Transcription of Margy Burns Knight and Anne Sibley O’Brien for the show Lessons in Learning #154
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show #154, “Lessons on Learning”, airing for the first time on Sunday, August 24, 2014. How do we learn? Each of us answers this question differently. Margy Burns Knight and Anne Sibley O’Brien offer important insights about compassion through their book, “Talking Walls”, which gives kids a glimpse into the lives of others. [Garrett Tankuitz 0:02:06] is using his experience with dyslexia to inform his own style as a high school teacher. Our guests might cause you to think differently about the way lessons are learned. Thank you for joining us. One of my different things to do is spend time with children’s books and all my children are older now.
They’re all older than 13 so I don’t have as much of a good excuse to spend time with children’s books. I’ll find myself sneaking over to my nieces’ and nephews’ houses and picking up books just so I can read them to my nieces and nephews. Today we have a children’s book that’s newly out in the world, “Talking Walls: Discover Your World” by Margy Burns Knight and also illustrated by Anne Sibley O’Brien. Margy Burns Knight is a children’s book author and career educator. She’s also an English teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer. Anne Sibley O’Brien has illustrated over 30 books and written 14. This month, she was honored by the Maine Library Association with the Lifetime Achievement Katahdin Award.
Margy and Anne both received the National Education Associations Author-Illustrated Human and Civil Rights Award and the Children’s Africana Book Award for their book, “Africa is Not a Country”. They also wrote and illustrated the book we’re talking about today, “Talking Walls,” a book that encourages children to ask questions and be curious about the world around them. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to us today about this book that you’ve put together. It’s quite wonderful.
Margy Burns Knight: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Lisa Belisle: Now on the cover is the Vietnam Memorial and I’m going to read what you’ve written about this. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial USA, everyday people leave flowers, boots, candles, and letters at a wall in Washington DC that is 165 giant steps long. Millions of visitors have lingered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall since it was completed in 1982. Some touch the names of loved ones and others cry as they honor the 58,165 Americans who were killed or witnessing while serving their country in the Vietnam War. Maya Lin was a 21 year old architecture student when she designed the wall.
She chose polished black granite because she felt you could gaze into it forever. If the names of all the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian men, women, and children who died in the war had also been chiseled into the wall, it would be more than 7,000 giant steps long. It’s interesting that you’re able to … The title of your book is “Discover Your World”, you’re able to pull in more of a world view when you’re talking about something that we often think about as uniquely American. I love that about this book.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: The key idea that we had from the very beginning was when Margy first thought of it was that sense of how the walls connected the world. I don’t think that that was particularly conscious choice to do that. I’ve never noticed what you just referred to but it was what informed the … Was the underlying concept, the foundation for the book that these things we have in common, walls, are what unite us as people, and then we can look at our differences having built that bridge of what we have in common. So I think it was kind of instinctive to do that throughout was to tell everyone the story at the time that we were also telling a very particular story.
Margy Burns Knight: Yeah, and it’s this wall actually is the inspiration for the book, and the reason the book is a book is because I heard a man named Doug Rawlings read a poem about this wall called “The Wall” and believe it or not, the whole book just popped into my head and I said, “We should have a book for children about walls around the world and stories they tell.” And the rest is sort of history and a very long story.
Lisa Belisle: But it was because of what had been happening in the world with the different walls?
Margy Burns Knight: Yes, because the Berlin wall had come down now so Mandela had been released from prison. The Western Wall is always in the news and for some reason I really actually it just popped into my head as I was hearing Doug Rawlings read this poem about The Wall. And Doug started Veterans for Peace in Maine. He’s a writer. He’s a poet, and he worked with me on how we’re going to write about this wall. I didn’t meet him until after the book actually came out but I talked to him on the phone and one thing he said is, “You can write about the wall but please include everyone who died in the war. American sometimes forget that the war was also devastating to millions of other people, and not only kids, people who read this book are sort of amazed by the comparison in the number of giant steps. So it’s 165 for the loss in America which is huge but 7,000 for all loses.
He actually said, “You have to come up with a visual image, Margy, like a school bus or something that kids understand,” so I came up with giant steps. So last week, so we’ve been in the schools a lot with this book recently, this new version of our book, and I was with fifth graders. And one reason I just love this work is kids are so curious and we just love to encourage curiosity. We love to encourage questioning and it doesn’t matter what kind of questioning. I just love when kids ask me new questions, so fifth grader, we’ve read it. We’ve talked about Maya Lin. We’ve talked about the granite. We talked about the rain. We talked about the items. “Anyway, this is [Hannings 0:08:00], so I have a question about your wall,” and I thought, “Okay, that would be great. I love questions,” and he said, “I need to know, do they wash it?”
