 I talked to Millie Lee the other night, and she was a very good friend of Effie Lee Morris, and she said, I really don't like it when people come unprepared. And she's given this lecture once, so I thought, well, I'm going to be prepared. So I actually wrote my speech, which usually I don't. I usually just talk ad lib a lot. But I want to talk tonight about the cycles of life and the fact that Effie Lee is now dead is very sad for me, because I was a huge admirer of hers. And I would like to talk a little bit more about her. So I've called my talks Sunrise, Sunset. 60 Seconds Makes a Minute, 60 Minutes an Hour, 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week, 4 Weeks a Month, 3 Months a Season, 4 Seasons a Year, and 88 Years a Good Lifetime. I'd like to, Effie Lee Morris lived for 88 years, and within those years, she experienced all of these smaller cycles. And as you've heard, her long lifetime is also representative of a much longer, more complex cycle that of the hero's journey. Effie Lee seized on her life's passion as a child, learning to read early and never letting books out of her sight. She pursued her devotion to sharing books with children from Cleveland, Ohio, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to New York City, and here, finally here to San Francisco. I've admired Effie Lee from afar for many years, but I didn't really know her. So when I was invited to give this talk, I learned more about her life and realized we had a few things in common. Okay, now, Dave, I hope I pressed the right button, yeah, okay. So I went on the web and because I'm a very good Google researcher, I found this picture of her graduate, with her graduating class at Case Western Reserve Library School. You see her there? Yeah, and then this one really tickled me because I thought I could have been one of those little girls in the audience. I had shoes and socks like that and a little dress and I think this was probably, it was undated, but I think it was probably 1964, thereabouts. You think 50s? Yeah? Okay. I found this beautiful picture, Ashley Bryan, who gave this speech and Christopher Myers. And then I found this picture where I think that's an Easter egg tree. I read that Effie Lee, I read her biography and I realized that we, that some of the things we have in common is that we're both older sisters, the oldest of two girls. Our favorite season is spring. We both love Paris. We both left cold eastern climates for this gentle San Francisco one. We both have fun fashion sense. We both love barbecue ribs and dim sum. And we both love alternative alphabets. Her alphabet was A for Attitude and I'm going to contribute A for April, B for Books or Brenda the Beaver and C for Compassion, Caring or Coffee Grounds. And we both seized upon our life passion as children and hung on. I can only hope to live as long a life and to accomplish a fraction of what Effie Lee did on her heroic journey. Au revoir, et salut, Effie Lee. I have created many books, over 50 books in 26 years of stubbornly hanging on to this idea of being both an artist and a writer. Every book is different, but in some ways every book is the same. What interests me over and over are stories both propelled and bounded by rhythms of one cycle or many cycles. I grew up in a small town in Vermont and like many children of the 60s, I was free to roam the streams and woods all day if I wanted to. My mother insisted that I play outside almost every day regardless of the temperature. And I believe adapting to and thriving in Vermont's dramatic seasons influenced my view of the world. This awareness of cycles inspired me to write and illustrate my first book, A Year of Birds, and every book I've made sense. One, some people in this room know that my dad was born in Germany and so he was a German speaker and many of the books I grew up with were in German and one of the books I loved most as a child was called the Wurzel Kinder. I couldn't read anything in this book, but what I did learn was how to read illustrations. And when I say this was one of my earliest books, you'll see where I was even too young to know better than to do face this book. Do you see how I've gone over with pencil, one of the little characters? So I did that in several places in the book. I'm not even going to try to translate because I know there is an English version of this, but it isn't nearly as good as the German one, I can tell because it doesn't rhyme. But I love this book because it really anthropomorphizes grasses and flowers and insects by making them these little children called the root children, the Wurzel Kinder in German. And Mother Earth is this benign old lady who wakes them up and sets them to their tasks. Of course, they're very sex stereotype. The girls have to do all the sewing and the boys get to do all the painting with the, you know, paint brushes, all the things I would like to do. And once they're done with their tasks, they all go above ground and they go become the flowers and the trees and the grasses and then when summer's over and it starts to get a little bit cold, they come back to Mother Earth and she takes them back underground and they go back to being root children. And so I know that this had a huge effect on me and is sort of the basic cycle of the year, 12 months, the four seasons. But because I'm really interested in other kinds of cycles and every book that I've done is a cycle, I chose some of my favorite books that are cycles. In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf. Everyone knows what this book is, right? So this contains two cycles. It contains the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly