiction writer will tell you is you can get lost in the research.

And you, at some point you have to say, I'm stopping research. I'm going to just write. I'm going to stop. I'm going to write because it's always, there's always more to learn. And you're just so eager to know as much as you can. But that was a lot of fun.

Elisabeth: Do you want to take us through your research process for these books?

Marissa: Well, each book is a bit different, but [00:20:00] I can tell you that for, for example, the woman who split the atom, this book is about Liz Meitner who discovered. That the atom could be split, which was thought to be impossible. And in fact, the Nobel prize gets given to shocking of all shocks, her male partner, Otto Hahn, who didn't even understand what was happening.

He did the experiment, but thought it was a mistake. He couldn't understand the results of the experiment. She interpreted the experiment and figured out what was happening. But now if you go to Oppenheimer or if you read about nuclear fission, if you go to Otto Hahn's. website pages. He still gets credit for it.

She still doesn't, which is grotesque. And for this book, I could read a lot of stuff about her in books, but I wanted to go to her archive, which is in Cambridge, England. And unfortunately I was writing this most, this book was written during mostly during COVID and the archive was not open to the public.

[00:21:00] When it finally opened up, I raced over there to read through her archive, which meant Translating German because she's German. All right. Her archive is all in German. I found letters between her and Einstein, which were amazing. I found the letters from the German government demanding to know what percentage of Jewish blood she had, because there was no right answer to that, by the way.

I mean, they were going to kick her out. And, uh, all this juicy stuff. It's astonishing what's there. And I focused because I didn't have very much time left before my book was due. I focused only on the crucial time period of her letters between her and Han and other scientists around the time of nuclear, her discovering to how the atom was split, nuclear fission.

But I couldn't stop. Even after the book was published, I went back and I have now translated 500 pages of her archive from German to English because it wasn't translated. I found so many juicy things and I found out why [00:22:00] she didn't get the credit. For doing what she did was because already right after it happened, Han was already spreading the story that she and her nephew, who was, who helped her with this discovery, who was also a physicist, were stealing this noble German discovery because they were dirty Jews who wanted to get, make money off of it.

And he started that story. And that story is what the, the Swedes bought when it was time to award the Nobel Prize. Which is just grotesque because everybody knew that she had done it. And when the nuclear bomb was dropped, by the way, she was interviewed all over the place, including by Eleanor Roosevelt, because she was called the mother of the bomb and MGM wanted to make a movie about this.

They knew she discovered it. And still the Swedes felt like they could safely ignore her because she was a double non entity. She was a woman and she was a Jew. You completely erase her and they do. And she continues to be erased. So I felt like she, I fell in love with her, which is why I kept on reading [00:23:00] her.

archive, even after the book came out. 

Elisabeth: Do I hear more books about her coming out? I hope so.

Great. I would love to read them. Yeah, that was a fascinating book. How about there's the, the woman who split the atom and then there's Um, spying on spies. 

Marissa: Spying on spies, and this is the most recent one. And, um, for her, for Elizabeth Smith Friedman, she's another person that you don't know about or hear about, and she's somebody who would, she again was born in the early 1900s and was fighting to have An interesting life as a woman, and she had to fight to get a college education.

She had to fight to get any kind of job. She ends up at this millionaire's estate outside of Chicago. He hires her because she's an English major to look for the codes that are supposedly written in [00:24:00] Shakespeare's folios. There was a fringe belief that Francis Bacon really wrote these plays, and that if you look through the plays, you'll find a code that tells you, Francis Bacon did this.

And what she realizes, Elizabeth Smith Friedman, is that there's no such code, but she gets interested in code breaking. And she and the man who becomes her husband, who's also at Riverbank, William Friedman, they start this kind of, code breaking department. And in World War I, this is way before, there's no CIA, there's no NSA, all of the code breaking done for the military is done by two civilians in this estate.

I thought that's astonishing. And this is stuff that's only recently been declassified. So I could go read her archives and I'd be like, Which, like I said, are only recently available, and I thought that's too juicy not to do. The work, so she worked doing this in World War I. Then, when her husband is hired by the military, she can't be hired because she's a woman, but [00:25:00] she's working for the, um, uh, the feds for Prohibition.

