Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Reading Inspires is Reading Is Fundamental’s new podcast celebrating the power of books and the joy of reading. Each episode invites educators, librarians, families, authors, illustrators, and all who champion children’s literacy to explore one big question: What does reading inspire for you? Through engaging conversations and storytelling, Reading Inspires bridges the gap between research and real-world practice—showing what literacy looks and feels like in classrooms, libraries, and homes. Grounded in evidence yet open-ended in approach, this is a space for curiosity and connection. Whether you’re an educator seeking fresh ideas, a parent hoping to spark a love of reading, or simply a lifelong bookworm, you’ll find inspiration, practical insights, and stories that remind us all why reading matters—and how it changes lives.
Welcome to Reading Inspires by Reading Is Fundamental.
I'm your host, Dr. Erin Bailey.
This podcast celebrates the power of books and the joy of reading.
In each episode, we talk with educators, librarians, families, authors, and literacy champions to explore one big question: What does reading inspire for you?
Through stories, research, and real-world experiences from classrooms, libraries, and homes, we explore what literacy looks like and why it matters.
Whether you're nurturing young readers, shaping learning spaces, or simply love a good book, we're glad you're here.
Be sure to subscribe to get the latest episode.
Let's get inspired.
Erin Bailey: Welcome.
Today I am joined by Mary Pope Osborne, and if you are unfamiliar with her work, you've probably seen these before.
They are the Magic Tree House books.
My daughter and I are reading this one right now, Dinosaurs Before Dark.
She's, she's five years old.
Um, these books were really important to me as a first grade teacher.
My students would refer to them as the Jack and Annie books, and for many students, these were the first chapter books that they ever read.
So it was a huge developmental reading milestone to go from reading decodables and beginning reader text to reading a chapter book and, and going on an adventure with it.
So I am so delighted to have you here today, Mary.
Thank you.
Mary Pope Osborne: Thank you, Erin.
I'm excited to be here.
Erin Bailey: So you've lived s- quite an adventurous and creative life.
You grew up in a military family.
You studied drama and mythology, and you traveled across Asia and the Middle East.
Um, we share that in common.
I lived in Asia and did quite a bit of traveling there myself- Yeah
um, before you even became a writer.
So I'm sure our listeners would love to hear how your early life experiences shaped who you became as a storyteller.
Mary Pope Osborne: Yeah, I, I traveled a lot in my early life and, and with my family in the military.
And then I did study drama and world religions actually, and mythology at the University of North Carolina.
And this is, I got out of school in the early '70s.
So then I put a pack on my back and headed to the East, as they said in those days.
"I'm going east." And I went to, uh, started in Greece and went overland with a couple of people for about A year almost in, uh, a number
of countries, and it was before, it was right before it got really scary in a lot of countries, like in Afghanistan and, uh, Iraq and Iran.
It was still a free space to travel in, even though it was totally foreign to, um, to young Europeans and E- Americans traveling there at that time.
But we lived modestly, and I just developed a wanderlust that's never stopped, except, we'll get to it, finally I figured out how to, how to go anywhere and be home by dinner, which is my ideal space.
So anyway, yeah.
And then I came back to the States and Jumping forward, I went to see an opening night of a show in Washington, DC, uh, called Diamond Studs, and the, a man playing
Jesse James came on the stage, was the lead in the show, musical, and, uh, I fell in love with him watching him on the stage, and I married him a year later.
But, um, short of that, I went up to New York to, to live with Will and be with Will, and that was a whole change in my life plan, and that's when I first started thinking of becoming a writer.
yeah, so all of it feeds into everything else.
You know how it is.
Your experience just becomes part of your voice and, and your, your whole viewpoint on life.
So, I, I think it was a wonderful way to sort of start out.
It was a little risky, terrified my parents.
I hate that part, but, uh, I wanted to see the world and I didn't have much money and I set out to do it in a way that I could, which was camping and traveling.
Erin Bailey: And now your experiences, I mean, they've allowed children to travel to all of these places too, through your, your storytelling.
So, um, you know, for listeners who aren't familiar, The Magic Tree House series is expansive, and the main characters, Jack and Annie, they're brother and sister, um, they go on all kinds of adventures, and to your point, they're home by dinner time.