and it's also the days of the week. On Sunday morning, the warm sun came up and pop out of the egg came a very hungry caterpillar. Oops, I think I mixed up the order of the slides. Yes, I did. On Sunday morning, the warm sun came up and pop out of the egg came a very hungry caterpillar. I'm going to go back to this one. He started to look for some food. On Monday, he ate through one apple but he was still hungry. I'm going to forward. When he had eaten all of his food from Monday to Sunday, he wasn't hungry anymore and he wasn't a little caterpillar anymore. He was a big fat caterpillar. He built a small house called the cocoon, which Eric Carle used but really it should be a chrysalis, but cocoon is much easier to read around himself and he stayed inside for more than two weeks and he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and he was a beautiful butterfly which the illustrator in me says, hey, you put the wings upside down. But another one of my favorite books about a cycle is called the ox cart man. I think if I could be anybody in the world, I would be Barbara Cooney. She was my absolute favorite illustrator and she was just a really cool lady. By the time I met her, I think she was probably in her 80s, but I really admired her and I love this book. The ox cart man is the cycle of the growing season and the year again and then it also contains a cycle of a journey. So the text goes, he packed potatoes they dug from their garden but first he counted potatoes enough to eat all winter and potatoes to eat all spring. This beautiful text is by Donald Hall. He packed a barrel of apples, honey and honeycombs, turnips and cabbages, a wooden box of maple sugar from the maples they tapped in March when they boiled and boiled and boiled the sap away. He packed a bag of goose feathers that his children collected from the barnyard geese. Everything his family had grown or made during the year. When his cart was full, he waved goodbye to his wife, his daughter and his son and he walked at his ox's head for 10 days over hills, through valleys, by streams, past farms and villages until he came to the market in Portsmouth. He sold everything he had, including the ox cart. Then he sold his ox and kissed him goodbye on the nose. Then he walked home past farms and villages over hills, through valleys, by streams, until he came to his farm and his son, his daughter and his wife were waiting for him. And he carved a new yoke and saw planks for a new cart and split shingles all winter. And it continues on a little past that. But you can see the cycle of life of the ox, the little teeny hindquarters of the calf there and the boy making the new brooms. And I just find this a beautiful example of a cycle. Along with this book, which I probably was published the year I was born or there about, and I was lucky enough at an ALA wants to meet Robert McCloskey and to meet Sal, who was his daughter. So we're all responsible for putting our family and drawing, you know, making our lives into fiction, basically. One day, little Sal went with her mother to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries. This is the kind of cycle where this starts to approach the hero's journey where somebody goes out and finds something and then they come back. And it seems like almost every story in literature is some version of this. And this is just a very simple book, which I think is actually a perfectly crafted picture book. I think that these drawings, while they're only in printed in dark blue, look like they're in color. And if I could draw like Robert McCloskey, I would be happy. One day, little Sal went with her mother to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries. Little Sal brought along her small tin pail and her mother brought her large tin pail to put berries in. We will take our berries home and can them, said her mother. Then we will have food for winter. Her mother walked slowly along through the bushes, picking blueberries as she went and putting them in her pail. Little Sal struggled along behind picking blueberries and eating every single one. On the other side of Blueberry Hill, little Bear came with his mother to eat blueberries. Little Bear, she said, eat berries, lots of berries and grow big and fat. We must store up food for the long cold winter. Little Bear's mother turned around to see what on earth could make a sound like kaplunk. Roof, she cried, choking on a mouthful of berries. This is not my child. Where is Little Bear? She took one good look and backed away. She was old enough to be shy of people, even a very small person like Little Sal. Then she turned around and walked off very fast to hunt for Little Bear. Little Sal's mother turned around and gasped, my goodness, you're not Little Sal. Where, where is my child? Little Bear just sat there munching and munching and swallowing and licking his lips. Little Sal's mother slowly backed away. She was old enough to be shy of bears, even very small bears like Little Bear. Then she turned and walked away very quickly to look for Little Sal. And they have the requisite three adventures and they find each other. And then the way it's structured, Little Bear and his mother went down one side of Blueberry Hill, eating blueberries all the way and full of food stored up for next winter. And Little Sal and her mother went down the other side of Blueberry Hill, picking berries all the way and drove home with food to can for next winter. A whole pail of blueberries and three more beside. One of my favorite parts of this book is the end paper. And a couple of years ago, I was invited to create a