Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.

What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.

I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart -- to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'