So she's basically reading codes for all the smugglers, because Prohibition is the law that says, is the new law, the new amendment that says, no, you can't. Um, sell alcohol in America. You can drink it, but you can't sell it. So there are all these, of course, anything that's illegal generates a market of smuggling.

And this was Al Capone's big business. And she ends up cracking the codes that gets his brother convicted. So she's, she's actually in danger because she's cracking down on dangerous criminals. And then in World War II, she's cracking codes again. Her husband is working on the Enigma machine for the Japanese, she's working on the Enigma machine for all of South America.

And it's incredible the work she does. A lot of that stuff is still classified, you can't read anything, you can't read, a lot. You can't read a lot about what she does during World War Two. You can read some, but not everything, because for some reason that's still [00:26:00] classified. But there are interviews with her.

You can, you can read, you can read and hear her talking. So again, it was just too juicy not to do. And I love codes and puzzles. And she's not a mathematician. She's a code breaker who solves codes or cracks them by looking at pattern recognition and just logic. And she's doing this. At the same time that Leslie Park has this big proto computer, The Bomb.

And we all know about Alan Turing because he's been written about, and there's movies about him. And he cracks the Enigma machine at the same time she does. He's got the bomb. She's got her brain and a very small staff and paper and pencil. So that says a lot about her. She does it at the same time. It's astonishing.

She sends him a telegram saying Enigma cracked. Details to follow. And he sends her telegraph back saying, no need. We've also done it at the same time. I thought like, wow, a lot about her abilities, doesn't it? And she's also Jewish. 

She's not [00:27:00] Jewish. Her husband was Jewish. She's not Jewish. 

She's not Jewish.

In fact, there have been several books that claim she's Jewish. She was Quaker. Her husband was Jewish. And the family changed his name to make him sound American. And he had the very uncomfortable task of being in the military at a time when there were files for Jews. Um, what are they doing? I mean, he was considered suspicious because he was Jewish.

Um, but she was not. And she didn't quite understand. She never understood quite. why he was so cautious about making waves, but he as a Jew was cautious because he didn't want to do anything that would make people think he was suspect. 

Oh, interesting. 

Yeah.

 But they, but I think they got along because they were both two outsiders.

She is a woman. He is a Jew. They got each other. They really understood each other. And they were an incredible couple. I mean, he never underestimated her. And in fact, when he had his own division in world war II, he hired a lot of women code breakers because she knew. Just how capable and smart [00:28:00] women were, whereas Hoover at the FBI wouldn't, just didn't allow any women to be hired.

There were a few women there when he came into the office and he kicked them all out. He thought women were just subpar. Although he had to enlist Elizabeth's aid many times and treated her terribly because of that. He just didn't give women any credit. 

Elisabeth: Hmm. That's so interesting. Talia's? Nope. Um, Talia's co hosting mathletes.

Marissa: So I was working on this at the same time that I was working on Elizabeth Smith Reedman. So I had to bring in codes because they're so much fun. And Amelia, like I think I said before, was basically based on me when I was a kid and the kind of writing and drawing and thinking I did. And Talia is based on the other aspect of me, which was, I was a middle school mathlete.

And, um, unlike Talia, I didn't have the [00:29:00] grit and cleverness to do what she did. So in real life, I was the only girl on the team. And after the first competition, Or went on a bus together, did the competition, came back, and nobody talked to me once. I was completely ostracized by the boys. I quit. I just couldn't take it.

And I'm not proud of that. I mean, the adult me is mad at the young me, the middle school me. Like, you should have stuck it out! You should have shown them what you could do! So I wrote Talia's Codebook as a corrective. Because Talia shows the boys what girls can do. And so she does what I wish I had done.

So that's, I write my books to do that. To kind of make things turn out the way I want them to in my fiction. And in my non fiction. To bring people to, to public scrutiny that you should know about. 

Elisabeth: Interesting. 

Marissa: Yeah, I wish I, I should have stuck it out. I just, I did, I also, At that time, girls had to take home ec and boys took shop.

I really wanted to do shop. I thought that was more interesting home ec. I thought it was very boring [00:30:00] and I petitioned the principal to let me take shop and he let me take shop. And the teachers and the boys were so horrible to me, I think I lasted a week and maybe two, and then I gave up. I mean, they were literally poking and prodding at me with their rulers and their hammers and their nails.

