the true story of the 3 little pigs by jon scieszka

“We hung out a little bit, and I thought, he’s a likeable fella and he’d probably be pretty easy to work with,” says Smith. Everyone thinks they can write a children’s book.’ ”īefore long the two couples got together. “Molly told me that her art director said, ‘My husband is a teacher but really wants to get into kids’ books and he has a manuscript,’ ” Smith recalls. “But I went ahead and sent him a bunch of stuff and he just cracked up.” As True Story fans well know, that guy was illustrator Lane Smith. “She said, ‘My assistant, Molly Leach, is dating this guy and he’s kind of funny and he’s doing some illustrations – and he loves children’s books.’ I thought, ‘oh great.’ ” Scieszka says.

“Some letters offered encouragement and others said, ‘Please don’t send to us again.’ I was getting depressed.” The main criticism of those early submissions, Scieszka says, was “too sophisticated.”īack at home, Scieszka’s wife had a bit of news that proved serendipitous.

But nobody nibbled when he began looking for a publisher. “There’s never a good time to do something like that, but my wife had a real job – as art director for two magazines – and we would be OK.” A friend let him use some empty office space in a law firm, and Scieszka commuted every day, knocking out the bulk of what would eventually become True Story and a later book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Scieszka took a year off from teaching “just to write stuff,” he says. I could tell them a Kafka story and they would say ‘Wow! That could really happen!’ The light bulb finally went off and I knew it was all about the storytelling.” Second graders will completely suspend disbelief. He taught at the school for 10 years and it was in a second-grade classroom there, he says, that “I found my true audience. are the perfect qualifications for a first grade assistant!” he jokes. “Because a pre-med undergrad degree and a writing M.F.A. Of course, nobody wanted it.” He then landed a job teaching elementary school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. at Columbia,” he recalls, “and I was sending out short, funny fiction for adults to magazines like Esquire and the New Yorker. “I was painting apartments and working on my M.F.A. “I love telling the story to kids, and adults, too, when they think there is some magical secret to getting published,” Scieszka says about looking back on how True Story came to be. When the picture book The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Viking), which offers the wolf’s version of the familiar nursery story, hit shelves in 1989, pretty much everything about it broke the mold – the way it sounded, the way it looked, and even the collaboration between its creators, author Jon Scieszka and illustrator Lane Smith.

The true story of the 3 little pigs by jon scieszka