I’ve been an editorial illustrator for 35 years and I started at the New York Times when I was a child, about 21 years old. And so I’d been a newspaper man for most of my career. I worked for Time and Newsweek and a lot of the magazines. And now I work for Slate.com which is an on-line news magazine.
When I had my first daughter, Isabelle, in 1998, she just started suggesting things, being with her. I’d written a script for an animation called “Courage of the Blue Man” years ago, and that was my first book, and it became Courage of the Blue Boy and it was printed by Tricycle Press in ‘04.
With Isabelle as a baby, Beasty Bath came about because I had to figure out a way every night to get her in the bathtub and get her into bed, and Beasty Bath is a book where she starts in the bathtub and she ends up in bed. What’s unique about that is when Isabelle was young, she didn’t know she was a little girl.
She thought she was a lion, she thought she was a dragon, she thought she was a lizard, she thought she was a bird. And, in fact, I own a bathrobe with a terrycloth belt and she wore that belt around her waist for like two years. I had to take it off and clean it when she was sleeping.
So Beasty Bath is basically non-fiction
And in the book she transforms into all these different characters where she’s a lion and a dragon, different things.
