It’s been such a blessed life, but it’s happened - you know, now I have - I’ve written more than 200 children’s books. I mean it’s — and it’s even a little bit scary to say that. But I never set out to do it. I never said, “I’m gonna be an author.” “I’m gonna win awards.” “I’m gonna be” — none of that. I — it was all organic. I wrote the first books, because I wanted my students to have that material. I wrote these sort things. I wanted my daughter to have it and then other children to have it, and — and it has all happened a little bit at a time. It’s like — and I tell kids when they comment on this, and I go, “Look, I never set out to be a grandmother of nine kids. I can tell you I first had a daughter and then a son and then another. And, you know, today, here is where I see myself.”
And it’s the same with these books. They — they were all born out of real experiences. I mean you take Gathering the Sun on the table, which is one of my most well known and most beloved books. These were poems that I would write at night when I came from working with field — farm workers in the fields in California, and I would just — these ideas would just come, and I would write. And I wrote other poems that were far more complex and I haven’t made those into a book. But one day, I was given the opportunity to put these poems together, and they got shortened so that you could have it in two languages when you need two languages on a page, and because I wanted these wonderful illustrations of Simon Silva.
But the reality is that I never set out to do this. I did it a bit at a time — one here, one there. And that’s true of so many other things. I write when - when I get an idea, and sometimes I don’t even know I’m making a book.