We spoke with Carl Laferton on the Afterword Podcast, and wanted to share some lightly edited excerpts from the interview here!
Carl Laferton’s, The Garden, The Curtain, and the Cross has been a bestseller at the Westminster Bookstore. It pairs beautiful illustrations with Biblical theology, taking children on a journey from the garden of Eden to God's perfect new creation.
On the Afterword, host Jonny Gibson and Carl talk about why The Garden, The Curtain, and the Cross is a bestseller, his new God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and how Carl ended up being a children’s author entirely by accident.
The Makings of a Bestseller
JONNY: The Garden, the Curtain, and the Cross is something of a bestseller. Can you tell us what the book's about and why you think it has been of such interest for parents and children?
CARL: Essentially, it's a whistle stop journey from creation and the Garden of Eden, all the way through the big story of Scripture, to the new garden city in Revelation, citing the cross and resurrection in its biblical theological context for young kids.
Why is it a bestseller? (I mean, never ask an author why their own book has sold well.) I suppose it's because it’s placing the cross and resurrection in the framework of the whole Bible story. It's also giving key doctrines to young kids of God as Creator, man made in his image, what sin is, why sin matters, who Jesus is, what Jesus has done, and what the future holds under Jesus's rule. I think doing that in 32 pages, parents have appreciated that for their kids and hopefully for themselves as well.
JONNY: I read it the other night to my two smallest children (Zach, 4 and Hannah, 3). It was the first time I'd read it to them and it was interesting to see how engaged they were in it. You've located this great truth about Jesus opening the way back to God in a story from the garden in Eden to the garden city of heaven. Also, you have the repetition of, “Sometimes things were bad, sometimes things were sad,” because of the fall, and the phrase ”the keep out curtain.” They had lots of questions: “Why can't people go into God's presence?”, “Why can't they go into his place, Daddy?” I thought this was interesting compared to other kids books I've read. There were more questions from them as I went along.
How old are your children? What do your kids think of this story?
CARL: Ben's now 11, Abby's 9. So when the book came out in 2016, they were right at the sweet spot. Actually, one of the repetition rhymes, “Because of your sin, you can't go in,” came from me talking to Abby about why Jesus had died on the cross.
JONNY: Catalina Echeverri is the artist and good artwork obviously always makes a good book. What do you think it is about her artwork that helps The Good Book Company– because she hasn't done just this one, she does a lot of the kids' books from The Good Book Company– what do you think it is about her artwork that kids find so interesting?
CARL: Catalina is absolutely fantastic and it's just a privilege to have her illustrating books that you've written. I think she does a couple of things. Her illustrations manage to be both historically accurate and sensitive to the fact that we're dealing with Scripture, so it's not to be taken lightly. But they're also playful where they can be and I think kids resonate with both those things.
The other thing is, she's a very theologically acute and aware believer, and she works that into her illustrations. There's always in her books a few things for those with eyes to see. There's one in The Garden, The Curtain, The Cross where the Lord is visiting the temple in Jerusalem. He's just turned to look at one of the goats being led towards the altar, and it's quite moving to think that the Lord Jesus would have visited the temple and seen the lambs (who were pointing to him) being led towards the altar, and would have known what that was pointing towards. I don't expect 3-5 year olds to necessarily notice that, but for theologically aware adults, there's hidden depths to her illustrations.
I think that's why they've resonated so much with kids, and with parents who are able to say to their kids, “Hey, have you noticed this?” It’s not just the first read-through that kids really love, but they notice more in the second read-through and the third and so on. That, among many other reasons, are why her illustrations have become so much loved.
JONNY: When we got to the second page, Zach said, “Oh, look what a beautiful garden!” It’s the Garden of Eden, but it's not just a simple garden. She's done it so well with all the different animals and different things that you can explore. It’s things like that that keep a kid focused on the page. You read it, but they are really engaged with the words complementing the picture. I think that's probably one of the reasons it's sold so well. Good artwork carries a book.
CARL: Absolutely. One of the good things about being a children's author is that it is very much a team game. Illustrations can either complement, add to, and lift a book and make it sing. Or (however good the words are) they can make the book come over quite dull– which is always a shame when you're talking about the gospel.
JONNY: You studied history at Oxford. Did you ever think while you were doing your degree that you would write children's books?
