I’ve always been friends with authors, because I am an author, but I didn’t really understand the power of some of my friends’ work until I became a parent. And there is nothing more amazing to me than reading to my daughter and now my son, who are both very young, and watching their minds just expand right in front of me as we explore these seemingly simple picture books. I think we are living in a golden age of picture books. And as I’m reading them and inspired by them, and watching my kids be inspired by them, I feel so privileged that I get to do this too.
There’s also something else that I think about as a picture book writer, and somebody who reads picture books to my children. I think about my childhood, and I was never surrounded by books. We didn’t own books. My mom read to us sometimes, but it wasn’t the focal point of our childhood. And then sometimes I look up from the chair I read to my kids in, and I just see that the walls are lined with books and I see the magic that can happen in this space. And I truly am amazed by the power of literature.
My daughter, she’s now seven, but for a long time, before she could read text on her own, she sort of measured the world by referencing the books we had read together and that was amazing to me. Like if something happened, she’d say, “Oh, it’s sort of like this when that happened in that book. And do you remember that scene?” And I was like, “Wow, she’s using it as a reference point to life, which I never did as a kid.” So I see the power of literature more as a parent than I ever have as an author, which is pretty profound.
