I loved to read and began thinking of the world in terms of stories. I also loved to explore. I was a dare-devil. My sister was only 16 months younger and a great playmate and coconspirator. Our neighborhood had a few overgrown vacant lots, one of them with a big fallen tree. We cut saplings and brush to make forts.

I built a stick village in the dirt, kept a nature notebook and wrote and drew in it all day long as I wandered around, examining the environment. John Muir was my hero and I decided to be a naturalist when I grew up.

My sister Becky and I also had many chores and worked hard at them. We often listened to the radio while working (or while drawing). I began illustrating the programs and my favorite books or stories I made up myself.

At college I helped write a musical comedy and acted in lots of plays. A play is very much like a picture book: you select a cast, create costumes and set, then arrange the scenes, building to a climax. I was preparing for my later career without knowing it. After college, I worked at an advertising agency in New York for a while. The work I was given to do was tedious and I had time on my hands so I used it to write graduate school and earned a Master’s degree in art history. It’s been helpful to have a background in fine art and history as I turn more and more to subjects that require research and an authentic look from the past.

Academic life was not for me- I never considered becoming a teacher or a curator. Instead, I made a portfolio of drawings and designs that I could submit to art directors at magazines, book publishers and advertising agencies. Little by little, small jobs came my way. I was asked to make a series of posters for subway advertisements for a radio station. The subject assigned to me was “children at play”. The first poster placed in subway cars caught the eye of a children’s book editor. She tracked me down and asked if I would illustrate a book called Sea Beach Express by George Panetta. It was an incredible stroke of luck. It led to another assignment, then another. I learned, as I went along, how to further a narrative with pictures.

In the years since, I’ve continued to learn from creating illustrations for other peoples’ stories and my own. I’ve done a little more acting, published novels and stories for adults and become a painter, no longer relying on a pen line to give form to a picture. I love drawing funny animals (and people), stories about brave girls, and historical subjects that shed a new light on the past. I never dreamed that I would be a children’s book author when I was young – but it turns out that I was preparing myself to be just that all along.