Um, so when you first thought of this idea of Jack and Annie and the magical tree house that could take them to any time and any place, um, why did time travel feel like the perfect doorway into imagination for children?
Mary Pope Osborne: Well, um, r- I had written a lot of other books before Tree House.
I'd written b- books of mythology, Norse, Greek, medieval, uh, American tall tales, one world, many religions, biographies.
Why, it, it was crazy how, how much I was working, um, before Tree House.
And then Random House, knowing me, came and said, um, "Would you be interested, I'm gonna- we're gonna have about three authors start a new genre called early chapter books, and it will get the kids between picture books and middle-" Mm
readers, where they'll be reading by themselves, and they'll feel so grown up, and then they'll keep reading the more difficult things.
So, um, I, I was one of the people they asked.
Barbara Parks and Junie B. Jones was the other, and then, um, Louis Sacher, he did the Marvin Redpost series.
So they started with the three of us, and I wanted to do something that would be different each time, so because of my, uh, varied interests.
So I decided to do time travel.
But it didn't come easily with The Tree House.
I tried, I spent almost a year spinning my wheels.
I had a magic museum, a magic artist studio- Mm-hmm … magic basement, magic whistles, um, whole drafts of books that didn't, uh, ever become anything other than a stepping stone.
And then one day in the woods of Pennsylvania with my husband, we saw an old tree house that had been falling down.
We had a little cabin in this area, and we started saying, "Well, what about a tree house that could take you to different times in space?
And when it lands, it's sort of hidden away, and the kids can go up a rope ladder, and the tree house will be filled with books." So I sort of brought into my, um, Tree House
world everything I cared about: childhood play, the outdoors, books, and a brother and a sister, 'cause I have a twin brother, and I have a brother h- a year and a half younger.
And we were all just a trio that did everything together, moved everywhere to new places together, so we were always each other's best friends, always playing outside and games of imagination and make-believe.
So all the things I loved came together, which was travel, going to these other places, reading, the magic of books, and the magic of play and, uh, adventure.
Erin Bailey: That's beautiful.
When you share your life story, it's like it's literary in and of itself.
I mean, the way that you met your husband was so beautiful and romantic, and then you came across a tree house.
It's, it's so whimsical.
I, I love it.
so one of the things that brought y- you to Reading Is Fundamental is your Classroom Adventures program and Gift of Books initiative.
Um, you've been able to put more than 1.2 million books in the hands of children in underserved communities.
So, uh, you know, and that's something that we do at, at Reading Is Fundamental.
That's why we came together.
What inspired you to create the program, and why was it important for you to give back to teachers and young readers?
Mary Pope Osborne: A few things, but one of them was RIF.
I was giving a speech somewhere in a conference, I couldn't even tell you which one.
In the first 15 years of my career, I was always on the road talking and going to conferences and visiting schools.
And RIF, a RIF spokesperson was on the dais and giving a speech about their mission, and I was so moved by that.
By that time, I had gone to hundreds of schools around the country, and I saw a disparity in the libraries and what the kids had access to.
I mean, it's, it's probably no surprise, but I saw it firsthand, and I saw that I could arrive at some places and nobody would know what I did, and not hardly care.
And then I'd arrive at other places, and there'd be hoopla, and there'd be posters, and there'd be everything going on that was so exciting that teachers were doing.
So two things.
This, the other thing was that I had been communicating with teachers for 10 or 15 years.
Teachers are responsible for Magic Tree House in the beginning.
They, they shared it.
It was like they gave it to other people.
They ei- they got it whether on Scholastic Book Club or at the store, but they started talking about it and inviting me to schools and inviting me to speak.
So teachers became my, my center of how … Now, I had not had courses in education or even in writing, tell you the truth.
I was, everything was self-taught.
But when this happened to me, it's like I got a vocation.
It, it was, w- the message was that these little books were getting kids over the threshold to reading.
Mm-hmm.
That they were pulling them in and then, uh, launching them into, hopefully, a love of reading.
So I got a lot of letters, and I got a lot of pictures, and I went to schools, and I saw a tremendous amount of activity around the books.
And then I c- you know, when the 20th anniversary came up, I decided I wanted to give books to schools that d- had no access to Magic Tree House.
So I set up a program where I could do that in partnership with a group that could deliver the books, and I would, um, you know, pay for the books.