piece of art that was an homage to a book that I really loved. So I took this picture, which is, as I say, the end paper, no part of the text. And I did this modern up to date version of canning blueberries, where you're in a high rise modern apartment and maybe in San Francisco. And when I went to the hardware store to see if blueberry canning technology had advanced at all in 50 years, I realized that it hadn't. The exactly the same red rubber rings and glass jars and boiling kettle are still needed today. So I really identified with Sal as a child. I grew up in a very small town in Vermont. My mother cut my hair. I wore little cut out sandals just exactly like Sal's. And so my my early life was spent in a similar way, being outside all the time. And for recreation, I would draw. I drew this picture of somebody in 1960. And many children guessed that this is a dog. But I think it's a really accurate picture of my little sister, Perry. I noticed the hairdo and her fat stomach. And I think you'll agree, it's quite a good likeness. So I, Perry and I grew up in in a house kind of in town. But when I started doing books, I realized I can change anything around that I want. So in a year of birds, I put our house way outside of town in the country where I thought I had always wanted to live. And in the first page of my first book in winter and spring and summer and in fall in every month of the year, all kinds of birds visit Ellie's house. And I'm sure that you can hear echoes of of blueberries for Sal and the ox cart man in in the texts that I write because those are the kinds of books that I've always admired. I I borrowed freely from my own biography. So I I have my mother being pregnant here. I think I was only about two. I was about two and three quarters when my sister was born. So I wasn't nearly this old. So I changed that around a little bit. And then because I really had always wanted a brother, I made Perry into a boy. And I just changed her name to Peter. And and that's fine because we are allowed to use artistic license. We can do whatever we want. So here here I am looking very pleased about Perry. And I haven't always felt this way. But now I now I do. Here she is in her little blue onesie, which shows that she's a boy. We're making something that my mother always had us make everything Thanksgiving. It's it's a turkey made out of an apple and toothpicks and raisins. And then the head is a green olive with the pimento pulled out to close for eyes. Anybody wants the recipe, I have it. And you notice my mother in the background there cooking a turkey. She never ever cooked a turkey. Once when my sister and I were in high school, we finally cooked our first turkey because we decided we would just take over Thanksgiving. But my mom was very beautiful. And in this picture, she looks a lot like she did when she was not cooking the turkey. I I love to draw her and I focused particularly on her lipstick. Check out the color of her lipstick and then see how close I got. Took four years at Rhode Island School of Design, though, to learn to draw arms. I put my mom in lots of books. You notice I put her in when she was young and had brown hair. Sometimes I put her in as a grandmother the way she looked when she was older. I put her in as this Italian grandmother, even though she is really Scottish. And I put her in in a book, my favorite book called Stella and Roy, sort of sitting off to the side in just one spread and knitting a long rainbow scarf out of that yarn that that comes in different colors as it goes along. And next to her are some long legs and corduroy pants and some hands holding a wallet. Well, if you've heard other authors speak or if you are an author or an illustrator, like many people in this room are, you know that you just use what you have handy. And because I have a man with long legs handy in my house, I use him a lot. I put him in a lot of books. This is my husband, Saban, who's sitting back there looking a little bit older than he does in this picture. When we first met, one of our first dates was on a canoe trip. And I was so impressed that he kissed my dog that I decided to marry him. But as soon as I did, I changed him into my dad, which is kind of weird. But I still wanted to be the little girl in the red coat rolling around in the snow and I wanted him to do all the work. And so I put him in many books after that. You can always spot him because of his black beard. Here he gets to be the servant and I get to be the queen in Block City. And here he gets to be a moose. Well, I get to be the bus driver. I'm not actually showing in this picture. When I first decided to make Ms. Bindergarten into a border collie, I realized that all the animals in this book had to be... I mean, all the people in this book had to be animals. And I had never done a book where animals were wearing clothes and I didn't really know how to do it. And you can tell from this picture that this moose does not look like he's, you know, really together. He's supposed to be a banker or a lawyer or something and he looks like he's wearing a sweater. So I asked my husband, would you please pose as a moose? And even though his arms look very manly, I decided to use the one in the coat. Because, and lengthen the sleeves just a little bit. And remember I told you you could always spot him because of his beard? You can in this one too. He's been in, he's still appearing with black and white dogs in boats. Just what, maybe 25 years later. Here he is posing as Joseph in a book called Who's Coming to Our House. Maria, those are your feet, by the way. And I was in dire need of a model for the baby