When I was a kid living in the city, the city was fun. It was paved. The tree that grew in Brooklyn the one tree was in front of my house. But in the summertime, we used to go to upstate New York, and the world was just completely the opposite. It was green. It was soft. You could walk around in bare feet, and we used to go out and pick lots of berries that grew wild. I always thought of the world as being particularly generous and joyful. And when I was searching my memories, trying to write a book for very young children about being joyful, that popped right up.
So, I wrote this whole story about berries, and it turned out that I was writing too much. And a very good editor said to me, “Why don’t you just focus on the berries?” I took the names of the berries, and I just started making silly rhymes that go along with the name of the berries: oneberry, twoberry, hatberry, shoeberry, canoeberry. And I wrote this nonsense poem, which was a lot of fun. The writing comes first. Then I had to illustrate this nonsense poem, and the illustrations give it kind of a rationale. You take a nonsense poem and you illustrate it, and it seems like, “Oh, yeah. That could happen.”
And so it became Jamberry.
