Godzilla. The name sparks terror in the hearts of mortals. Godzilla is the fear of nuclear proliferation made flesh, a kaiju who will stop at nothing to make their displeasure with human meddling known. But is Godzilla for kids? It may not seem the most likely combination, but it's one TOHO took a chance on with Godzilla Stomp, a rollicking madcap picture book adventure where the iconic kaiju invades fairy tale land. We sat down with author Katherine Locke to discuss how they brought Godzilla to Cinderella's castle and what they hope young readers (and parents!) will take from the book.

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How did you arrive at the idea of Godzilla stomping their way through fairy tales?

Katherine Locke: So, when I was first approached about this project, the fairy tale village part already existed in the minds of my editor and TOHO , and I think that it just kind of evolved from there. I think my cats marching across my desk with absolutely no care in the world is a nice example of Godzilla just stomping away doing its thing and leaving a path of destruction that other people have to kind of clean up. I also was thinking a lot about the young reader. So, both the read-aloud: whenever you write a picture book, you think about the read-aloud for the parent, but you also think about the young reader. And I just had this image in my head of kids literally stomping around the room as a parent or a guardian is reading this book to them. And I was delighted by that. I hope kids are up and active when they are interacting with this book. Sometimes you write a bedtime book, and sometimes you write a book for busy kids, and this really feels like a book for busy kids. So, I was also thinking about that type of action. The stomping, the stomping more things, the “stop not stomp” play was really intentional. I really had a lot of fun with that. So yeah, I was both thinking about wanting to bring this concept to life in a certain way and to make sure that we're touching fairy tale elements that would be familiar to kids from other books they have read or movies they had seen, but also making sure that it was an exciting book and had some repetition and had some action for them to participate in as well.

That actually was one of the things I noticed: how well it reads aloud and how kinetic it is. I could see this working at a library story time, having kids Godzilla stomping through the library.

Locke: Fingers crossed. Yes. I always read my picture books aloud a number of times to try to make sure the rhythm is there, the page turns feel right. And I was really lucky to work with an incredible editor, Caitlyn O'Connell, who also has a really keen eye for these types of things. and was really helpful in making sure it was all working exactly how we imagined it would.

When I've taught writing for children, one of the things I sometimes tell students is that writing a picture book is perhaps more like writing poetry than other prose forms. Would you agree with that? How would you describe the process of writing a picture book?

Locke: I started as a novelist, and I started writing picture books like seven or eight years ago, I think now, and it was a steep learning curve. I had to really study. I went and read hundreds of picture books to figure out how they were written. I hadn't written short-form fiction in almost 20 years when I did that. The younger your audience, the smaller the word count and also the harder it is to write. Like, you cannot hide a story mistake or some repetition in a big paragraph. A big paragraph does not exist. Kids will notice intentional repetition, which they like. They will also notice unintentional repetition, which will bore them.

Every word really counts in a picture book. You have a limited amount of space. You have child readers who are so attuned to the words that you're using and how they feel. They are just keen observers at that age, especially, and they'll figure out anything that doesn't feel quite right. So I always read it aloud a lot, and in this case, when I was thinking about what books really resonated that were very similar, I crowdsourced. I do not have young children of my own. So I was asking friends and neighbors, “Your super active six- and seven-year-olds. What are they reading?” And they tell me a whole bunch of picture books like four- to six-year-olds. These are what my kids who can't sit still like. These are the books they're reading. And I went out and read those books as well to figure out, okay, if I wanted a really active book, but I also want to be mindful of word count and how it reads and making sure each page is landing. What does that look like? How are other people writing these books?

That's so important. When I was in grad school, I actually had people say, "Well, isn't it easier to write for kids because kids are stupid?" Like, no.

Locke: Absolutely not. No, it's definitely harder to write for six-year-olds than it is to write for adults any day of the week. Kids know if you've made a mistake. They can feel when something's off. They can feel when you forced a line that you couldn't quite figure out how to work in. They're just more in tune to it. And they read more than most adults. Like, quite literally, kids are reading all the time. We lose that as adults now. And so they're reading these books, and they're really good at knowing what books they like and what books are like, "Ah, that wasn't my favorite." So, I'm hoping that this is one of the ones that parents get tired of reading. And that's how I like to pitch it: I hope that the parents get tired of reading it only because that means that the kid has asked for it so many times.

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That's a great way to think about it. Was one of the books you were suggested The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith? Godzilla Stomp has Stinky Cheese Man vibes.

Locke: Oh, yes. And that's a classic that deserves a spot on everyone's shelf. Yes, that's a fantastic one. There was also a Darth Vader one that was very funny, Are You Scared, Darth Vader? by Adam Rex. It is also hilarious, and that was a really good mentor text for me.

Do you think that Godzilla and other Kaiju are sort of a modern folklore?

