Always Regarding the Reader with Andy Griffiths

Andy Griffiths, author of You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast (Feiwel & Friends), joins Matthew to talk about puncturing the vanity and making us believe.

Listen along:

About the book: You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast by Andy Griffiths and Bill Hope. Published by Feiwel & Friends.

Come along with New York Times-bestselling author Andy Griffiths (The 13-Story Treehouse) on a brand-new adventure that plunks the reader right into the middle of all the wacky action and laughs with peanut butter monsters and its unique storytelling style—perfect for fans of Dog Man and InvestiGators!

Hey, you—yes, you!

Remember when we found that really deep hole and you jumped in and I had to jump in to rescue you and at the bottom of the hole we found the cave of the legendary Peanut Butter Beast?

That was one of our deepest—and most dangerous—adventures ever!

What? You don’t remember?

Well, have I got a story for you!

Let me remind you how it all went down … and down … and down … and down …

More:

Visit Andy Griffiths online at andygriffiths.com.au 

Learn more about Boyds Mills and their upcoming programs by visiting www.boydsmills.org. 

Transcript:

NOTE: Transcript created by Descript. I've attempted to clean up any typos, grammatical errors, and formatting errors where possible.

Andy:  The world has always seemed to me like a vast toy shop. One of my favorite movies is Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, where you see Pee-Wee Herman, a man-child, in a world that's just full of possibility and wonder and opportunities for delight. Um, so yeah,  I think I was that kid who always had a project. I remember my next-door neighbor who, one, gave me a thesaurus when I was 10 years old. You could see there was something going on, 'cause I was always writing. And oh, she said, "You've always got a project going. You've always got a scheme going." And, yeah, she was right. 

Matthew: That is the voice of Andy Griffiths, author of the Treehouse series, including The 13-Story Treehouse, and 2026-2027 Australian Children’s Laureate. Andy’s latest book is the second in a new series and it’s called You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast (Feiwel & Friends).

Welcome back to the Children’s Book Podcast, where we celebrate the books and creators who help young readers feel seen, supported, and understood. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Boyds Mills, positively impacting kids by amplifying the voices of storytellers who inspire children to become their best selves.

I’m your host, Matthew Winner—teacher, librarian, writer, and a fan of kids.

Andy has written over a dozen books since we last talked, but remains a writer who always refers to the reader in their work. 

Here are a few of the things I learned in this conversation: 

NUMBER ONE: The spark for Andy’s new series was being asked “Can you put me in the book?” by hundreds and hundreds of readers that he met. So… he did!

NUMBER TWO: Getting away with it. Andy is silly. His plot points are ridiculous. It’s fun to a level that squeals in delight with the readers. And he gets to do this as a career. Imagine feeling so comfortable in showing up just in this way. I love this for him. And I hope it can influence us all just a little bit too.

And NUMBER THREE: Andy wasn’t sure what kind of stories he would be able to make when Terry Denton, his longtime collaborator, bowed out from doing any more books. And then came Bill Hope. I love the love and adoration Andy shares for Terry. And I love the new stories Andy and Jill and Bill get to explore together. 

So, a little about You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast (Feiwel & Friends) from the publisher:

“Come along with New York Times-bestselling author Andy Griffiths (The 13-Story Treehouse) on a brand-new adventure that plunks the reader right into the middle of all the wacky action and laughs with peanut butter monsters and its unique storytelling style—perfect for fans of Dog Man and InvestiGators!

Hey, you—yes, you!

Remember when we found that really deep hole and you jumped in and I had to jump in to rescue you and at the bottom of the hole we found the cave of the legendary Peanut Butter Beast?

That was one of our deepest—and most dangerous—adventures ever!

What? You don’t remember?

Well, have I got a story for you!

Let me remind you how it all went down … and down … and down … and down …”

Ready to embark on a breathless and incredible adventure?

Please welcome Andy Griffiths to the podcast.

Andy: Hi, I'm Andy Griffiths, an Australian author, a very silly, sometimes exciting, always adventurous fiction for middle grade and their parents. And yeah, I just I can't believe I'm getting away with it after 25 years and multiple series. It started with the Just series that e- that morphed into the Treehouse series.

And now I'm writing the You and Me series, featuring you the reader as one of the main characters, along with me, of course, 'cause I'm always in my books. 

Matthew: I am so glad to reconnect with you, Andy. Thanks again for setting [00:01:00] time aside to chat. 

Andy: My pleasure. I actually like talking about writing even more than writing.

It's a close thing. 

Matthew: No kidding. 