I'm like, I can't take this. And, 

Elisabeth: uh, 

Marissa: write a book about that, except for girls don't have to take home ec anymore. It doesn't exist. Thank goodness.

I don't need to correct that problem. They corrected it by not making it mandatory anymore. 

Elisabeth: Do you think there's still a problem with science and math with, uh, girls? 

Marissa: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think girls are still given that subtle or not so subtle message that boys are better at math and science, girls are better at languages.

I think boys are also taught they're better at math and science, they're not good at languages, which is also a problem. I mean, we've got this gender bifurcation, which is completely ridiculous. Everybody can be good at math. You just have to be taught it by people who like it. Because I think the real problem with how math is taught is most [00:31:00] elementary and middle school math teachers are afraid of math themselves.

They don't like math, and the kids get that. They sense it. You need people who really like math. And can show kids how it can be fun. Because kids like problem solving. They like codes. That's why I put a bunch of codes in here. They like puzzles. Math doesn't have to be a bunch of boring stuff you have to memorize.

It's figuring things out and what I have. So I have, I have Talia starting her own all girls math league team and one of the first things they do is they go around the room and talk about what they like about math. And there's a cleanest to math. There's a, there's a right or wrongness that's very easy.

Whereas, you know, A lot of life is gray and mushy, and you don't know what's right or wrong, but math, you know when you're right, you know when you're wrong. And that's satisfying, and I wanted to impart some of that. 

Elisabeth: Hmm, interesting. That's great. Okay, let's circle back and talk a little bit more about you.

What would you tell your [00:32:00] teenage self? What would 

Marissa: I tell my teenage self? Well, I would have told my middle school self, don't give up. But my teenage self, um,

I don't know. I think it's good to make mistakes. I think the mistakes I made as a teenager, those are good things to make. You're trying to figure things out. It's better not to know exactly what's going to happen. I think that's part of the discovery. I mean, I was a complete, utter nerd and that's okay.

There's a place for nerds in society. 

Elisabeth: I was a nerd too. I was a nerd. My brother was a nerd. Our friends dated each other.

Marissa: We used to have parties. You grow up and you find there's a place for nerds, you know? 

Elisabeth: [00:33:00] Anyway, um, what would you tell budding authors and illustrators? 

Marissa: Well, I would tell them that, um, talent matters, but more than talent, Persistence matters, and you really, really have to keep at it, and if this is what you want to do, you just have to keep on doing it. When I started out, it took me five years to get my first book.

So five years of going to New York, coming back, revising things, five years of sending things, revising them, making them better, until I got my first book. And if I'd given up year four, year four and a half, I'd still be waiting tables. I did not have a fallback plan. It was all I ever wanted to do. I sent my first book to publishers when I was nine.

It wasn't very good, obviously. They didn't publish it. It was terrible. But that was just what I wanted to do. And I think you just You have to really be persistent and be stubborn and not give up. If you really want to do [00:34:00] this, just do it. And the other thing is to just read, read, read, read, read. Because the more you read, the better you'll get at writing.

And read like a writer. So start noticing. You notice when your intention flags in a book. Like, why are you bored now? What's happening in this story? And why are you interested? What are they doing? And what a great first sentence. Like, I actually have a notebook where I keep great first sentences. because you really want to pull your reader in.

And how do they make the ending work? Because the most important parts of every book are the beginning and the end. Because you can have a great book. We've all read really great books that have really bad endings. And then you feel really mad because you feel like this was a good author. They could have done it.

And then they just walked away and leave you hanging. You're furious. You feel cheated. So you owe your reader a good ending and a good ending You feel it in the pit of your stomach. You really know it. And the other thing I would say is read your stuff out loud. Because when you read it in your head, it doesn't hit you the same way.

When you read it out loud, you hear where the rhythm is off. You hear when you're [00:35:00] repeating yourself too much. You hear where it bogs down and you cut that part. So read it out loud. Then you'll know when you're getting things right.

Elisabeth: Sometimes it's great to have someone 

else read it out loud also. Yes.

