They ask me how a columnist becomes a children’s poet and my answer is always that I had a very delicate operation. Of course which isn’t true. But I would say in a word, serendipity. I didn’t discover poetry until I was almost forty years old. And then I became a fool for it and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing it, but I couldn’t quit my day job, so I continued teaching for another ten years. During that time I was actually writing both adult and children’s poetry, and publishing it, I think I had about fifteen children’s books published before I retired early from this little college where I taught in Ohio.
You know, I won’t say it’s been smooth sailing because as I tell kids at every school visit, rejection is the name of the game, even when you’ve published lots and lots of books. I get rejected all the time and it’s just something that you come to accept.
I took my children to a place in Kentucky called Cumberland Falls and if you’re there at the right time of year, by which I mean there must be a full moon, you will see something there you will never see anywhere else in America, only in Lake Victoria in Africa, it’s a — if there’s a full moon you’ll see a white rainbow.
And in Kentucky they don’t call it a rainbow they call it a moonbow and I was so exercised by that that I came home and I thought well I’ve got to write a story about it, I did, I sent it off, two weeks later a publisher called me and said they wanted to make a book out of it. I said, “Wow this is going to be easy.” And two and a half years later that same publisher canceled the contract, and it broke my heart, but it also taught me that this wasn’t going to be easy.
So for the next seven years, I got nothing but rejections. And you know I could have given up but I believe in what I was doing, so I kept at it, and I finally got my first acceptance. That was in 1985, published my first book in 1988.