It’s National Fortune Cookie Day! We chat with co-creators Robbi Behr and Matthew Swanson about their upcoming release Ben Yokoyama and the Cookie War, exploring the fortune cookie connection in the Cookie Chronicles series, along with their collaboration process as author/illustrator, what the illustrations add to the story, and how kids have connected with them!
In the latest installment in the highly-acclaimed Cookie Chronicles series, Ben Yokoyama and the Cookie War sees two best friends are pushed to the breaking point when a class election gets out of hand. Rivalry and ridiculousness abound in this delicious, delightfully-illustrated adventure for readers who love Wimpy Kid and Dog Man.
What is your collaboration process like? Do the images or words come first? How do they influence each other?
R: Matthew always writes the words first.
M: Only because you make me. I would love it if you went first.
R: No, you wouldn’t! You would hate it.
M: You’re right. I love going first. I love making stuff up out of nowhere. I write fiction because I don’t like facts. It’s much more fun to make everything up. So that’s what I do.
R: And I don’t like having to make things up out of nowhere. I like to reflect what someone else comes up with.
M: Robbi is like a barnacle. She likes to affix herself to someone else’s clamshell.
R: One of the things I like about Matthew’s writing is that he leaves plenty of room for the illustrations. He doesn’t do much describing of what things look like. He doesn’t do a lot of place-setting. I get to do all that with the pictures. He influences the illustrations by leaving a bunch of information out of the writing.
M: It’s true. We’ve been making books together for more than twenty years, and one of our favorite parts is telling stories with equal contributions from the drawings and words. You need both to get the whole picture. No pun intended.
What do you feel the illustrations add to the story?
M: The Cookie Chronicles books are loaded with colorful metaphors, because I’m trying to introduce kids to the fun of figurative language. And Robbi creates literal illustrations of those metaphorical sentences, so it gives kids a chance to learn through the interplay of my words and her drawings how metaphorical language works.
R: And to show them there is such a thing as a visual metaphor as well.
M: Robbi also has staggeringly beautiful illustrations that capture the tone and mood of certain moments. The Cookie Chronicles books are mostly funny, but they also have a lot of heart. Robbi does a really nice job of calibrating the moments where it’s time to step away from the humor and hit you with a gorgeous, tone-setting illustration of the moon rising over a snowy field, for example. Robbi can really bring it, friends. I love it when she pulls out the stops and tugs on your heartstrings.
R: I also add funny jokes that talking brains say in the margins.
M: And talking stomachs and talking hearts. All the different parts of Ben have their own opinions!
What elements of the series have you seen kids connect with the most.
M: We have a friend whose daughter loves the “about the author and illustrator” dialogues in the back of each book. We want kids to know us as creators, so there’s a little play in the back matter where chat about our own lives in ways that relate to the theme of the book.
R: A little play? You flatter yourself, Shakespeare!
M: Mostly what kids relate to about our books is the interplay between the words and the pictures. There’s a constant back-and-forth, so kids who are intimidated by a sea of paragraphs always have something fun to latch onto visually
R: I think they also like that when they’re done, they’ve finished reading a big fat book.
M: Because there are so many illustrations, our books are thicker than the word count would suggest. But once kids start reading the series, they tend to quickly tear through the whole thing.
What inspired you to have a fortune cookie be the inciting incident in each book?
R: Matthew writes a lot of random stuff, and he wrote a random paragraph about a kid who gets a fortune cookie. That’s how it started. It wasn’t intentional or purposeful.
M: Matthew is never intentional or purposeful about anything!
R: No! He does his best work when he’s not really paying attention.
M: But occasionally, I stumble upon an idea with a marketing hook. We realized, wow, there are a lot of fortunes in the world. And they’re really interesting, often weird, and have helpful wisdom embedded inside of them. Which makes them a good vehicle for writing a story about a kid like me, who grew up constantly confused, and impart some of that wisdom and have a nice repeating structure for every book.
What is the best fortune you’ve ever gotten or what fortune would you like to get?
R: I think the best fortune I’ve ever gotten is “The key to happiness is a bad memory.”
M: Boy, do you live by that one! Let me tell you friends, the best thing about Robbi is that we can have a big argument, and a half-hour later she doesn’t remember it ever happened. And the worst thing about Robbi is that we can decide something really important, and three minutes later she doesn’t remember it ever happened.
R: But I am thusly, very happy
M: Every once in a while, I get a really good fortune and I feel like it’s going to change my entire outlook on life, but five minutes later, I forget what it is. On my desk is a stack of helpful fortunes I should probably read a bit more often.
R: Right now, you’re living by my fortune.
M: The best fortune I ever got was meeting Robbi Behr.
R: Oh boy. Did I mention Matthew is a total sap?
M: It’s better than being a barnacle!
What are we going to see from you next?
R: Whatever we tell you, we’re going to forget in five minutes and fail to do it.
M: I just finished writing Cookie Chronicles 7, The Cookie of Destiny, about an ill-fated family road trip.
R: Which was inspired by our year-long, family bus tour where we traveled around the United States visiting one Title I elementary school in each state and giving away 25,000 books. It was called the Busload of Books Tour, and you can learn more about it by visiting www.busloadofbooks.com.
M: Some of the things that went wrong on our trip found their way into our book. And several things that did not go wrong also did. Our trip actually went pretty well, so I needed to make some stuff up.
R: But let me tell you something, Robbi has still never fulfilled her lifelong dream of visiting Crater of Diamonds State Park, which closed two minutes after we arrived. This same sad thing happens to Ben’s mom in Book 7.
M: And Robbi has never been sadder than she was while with an extremely leaky bus roof for the first month of our adventure.
R: So read the book, and see if you can figure out what was true and wasn’t true.
M: And after that, we have a book called Life on the Moon coming out in 2026.
R: It’s so good! I love it so much.
M: It’s about Life on the Moon.
R: Just to clarify, the book supposes that there is life on the moon. I get to draw all sorts of wonderful moon creatures.
M: And you know what? We have no proof that there isn’t. But mostly it’s metaphorical life, and we’re using the moon creatures explore the problems of life here on Earth.
R: Like leaky roofs, for example.
M: There are no leaky roofs on the moon, Robbi.
R: I’m still so mad about the leaky roofs on Earth!
M: Just wait five minutes, and you’ll forget all about it.
