Part career guide, part science lesson, So You Want To Be A Firefighter turns fire behavior, rescue tools, and emergency response into something fascinating and accessible. What were you most determined not to leave out, and what did you most want to show beyond the fire truck?

The 75%. More than three-quarters of the calls a modern firefighter responds to aren’t fires at all. They’re heart attacks, broken bones, seizures, car accidents, floods, chemical spills, the woman down on the kitchen floor, the kid trapped in a wrecked car. If a young reader closed the book thinking “firefighter” means “person who sprays water on flames,” I’d have failed them. Today’s firefighter is an emergency responder in the broadest sense, and the truck on the cover is just the most visible part of a much larger promise.

In addition to including some of the science, the other thing I wouldn’t budge on was the station as a home. The cooking together, arguing over who does the dishes, the 24-hour shifts, the bond that retired firefighters describe missing more than any rescue. Children imagine the dramatic parts on their own. What they don’t see is the long, ordinary middle — the trust built over thousands of shared dinners that makes the unity and teamwork in dangerous moments possible. That trust is the real engineering of a fire crew, even though it’s much quieter than the siren.

The inclusion of historical figures like Molly Williams and references to 9/11 give the book a wider sense of firefighting history and sacrifice. Why did you feel those stories mattered for this audience?

Because firefighting history is a story about who gets to be a hero — and for a long time, the answer was narrower than it should have been. Molly Williams was an enslaved Black woman in New York City who, in the blizzard of 1818, dragged a fire engine through snow when the male firefighters were too sick to respond. She did the job they were paid to do and got none of the recognition they received. She was never officially acknowledged in her own time.

History has corrected that, and a child who reads about her closes the book understanding something true: the people who have always shown up include people whose names were left out of the old books on purpose.

The 343 firefighters on 9/11 belong to a different conversation, but the same lesson. Children today were not alive when that happened. They know it as a date on a wall somewhere. Telling them, plainly, that 343 people ran into those towers while everyone else was running out gives them something solid to hold onto about what human beings are capable of when the moment asks everything of them. I trust kids with that. I think they’re hungrier for that kind of truth than we give them credit for.

I liked that the book offers readers practical ways to start preparing now through fitness, volunteering, and taking on responsibilities. What inspired you to make the book so action-oriented?

Two things. First, kids ages 8-14 are at exactly the age where the gap between “I want to” and “I can start” feels the most discouraging part of dreaming about a career. We tell children to follow their passions, and we mean it well, but the encouragement lands flat without doors they can actually walk through today. So I wanted every reader to close the book with at least one thing they could do this week — and ideally a few more they could pick up over the months ahead.

There’s also an indirect benefit to taking action early that I wanted to honor. Most children will change their minds about what they want to be many times, and that’s exactly as it should be. The habits built while chasing one dream — discipline, service, showing up, paying attention — travel beautifully to the next dream, and the one after that. A child who volunteered at the animal shelter at ten because she wanted to be a veterinarian will carry something from those Saturdays into whatever calling actually claims her. Action turns a dream into a practice, and the practice outlasts any single version of the dream.

Second, and more fundamentally, I wanted parents and teachers reading over the child’s shoulder to have something to do together. “Make a fire escape plan for your home — seriously, tonight” is in there because real firefighters will tell you it’s the single most important thing a family can do. That sentence has nothing to do with becoming a firefighter someday. It has to do with not dying in a house fire next month. If the book convinces one family to walk through their house this weekend and pick a meeting spot in the yard, the book has already earned its place on the shelf, regardless of what the reader grows up to be.

Aspirational and practical aren’t opposites. I aim for these books to be both at once.

Your So You Want To Be A… series consistently treats kids like capable thinkers rather than passive learners. Why is that philosophy important to your work?

Because the way you write to a child is the way you tell them what you think they’re capable of, and they’re listening for that signal even when the words are about something else. A book pitched slightly above where a child stands is an invitation. A book pitched slightly below is a ceiling — and children sense the difference within a page or two. Give them the harder vocabulary, the surprising fact, the genuine complexity, and most will rise to meet it, and feel taller for having done so.

My North Star for this whole series has been a single question: what would I want to hand a curious child? Not a child whose curiosity I plan to manage, but a child whose curiosity I trust to lead somewhere good if I give it real material to chew on. That means the surprising facts, the hard parts of the job, the historical wrong that wasn’t righted in its time. It’s important to provide tools to understand new concepts presented, and sometimes, younger kids will only pick up a piece of it the first time around, but the reach itself is part of what makes the reading worth doing.

Underneath all of this is a permission slip I am trying to slide across the table: you are allowed to take yourself seriously. Your questions are real questions. Your interests are real interests. You don’t have to wait until some later age to be a thinking person — you already are one, and here is a book that proceeds on that assumption.

There is also something subtly political in it, though I don’t say it that way to kids. We live in an era that markets to children constantly and listens to them rarely. A book that meets a child eye to eye is doing something small but real against that tide. It’s saying: you are a person whose attention is worth earning, not capturing. If a child closes one of these books and feels — even without naming it — that someone took them seriously for 38 pages, that’s the experience I’m trying to give. Everything else follows from there.

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