The Children's Book Podcast · Matthew C. Winner

Bringing Joy with Steve Light

·31 min·2 clips

Steve Light explains how a classroom weather chart sparked his Gus and Sully book series for preschoolers.

Steve Light starts with the classroom. Teaching helps because he can step away from the desk, read with three-year-olds, and see what actually catches them. Matthew Winner welcomes him through books like Have You Seen My Dragon, Swap, Blackbird Yellow Sun, A Spider Named Itsy, and Gus and Sully All Week Long, but the talk keeps circling back to the children in front of him. A story's shape, a child's laugh, or a flicker of fear can all tell Steve something useful about making books. That gives the conversation its nice push and pull: practical craft talk, but warm at the edges. Preschool is not separate from the books. It is where some of the books get tested, gently and in real time. Story boxes become part of that. Steve talks about carving little wooden figures and using them almost like puppets, mostly for familiar tales. Then the wolf gets interesting. In other years, one child might be nervous about the hand puppet. This year, more of the class needed time with it. So he keeps showing them it is fabric, letting the fear shrink a bit. That opens into why scary stories belong with young children at all. Steve does not make the answer too tidy. Stories about danger can help children practice: build a stronger house, look after one another, come back and try again. Eventually the children ask for those stories. He makes figures so they can act them out themselves, and their versions become another thing worth watching. Books work that way too. A giant Richard Scary book gives the room a shared world to inspect and love together. The ending comes back to need. People need stories because they teach how to live, why lives matter, and why everyone gets to tell one.

As heard by us

A warm look at how stories help young children face fear, humor, and the world.

Steve Light talks through storytelling, humor, fear, and the small work of helping young children feel safe inside older stories. The conversation moves from board books to Grimm fairy tales to Richard Scarry, and it lands on how children react in the moment: what unsettles…

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Why you'd press play

You want a gentle, book-loving conversation shaped by classrooms, fairy tales, and childlike wonder.

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