I thought, “Wow, no one’s ever asked me that. I don’t know if they wash the wall. Why are you asking?” “Because I don’t know, I think maybe it gets dirty and people should take care of it.” So I said, “Do you think we can find out?” And of course we can find out because we can find out everything now. I went and I found on the Washington Post this great article, “Washing the Wall to Remember Vietnam Vets” and not only do they wash it, you and I can wash it. Volunteers gather every Saturday and Sunday morning in a nice weather and wash the wall, and I will be joining that group in May 30th and I will wash the wall. So I thought, “Wow, what an incredible question.” We, Anne and I, have actually shared this story like seven times.
You’re the eighth or ninth and not one person knew that we wash this wall because we ask them to raise their hands. We’ve done workshops with teachers. We’ve talked to kids. I’ve worked with college students and nobody knew that you can go wash the wall and I actually have called the national park service and they answered the phone right on the first ring, it’s like there wasn’t dial one, and she said to call back and talk to the volunteer and you sign up. And the Washington Post article, it’s almost hard to read because it’s very emotional, so that’s one reason we love this work because we get new questions and we find new answers.
Lisa Belisle: There’s something about that that’s very biblical like the washing of the feet.
Margy Burns Knight: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: It’s sacred.
Margy Burns Knight: Yes, it is. That’s all volunteers and so I’ve told teachers and kids who can’t get to the wall, “You can actually go on Google image and you can see people washing the wall. They give you soap and big brushes and they provide the water and it’s early, early in the morning before the park opens and everybody just washes the wall and everybody leaves.” So I thought, “I wonder what else they don’t know.” That’s why I love this work. What else don’t we know? Now, I will find out when I go and I will actually take this new book and put it under the name of the man who died in the war that Doug Rawlings dedicated the inspiration poem to. And I did that previously with the other books and Vietnam definitely is part of my life because I was alive but I had very little experience with it and I thought, “I’ll just leave the book,” and it’s so emotional. I didn’t just leave the books and now I understand why people leave things at that wall.
Lisa Belisle: You described a very different sort of wall when you described Nelson Mandela’s prison walls in South Africa. As a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela fought in South Africa’s system of Apartheid which divided people by race. Threatened by his ideas of justice and revolution, the white-ruled government sentenced him to life imprison in 1964. The entire world celebrated when he was finally released in 1990. Mandela and millions of black South Africans cast the first votes of their lives in 1994 and Mandela was elected president, a beloved symbol of reconciliation and unity, he has often said education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
You went from talking about a wall as a memorial to talking about a wall that contain someone who is so pivotal to changing a society, but there was something very important about that wall. My daughter and I was telling you before we came on air, my 13 year old and I were watching a “Long Walk to Freedom” and she was noticing how he had changed over the course of the time that he was in prison. So these walls actually did have an impact on him psychologically and how he did change the system of Apartheid.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Well, it’s how he chose to use that time of incarceration and he said that he knew as soon as he was locked up and taken or hand cuffed and thrown into the belly of the boat to be carried to Robben Island which is seven miles off of the coast that they would try to break his spirit and the most important thing was that he would not allow that to happen to him. And he chose to use the time of the 17 years he was on Robben Island as a time to be strengthened. There is this wonderful Carlos Castaneda quote, “You can make yourself strong or make yourself miserable, the effort is the same.” And so he chose the strength, but I visited Robben Island in 1998 and you take a tour of the prison and the guides are people who were formally prisoners there.
Unlike any experience I’ve ever had, it’s so deeply moving the entire time that you’re viewing it, you have tears standing in your eyes. It’s just deeply, deeply piercing to be there and then to see what these men and women chose to do with their time, and one of the things that becomes very clear is that Mandela is not an isolated individual. He was an individual of extraordinary gifts but the choice to create community, to teach each other, to create a university, to iron out differences in dialogue and conflict, debate that went on for weeks and months and figuring out how the people from different tribal backgrounds could work like the foundation for the new government was laid during that time they spent together in prison and it was really how to do with a vision and a choice and that was the point at which Mandela who had a background in nonviolence and see but then chose to …
He came to believe that Apartheid could not be dismantled with only nonviolence and that’s when he became part of the guerilla arm that attacked like ammunitions, not people but places where weapons were kept. But in prison he determined that nonviolence was going to be the most effective method and so he embraced it completely and everyone else, they taught it to each other and learned how to use it powerfully.