But I would get them at a, pl- they'd come from a place where I knew they'd be delivered, and I could count on it.
So I started this at, uh, a program with a, a, you could say a grant program where a teacher of a Title I school, it has to be an underserved area, because otherwise a publisher wouldn't want me give- giving away all my books.
They, they'd have a problem with that.
So had to be sure the kids probably couldn't get books by themselves otherwise.
So, um, started giving away the books, and then we had a wonderful person who helps me do everything, Cindy Mill.
she set up with me a Classroom Adventures program where teachers could give lesson plans for all the books, and they could do, a curriculum key, uh, t- so that
teachers could say, "Oh, this will go with my social studies, this goes with my science, this goes with my w- whatever the subject and, matter of the book is."
And that, it also had r- reading levels and teachers writing in with their own projects to stimulate the imagination of other teachers.
So that's just been an enormous, um, part of my life in the last, uh, 15, I think… What is it now?
15 years.
And then we also, um- Started writing musicals at that time.
My husband and two other people, all of them in the arts, a writer, a playwright, a composer, and my husband a playwright and composer, and they have written nine Magic Tree House musicals.
So we would combine our forces and do a musical in Chicago, say that they would pipe into all the public schools for second grade, and then every child would get a book in the public schools based on what the musical was on.
Mm-hmm.
So if it was on Louis Armstrong or William Shakespeare, um, j- and we did it with, uh, Jackie Robinson and Orlando, and all the kids who saw the musical got the books.
And we did it in New Orleans.
I wrote a book on, um, Louis Armstrong, and we had a musical of Louis Armstrong.
Anyway, it's been a fabulous, um, journey with my husband.
My sister was wor- meanwhile working on the nonfiction books, The Magic Tree House Backtrackers.
and then our best friends, we all live in Massachusetts now in a beautiful area in, called the Berkshires, and it's in the western part of the state.
It's the Berkshire Hills, very New England-y.
And we have a barn that we renovated and call it the Frog Creek Barn, and that's where a lot of this work takes place.
So we're playing, you know, back to the idea of play.
It's all playing, and we're still having fun.
I'm working on the 67th Magic Tree House book now- Wow
of the fiction, and having more fun than ever.
So it's, it's, um, it's a phenomena for me because, it comes out of our kitchen, basically.
You know?
It g- comes out of our small life, and, and then when it reaches out into the world, it's in, um, I think 40 languages now.
It's, it's, it's all over the world, and I, I get books from all these different countries that have translated it and done their own art.
And I can see all the goodness, basically- Mm-hmm … that's out there, 'cause I get letters too that, from parents and teachers and kids, and they're so positive.
And I just have this in- inc- I know the world's in some turmoil, it always is, but I just get this bird's-eye view of how much goodness is, is taking place at any moment.
And, um, when you go to a bookstore to sign and you have, you know, a lot of kids and your, the parents are with them 'cause they're young, and I would love to make a
videotape of the parents' faces as each child lines up to get a book signed and a picture, and the look on their faces is, there's so much love and hope and trepidation
And, you know, th- the child has talked about this, they get the author there, and you want so much to give back to the parents as well as the children,
'cause they've gone to a lot of trouble to get there and wait in line, and they're excited about reading, which, uh, you know, I know scores are down.
Things always sound dismal when you read about it, but I see it from another point of view.
Erin Bailey: It, it's incredible how something so homegrown and, you know, the way you were mentioning your husband and other people in your family have touched it, can then branch out and reach so many people.
Yeah.
Um, and I, I think with the parents, you know, what's probably also incredible for them is I'm sh- at this point, because Magic Tree House has been around
for decades, there are many adults, parents, who fell in love with reading because of Magic Tree House, and now they get to share that with their children.
Well, a
Mary Pope Osborne: lot… And also, when they share it with me, like let's say I'm at a bank teller s- stand and she sees the name and she goes, "Ah,
Magic Tree House." Or this has happened to me at the airport with a person take, you know, giving me a ticket, and sometimes people get teary-eyed.
Erin Bailey: Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mary Pope Osborne: I'm not being falsely modest when I say it's not me and it's not even Tree House, it's who they were when they began to read, and that's such a touching place to be.
It's so open and vulnerable.