Marissa: Yeah, exactly. If you can have a writing group, better. I mean, I encourage writers. To get a writing book, find a writing group because you may, it may be perfectly obvious to you in your own head, but somebody else may say, what, this is confusing. I don't know what you're trying to say. You, everybody needs a writing group and I'm still have a writing group.

I'm very lucky. I have a very good writing group of very, very good readers and writers.

Elisabeth: That's great. What's on your front burner?

Marissa: What's on my front burner? Well, right now, actually, I'm working on, um, I usually am juggling a couple of things at once. And one is, uh, let's see this book. Okay. I wrote this, this book, I wrote, oh, a long, long time ago, Sky [00:36:00] High, the true story of Maggie G, and I got the idea for this book because, um, there was a Veteran's Day story about women who flew for the WASP, the Women's Air Service Pilots.

I didn't know there was such a thing, and one of the women they interviewed, Happened to be in Berkeley. Her name was Maggie G. And I thought, again, this is pre computer time, pre internet time. I looked her up in the yellow pages, white pages, called her, cold called her and thought, maybe she'll be kind and let me interview her.

Maybe she'll let me. meet her. And she was totally generous. Turns out she lived very close to me. And she had everything from her WASP times. I mean, she had, well, here's some great photos of her. So, um, she had all these photographs. She had her WASP training manuals. She had her, um, her ID cards and she was just a treasure trove.

And I thought, I didn't know that these [00:37:00] women, these women did all the same tough work as male pilots. except for they were not overseas. They weren't facing, um, uh, you know, the enemy fire, but they were transporting planes from base to base, often planes that needed repair. So planes, men wouldn't fly because they weren't safe to fly.

And one of their jobs was to fly planes with targets attached to the tails. And the male pilots would shoot at them with live ammunition because the women were considered expendable. So they were doing really dangerous, risky work. And they were considered civilians because women couldn't be in the military, God forbid.

And they didn't even get veterans benefits into the 1970s. And when I first sent this book out to publishers, nobody wanted it. They all said, who care about who cares about women? Who cares about Asian Americans? Because by the way, there are only two Chinese Americans in the wasp. The other one died in service.

38 of them died in service because this was not easy work. You're flying damaged planes and you're flying at a time [00:38:00] when you're test flying for the air force. Because all of these planes were being new and being developed. Um, but no publisher was interested, but like Maggie, I don't give up. So it took me 10 years of revising it until the time was right.

It finally came out in 2005, and that was actually the right time because that was also when the WASP received the Congressional Medal of Honor. So I could go with Maggie to Washington, D. C., see her accept the award. And we did a signing together at the Smithsonian, and now pilots came up. Who she had trained to thank her for training them so well before they shipped out.

And they said, I know one of them said, I know I wasn't very nice to you. And she said, yeah, well, that's the way it was back then. That's the way it was. So this book went out of print and I wrote it when I wrote it, I wrote it as a. A kind of fictionalized version, because at that time there was no narrative nonfiction.

There weren't picture book biographies. So now I'm redoing it as a picture book biography, completely nonfiction. [00:39:00] Because since then, Maggie has gone on to win two more Congressional Medal of Honor. One as a Chinese American veteran of World War II, and another as a Rosie the Riveter, which is what she did before she joined the WASP.

So it's just. She's too good a story not to tell and, um, she's since died, but I feel like her story should live on. I don't want it to die with her. And there's still nothing that's taught about the wasp in any curriculum, ever. I 

haven't, I hadn't heard about it. 

Yeah, exactly. My point exactly. 

Elisabeth: So that's on the front burner.

Anything else? 

Marissa: Um, and I'm also doing, I'm trying, I want to do another book in this genre or this genre, um, with the graphic novel pages and short chapters and prose, um, but at this time I think I will include more line drawings because Middle grade students need to be more engaged now, post COVID, and that one is about a woman [00:40:00] astronomer, again, turn of the century that you haven't heard of, who made an incredible discovery and nobody knows about, and I'm doing, I'm thinking about doing that in both middle grade and picture book version.

So I'm juggling back and forth between that and the Maggie G story. So it's partly, I'm always doing research. And writing and sketching and going back and forth between them. So if I get stuck, I mean, kids often ask me what happens when you get writer's block. Um, I don't often get stuck, but if I get stuck, I just go, I just work on another project and then I come back fresh to the old project.