CARL: No, certainly not in the first year before the Lord brought me to faith. I was going to be a journalist and I did work as a sports journalist for a little while and decided for various reasons that wasn't where the Lord wanted me. Even when I started working for The Good Book Company, I was working as a senior editor working on the adult side of things.
The Garden, the Curtain, and the Cross started as a Bible talk at a summer camp for teenagers. I was given Genesis 3 and we put a big curtain up and ripped it at the right moment to explain the cross. Then, when we wanted to do a book about Easter, I thought: kids love concrete ideas, concrete stories. They can get their heads around that much better than they can abstract concepts. The curtain is literally a divine gift of a visual illustration. It was there for the Israelites to see, to look, to remind them. So that's how I ended up being a children's author entirely by accident.
JONNY: Was The Garden, the Curtain, and the Cross the first children's book you did then?
CARL: Yes, in 2016. Then I wrote The God Contest, which is about Elijah on Mount carmel, looking towards the resurrection. Then God's Big Promises Bible Storybook just came out.
Writing a New Bible Storybook
JONNY: So tell us a bit more about God's Big Promises Bible Storybook.
CARL: Essentially, it's a Bible storybook for 2-6 year olds. We wanted to tell the foundational stories of Scripture faithfully, illustrate them in a way that's engaging and historically accurate, but also give a sense to young kids that the Bible is not just a collection of random stories but one big story. So we went for a covenantal theme–we call them “promises.” There's 92 stories (about half Old Testament, half New Testament.) All the way through, there are five types of promises, and little icons crop up whenever a promise of a particular type is being either made or kept.
What I'm really hoping is that kids are being introduced to the key stories of Scripture in a way that's faithful so that when parents sit down to read them, they don't have to reword it slightly or try to change the point being taught. I hope that kids come out with this sense that the Bible is one story about the God who makes and keeps all of his promises supremely in the Lord Jesus.
JONNY: 92 stories. That tells me you've gone beyond the typical Adam and Eve, Noah in the ark, David and Goliath, Joshua and the walls of Jericho. Tell us some of the lesser known stories you decided to include and why you decided to include those, because they all do play a part in covenant theology in God's redemptive history.
CARL: So we put the classics in because everybody expects to see those. But I also wanted to give the sense that something happened between David and Goliath, and Jesus, other than Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and Daniel not being eaten by lions. So we cover Solomon, we cover the division of the kingdom, we cover the exile, we cover the prophets, and the return.
In the New Testament, I wanted to make sure we saw what the Lord did through his Spirit after he ascended. So we have plenty of stories from Acts and a couple looking at the letters, summing up the Epistles in a few lines. In one sense, I found it harder to narrow it down to the 92 than than I did to get it up to 92. But again, it's trying to give kids and parents a sense of the actual storyline thread through Scripture, and trying to show how the famous stories fit into that storyline rather than being effectively moralistic tales about how to be brave or how to be good.
JONNY: Samson– does he make it in there?
CARL: Samson's made it in there, yeah. I really love the way Jen the illustrator has Illustrated that because when Samson pushes the pillars over, his body is in the shape of a cross. Again, I don't expect your average 2-3 year old to spot it, but it's just one of those little resonances of the Lord Jesus that’s there for those who spot it.
JONNY: Who's the artist?
It’s Jennifer Davidson. She's a Northern Irish illustrator and used to work as an animator. She’s theologically acute, thoughtful, and careful. Again, the great thing about writing kids' books is you write the words and they're on a Word document, and then when the illustrations start coming in, you see it come to life. You sometimes see more being told through the illustrations than you had anticipated.
Jen and I hadn't really noticed this as I wrote, but every time Yahweh appears as fire –Abrahamic covenant, burning bush (or rather not-burning-up bush), Mount Sinai, and then on through Pentecost–she's done it as a with a kind of a blue tinge to show that this is not just a normal fire. It’s really great as you read through it to see those links building up which I hadn't really planned for or anticipated, but when the illustrations start coming through you realize that the Spirit is guiding the illustrator just as much as the author to bring it together.
What Makes a Good Children's Book?
JONNY: What do you think makes a kids’ book cringey?
