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The book's narrator is Jack - of Jack and the Beanstalk fame - but here he writes the introduction ("you should definitely go read the stories now, because the rest of this introduction just kind of goes on and on"). One day we looked at the big board and it all worked." "It was one of those serendipitous things. And maybe this character could walk out of this story and go into this," says Smith. "We would just arrange stuff and rearrange stuff and say 'Well, how about if we started with this one.' And then we put this one at the end. Scieszka would come over and they would storyboard together.

They had a big bulletin board in Smith's studio. Once they had the idea, they had to make it all make sense. "He was bringing this wealth of experience from the art world, just bringing pure art.

"I was bringing all my favorite literary devices and books that I loved - metafiction - stuff like Tristram Shandy," says Scieszka. When Scieszka and Smith met, they connected over a shared love of high culture, art and literature, but also pop culture. He read them George and Martha, and Frog and Toad - anything other than the leveled readers. The second graders were completely taken with Franz Kafka. "Like, 'Hey, have you ever heard this story about a guy who woke up one morning and he was a bug?'" So he started testing out other material. Scieszka, why are we even reading this?' " It was love at first sight - for Scieszka and Smith.īy that point, Scieszka had earned his master's degree in fiction writing, done some apartment painting ("Because that's about what you can do with an MFA."), gotten a lot of rejections for book manuscripts, and had turned to teaching elementary school, where he was exposed to some truly terrible leveled reading material for children. The guy was Lane Smith, who'd gotten work at Sport from his then-girlfriend Molly Leach. "Not having much luck." His wife, Jeri Hansen, said "Oh you should meet this guy who just did some art for the magazine." "I was off trying to sell children's books," says Scieszka. They first met through their wives, who were working together at Sport magazine. Scieszka and Smith have worked together for decades and on more than a dozen books.

"The Really Ugly Duckling," "Little Red Running Shorts," and "Cinderumpelstiltskin." Some of the other "fairly stupid tales" in the award-winning collection: It's the title story of their 1992 children's book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. It's Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's take on The Gingerbread Man, with one very important plot twist - the stinky cheese man is so stinky that no one wants to run, run, run after him, much less eat him. They were lonely, so the little old lady decided to make a man out of stinky cheese." Here's a story you might know - it's a classic fairy tale - "Once upon a time, there was a little old woman and a little old man who lived together in a little old house.