Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
Heidi and I actually wrote this as a companion book to YOU NEST HERE WITH ME which Harcourt bought speedily. But the editor didn’t want it as it seemed too close to their perennial bestseller TIME FOR BED by Mem Fox and-yes-Jane Dyer. So we sent it to Harper, to the marvelous Maria Modugno
im Burke and I wanted to do a new book together and we had a bunch of ideas, including Grizzly Adams, the Statue of Liberty, Honus Wagner, and a bunch of others. But the editor at Harper I worked with, Maria Modugno, came up with Johnny Appleseed. As he was a local boy (lived some time in Longmeadow, Massachusetts) and
Baby Bear’s Books grew out of two things—first it was the follow up to the successful Baby Bear’s Chairs, both with delicious pictures by Melissa Sweet. And both books were expansions of poems that had been in my much earlier Three Bears Rhyme Book with Jane Dyer. In fact the poem “Read to
I worked on How Do Dinosaurs Counting and Colors at the same time, and as they are small so-called “novelty” books, they are different from the others. They are shorter and they don’t have the same rhyme schemes or cadences.
What fun I had working on this book, enjoying the rhymes and the silliness. And loving the illustrator. Met him in London after the book came out. Thought we had decided on doing a second book and then things fell seriously apart. He didn’t like my second book or was on the move to
The book began with the idea of LITERARY TEA PARTIES and somehow morphed from there. It was my idea, but early on I got daughter Heidi–a great cook–interested in it because I am only a very very plain cook and she is always interested in experimenting. We sold the book in the early 2000 or
This book was meant to be a companion to our successful COLOR ME A RHYME, but I consciously decided to make the poems simpler and to concentrate on rhyming poems since counting books are for the quite young. Along the way, Jason found some wonderful shots for the early
This is the third of the big books about those dinos. It’s about table manners–the good, the bad, and the ugly (“Does he flip his spaghetti high into the air?”) The Scholastic’s marketing staff,
Here is a complicated and ironic book history. About ten years ago I sent around a proposal for this book, listing about fifteen cat folk stories I’d like to retell. Every publisher I sent it to (including Harper) turned it down.
My newest editor hero is Liz Van Doren at Harcourt. She called me about two and a half years ago and said that she wanted to talk to me about doing a series of books that had the same kind of impact as my Scholastic HOW DO DINOSAURS books. In other words,