Locke: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Folklore is one of my niche special interests. I think that they have all the makings of folklore: heroes and anti-heroes, both sometimes in the same space. Folklore and folktales and fairy tales all came out of reflections on society and trying to pass through messages in a way that sometimes we learn lessons that in more indirect ways, or because it is socially not available to tell a story in a direct way because of societal power structures. And that is what all of these characters- Godzilla, Mothra, everybody- are doing: they're all telling stories, and they're reacting to their environment and their society and telling a story about that environment and that society through myth. And myth is built up around it.

I also think about all the iterations as I read in preparation for writing this book. I read Godzilla: The Half-Century War [by James Stokoe], which was so good, and it made me really think about how Godzilla has really changed and morphed. Godzilla has these different forms: the cutesy Godzilla that ends up in kids’ books versus the Godzilla that we put in movies and the Godzilla in comics. That's also very reflective of fairy tale and myth, right? It takes different shapes. It's telling a similar story, but it takes different shapes depending on its audience. So, yes, I think that's one of my favorite things and one of the things that attracted me to writing Godzilla.

And you're sort of taking him out of the exclusive sphere of adult literature and putting him into a childhood for him, which is what we've done with fairy tales over the years.

Locke: Yes. Exactly. And then cross-pollinating them too, like little callbacks to different things. And it helps center a reader in a story, but it also empowers a reader to be able to make connections because they're going to see things and say like, " Oh, I know what that is. I don't have to be told what that is, but I'm making the connections between these stories as well."

There's still this idea that Godzilla is a “boy thing” that it's gendered masculine when I don't know that I've ever seen a pronoun actually applied to Godzilla themselves. What is the risk of gendering something like Godzilla, gendering that kind of folklore?

Locke: I definitely see that, and I wouldn't be surprised if that still happens in many ways. I think that outward expression of destruction is something that we attribute to boys and to men and not to women, in that gendered binary type of way of looking at the world. And I don't think that that is accurate, but I also think that it's really interesting that we often only give boys and men access to characters that express themselves in this kind of way or interact with the world in this kind of way and have these kinds of rivalries as well. Um, and that girls don't get that same chance. I think in this book, I was really mindful of how Godzilla interacts with the world. And Nikolas [Ilic] did the best job with illustrating this, but on page seven, where it says Godzilla doesn't belong here. This is a fairy tale village. Godzilla isn't a big bad wolf or a princess or a fairy godmother, and Godzilla's wearing princess clothes and fairy godmother clothes that are pink, and it's both like Godzilla doesn't belong in those clothes, but it's not saying it's impossible. Godzilla exists in this world, and maybe this world also includes a version of Godzilla that is a princess or a fairy godmother. One of my favorite parts of working with an illustrator is that they add so much to the story with the visual side.

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I think that's frustrating. I think we do it in a lot of different ways, not just in picture books and in children's literature, but across content and toys that we give kids, is that we gender things in ways that kids don't perceive as gendered. My mom likes to tell a story about me where I was a very shrimpy kid, and I was trying to play with bigger kids, and they wouldn't let me be king of the mountain because I was perceived as being a girl, so I couldn't be king of the mountain. Girls aren't kings. And I was like, fine, I'll be queen of the valley. And I was just kind of trying to figure out how to make the game work for me and in a way that made sense to the rest of society. And I think that about that a lot with children's books and, like, who is in my children's books and how am I writing it in a way that allows everybody to stomp, like everybody gets to be stomped around their bedroom and stomp on their toys and stomp on their blankets and stuffies and whatever else is on the floor because that is all part of this story. Godzilla is not stomping because it's gendered. Godzilla just stomps. Like that's what Godzilla does.

It's a frustrating trend. I think there are people and parents, teachers, and librarians who are all aware of it and are trying to break that down, but I think that it is really baked into society. It's hard to fight against sometimes.

I love the idea that Godzilla could be part of this movement towards getting rid of the gender binary.

Locke: I mean, there's nothing in the canon that says this is just for boys. The '50s were a very gendered time, right? And so I think that it's really built on a foundation of that, and that it's really kind of changed in the last maybe 15 years or so. And I'm excited that this is part of that canon that builds towards Godzilla being for every kid. Godzilla is for everybody. While I'm non-binary, my name is very gendered. And I think that can also help on a book cover. Like if there's a little kid who is like, "Oh, that book's not for me." But they see my name, and they're like, "Oh, but a Katherine wrote it, and my name's Chelsea, and maybe that it is for me."

How did you choose the fairy tales that Godzilla was going to stomp through?

Locke: Oh my gosh, that was a complicated thing. So, I had a list. I think I started with a list of like 26, and I was like, "Picture books have 32 pages, Katherine. Like, pull it together. This is not going to work." So, then we had to whittle it down. And then I also had to make sure that any imagery that was in here was not IP-related imagery. So, I started with a very long list, and then I whittled it down to probably 13, and then my editor and I worked together to kind of figure out which of those stood out the most to us and that we felt would resonate. So, what is a kid going to know: a reference to Little Red Riding Hood, or can we combine multiple references on the same page? Can one allusion or illustration cover a couple of fairy tales, like a fairy godmother? So, it was a tricky process because I would have put in 10 more if I had 10 more pages. I think there was a lot of stomping that could have happened, but I wanted things that the kid readers would really recognize.

