Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
The umpty dozenth book in the series was one suggested by the editor. My mind had gone on walkabout, so we brainstormed ideas. But once I knew a direction, the rhyme began to flow. And boy was I glad it did! I remembered all those school days when friends got mad and did bad things, said bad things, and then
A collection of poems based this time on nursery rhymes, in which poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich and I write poems from differing viewpoints than the originals. This follows the well received GRUMBLES FROM THE FOREST collection which did the same for fairy tales.
I had written this Little Frog book a couple of years ago, it had gotten some nice rejections, but then sold a picture book to Brian Sockin for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new children’s line. Turns out Brian (fastest editor/publisher in the East) also had a line of non-bird books called Persnickety
After Jason and I did THE EGRET’S DAY for Boyds Mills, and with the then editor’s enthusiasm for another project, we settled on the idea of alligators as being a good follow up because Jason lives in South Carolina and already had a whole lot of alligator photos from there as well as from having been an Everglades Fellowship winner
I began this book (a tribute to a cam song I loved, “The Green Grass Grows All Around”) when I saw Bob Marstall’s latest work. Bob, an old friend of 35 plus years, had up to that time been notable for his careful, realistic landscapes and nature books. He won an Orbis Pictus award among other honors for them.
What to Do with a Box was first written in the 1980s and never sold. Partly because I didn’t know how to solve the problems in it, and partly because the genre (concept book) had pretty much died. So I put it in a drawer and somewhere in 2014 or so I rediscovered it, re-read it, knew how to revise it. Also, concept books were back in vogue.
I wrote part of this book (slightly altered) as a poem which was published by ricket Magazine back in the 1990s, and then over the years reworked it till it was a book about all four seasons and the circularity of nature. I hadn’t known Lisel Ashlock’s work till I saw the first sketches and fell in love with her pictures and their intricate interlock.
I began this book after I heard of a whale (or porpoises) stranding and rescue effort in one of the fishing villages in Fife, Scotland where I have a summer home. A friend who saw it all told me about it. I set it back in time and place to the 1970s when my husband and I iused to take our children camping beachside in Maine.
Heidi and I wrote this book about eleven years ago, sold it to the very first editor, the marvelous Liz Van Doren. And we did a couple of good revisions with her. She loved the book. Then Harcourt imploded and Liz was without a job. She became an editor of adult books. Nest languished five years at
Those dinos, they keep on going. And this one began because the editor asked for it. I made a dozen wrong tries until I got it right. She and I made lists of possible scenarios. And only then did I manage to get it right. Mark Teague’s pictures do indeed steal the show, and it seems nothing is going to