New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More
By Motoko Rich
Published: January 4, 2010

BARRE, Vt. — Katherine Paterson, the children’s novelist who will be appointed the national ambassador for young people’s literature on Tuesday, often assures aspiring writers that she showed little apparent talent as a child.

Author photo by Paul O. Boisvert for The New York Times
The author Katherine Paterson is to be appointed the national ambassador for young people's literature on Tuesday.

On visits to schools and libraries, Ms. Paterson, a two-time winner of both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, frequently recites her first published work, a poem that appeared in her school newspaper in Shanghai:
Pat pat pat
There is the rat
Where is the cat?
Pat pat pat

She gleefully recalled the lines over lunch at a favorite Italian restaurant not far from her home here last week, adding that her teacher appended a footnote to the poem: “The second graders’ work is not up to our usual standards this week.”

Ms. Paterson, who is perhaps best known for the novel “Bridge to Terabithia,” said it was reading that informed her future writing self. As the daughter of missionary parents in China, she read her way through her parents’ library of children’s classics by A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame and Frances Hodgson Burnett. “That is where the friends were,” she said, evoking her lonely childhood.

Now, as ambassador — a joint appointment by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book and Every Child a Reader, a nonprofit group affiliated with the Children’s Book Council, a trade association for children’s book publishers — Ms. Paterson hopes to share the unfettered pleasure that reading can deliver.

“I think of all the joy reading has given me,” she said. “It is not just because it is good for you, but because it is good.”

She does retain a bit of her parents’ missionary zeal. “I want people to be reading about children of other places and other races and religions,” she said. “I think novels are a wonderful way to do that because you get in somebody else’s psyche and you see things quite differently than the way you see things simply through your own eyes.”

Ms. Paterson will speak at Children’s Book Week in New York in May and at the National Book Festival in Washington in September, and will travel the country to speak to children, parents, teachers and librarians.

The main advice she’ll be giving adults: Read aloud to your children. “You can read out loud, and if you’re exhausted or crying so hard because you know that Charlotte is going to die in the next chapter,” she said, “you can turn it over to the kid to read the next part.” (That’s “Charlotte’s Web,” she’s talking about, of course.)