What inspired you to create the Ben Yokoyama series, and the Cookie of Destiny specifically?
R: A few years ago, our family took this wild, yearlong road trip we called the Busload of Books Tour. We lived in a tiny home school bus and visited Title I elementary schools in all 50 states, giving free presentations and donating books to 25,000 students and teachers in communities that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an author visit.
M: As we started working on Cookie of Destiny, we thought our tour might be a useful framework for this book.
R: Yes. Ben and his family travel across the country in a rickety RV, hoping a little adventure will help Ben feel better about moving to California and leaving his best friend Janet behind.
M: Of course, catastrophe strikes early and often. It was helpful that we were so familiar with the things that can go wrong on a road trip.
R: The leaky roof incident in chapter 13 is straight facts. Two years later, I’m still having flashbacks.
What was the most difficult part about writing/illustrating the book? What was the easiest?
R: The hardest part was drawing that stinking RV! I’m terrible at vehicles, especially drawing wheels that don’t look lumpy and bent and about to fall off. I had to draw it so many times (cry emoji!).
M: The easiest part was writing dialogue between Ben and Janet, because it springs straight from my heart and experience. We didn’t know it when we started working on this series, but Cookie Chronicles is a thinly veiled autobiography. Like Robbi and me, Ben and his best friend Janet think and approach life in opposite ways, yet both of their skillsets are needed to get themselves out of trouble.
R: Somehow, we keep writing books that are secretly about ourselves. In both the Cookie Chronicles and Real McCoys series, we’re telling stories about working with your best friend to solve problems.
What element of the story do you identify with the most and why?
R: That sense of adventure and waking up each morning not knowing what’s going to happen. We were traveling with four kids, two dogs, and no bathroom. Every day was some new kind of chaos.
M: For me, it was the idea of hitting the road and leaving everything you’ve ever known behind. When I was in sixth grade, I moved from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Kansas City and had to start all over again.
R: That is so sad! I don’t know how anybody does it. We live literally two blocks from the house I grew up in. Every time I read the Cookie of Destiny, the idea of leaving it all behind makes me cry.
M: But you know what? I survived and came out better on the other side. I wanted to create a story for kids—so many of whom go through this kind of transition—to let them know moving is a normal thing and it’s going to be okay.
What do you want kids today to take away from this story/art?
R: I want to show kids that art is its own language—one that we learn earlier than writing but for some reason value far less, even though it’s often easier to understand.
M: And just as powerful. Robbi does lots of storytelling with her drawings. When I wrote the first book in this series (The Cookie of Doom), Ben was just Ben. But by the time Robbi was done illustrating it, his name was Ben Yokoyama.
R: It’s true! I’m half-Japanese. When I first read the manuscript, I saw an opportunity to show Ben coming from a mixed-race background and growing up like I did. As a kid, I never had books about someone who was half-Japanese. The closest thing I could find was books about feudal Japan. Imagine if everything you knew about American culture came from Little House on the Prairie.
M: You’d think all we do here is churn butter and haul water from the creek bed.
R: That’s my American dream.
M: Which makes total sense. Even though Robbi is ethnically half-Japanese, she’s culturally American.
R: Which is very much Ben’s experience, too. I was able to put little pieces of my Japanese heritage into his American story through details of daily life that find their way into the illustrations—and text—from the Zojirushi rice cooker his family uses to the fact that no one wears shoes in his house.
What did the Busload of Books Tour teach you about this country, and how does it show up in Cookie of Destiny?
M: As Ben leaves home on his epic road trip, he has no idea that it’s going to be an adventure full of self-discovery and that he’ll never be the same on the other side of it. The same was true for us and our kids. Mostly because of all the incredible students and teachers we met.
R: We drove 34,000 miles on our tour, visiting tiny towns and huge cities. Red states and blue. We met kids who walk through encampments of unhoused people on their way to school and kids who do rodeo club after school. We rode in a helicopter to visit the Havasupai School at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
M: Every preconception or stereotype we might have held about a given part of the country was rewritten by stories of hard-working teachers and students who are living their lives with joy and purpose, lifting up their communities, representing the best of us in every way.
R: It was an incredibly affirming adventure of unity and goodness in these contentious times, when all we hear is how divided we are as a country. It was actually the best year of our lives, and it genuinely restored our faith in humanity.
M: Which was another inspiration for Cookie of Destiny. As Ben and his family make their way across the country, they meet good, interesting people wherever they go—from a teacher in Nashville, Arkansas, to a waitress in a roadside café in the desert southwest, to a woman who has devoted her life to collecting and making art out of pushpins.
R: Life is an adventure, and almost all of us are trying our hardest, no matter where we come from or how leaky our roofs might be.
What are you currently reading?
M: I am currently reading the fine print on many field trip permission slips, and I tell you, it’s taxing my powers of concentration.
R: I’m reading Skunk and Badger (by Amy Timberlake and illustrated by Jon Klassen) with our son Jasper. It’s funny and charming, and I love it.
M: But it doesn’t hold a candle to the permission slips.
R: Come on now, it’s apples and oranges! The permission slips aren’t even illustrated. Get on that, Kent County Middle School!