Jesus. So luckily right around that time I had a baby. And I was able to put him in. Looking a little sweeter than he does here. This is our son Brennan who's been, because he's the child of an illustrator, has been in many, many books. This is the book I was working on while I was pregnant with him. And you can see where he appears twice. Once in my womb in the queen climbing the stairs. And then once again as the little boy who holds up the queen's train. Which is where I think that, you know, children, what children really should be doing. And I imagined him older. I think when I was writing a book called Come With Me, I wanted to work out the idea of whether I should have another baby. And so I had this little boy get a puppy and talk to him about what will happen in the future when they go on a walk. And so Brennan maybe was two and I imagined him five or six and I put him with my dog Pumpkin. But I made up all the puppies. And the way I got her to appear to lick a puppy is I rubbed some butter on one of my sneakers and put it between her paws and said, lick this. I don't have that photo though. And then we had another child. Must have been what writing Come With Me that made me feel okay about it. So we had two little boys but you know me. I wanted a brother so I made up one. I really wanted a daughter so I made up one. I just made Brennan into a girl and renamed him Stella. And I'm not really sure why I chose the name Stella and Roy. I realize now that Stella means star and Roy means king so maybe I was just thinking ahead to star king or something. But I set this in one of my favorite places in the whole world which is Stowlake in Golden Gate Park. And so here is Stella and Roy now. Now they're both over six feet tall. They both shave and they talk like this. So if you see them, if you ever meet them, don't tell them I'm showing naked pictures of them. When Roy rides his scooter around Stowlake, he encounters many things along the way and one of the things is a dog who kisses him and you probably already recognize who that dog is. She was a real dog and long ago when I was a student at Rhode Island School of Design, I went home on Spring Break and I was dating a man at the time who owned a pickup truck and knew, had a friend who had a litter of puppies. And he said, why don't we go out to the Fens farm and we'll go see those puppies. And I said, sure. And there was only one puppy left, a little female. And I took one look at her and I said, this is my puppy, her name is Pumpkin. And so Tim pulled out a piece of bailing twine and he said, okay, we can tie her up in the back of the pickup truck. And she was about this big and I said, no, I'm gonna hold her in my lap and take her home. And I took her back to art school with me and that's basically where she grew up, going to all my classes with me and then you already know that she snagged Saban for me. And when we moved to San Francisco, my first job was working at the Pacific Sun in Mill Valley and naturally Pumpkin went to work with me every day. And the tradition at the Pacific Sun is when you retire, when you leave there, they make you a fake front page. So here we are posing in the newsroom and you see there's even a little milk bone down there and where the seal of the sun is. Pumpkin was a very smart dog, very agile and she was able to jump into any chair she wanted. And I'm convinced that in this picture, she's staring at me and trying to hypnotize me and putting her in a book. Because she had very light yellow eyes and she would gaze directly at you and she was hypnotic. So I decided I would put her in a book but before that ever happened, I had already started making her into a character. So everyone needs an alter ego and somebody who can do things that they can't do or do them in a much funnier way and get away with murder. So I'm mocking my mother in this picture because she collected blue and white pottery called Cornishware and she had way too much of it. So here Pumpkin bounces on a pile of plates. When we took a trip around the world, instead of sending regular postcards, I would make cards like this and send them to my dad and mom and so she has a picnic at Hanging Rock in Australia and she rides on a camel at the Great Wall of China and she goes fishing for soul in the Bosphorus, I think in Istanbul and Turkey. And then when we got home, we were pregnant. And so you notice how Pumpkin's obstetrician has a red high heels just like Tony and her first ultrasound or no, she never did have an ultrasound. I forget what those death scopes are called. And then she had a baby and they moved and then this is one of my most recent Pumpkin cards. Which one do you think it is? So I've been doing these for years. So really it was no big stretch to make Pumpkin into a book character but she started out very conservatively posing as a dog wearing her collar, walking on all four feet. And then along came a book called A Garden Alphabet where F is for frog, a gardener's friend for unwanted insects, his tongue marks the end. So I thought okay, if a frog can be the gardener's friend then surely the gardener can be a dog. So she got a hat and a kerchief and some boots and she got to be the star of this but she wanted more, she wanted a dress, shoes, jewelry and a real career. So she became Miss Bindergarten. When Joseph Slate first wrote this book he envisioned her as a human. She had a cat and a hamster and she was just a normal human with a normal class of humans. But I thought it would be a lot funnier if her class at least were animals and then of course I had to choose an animal to be Miss Bindergarten. So I was able