I, I, that kind of age of five, six, seven, eight, it's the freshest you'll ever be on the planet, and you… What I hope is that they can go back and retrieve some of that
joy that they felt when they first started reading Tree House and first started learning about- And got so excited over their own abilities to translate the words into meaning.
Think of it, just this little code of black squiggly letters, and suddenly, you know, there's a great passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when the
author Betty Smith figures out she can read, and she puts together the, the letters for the word horse, and suddenly she hears a horse galloping.
And then she sees a horse, and then she feels breathless.
And she sees a mouse.
The word mouse becomes a real mouse, you know?
And she, she's transported to another world And that's the magic.
And that's why I think reading is essential.
I mean, of course it's important to, to get a job and be out there and read instructions everywhere you turn, and figure out how to type on the computer.
But more than that, for me, it takes you to other places and times, and you live other lives.
You learn empathy, you learn about the world.
And if you live a hard life, let's say a really hard life as a child, you … A friend once told me she read books as a child sitting between a refrigerator and a wall in an inner city tenement, and she left that space in her imagination.
And I think that's what we wanna give all kids the ability to do.
You're not confined by your boundaries or, or the walls of your house, or the limits of the grown-ups around you.
You, you can go other places and learn things and, you know, take the steps that you have to take to get out of your, limitations.
Erin Bailey: And that's something I've enjoyed since being the host of Reading Inspires.
It's called Reading Inspires, so I think, uh, you make a great point.
We tend to sometimes be fixated on negative statistics and maybe overly focused on college and career readiness.
The purpose of reading is for college and career readiness, but I think what you're highlighting so beautifully is that there are many important life lessons, social and emotional, building empathy, transporting yourself to a different time and place.
Like, it's, it's more than just what you do from your day-to-day for your career.
It's how you live your life.
Mary Pope Osborne: Yeah.
It, and it develops your imagination in a way that you need imagination to eventually figure out what to do with your life, what your career is.
You have to conceive of something that might not be in your immediate surroundings.
You have to see a vision.
I mean, they often say if you have a vision of what you wanna do, what you love, and then you take the steps, as remedial as they might be to get there, you will get there.
And I knew as a kid, I didn't know anything about writing.
I didn't know kids … I, I mean, kids write now.
They're writing.
Every time I go to a school, they're writing stories.
They're making pictures and booklets.
We didn't do that in school.
It was inconceivable to a child in, in my childhood that you could grow up to be a writer.
And, but we knew imagination.
We knew play, like I was saying earlier.
So if I then started
I, then I went into theater in my teen years just to get it all out of me.
I went to the local community theater and was in every show they'd let me be in or work backstage, and that was imagination.
So what you get to do with writing is to create a world, but you're in charge of it.
You're not waiting to be cast in it if, you know, if you're in theater, or you're not waiting to, uh, be called in from your play.
You get to run the show and create a reality that brings you joy.
And even if it's a hard reality, even if it's a g- you know, a, a bitter story, you still are in the process of, using real imagination.
And we wanna, you know, preserve that at all costs.
It's gonna be harder with AI coming in because all humans can get lazy and just let something else tell the story or write the story- Mm
or answer all the questions.
But certainly people who have been writers, are writers, they know the difference between having something that's kind of fake and something that's real.
So I'm, I'm hopeful.
I have optimism that We will learn the difference between what's coming from a heart, a human heart rather than a
I don't know what it even is, an AI, but whatever that is on the screen, there's gotta be more to life than that.
Erin Bailey: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you, you said it best.
Uh, things that are missing from childhood, play- Yeah … something that I'm a strong proponent of.
Curiosity.
Yeah.
Um, I recently heard, and I'll repeat it for listeners, uh, it, it's something that really resonated with me that curiosity is not a characteristic, it's a skill.
Oh, that's interesting … so just think about it.
It's, a lot of times y- like my son, he's two and a half.
People often describe him as curious.
He asks why all the time.
It's very annoying.
But we love it at the same time.
But I think a lot of people would describe him as a curious kid, but I also think that all children are curious, and what you need to do is to continue to build that skill.
If you think of it as a characteristic- Yeah … it's something that somebody either has or doesn't have, you're less likely- Yeah … to build it up, whereas if you view, view it as a skill, it's something you can practice every day and get better at.