Andy: It's fun to reflect. 

Matthew: I love that. Before we go any deeper, let me just ask you, today, as I meet you midway through your weekend, Andy, what's giving you hope today? 

Andy: Today w- it will be there for you tomorrow, but it's Record Store Day, and I'm a passionate music collector.

And music fuels a lot of my inspiration for books. I'm pretty excited to get out to my local record store today straight after this. It's called Strange World Records, and Richie, who runs it, has very strange music that gives me a lot of really strange and wonderful ideas. Next week it will be International Book Crawl Day where we crawl around to all the bookshops in Melbourne.

I'm really enjoying these days that [00:02:00] celebrate analog forms of entertainment, records and books. And that's a big part of where I get all my ideas from, other people's books and records. Yeah. 

Matthew: I love hearing about Book Crawl Day, but I have actually a really cool fun fact to share with you about Record Store Day, which is that- Yeah

I'm from Baltimore, and my- Yes ... local record store is The Sound Garden, is the people that started Record Store Day. 

Andy: Oh, wow. So 

Matthew: we will be there at, ugh, like- five in the morning, we will go. My wife and I will go and, Wow, that's- ... wait in line to see what we can see. It is, it's amazing actually. You're the first person I've talked to i- in my hemisphere that is saying, "Oh yeah, Record Store Day's coming up."

I love that. I'm very excited to make that connection with you. 

Andy: Yeah. Excellent. 

Matthew: Mine is always both the chance to get, to see, they've already published what list of things that they'll have in store. But it's also really fun to just have... [00:03:00] they always have a camera out where they're interviewing people about, "What brought you in?

Why are you here? What were you looking for?" And as you're waiting in line, you're just hearing people- Yeah ... with joy saying, "I've been waiting for this one thing, and I can't believe I got it." There's nothing this year that I'm looking for, but I'll go shop the used records and be excited to be around other music listeners.

Andy: Yeah. No, I've just got one on my list, the the band Air- ... have released a live album. And so yeah, I'll be biking around Melbourne trying to find my one copy of that. I 

Matthew: hope you'll get a copy, yeah. 

Andy: I think I will. 

Matthew: Yeah. Love it. Let me ask you, if you don't mind, to share a brief book talk of You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast, which is book two in this You and Me series.

Yeah. The Land of Lost Things being the first one. But just in case there are listeners, readers out there who haven't encountered this series yet, let alone the sequel, do you mind sharing a book talk? 

Andy: Absolutely. You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast starts with You and Me out looking for [00:04:00] adventure.

We walk into a very deep, dark forest. We find a very deep, dark hole. And you said to me, "How deep is that hole?" And I said, "I don't know. I'll drop a rock down, and we'll count the seconds, and then we'll figure it out." But we dropped the rock, and we couldn't hear it hit the bottom. And you said, "I've got a better idea."

And I said, "What's that?" And you said, "I'm gonna jump in." And I said, "No, that's a terrible idea." But it was too late. You'd already jumped in, and we fell down a hole for a long time. At least 50 pages we are falling down a hole- ... because of you. And to cut a long story short, at the bot- we, we had a... we got hungry, so we had to have a peanut butter picnic 'cause I'd brought peanut butter and bread and a table.

Matthew: A table. And, 

Andy: When we hit the bottom, we got peanut butter all over us. But to our horror, we discovered that we were outside the cave of the dreaded Peanut Butter Beast, and it was very interested in us, and that's where [00:05:00] the real story begins. 

Matthew: I wrote this to you prior to talking, but I am obsessed with this voice you found for this story, as you're doing right here, the- We had this adventure together.

Let me remind you of the thing we did together. It is a exceptional invitation to play and also to practice storytelling. Can you remember where you found that voice for the series? 

Andy: I've always... I think my one strength as a writer is that I always address the reader that you are front and center in my mind.

And throughout The Treehouse Series, although I was hanging out with Terry and Jill, I was... We would often refer directly to the reader. I'd go, "Hey, readers what do you think? Can you help us solve this? 'Cause we're not getting anywhere." The reader is my companion in every book anyway, and I...

And as you say, [00:06:00] play, I'm playing with the reader. I'm leading you down the garden path, making you think one thing and then surprising you with something else. So it was a short step when to the reader being actually in the book with me, and it was something my readers requested over many years through f- reader mail.

"Can you put me in the book? Can I be in your next book, please?" Of 

Matthew: course. 

Andy: Because, it is so personal. Terry and Jill and me are their friends, and "Can I be there, too?" And so I thought, "How do we do that?" Because all readers are different shapes, sizes, genders, nationalities, ages, and I thought, "That's gonna be a hard character to show."

