After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn't know what.

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

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at 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.