Mary Pope Osborne: Oh, that's really observant, and I think you're absolutely right.
in fact, I, I think I really became much more curious as an adult because I didn't h- you know, I was pretty focused on myself growing up, as kids are, and, and especially going
into theater, and then getting out of theater and stepping a kind of, by surprise one day in my university into a class on, um, uh, the psychology of religion I think it was.
And just listening and paying attention and getting interested, and then leaving the room and then finding a book, and then trying to change my curriculum to
getting into that course, and getting into that co- you know, it's like one thing builds on another, and you start to leave yourself, which is really healthy.
I, I'm sad when I see today so much focus on the self because really you don't know who you are until you're engaged with something outside yourself.
You know?
Uh, that's kind of a cliche, but if you're, you know who you are by what you're saying in a conversation, by how you're reacting to other people's stories, by what you do in a job.
Y- you know, I did a lot of bad jobs when I was very young.
I waitressed and hat-checked and was, was always, um, in motion with strangers, but that I took later into my writing.
You know?
I was, my imagination was working even seemed like a dead-end situation, but I would take all of that, and when I really got into writing, I remember thinking Darn, I
could go to the dentist and sit can- sit in the waiting room and never be bored because I would write down who came in and what they were wearing and what was on the walls.
And, you know, I started keeping index cards in my pockets, and I lived in New York City then, and everywhere I went, I took the index cards and copied down observations.
You know, most of them were just innocuous and, but they trained my mind- Mm-hmm … to look for details and, and to have an interesting time, a curious time wherever I went.
So when you decide on a career that's in the arts, everything becomes your material.
Um, I'm sure that's true for other careers too.
Mm-hmm.
Living with an actor and a songwriter and- … my being a writer, it's just everything's material.
Erin Bailey: Yeah.
But I think, I, I mean, something, again, curiosity, it's a skill.
I think to your point of waiting in the, in a doctor's office, something that became way too routine for me was- Yeah
to get there and start checking my email on my phone.
Um, and, uh, you know, a few podcast epis- episodes ago, I interviewed Jessica Jones, and she gave me this mentality of pretend it's 1990.
Um, and so I've been doing that.
Like, when I go, when I'm waiting in line at the bank or at a doctor's office or somewhere else where it would be natural like, oh, I'm just gonna check my email, I t- I tell myself, "Pretend it's 1990."
And what did you do when it was 1990 and you were in the doctor's office or wherever?
You, you people-watched.
You created stories about the people that were around you, even if they were just in, in your mi- in your mind.
Um, and it's so refreshing to do that.
I highly recommend it to anyone who's listening.
Just try it the next time you're in a waiting situation.
Pretend it's 1990, and see where your imagination can take you.
Mary Pope Osborne: I think that's superb.
I love that idea.
And I was lucky enough to spend the first 20 years of my writing without all of that, you know, with that, 'cause I started, um, in my thir- early 30s, I started serious writing, and, um, and I didn't…
Oh, but what I d- I'll, I'll admit my tools changed.
I could never have done Treehouse without a laptop because I can work anywhere, anytime.
There's so much to, to, to change, to, you know, correct, and those years on a typewriter and then a big lunk, clunky computer, desktop, were so limiting.
But what I have to remember, and I don't seem to have a problem with this, is that I rewrite and I rewrite and I rewrite.
I don't just, you know, try to make it- First draft, in fact, I rewrite so much that that's probably what I do 90% of the time.
I may do all my research, and then I start to draft a story, and then it changes a million times, you know.
And it seems simple 'cause these books are small and, you know, they don't seem very deep.
But it's amazing how much you have to think about simple words to describe-
Erin Bailey: Mm
… Mary Pope Osborne: complicated situations, and that becomes a game in itself, the love of words and language, and how you can make a living word that, uh, take away the dead words.
You know, I just have so much fun with words, but I'm down the, to the forensics of, of writing for early readers.
I think as a writer, getting that close to words and wrestling with them every day, I, for me it's joy.
I mean, those tools that we're given as writers are joy.
Uh, if you love words, love poetry, love to read.
I like, like I have a stack of books going all the time, but I'll just open any book to any page and enjoy the words, whether I know what the story is And, and then I'll start writing the words down.
I keep so many notebooks just on words, ordinary words, that I, I, I think are lively and evocative.
Erin Bailey: Yeah.