But then I met Bill Hope, who is drawing the incredible drawings for this series, and he said, "We'll just put a cardboard box adventure helmet on our heads- ... 'cause we are adventurers, and then no one will see what we look like." [00:07:00] And so those, that character can be you, no matter who you are. And there's an extra level of complication because if you're a parent reading to your child, you become the me character.

Your child is the you character, and vice versa. So whoever's reading the book is me. Yeah, very complicated. Oh, that's 

Matthew: so cool. I didn't even think, 'cause I'm reading it in my own head. I'm not even thinking that I'm the me- wow. I, I think it's so selfless that you bring in the reader, but I think there's probably a lot of writers and illustrators that seek ways for their readers to see themselves in the books, to have the stories be about them, to be part of it.

What a neat way to literally bring them in. That's fantastic. It's, 

Andy: it's a silly way because- Of course it is ... even if the reader is not you sorry, if the main character is not you, what we do as readers, we tend to [00:08:00] identify with that character- 

Matthew: Yes ... 

Andy: anyway. But yeah, I'm just, I'm teasing the readers with this, 'cause now they're saying, "Can you put me in the book?"

And I say, "I already have. You're in the book."

Matthew: It's delightful too when you share in the book this was your i- remember, this was your idea. You're the one that brought these things," or- ... "You're the one that led us into the... I love that sort of, we wouldn't be in this exact same mess, reader, if it weren't for you."

That's fun. You'll 

Andy: see the same dynamic in The Treehouse is- Oh, yeah ... that Andy, the narrator, is always blaming Terry for everything that goes wrong. Not realizing for a moment that he's part of the problem, 'cause Andy- Of course ... struts around, "I'm the best, I'm the greatest." And I have a lot of fun puncturing that vanity of Andy thinking he's in control.

And same with the reader. I was gonna boss the reader around a lot more, but I didn't wanna come across as too nasty. 

Matthew: That's probably kind. [00:09:00] Did you and Bill... You mentioned about Bill providing some of the solution to how the reader would see themselves in the book. Did you and Bill pair up prior to selling the book series?

Did you come in together? 

Andy: What happened was I worked with Terry Denton for probably 25 years- That's a long time, yeah ... on all of my books, and we got to the end of The Treehouse series after 13 books, and he said, "I think I'm gonna retire now because you've worn me out-" "... because every book had a thousand pictures in it."

And I said, that's fine. I'm real- I love this series." It was the combination of adventure, fantasy, and comedy that I'd try, was trying to get right from the beginning of when I started writing. So I didn't think I'd find another Terry, but Mr. Big Nose, the publisher, had other [00:10:00] ideas- Mr.

Big Nose "We found this guy, Bill. We think he might be a really good match." And I was like, "Yeah, I can't see. I c- I don't know how that's gonna work." But I sent him just a paragraph, which is the paragraph I described to you. You and me, we're walking through the forest. And Bill just illustrated it in such a cinematically vivid, compelling way, and then kept the story going h- himself.

And I was like, "Oh, my goodness, this guy gets it, and we could... we can have a lot of fun together." So off we went. We... The books are written by me and Bill, and my wife, Jill. Jill is a crucial part of my writing process, being both my wife and an editor. That's how we met. 

Matthew: Oh, okay. And 

Andy: so it's a sort of slow motion, three-way improvisation over the course of a year, where we're figuring, we're throwing ideas around, we're [00:11:00] playing, we're being silly.

We're picking the best ideas and then putting them in a sequence that we believe, that, that makes us believe what's happening is real. And anything that doesn't, anything that takes us away from that, we edit out ruthlessly and we rewrite and redraw. So yeah, it's a very pleasurable, sometimes frustrating process over a year.

But we want the young reader, first the young reader, to just g- go into the book and hardly even realize they're reading before they're swept up or in, in it. And anything we can do to make that easier, such as the illustrations doing all of the the huge amount of work of description. They don't have to read a a description with hundreds of words of us falling down a hole.

They're just turning the page gleefully, watching us fall down the hole, and being silly as we, we go. [00:12:00] 

Matthew: I like, from a librarian standpoint, I like that having so many series of pages where there's only a couple words or maybe a sentence or two, that we can pace ourselves the way we want to with the illustrations.

Take them in or move quickly. And it's only after a little while that we get a half a page of text or something like that. That both gives that reader the sense of accomplishment of, "Look how much I read today," Exactly But also I feel like keeps pace with the reader almost the way a picture book does, right?