Elisabeth: Yeah, I mean the other one. I mean, none of them are old, but I think when you get stuck, sometimes you just need to give your brain time to recharge and see it freshly.

Liz: What's 

Elisabeth: on your professional bucket list?

Marissa: Professional bucket list? Oh, well, I'd love to win the Caldecott or the Newberry. That'd be nice. I don't think that will happen, but [00:41:00] that would definitely be a wonderful Recognition of the work I've done.

Elisabeth: Can you do something about that?

 I have to say your work is way up there. I've read a lot. I've read a lot of, as you can see, I've read a lot of middle grade work and your work is way up there. 

Marissa: But I don't think I've ever even been under consideration. I don't, I don't think I'm, I don't know. I'm, I'm too.

They want younger people now they don't want older people. 

Really? So 

I think they want. Yeah, I would, and for a long time, those awards were predominantly men. I mean, men got 80 percent of the awards, even though children's books are 80 percent written by women. Surprise, surprise. But, you know, it's a, it's true in all professions that men get more recognition in gender role [00:42:00] than women.

Elisabeth: That's just the way it is.

 What's on your personal bucket list? I don't, I, you know, I feel like I've been lucky to do everything I've really wanted to do. I've traveled very widely throughout the world. I'm very lucky because I've got done a lot of international school visits, which are so much fun. I recently did one in Casablanca to a school I've been to before.

It's fascinating to see education throughout the world. And I've got to tell you, American schools are way worse than what you see once you travel around the world. I don't know what our problem is. I, we do not, I think we don't take, we don't pay teachers enough and we don't give them enough status. And it just doesn't matter.

So it's a, it's a major problem. You see, 

that's interesting. 

Marissa: Yeah. It really whenever I do one of these international school visits and I see like, wow, these are great schools and these kids are so smart and they're learning so much. And I will do projects with them and they are right there. They get it.

[00:43:00] And they're writing amazing stuff. And I, American schools don't ask me to do these things. They're not, I mean, I don't think there's many author visits in American schools as there are internationally. There just isn't the budget or the interest of the value that an author can bring. And I think there is a big value because kids see that it's a real person doing this and that they can do it.

And it makes them feel like they can write too. 

Elisabeth: Oh, I think the author visits are great for kids. It puts, it brings a face to a project. I mean, that's what part of why I do the podcast. 

Marissa: Right, it demystifies it, because I, long ago when I first started out, the reason why I thought I could be an illustrator and not a writer is I thought writers were, I pictured writers as kind of this Leo Tolstoy figure, old men who are writing alone and their wives are bringing them endless cups of tea, and that's not me, how am I going to get to be a writer?

But everybody can be a writer! 

Elisabeth: Interesting. Anything we missed? 

Marissa: No, I think you covered a ton. [00:44:00] Yeah. You got a lot in. You can see I'm passionate about, I'm passionate about history. I'm passionate about, you know, writing and illustrating in general. I want kids to feel empowered to be creative and to think.

Elisabeth: You are, your energy level is amazing. I can't imagine what it would be like to be with you for, you know, 

Marissa: Yes, I can tell you what, uh, I think, um, when the first time my son had a sleepover at my sister's house, he, and she was sitting on the sofa, he said, what are you doing? And she said, I'm reading. And she said, you're sitting down.

My mom never sits down. It's like, I'm always, I'm sitting down and writing or drawing or whatever. Yes, exactly. Constant motion. That's how you get things done. Yeah. 

Elisabeth: Yep. Yep. 

Anyway, thank you so much for being here. 

Marissa: Oh, totally my pleasure, truly my pleasure. I think it's great what you're doing and I'm impressed by what you've read, how much you've read.

That's a, that's just an amazing stack of books behind you. Good for [00:45:00] you. 

Elisabeth: I love books. 

I did get a Kindle. 

Marissa: It's not quite the same, I gotta say. I like, I like, you know, the feeling of page turns and there's a, with picture books especially, there's the drama of the page turn, you can't really get that on a Kindle.

Also, I like knowing how far I am in a book, you don't know with a Kindle. 

Elisabeth: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Marissa: Well, thank you so much for having me

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