CARL: Well, I suppose there's two types of cringey. There's the sort of cringey as in when it's written in rhyme, for example, but the rhyme doesn't really work or scan well unless it's being read by the author who knows how it was meant to be– sort of stuffed into its lines and so on. There's cringey when you have a story about something and then there's a sort of a crunching gear shift into the God bit. That can be a bit cringy.
But I think for me as a Christian dad, the worst cringe is when a part of Scripture has been taken out of its context, slightly mishandled, making a point that wasn't intended to be made. Before my kids could read, that was fine because I could reword it on the hoof as we went along. Once the kids started to read and they were able to say “I don't think that word says that, Daddy,” I had to be much more careful about which books we were dipping into and out of. So I guess most of all there's the cringe factor of just not sticking to the Bible story faithfully.
JONNY: I found out with one particular Bible storybook that we've read over the years to my oldest son Ben years ago, Jackie and I would find ourselves having to correct a few things or he would say “Well, what's that mean?” or “Is that true?” It shows the importance of good, orthodox, sound doctrine, even in a children's book so that kids aren't imbibing wrong views of Jesus, how God works in the world, or who God is. That's one of the things we appreciate about the books you've written and The Good Book Company.
CARL: I remember when I wrote the first draft of God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, I was doing it at home and I came down for lunch and told my wife that I finished the first draft. She said, “I hope you’re praying as much as you're writing because a Bible story for little kids will be their first impression of the Lord Jesus, who he is, what he's done, and what he does for us today, and that's actually a big responsibility.” I was really struck by that.
The doctrine we put in kids’ books doesn't just matter as much as what we put in adult books. In one sense it matters more. It's forming their first impressions of who Jesus is, what the world is like. Whereas a 25 or a 45-year-old can sort of sift good from bad, truth from error, 5-year-olds can't. So it was good that Lizzie reminded me that this is a weighty responsibility. She was right that I wasn't on my knees enough about it, so that was a useful reminder for me.
JONNY: We want kids’ books to be good, orthodox, sound on the gospel and on the basics. But we don't want them to be boring either. What do you think makes for a boring children's book?
CARL: I think there are two ditches to fall into. One is you write a really exciting story, there's fantastically fun illustrations, but actually in the end it's a bit fluffy. You're not getting to the nub of the gospel because you were too busy writing a fantastically well-written story. We're a confessional publishing house, so I don't think that's our danger. Our danger is that we are so busy being faithful that we don't adorn the gospel by writing in a way that is engaging and fun, or we have illustrations that appeal to Boomers or Millennials, but actually aren't going to really grab children.
We have a sort of internal aim with our kids’ publishing, which is we want kids to choose to read our books off their bookshelf even when they're next to secular books on their bookshelf. But we also want their Christian parents to be really pleased that their kids have chosen to read one of our books because they know it's going to be faithful in a way that's accessible for their children to grasp, think about, and respond to. So we want our books to be illustrated and written in such a way that they are just as good as anything in Barnes and Noble, but also theologically sound.
JONNY: Any advice for someone listening to this who, maybe is a bit like yourself, never had any aspirations to be a children's author and yet actually feels compelled having done an illustration at a camp or a kids talk in church? He’s thinking, “I'd love to write that up and give it a go as a book.” What's your advice to a young, aspiring children's author?
CARL: I'd mainly say, have a go. The great thing about kids’ books is they're short. You can work out pretty quickly whether they're going to work well or not. It's not like writing an adult book where it can take a year before you realize that it's not a very good idea. So have a go.
The other thing: I try to write by either imagining myself speaking, or literally speaking, to kids of the target age range. The wonderful thing about kids is whereas adults are polite and therefore don't tell you that you've been a bit dull or that they don't understand, kids will let you know. So my other tip apart from just having a go is: if you've got a story on your heart that you think is going to communicate theological truth beautifully, grab some kids of the age that you want to write it for, sit down with them, tell them the story. See how it goes. See what lands, what seems to go over their head. That will give you a good impression of 1) whether it's worth pursuing, 2) which bits work well, which could do a bit more work, and so on. Then, fling it to a publisher.
We have a submissions inbox at thegoodbook.com. People can email us and as publishers, you end up saying “no” to loads of good stuff, but you never know. We publish 2-3 things a year that are in the kids range and adult range that have come into through submissions. Which is always really exciting to see something come from just an idea from somebody we don't know all the way through to publication.
