Why did you become a children’s librarian? I suspect it wasn’t simply to help children find information.
I often find myself asking a similar question: why do I write children’s books?
The answer has evolved over time. Every new book has become another experiment—not only in storytelling, but in understanding what truly captures a young reader’s imagination. Every thoughtful review and every unexpected reader reaction teaches me something new. The process has made me less interested in delivering messages and more interested in creating moments that stay with readers long after they’ve closed the book.
Oddly enough, I think the seed of that journey was planted years before I wrote my first story. While working as a conservation biologist in Bolivia’s Gran Chaco, I shared my solitary campsite with an unlikely companion: a coral snake. Every evening, as I left to conduct bird surveys, it emerged from its burrow to hunt. I knew where it lived; it knew I wasn’t a threat. For several days we quietly shared that small corner of wilderness.
I have rarely felt so connected to nature. What has stayed with me all these years isn’t the danger of that situation, but rather the privilege of reconnecting with a lost sense of wonder by sharing a tiny corner of wilderness with another living creature.
When I began writing ‘The Adventures of Captain Polo’, I decided to do my best to share this sense of wonder about the world we live in through the combination of illustration, dialogue and storytelling. The question then became: how do you recreate that feeling on the pages of a book? The answer, I gradually realized, lay not in explaining the world, but in inviting readers into a story.
Every place my stories visit is real. The landscapes, wildlife, human cultures, languages, history and environmental challenges are researched with the same care I devote to my conservation career. My years of travel and exposure to different landscapes, cultures, social and environmental realities did not teach me how to write stories. What they gave me was a deep respect for authenticity. The storytelling itself—and, perhaps even more importantly, listening to young readers—has taught me something different: children rarely fall in love with facts, but with experiences. It’s not about what they learn, it’s about how they do so.
Once the imagination is captured, the facts have somewhere meaningful to live. That has gradually become the guiding principle behind my work. Wonder is not the reward for learning about the world – it is the reason we begin learning in the first place.
That is why I try to resist telling readers what they should think. Instead, I hope to invite them into a world that feels so authentic, so alive and so fascinating that questions arise naturally. The story may be fiction; the world in which it is set is not. Children are wonderfully capable of asking profound questions when adults resist the temptation to answer them too quickly.
Readers don’t turn pages because they hope to receive another lesson, but because they care about what happens next. If the story comes first, curiosity follows almost effortlessly. Every Captain Polo story is built on two intertwined layers: a fast-paced fictional adventure full of humor and memorable characters, and an equally real world of carefully researched geography, science, cultures and environmental challenges.
This approach isn’t unique to storytelling. Children’s authors and children’s librarians are engaged in remarkably similar work. Neither of us is simply handing children information: we are creating opportunities for leisure and discovery. One of the things I’ve always loved about libraries is that they encourage us to slow down. To wander quietly among shelves, pull out a book simply because its cover catches our eye, feel its weight, leaf through a few pages and perhaps curl up in a quiet corner to discover where it leads. That experience has much in common with becoming absorbed in a story itself. Neither begins with a destination; both begin with curiosity.
Perhaps that is why libraries have always felt like natural homes for the kind of stories I try to write. Both invite children to explore freely, without the pressure of being tested, assessed or told what they ought to learn. Sometimes the most enduring learning happens precisely because it never feels like learning at all.
If a child finishes one of my books wanting to know more about pandas in China, glaciers in Tibet, thermal energy in Iceland, flooded communities in the South Pacific, roof gardens in Cairo, illegal logging in the Amazon or something – or somewhere – they had never heard of before, then the story has done its job. Not because it provided all the answers, but because with any luck it just may have reignited a lost sense of wonder and curiosity.
In an era when all of us – including and perhaps especially children – are constantly fed endless information through AI-enhanced smartphones, tablets and computers, opportunities simply to slow down and be curious matter more than ever.
Perhaps that is why so many of us—authors and librarians alike—do what we do.
Libraries and stories have more in common than we sometimes realize. Neither changes the world directly, but they may change the relationship people have with the world.
And perhaps that is where caring begins: not with being told what matters, but with discovering—one shelf and one story at a time—that the world is full of things worth wondering about.
Today’s guest contributor is Alan J. Hesse. Alan is an award-winning author-illustrator who merges professional expertise in nature conservation with storytelling and artistic skills. He is the author of eleven children’s books, including ‘The Adventures of Captain Polo’, a graphic novel series inspired by real places, cultures and environmental science.
Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.
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