Audrey has decided a very young age, right, that you wanted to write and illustrate children’s picture books.
I did. I started reading when I was three years old. I was one of these children who just — I have no memory of being taught how to read. I just began to read words everywhere and so I think my biggest influences were right off because I could read that early were Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss and others but then when I was in the fourth grade I really fell in love with Dr. Seuss because here was someone who was doing what I really loved the most which was writing and drawing because I was already writing stories when I was in the second grade.
And this was the only artist/writer that I ran across that could combine both arts so that was exciting to me.
We need to argue about who’s the best artist. It’ll sound like a hopeless case of mutual admiration but that of course is the key to a long and productive relationship. So, of course, when it comes to representational art, I am in a different category than Audrey but her art is so expressive. I am after her on almost a daily basis to do more of it. I find her art to be — she leaves little notes around for telephone calls that I save in a file because they’re masterpieces, so there’s expressive and there’s representational.
And sometimes of course in some of our books she draws the pictures and I color them in which makes for a very interesting artist indeed because you get the expressiveness and the love of form which creates a totally new art form, a new artist.