Today We Will Be Eaten

In this episode of Reading With Your Kids, Jed welcomes Academy Award–winning director, animator, and author Alan Barillaro to celebrate his new picture book, Today We Will Be Eaten. Alan shares how a seemingly dark premise—a ladybug and dragonfly convinced they'll be eaten—becomes a gentle, meditative story about anxiety, uncertainty, and learning to take a breath. He describes the book as a "little reset," inviting kids and families to slow down, look up, and discover beauty even when life feels scary or unpredictable. Alan talks about the shift from collaborative animation at Pixar to the intensely personal world of writing and illustrating books, where there's "less to hide behind." He explains his creative process: keeping notebooks of ideas for years, working on multiple projects at once like "tomato plants" in a garden, and borrowing lessons from animation—testing work with trusted readers, listening to how it sounds out loud, and embracing failure as an essential part of finding the story. The conversation also touches on kids' anxiety, helicopter parenting, graphic novels as real reading, and Alan's nuanced view of AI and technology as tools that must be used ethically and thoughtfully. He teases upcoming projects, including Bun's Rabbit 2 and another picture book on the way. In the second half, Jed chats with Jennifer Dickinson, author of Maggie's Big Break, a middle grade novel about a girl with a stutter who faces bullying but finds belonging in theater. Jennifer shares her own history with stuttering, using story to help kids feel seen, heard, and brave enough to take risks—and encourages families to co-read and talk honestly about fears, bullying, and courage.