Lisa Belisle: This is something that Margy you were talking about Vietnam being part of your time. I was born around the time that Vietnam was still going on but I don’t have really any memory of it, but I remember what was going on with Apartheid. I remember Nelson Mandela but I didn’t really know what the significance of it was. I didn’t really put it together with the civil rights things that had gone on in our country not very long before. So I think it’s interesting now to be teaching another generation of children for whom that seems like ancient history but it wasn’t that long ago.
Margy Burns Knight: No, right. It wasn’t that long ago at all, and I think of all the illustrations in our book are the work we’ve done over 20 years, the Nelson Mandela illustration has peaked so much curiosity with kids. They really want to know and they want to know the facts and I think that they see children protesting. They want to know why are those kids doing that because they’re children and most children that we’ve shared this book with don’t do that but this is you can connect it so much with what’s going on in the rest of the world today with the Arab Spring and all of the other protests that people are trying to make the world a better place.
Kids when you just give him a little bit of Mandela’s story, and I sort of make it a little magical because it is, okay, so this is basically his story. They’d put him in jail and I make it very simple why they put him in jail. He wanted everyone in his country to vote and people are a little suspicious of that. And then he spent a lot of time in jail then he was released and four years later he was elected president, why do you think of that? And they go, “Whoa,” I said, “Yes, pretty much of a whoa.”
Lisa Belisle: It’s wonderful to kind of disturb those stereotypes in our mind of the kind of people who are in prison and the kind of people who become president.
Margy Burns Knight: Right, right.
Lisa Belisle: We put that together and there’s a lot of whoa and they always say I need to know more and I said yeah. Well this book is just to launch your discovery and we hope that you go and learn lots more about Nelson Mandela.
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Lisa Belisle: You’ve also I think caused children to understand a little bit about what’s actually happening right now. There’s been a lot of press about people who are Muslim and we don’t really exactly … I think not all of us really understand the issues that have gone on with people who are Muslim quite as well as we now understand in retrospect what went on with civil rights. So you have written about the Mecca walls in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and you talked about how Muslims paint the walls of their homes to tell me where is that they have made a pilgrimage to the City of Mecca, the holiest place in the Islamic world. I think this is a different way of looking at walls. It’s a communication that occurs between people, so tell me why this was important to you.
Margy Burns Knight: Well, I can illustrate it with this great story, so my husband and I were both teachers and we’re on a Fulbright Teachers Exchange in Manitoba and I went to Winnipeg to share this book. I went to a six grade class in Winnipeg, and I showed the picture of the little girl who is hoping one day to go to Mecca for a Hajj. And all of a sudden that little girl stoop up, well I don’t know if she stoop up, she started talking and she said, “Well, I can just tell you, that’s my story.” And she told the whole story, “Someday I hope to go,” and she said, “To help you know Mecca, I’ll tell you all about Mecca.” So she basically repeated what I had written. She sat down or stopped talking and the whole class clapped and the teacher clapped, and I thought, “You have all these very nice Canadians, they just clap for everyone.”
Afterwards the teacher said, “We don’t clap every time someone talks in Canada.” And I said, “Well, why’d you clap for her?” “Well, she’s a new arrival from Afghanistan and this is the first time she’s ever talked because it was her story.” And I think it’s not easy to write other people’s stories. We have to be very careful how you do it. We do not follow the faith of Islam. We will never go to Mecca but I think especially in today’s world where we want people to be culturally competent, the way you get to be culturally competent is you understand how the whole world works and this is like a premiere for that, right?
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Yeah, of foundation.
Margy Burns Knight: Of foundation.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: You mentioned that we’re often not really fully aware of understanding what’s behind actions or the meaning of stories that we hear and we get so much misinformation about people who are different from us. For this particular story, I read three adult books on Islam in order to correct my own ignorance I was very aware as Margy said when you’re telling other people’s stories you have to be so, so careful and pay attention and continue to ask questions because of all of sometimes hysteria but all of the stereotypes, the fear that surrounds the faith of Islam, and the fact that I knew I had so little information about it myself. I knew that of all the walls that I was illustrating this is the one where I had the biggest chance of making a really big mistake.