Such a good practice, and two things that I think, you know, teachers who are listening can inspire their students with is that idea of drafting and writing things many times in many ways.
Yeah.
I, I think it's easy for students to think that they need to write something perfect the first time, but hearing from an established author, you know, that it takes many drafts and revisions.
Um, and then the, the idea of playing with words.
If you have words that you enjoy, write them down, and you can find a way to use them.
Mary Pope Osborne: Yeah, that's a good exercise.
I usually keep a file box with, you know, words of color, words of light, words of weather, words of, you know, nighttime, words of daytime.
I… Just categorizing words.
I wanted them to all be accessible to my mind when I needed
Erin Bailey: them.
Mm-hmm.
Mary Pope Osborne: it really works.
The fun thing to do, go to a catalog and just start writing down the words people use for colors, and, and, a- and, you know, you can find so many fresh images in advertising.
And so it's everywhere available to you, and we're being, you know, assaulted every day by words.
But you can use them to your own purposes, and not be so overwhelmed.
Oh, the other day, perfect example.
I was sitting on a porch taking notes for a book at an old inn in, um, New England.
In beautiful, beautiful old inn, and the traffic noise was deafening 'cause the trucks and all were going to the freeway, and I got so annoyed.
So I put down my book, my, my notebook, and then I started looking at the trucks, and I started copying down the words written on the trucks.
What were these trucks, and where were they going?
And an hour later, I had about 50 trucks named, and I… And this is actually a positive exercise.
I realized they were all delivering things to help people.
They were plumbing, electricity, painting, landscaping, flowers.
telephone.
You know, there, everything that people physically need was, was in the trucks, were in the trucks that were going by that day.
And then I felt more philosophical.
I felt, "Oh, so AI's not gonna destroy us.
We'll always need trucks.
We'll always need people driving." You know, so you d- but it was the words.
I got caught up in the words on the trucks that lifted me out of my despair about the noise.
and I love to do that if I'm working on a story and I need to know just some neighborhood ambience or city ambience.
I'll just start to take notes, and then find the, if they can fit into the descriptions I use in the stories.
Erin Bailey: I love that.
Words can lift you out of despair.
Mary Pope Osborne: Yeah.
It's all we can use.
But, you know, I'll also say another thing I would emphasize for my writing, but for so much writing, is research.
And I always try to do my research, I take months to research, even though you would never know it if you read a little book.
But, um, I'm doing a book now on Thomas Edison, for instance, so I'm researching the train he worked on in 1854, and I even… Uh, it's in Michigan, and I
even got a, a subscription to the Detroit Free Press so I could go into their archives to see, well, what was in the paper on that day, me telling that- Mm.
Erin Bailey: Mm-hmm
… Mary Pope Osborne: you know?
So you start down all these different paths of research that are so much fun if, if, if you have curiosity, and suddenly something you would never have been interested in becomes the most interesting thing in the world.
So you're, you're fanning a flame all the time of observation and learning.
Erin Bailey: I, I would have guessed a lot of research went into, uh, your writing and y- and your books.
I mean, particularly the historical background, so that doesn't surprise me at all.
Mary Pope Osborne: Yeah, and you just can't expect yourself to know everything, so especially writing for children.
Now if you wrote a serious book of history for adults, you'd spend 10 years on it, but I can only spend six months on my book.
Mm-hmm.
There, there's always another one I have to write.
But- you can actually get a good sense of things from writers of that period.
If you're looking for vocabulary, then it's a good excuse to dip back, or into travel logs, or I always get a map of wherever I am talking about and locate myself, the characters in, in a world.
And you find these amazing points of, um, things that you can turn into a plot because y- you'll see obstacles in the, in the situation.
Like the train i- in 1860 is hot and stuffy and loud and, you know, you, you… I read that from someone who rode a train in 1860.
But now, that's the advantage of the internet too, is you can find a lot of historical documents where people describe things that, uh, they went through and, and lift an atmosphere out of that.
Erin Bailey: Mm-hmm.
I also think about for the characters' perspectives of Jack and Annie, this is actually randomly something I think about quite often, is since we in modern times are used
to air conditioning, how- Yeah … it would probably feel hotter and more uncomfortable to us than somebody who was used to that and that was a regular train ride for them.