to fudge Border Collie into Bindergarten. And what makes her such a great teacher is that Border Collies have three things going for them. They're extremely intelligent, they're very good at herding sheep and kindergartners and like every teacher I have ever met they are willing to work like dogs. This classroom needs to be ready in two hours and only Miss Bindergarten, the Border Collie can do it. You can see the clock there. And unfortunately I see that Miss Bindergarten has left but I wouldn't be able to do these books without my dear friend Maria who bless her heart has stayed thin enough for 10 years to still fit into a Laura Ashley jumper. This picture was taken in 1995 and she can still wear this dress. So she poses I don't really put my dog in a green dress. I take my friend Maria and just change her into a dog. And that too is very easy, you just put a dog head and paws on her. I think everybody over 50 in this room will recognize this kind of scene from Saturday morning cartoons. When I first showed this to my kids though they said, mom, why does she have nine arms? And so I had to take white chalk and dust it over all but two of them to make it look more realistic to them. I was so used to that from Mighty Mouse. Check out the clock, five to nine. The classroom scene from the exact same angle is completely done and Miss Bindergarten is ready for school. I had no idea that teachers would embrace these books so much and it was great fun to over the next 10 years to do six more books, the 100th day of school. The Miss Bindergarten takes a field trip with kindergarten and meets the handsome fireman. Somehow right after that she got sick with the flu. You can see she has one of those old fashioned thermometers in a cup by her bed. And then she learned, not only learned to juggle, make balloon hats, ride a unicycle, and hula hoop from books, but she can balance three tea cups on her nose too. And she had a wild day in kindergarten and Zach, her favorite student, went into the classroom and let all the butterflies out of the monarch box. So that book was about wild behavior and wild things. On the last day of kindergarten, she makes her students a little present. Here's a little gift for you, a penny and a kiss. The penny for success to come, the kiss that you'll be missed. Well, we know that Miss Bindergarten is, you probably guessed from the timeline that I laid out that she died a long time ago. She died in 1992, well before she ever became Miss Bindergarten, the real one. But then luckily we got another dog and in a book called Stella and Rigo Camping, she pokes her nose into the backpack of the kids before they go off, just on the title page, very subtle. But those baby pictures belong to Lucy and Lucy and Pumpkin are the subject of my exhibit upstairs because I've had two dogs that meant a lot to me in my life and they also were huge inspirations. Lucy was very similar to Pumpkin in coloring except she had one leg that was completely white up to the shoulder and one leg that was almost black down to her paws. So it's very easy to spot Lucy in books. She's the one who gets to see the Portuguese Man of War in each living thing. And she's the one who lies in the shade in this scene from the pen that Paul built. And she's the one who gets to star in a book called When Lucy Goes Out Walking. And sometimes people wonder where authors and illustrators get ideas. I got the idea for this book by driving up I-5 once and listening to the soundtrack for Oh Brother Where Out though, which has a really great version of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. And I kept listening to the lyrics and being intrigued by the rhyme scheme, which kind of goes along in a normal way and then has these very short lines inserted in the middle and then finishes in a normal way. So Lucy, I had to cut back very much on the original rhyme scheme of the Big Rock Candy Mountain but you can kind of hear it in the singing when Lucy goes out walking in January snows. She leaves a trail of puppy prints everywhere she goes. And then this part kind of goes off rhyme. Frosty fur, bur, bur, bur, in January snows. So I was very interested in the months of the year as you probably guessed from all the books I've admired as a child. And I also had a son who really never got the order of the months. And I thought, well, I'm gonna make this really obvious. I have a book at home called The Story of May, which is a really nice book about the months of the year except that they're always jumping around in the calendar and figuring out and it's hard to know where you are. So I thought I'm gonna design the pages so that they curl over on one side and say the month before and then they curl over on the bottom right corner and they say the month after. And this way nobody will be able to get that wrong. So I'm gonna show you just a few pictures from it when Lucy goes out walking one hot night in July. She stretches on a grassy hill beneath a glittering sky. I see Mars shooting stars one hot night in July. When Lucy goes out walking in January, I mean in cold November rain, she wears her cozy winter coat while splashing down the lane. Puddles, slosh, oh my gosh, in cold November rain. And remember how she left a trail of puppy prints in January? Well, the amazing thing about a puppy is that when Lucy goes out walking in first December snows, she leaves a trail of big dog prints everywhere she goes. I'm not a pup, I'm all grown up in first December snows. Now the sad part is that Lucy, who was our great family dog for 11 years, died this early this spring. And this is probably one of the last picture we took