I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.