October 2009

I had written this little poem many years earlier, showed it to a few editors who shrugged and couldn’t figure out what to do with it, though all along I thought it a perfect picture book. And then I began a relationship with the Canadian publisher Key-Porter where my dear friend and editor Jonathan

The fourteenth book that my photographer son Jason and I have done together, I think it is one of my favorites. The photographs—as always—are stunning and the design elements have matched the elegance of both Jason’s pictures and the bird itself. The poems are varied in kind (there’s

This book began in a very different way from most of my books. My dear friend Gary Lippincott, an illustrator I have known for years and whose career I have had a bit of a hand in. His first book sale was for the cover of my anthology Werewolves, at my request of the editor; and when I had my

I had the start of this book years ago and wrote the opening couple of verses while listening to a talk by Sid Fleischman. Heidi was sitting next to me and was appalled at my bad manners, but when I told Sid afterward, he just laughed. It took me months to get the book to where I was happy with it.

The idea for this book came from the Scholastic salesmen and the editor who all felt it would be a winner. And since they did a huge Toys R Us push for the book, they asked Mark and me to sign 7500 (that’s the correct number) bookplates.. Without thinking, without remembering that I have

I began this years and years ago, with a young illustrator, and it was a watermelon baby. But she disappeared from the scene. About fifteen years later, I rewrote it entirely and finally found the perfect editor in a Canadian publisher for the book. She found

When going through Jason’s backlog of photographs—never an onerous task but rather a real joy—I realized how many pictures of animals and birds reflected in water that he had. Almost enough for a book. So I wrote some poems for the best of the pictures and started trying to sell it. Boyds