Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
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.
The Last Changeling is the middle book of a trilogy. Always the toughest part. You have to move the plot along, add some new characters, but not solve any of the major mysteries/explain away all the hanging threads. Indeed, Adam (my son and co-writer) and I didn’t really yet know
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
Trash Mountain after I had been rereading a lot of Jane Austen and that voice was stuck in my head. Except, of course, this was a squirrel. I knew quite a bit about the war between the red squirrels and gray squirrels, mostly from British magazines and newspapers (I live part of the year in
I was asked (at a time when I was incredibly busy) by National Geographic too do a book of amazing (often heroic) animal stories. I said only if I could write it with my children, all of whom were well-published writers. They agreed. I made a list of fascinating animal stories, from the dog (& team)
This began as a short story in 1994 called “An Infestation of Unicorns” in my collection HERE THERE BE UNICORNS. Not my first foray into unicorns (that would be poems and a novel called THE TRANSFIGURED HART). Then I met the Zonderkidz editor at the Texas Library Association meeting and we hit it off.
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