That we ... You're orchestrating the reader on, "Here's how I want you to read this."

Almost, also like a novel in verse does a similar thing, only with white space rather than with illustration. It works really well. Yeah. So neat to know that the three of you are ... You're not writing the entire manuscript and giving it to Bill and saying, "Figure out where the pacing is," but rather that you're crafting it together.

Andy: [00:13:00] Yeah. I've got an idea of the ultimate feeling I want the reader to have, and with any book I write really, especially You and Me, I want this feeling of breathless, incredible adventure that is so outlandish that you're just like, "Ah, this, I never thought of this before." And so I know that feeling that I'm trying to get, and so when Bill's giving me pictures, my inner 10-year-old knows exactly what he wants.

But I don't know what I want before I see it, and so Bill helps me enormously there. A character like our frenemy Mr. Johnny Knucklehead,

Matthew: Oh, the Knuckleheads. 

Andy: Who's a sort of Batman style villain, who has a knuckle-shaped head and a little suit, and he's always like a little gangster helping them at times, but then when the treasure is there, he's the one who's gonna double-cross them and steal it.

And even though he's done it 100 [00:14:00] times, You and Me are so dumb that they say, "You promise you won't double-cross us this time?" Yeah, I promise. Yeah." And then he double-crosses them. "Hey, you double-crossed us." "Yeah." I love that pantomime villain type of s- thing. 

Matthew: That's fun. It reminds me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth, that, that sort of playfulness or, I don't know.

Yeah. It's that or Space Balls to me or something. There's something in me where that moment felt like humor but felt slightly shifted in the story to the other humor and I found really delighted, delighted my brain and my memory. 

Andy: Yeah. Jill, one of Jill's favorite books is The Phantom Tollbooth, and and y- I think everything I love is a, is play.

You're just- Yeah ... playing with ideas, with pictures, with words, and I think that's what you do as a kid very naturally is you're just experimenting with things. And I think that's what they pick up on in our books is that spirit of play [00:15:00] feels very normal and real and genuine to them. And I want that for teenagers and adults as well.

I think play is a really underrated, Way of solving problems of being creative solutions to many aspects of life. It just works better if you're slightly loose and able to make a mistake and it doesn't really matter.

Matthew: Were you a playful kid, Andy? You clearly have held onto some sort of play through your work with writing for children and being in front of children.

But has that always been in place? 

Andy: I think so. I'm sitting in a room here just full of hundreds of toys, many of which I collected as a kid, or objects that are odd in some way that stimulated my imagination. So yeah, the world has always seemed to me like a vast toy shop. One of my favorite movies is Pee-Wee's Big Adventure- 

Matthew: Oh, yes

where you 

Andy: see [00:16:00] Pee-Wee Herman a man-child in a world that's just full of possibility and wonder and opportunities for delight. So yeah, I think I was that kid, but I was also... always had a project. I remember my next-door neighbor who one... gave me a thes- thesaurus when I was 10 years old. Okay.

You could see there was something going on, 'cause I was always writing. And oh, she said, "You've always got a project going. You've always got a scheme going." And yeah, she was right. That's 

Matthew: interesting. About whatever it is, that you were just a kid that your brain needed to be busy, needed to be occupied, needed to have something to focus on.

Andy: And it was usually based around books- Cool ... because I would read a book, and then I'd wanna do my own version of it. 

Matthew: Oh, I love that. And go 

Andy: that's funny. I'm just gonna do a k- a kind of funny comedy version of it for the entertainment of my friends and my family [00:17:00] and and myself, most importantly."

Matthew: So that- that's no different than your readers, is it? Is your readers making their own Tree Story stories, or your readers drawing your characters or things like that?

They're playing the same way you did 

Andy: Exactly, and that's what I wanna pass on to them. Yes. I was in e- a high school English teacher for a few years, and I met a number of kids who...

I met most of the kids at this school- ... didn't like reading, the, the- Yeah ... readings for losers, it's, it's- Oh ... why would you read when you can watch a movie or do a computer game? And I said no, reading is a really particular pleasure. It's where you are in collaboration with the writer.

You're actually making it up out of the black marks they give you on the page. You're casting it. You're you're making those characters just how you want, and it's a game that you're playing with the writer, and it goes very deep when you fall in love with a book. Y- truly you [00:18:00] remember that feeling for the rest of your life."

And so I had many such books, and I thought, "What a pity these, the new generation are leaving this alone." So I started writing provocative, silly pieces for my students. "Oh, did I ever tell you about the time my bum detached, my butt detached itself from my body- ... and ran away and tried to take over the world?"