The parents also needed to recognize the references to explain it in case a kid didn't get it. I wanted them to be very visual. So, not all fairy tales really lend themselves to a very visual illustrated element of what Godzilla could do here. And I wanted it to be escalating, too. I wanted the path to be escalating, what was going on in the book, and funny. Like, some of the things that Godzilla could have done would not be funny to a kid, but I wanted, like, the squashed pumpkin carriage to be a very funny moment for a kid. And it's coming out right before Halloween, so there could be a lot of squashed pumpkins in the future thanks to many little Godzillas. So I was thinking about all of these elements and what would work: escalating conflict, very visual, and then references that kids would get. They'd be able to connect like, oh, this is from this fairy tale, and this is from this fairy tale.

I did a lot of Googling into whether someone owns the copyright to this element of this fairy tale, and there are good resources out there online. So, thank you to the internet denizens who keep up those lists.

Was there any concern that this may have been before you got brought that Godzilla might be too scary for a picture book?

Locke: If that was a concern, it didn't come up with me. And I know there have been other Godzilla picture books. So I think that there's an understanding that kids gravitate to things that scare them a little bit. Like, that's a natural part of, like, kid curiosity. I think that there's that attraction to something that's a monster. I also think movies like Monsters Inc. have really helped bring kind of an understanding of how to talk to kids about scary things. So, I think that has also helped. I didn't hear any conversation about that when Nikolas' illustrations came in, either. I think they are the perfect balance of like a little bit scary but a little bit whimsical at the exact same time. Like Godzilla's face in these illustrations is amazing. The facial expressions! I was just dying when I first saw the proof. So, I think that this rides that balance carefully. It's a good way to engage parents and children together; it's like, "Dad loves Godzilla, Mom loves Godzilla. Look, you're a Godzilla."

It's intergenerational.

Locke: Absolutely. And I think, you know, I grew up with a lot of Godzilla in my life, and so many of my, like, nerdy friends are all having kids now, and I'm like, this is perfect. I understand why these types of books are hitting the mainstream now and why there's interest in them because my generation bridged both comics and then the online community and started to really take this understanding global phenomenon and that type of thing in the early 2000s. The way everything kind of became very interconnected, and people were able to connect with fans all over the world. Like, I just feel like all of my friends want their kids to be just as nerdy and into these things, and like, what is the gateway product so that my kids will read the comics I have carefully kept for the last 20 years? I'm really excited for that.

Maybe you can't answer this. Is there any talk about Godzilla having other picture book adventures with you?

Locke: I don't know about any of those conversations. If there are, I would love to be a part of them. I'd be very excited, but whether it's with me or somebody else, I am really excited for the idea of more Godzilla picture books out there.

You said you started out writing for older readers, then moved into picture books. Do you have a preference as an author?

Locke: No, I really love having a diverse career. For me, it is one of the best parts of being an author, and being able to write stories is having this flexibility to have a bunch of ideas and then be able to put them in for different reader categories. I feel like it's just made my career limitless for me in a really fun way. I don't have to be like, " Oh, well, I don't write picture books. I only write this kind of book." I was really lucky early in my career to have both agents and editors who supported the fact that I was like, there is no Katherine Locke brand.

I don't just write one thing. I get to do whatever I want and whatever I'm interested in. And they all have different things that attract me. You know, I write a lot of, like, historical fantasy for older readers, and I love telling parts of history that don't really get told. I love writing these energetic, brightly colored, very, very kid-oriented picture books that are very different from my novels, but it feels like a fun outlet, and writing picture books, I think, has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

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I think I get the most emails and fan mail from picture books. It's almost all universally positive. Like it's just parents being like, " Thanks so much. My kid has read this book 170 times, and I never want to read it again." And I'm like, "Yes, I did it!" You know? And then, like, kids, little kids are at festivals and book festivals and book events. They're so cute when they like come in, their arms are like wrapped around the book like this and they are just so excited. Their love of reading is really pure at that age. Like it hasn't been tainted by the internet or ruined by school assignments or anything. So, they're just really fun readers to interact with. Doing story times is really fun. It's been a very, very rewarding experience to write picture books, and I'm really lucky to do it.

That's wonderful. Have you ever written a graphic novel manuscript?

Locke: Yes, fingers crossed, I am on submission with a graphic novel manuscript right now that I co-wrote with Marieke Nijkamp, and we're very, very hopeful for it. So, that's my plug into the universe, manifesting it into the universe. I'm excited to hopefully do more of those.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for it! Would you like to see Godzilla Stomp someday turned into a short-form animated project?

Locke: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I would love that. I don't I have no idea how any of that works, but I would love that. So I hope that happens someday. I think it would be really fun, and I would love to see that happen.

For what it's worth, I think it would be a really good cartoon.

Locke: Thank you so much.