I mean, it would still feel hot and uncomfortable to them, but probably not to the degree that it would if we were time traveling.
Mary Pope Osborne: Well, 100%.
And, and, uh, I think that's true, especially when you get to be my age.
When you look back to your own past, we didn't have air conditioning in the deep South where we were stationed a few times, and just would lie there in the summer with a fan on you and keep taking showers, cold showers.
I mean, it would get so humid and hot.
But you- that's life.
You can cope with those things.
And I want kids to know that they can cope with more than they think they can cope with, 'cause we, you know, w- we're so comfortable now, most of us.
And I'm, I'm doing a, a new series called Magic Tree House History Heroes, and the first one will be a girl who lived in England in 1812.
Totally poverty-struck family.
Only her mother had survived.
Eight siblings had died.
Father had fallen off a cliff.
She goes every day down to the coast, 12 years old, and to get a little money for her and her mother to eat so they don't go to the poor house, she hammers a cliff and finds these fossils- Mm
these marine fossils that, you know, she then polishes and cleans, and she takes them to the village and sells them as little fun things for the tourists.
And she turned out to be the greatest fossil finder of all time, Mary Anning.
So Jack and Annie come the day that they a- she actually did find this 16-foot skeleton in the cliffs, a fossilized sea monster co- uh, that she uncovered and got people to help her l- take it out with a lot of work, hammering and, and chiseling.
And then she gets it to someone who gets it to a museum, and she starts to make more money.
Not much, but a little more.
And the men who find it, uh, uh, uh, help her- Take
Erin Bailey: the credit
Mary Pope Osborne: But there's, you know, now there's a museum in her honor in the town in the coast of, uh, Li- Lyme, England.
and then Thomas Edison, you know, he was three-quarters deaf, and he, he, I'm sure he was on the spectrum the more I read about him, and his lack of ability to really properly be social.
But his concentration on hi- when he was a child on math and science, he was kicked out of school 'cause they thought he couldn't learn.
Erin Bailey: Mm.
Mary Pope Osborne: But he was so advanced, nobody knew what he did know, and, except his mother.
She believed in him.
But they meet him when he's 12, and he's fired from his train job 'cause he put up a little chemical laboratory in the baggage car and it exploded.
And, you know, he's fired, and humiliated, and assaulted practically, and Jack and Annie follow him off the train, and their job is to show him the future.
that was their job, was the first Mary Anning, the fossil finder, too.
Anyway, the point is, I would like to emphasize to children that you can rise above your situation, and you can be more resilient.
I love the idea of resilience-
Erin Bailey: Yeah
… Mary Pope Osborne: for myself as, as well as for kids.
Erin Bailey: Yeah.
I, I love it.
Uh, reading inspires, resilience.
so wonderful talking to you, Mary.
I, I mean your s- your work is, um, incredible, and it's inspired generations.
Um, so I always end by asking, what does reading inspire for you?
Mary Pope Osborne: Well, reading inspires for me, that the w- world is a miracle.
You know, when you really read about history and people and heroes and mythology and all the different philosophies, it's just a miracle that we can do this.
And I, I think that it's, if we get too narrow, and I certainly do, just opening a book can take us out of the, the, the pit we're in.
before we go, I'd like to encourage teachers to look at M- Magic Trails Classroom Adventures, and you'll see the program that's totally free of cost for teachers that gives you all the information you need, even life lessons, with all the books.
And, what we're trying to say about the joy of reading and learning and history and just open things up considerably to having fun, and yet, you know, just learning.
Yeah.
Learning for fun.
I mean, that's, that's the whole message, I think.
Erin Bailey: Yeah.
Learning should be fun and, and it should be fun to learn, right?
Yeah.
I, I will also link, link that website below so that anyone can click on it and have access to it and all the resources.
Oh, thank you.
Yes.
Mary Pope Osborne: Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, it's been great talking to you.
Yeah.
I like your enthusiasm for… And I think we're on the same wavelength about all of these things.
Erin Bailey: Absolutely.
Thank you, Mary.
Mary Pope Osborne: Thank you.
Thank you for listening to Reading Inspires by Reading Is Fundamental.
I hope today's conversation sparked new ideas, meaningful connections, and a renewed love of reading.
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, share it with a fellow literacy champion, and join us next time as we continue exploring what reading inspires