In January, 2002, after he endured months of pain, an MRI showed a cancerous tumor in my husband’s skull. In March radiation therapy was started. The time from discovery to treatment was an eternity for us. An eternity. With that metaphor I
Hoptoad
HOPTOAD is one of the shortest picture books (if not the shortest) I have ever written.But the pictures by Karen Schmidt give it a longer story. The piece began as a silly rhyme which I thought might be a board book, but my editor had broader (wider?) thoughts and so it became a picture book.
Flying Witch, The
I have always loved Baba Yaga, the Russian witch with the iron nose who flies around the forest in a mortar and pestle. When my HarperCollins editor asked me to tell a Baba Yaga story
History Mystery: Roanoke, The Lost Colony
In many ways this book was the hardest of all to write so far of the Unsolved Mysteries, because it had three separate stories of travel to America by boat, with slaughters on all sides, and then a missing colony. Also, because it dealt in part with
Animal Train
I had written an early version of ANIMAL TRAIN called ALL ABOARD THE ANIMAL TRAIN which I tried to sell–unsuccessfully–for a number of years. It lacked something, but I wasn’t smart enough or alert enough to understand what it needed.
Bedtime for Bunny
I have always wanted to write an original board book for very young children. My agent challenged me because–so she said–I tend to be a writer of very sophisticated books. I think she saw it as a stretching exercise. So I tackled the area–in rhyme,
Time for Naps
I had written two board books already–ANIMAL TRAIN and BEDTIME FOR BUNNY. Enjoying the form (and the wonderful editor at Little Simon) I decided to try another. I wrote a book about a little dinosaur resisting naptime. But it
Horizons
I love working with my son Jason on books. His photos are so strong, so powerful, that their very existence pushes me to write poems to match them. When we were completing COLOR ME A RHYME, and my husband and I were
Devil’s Arithmetic, The (Movie)
Lovely adaptation of the book done for Showtime, starring Kirsten Dunst as Hannah. See the book page for information on the book.
Stuart Quartet: Girl in a Cage
I first heard the story of wicked King Edward Longshanks putting the captured Scottish Countess of Buchan in a cage through a folksong. Then I found out that Longshanks had not only put her in a cage, but Robert the Bruce’s sister and twelve year old daughter as well.