I read three full length adult books in order to fill in all the blanks and correct my own misinformation and then we showed it to a number of people. We did that with all of the cultural information, made sure that we check with the people whose culture we were representing to before it went to press and in some cases caught mistakes that really saved us. But I think that starting with that there’s a wonderful phrase called cultural humility where it just go in with an awareness of how little you know and that makes you receptive and vulnerable, and responsive, and curious, but not with no assumption that you know best or that your way is best, and it’s a lovely way. It’s a skill that children can learn and that’s one of the things that Talking Walls can do is to just give us an access, give children a door, a bridge to walk over where they can connect or I’m like this child in this way. But then it also becomes a window to look at difference in a way that’s a lot of metaphors, doors, bridges, and windows, where children …
Lisa Belisle: You get an A plus to the metaphors.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Metaphor so that children can be invited in to view difference from standing on the foundation of what we have in common.
Lisa Belisle: In this book, you mentioned in that part of the reason for your passion was because you’re raised bilingual and bicultural in South Korea as the daughter of medical missionaries. You started your life with this needing to be part of something that you need to understand something in a way that I think not every American child needs to understand. I also know about you Margy that you are the middle in 11 children so that’s not necessarily an American thing or not an American thing but you certainly have had to understand different personalities and different communication types, and this book really does reflect that. It reflects this sort of assimilation and a very gentle way of approaching similarities and differences. So did you have any sense when either one of you were starting out your lives that you might go into this sort of work?
Anne Sibley O’Brien: We have very different stories. This is Anne. I had a dream from the time I was seven years old. It never changed. I told everybody who asked that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up, and essentially the image in my mind was I wanted to draw pictures for my job. And I really enjoyed talking to classes especially second and third graders and saying, “When I was your age, I had a dream and guess what? Now my job is drawing pictures.”
Margy Burns Knight: She wrote stories about she was really jealous. She wasn’t from a large family.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Really I had four kids and I wanted like eight or 12 and that’s where all of my stories were about.
Margy Burns Knight: She would just name her 10 brothers and sisters.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: In their ages.
Margy Burns Knight: In their ages.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Nothing ever happened for years in these little stories.
Margy Burns Knight: But she still has, right?
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Yeah.
Margy Burns Knight: She brings us sometimes.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Yeah, sometimes.
Margy Burns Knight: She brings up pictures that her mother saved when she was three and six and I could draw just as well now.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: She only had four children so she could save pictures.
Margy Burns Knight: Right, she could save pictures.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: I was very clear about wanting to draw. I didn’t in my seven, eight, nine year old mind think I want to grow up and create books that show the beauty and glory of human diversity, but I was living that experience because first of all I was a spectacle for being the one who is different but the lens was positive. So I was put up on pedestal and celebrated, often responded to almost with awe at my difference. So my association with difference is with this is pretty great. It’s working well for me, and I tell kids it was like across between being a princess and a friendly space alien. There was that wonder and amazement just to see me but it also made me very conscious of my own racial and cultural identity. And then at the same time I was being welcomed and embraced by people who were not my people, the people who did not look like me were communicating in all kinds of ways that we were family.
That was really powerful and all of that was happening unconsciously but was absolutely the foundation for what I do today. My parents were unusual at that time for missionaries, just a few people were thinking that way. They didn’t want to stay on the mission compound that they had at that time in the 1960s, these huge brick mansions on the mansions but in contrast to grand housing at that time, they really seemed palatial, three story brick Victorian houses on hills surrounded by walls and barbed wire, and that wasn’t their idea of how to work and live side by side with their Korean friends and colleagues. We got into a Korean home by the time I was nine and that changed everything. It was very much my parent’s example that we are family. We are here to learn. We’re the ones who need to watch and be careful and notice how things were done. I really followed their lead.
I mean, I learned cultural competence as a seven, eight, nine year old by my parent’s example, and wonderful, wonderful education that was. It’s a life skill that everybody benefits from. And then the more that you’re exposed to that, the more your ease and comfort of navigating across different growth, and then you’re a global citizen in your experience.
Margy Burns Knight: My story couldn’t be any different than Anne. So we show these funny little pictures of when we do our workshop and here’s Anne in Korea and here’s me in the row with all my siblings and we look exactly alike and we wore the same dress, and we have the same haircut, right. And the kids, we have to be careful not to spend too much time on those pictures because the kids are overwhelmed that we were actually children once and we think, “The teachers did not hire us to talk about our life as six year olds.” In my big family, education was absolutely regardless of what else was going on, education was absolutely crucial, especially my dad, he just really knew that we all had to be well educated.