"No." I said here it is in this story." "Can you write about this, sir?" I said, "Yes, you can write and imagine anything." Which takes me back to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland- Sure ... the Red Queen. When I was your age, I used to imagine six impossible things before breakfast. Before breakfast.

And that was me as a kid, just trying to, what else can I imagine, and- ... or someone, or a guy the guy who ran the holiday house that we used to stay at, his name was Mr. [00:19:00] Hollibon. He could have been a character in- Oh, beautiful name. Mr. Hollibon. Mr. Hollibon's Holiday House. Oh, there's a title I should write.

It writes itself, doesn't it? Yeah, I think that's my next series. He'd say, "Oh, my favorite food is hot ice cream. I love hot ice cream." And we'd go I puzzled on that for years. How could it be ice cream if it's hot? It would just be a puddle, and I think that's the sort of grain of sand that makes the pearl.

Yeah. And I see books as a huge opportunity to put a lot of grains of sand into kids' minds so that their imagination grows. That's really what you want at the end of all of this. 

Matthew: That's so delightful. Were you a- When did illustration come into your stories? Were you writing... Were you drawing your own things?

Were you, I don't know, inspired by Jules Feiffer in putting little line art in, inside of things? Because I know you to be a person- Yeah ... that engages readers [00:20:00] with both words and illustration. It'd be... You can write whatever you want, but it'd be almost odd for me as one of your readers to experience a book that was only prose and was devoid of illustration, because I've come to know your voice as a person that talks to me in words and in pictures.

When did illustration come in? Or maybe that's always been a part of your DNA. 

Andy: It's always been a part of it. The famous book in Melbourne, it was written 100 years ago, it's called Cole's Funny Picture Books, written by a bookseller E.W. Cole, who had the Cole's Book Arcade, which was- Oh ... three stories of exotic animals of books and couches that he invited people to come in and just read.

They didn't have to buy. He just saw reading as an unmitigated good and how we're gonna develop ourselves. And he made compilations of funny pictures and funny rhymes and odd little stories [00:21:00] that were designed to give a young reader pleasure, because he said, "That's how you make a reader. You give...

You make it a pleasurable experience, and you can have a lot of..." And pictures don't require any decoding, which is hard work for a y- an emerging reader. You see it in Alice in Wonderland. The pictures of John Tenniel are inseparable from the text, and they're the first thing that captures you even before you can read.

You're intrigued. So they were just part and parcel of the experience for me. And my early attempts to write my own stories, w- I did stick figures, 'cause I have- Okay ... I don't have conventional drawing ability. But Terry used to say, "You're a very good stick figure artist, 'cause you can get your ideas across."

Matthew: Okay. And he 

Andy: said, "That's what's important in a drawing," or I would say in writing, too. Doesn't have to be fancy writing, just has to [00:22:00] do the job of getting into the reader's mind and making them see something that they'd never thought of before. So yeah, my wri- my drawing hasn't evolved beyond 10-year-old stick figures, and I think if you were being harsh, you'd say my writing hasn't really evolved beyond the 10-year-old mad things I used to write.

It's just better edited now.

Matthew: It's an absolute pleasure- Yeah ... to read your books, as much as it is to talk to you, Andy. Thank you so much again for b- For talking to me, and especially thank you for writing for our readers. As a librarian, I know firsthand the way that my readers connect with your work, and that always makes me feel a certain way toward authors, knowing that they, that they're- Well-

helping kids see themselves. Yeah 

Andy: And I feel the same way towards librarians and teachers and parents anyone- Beautiful community ... who's helping- Yeah ... connecting kids with books, I think is doing [00:23:00] really important work now more than ever. 

Matthew: Love that. Andy I'm gonna let you go asking you about my students.

I will see a library full of children, not tomorrow, it's our weekend, but soon. Is there- Yeah ... a message that I can bring to them from you? 

Andy: If you're going to go on an adventure, make sure you're wearing your helmet. Safety first. And all you need is a cardboard box with a couple of toilet rolls for ears and a brush for d- for

I don't know why you've got a brush on your head. Whatever you wanna put on your helmet is fine with me. But yeah, put your helmet on, and here's the message, let's go.

Matthew: Thank you to Andy Griffiths for joining me on the Children’s Book Podcast. 

You can pick up your own copy of You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast (Feiwel & Friends) wherever books are found. Consider supporting independent bookstores by shopping through Bookshop.org.

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And on that note…

Be well. And read on.