My parents both had college degrees which I think was not that common, so when we finished the book this time, I chose that Mandela quote about education because it’s really my life work and I think education will change the world. It does change the world, it has changed the world, and just coming to Maine and going to college here because the people I met at Bowdoin so this is a little Bowdoin story but you should know about Michael Fiori, I don’t know if you know Michael. Do you know Dora Mills? Well, she’s married to Michael Fiori. So Michael Fiori fell in love with these illustrations and bought them all. He owns all the Talking Walls illustrations. Can you tell a little bit how I fell in love with your illustrations and bought them? Because it’s very rare, what he did was very rare.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. He created a travelling exhibit so that schools can borrow them and see the original illustrations and he’s also preserved them, and saved the finances of an illustrator at that time too.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: He felt that they should be publicly shown, that people walking around and just looking at the pictures would learn about the world in a way that was really valuable. At that time he was the owner of the Downeast drugstore chain and I think he had that …
Margy Burns Knight: Well we did a mural on his wall, so we’ve done 10 community murals in Winthrop instead of me signing books. I wanted to do something else and he gave us the first walk because I knew him and I said, “Michael, can we use your wall?” “Do you know how to do them on your own, Margy?” “No, I really don’t, but at one point I didn’t know how to write a book or ride a bicycle so trust me.” And that’s why when he talked to you. And literally he purchased … Most of your illustrations are at home in a …
Anne Sibley O’Brien: They’re all stacked up in my shelves, yeah, and nobody sees them except in the book but he just had these visions, really, really unusual visions so now the original illustrations have all been preserved in that way.
Margy Burns Knight: We actually wrote thank you to Michael Fiori for purchasing the original illustrations for Talking Walls and Talking Walls’ histories continue and for preserving them as a collection to be shared. So that’s thing we really want to do with the new edition of this book is to get these illustrations so I took them to Park Avenue School in Auburn and we’re there for about a week and a half, and I went to work with the kids and Park Avenue has a lot of new Somali arrivals and we were working on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall.
By then the fifth grader had already asked me for Winthrop so I was talking to them about Washington wall and then a fifth grade boy from that school who is I think who was born in a refugee camp in Kenya, he raised his hand and he goes, “Well, I have a question. After they wash the wall, do they add the new names for that week?” Because how does he know the war is over, that war? He thought the wall was for every week after people died in wars, after we washed it, we added new names. And I thought, “What an amazing question. What an amazing thinker. Thank you for asking. Let me explain. Let me explain.”
Anne Sibley O’Brien: How long would that wall be?
Margy Burns Knight: How long would that wall be. So these are 10 year old boys asking these unbelievable questions and the teachers were like, “Whoa”. I said, “I know but that’s why we’re in the business. We’re in the whoa business.” And of course you should think that.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Yeah, you should think that.
Margy Burns Knight: He has no experience with Vietnam, so he has no experience with time really. He’s 10, but he has experience with war.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: He’s right, everybody should of all the Syrians who were dying …
Margy Burns Knight: Right, right. I thought that it means just since this book has been rereleased in February, it has renewed my passion. When Anne won the Katahdin last week, I gave her a present and I gave it to me too, a bumper sticker that says, “Books change lives.” We are now proud owners of that new bumper sticker that I bought at the bookstore in Brunswick and I’m going to buy more today.
Lisa Belisle: Well I hope that people who are listening will pick up a copy of your book, Talking Walls: Discover Your World by Margy Burns Knight illustrated by Anne Sibley O’Brien, and share it with their children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, maybe just read it for themselves because I learned a lot reading this book.
Margy Burns Knight: We learned a lot making it.
Lisa Belisle: You both have websites, what would those be? Tell me.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Our names .com. AnneSibleyOBrien.com.
Margy Burns Knight: MargyBurnsKnight.com.
Lisa Belisle: Well, you’re a very effective duo.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: We’ve been working together a long time.
Margy Burns Knight: Kids think she’s my sister.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I really …
Margy Burns Knight: I said, “Well, then I’d have seven sisters. That would be too many. Maybe I could trade a few?”
Anne Sibley O’Brien: I hope your sister is [inaudible 0:35:18].
Margy Burns Knight: The ones that are listening, I don’t want to trade you.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your both coming in and talking to us today and Margy for helping continue the relationship that you and I began when we met since we’re both in graduates and you’re helping me with our daily trend back when we published it for in [Henley’s 0:35:36] memory in honor of safe passage. I hope that people as I said take the time to learn more about the work that you’re doing and I really appreciate that this is the way that you’ve chosen to spend your lives. It’s very important. Books do change lives and I think that that’s what’s happening in your case.
Margy Burns Knight: Thank you so much.
Anne Sibley O’Brien: Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.