of her. But I don't wanna end on a sad note because we've already talked about passing. So I wanna show you a few pictures from my newest book. It is a book about life and death, but it's almost entirely vegetabilic. The motto of compost stew is let it rot. Environmental chefs, here's a recipe for you to fix from scratch to mix a batch of compost stew. Ingredients, apple cores, bananas bruised, coffee grounds with filters used. When I first read this text, I just loved it. It's by Mary McKenna Siddles. And she's a Canadian author and, you know, I've done a lot of alphabet books, but this one really grabbed me. Dirt clods crumbled, eggshells crushed, fruit pulp left behind, all mushed. Grass clippings, hair snippings, and an insect or two. That's where the non-vegetables come in. Just add to the pot and let it all rot into compost stew, the end. Should I come down or should I answer questions? I do have, I think I have, do I have time to answer some questions? I don't know. Okay, does anyone have a question? I know that I've always enjoyed that part of the other lectures. Yes. Oh, I do visit schools all the time. Yes, yes I do. Yep, it's actually a pretty important part of my income because books are unpredictable. You know, you never know when you're gonna get paid for a book, whereas schools will pay you usually. I do a lot of pro bono stuff in my neighborhood, but I kinda have to keep it to my little part of San Francisco. Any other questions? Yes, hi. Yeah, the first year to get Miss Bindergarten, it was based on, I used my son's rooftop class of 1995 for a lot of the inspiration. And so the first book was published in 1996. So I don't know how old he was, but the oldest kids to have known it would be about 18. Yeah, and the last kindergarten has totally changed and become so strange since then. Yes, hi. Oh, oh, extreme restlessness. One of the things that I always loved about being an illustration major at Rhode Island School of Design was that there was no rule, there were no rules about what you could use to solve a problem. And I remember making a project out of gingerbread dough that I had left all the leavening agents out of. So I made sort of a 3D or this ball relief, really. And that was acceptable and collage once I painted on glass. And I just loved that about illustration. And so from the very beginning, I've been illustrating books in as many different styles as I felt like I needed to use. And so the last pictures you saw, collage, those and the, I love, I call my grandma Nana and call my grandpa Papa are the first three books I've ever done in collage. I just got this be in my bonnet that I should use collage. And so I've invented a, I looked at a bunch of people who'd done it, but then I invented a new way where I painted faces which always are a hard thing to do in collage. Yes, Susan. Well, I have to think about it a long time. That's probably the key. It's easy to read a text. It takes about a minute sometimes to read a picture book text, but then you really have to let it stew in your mind. And I remember when I first got Miss Bindergarten, that was a text that the author had sent directly to me. And only then were we able to sell it to a publisher. But I took it at face value at first and it was only after a couple of months, probably, of having it around, that I thought that I can't do this with real children. I have to find another way to enter this text. And I've actually, I hope I don't have a bad reputation for this, but because I'm also an author, I'm very critical of texts. And I've actually asked for words to be changed in texts before. Things that just didn't work for me or broke the whole arc of the story or was definitely, we're not needed because the pictures were going to tell that. Or a text that Lisa Schulman, who lives up in Sebastopol, wrote called Old MacDonald, had a wood shop. She had envisioned Old MacDonald to be a human woman working alone in her wood shop. But I thought, what is Old MacDonald without animals? So I made her into a sheep. And then I made, instead of working alone with all these different tools, I had a different animal come in each time for the tool, to use the tools. And there was no need to change the text, but there was a radical reimagining of it. And I think that authors can be kind of taken aback by that, but my belief in picture books is that here's the text and here are the pictures and they go together like this. And that neither they should not be like this or like this. And I always try to be as respectful as I can of the text while bringing my own total interpretation to it. That okay? Yeah, well, you're an author, so, you know, it is. Yeah, yeah. Oh, good, good. Yes, Charlene. Yes, go figure. Charlene and I went to high school together. And so, and we were in Winnie the Pooh. And I was Eeyore. And she was Owl. Any other questions before Ella has to leave? Yes. Well, kind of, in that there are certain things I love to draw. And I usually, if I'm going to write a text, I will draw, I will write it about something that I love. So I probably would not write it about submarines or monster trucks. Although I wouldn't not draw them if somebody told me to. They wouldn't be my first choice. So yeah, I mean, children, nature, animals, those are the things that I think I was imprinted with as a young child. And those are the things that I'm still expressing today. The same things I like to draw then. I still like to draw. Thanks for coming. Any other questions? Yes. When somebody told me once that they wrote a book in an afternoon, I think Eve Bunting. Isn't that a quote from Eve Bunting? She wrote it on a napkin in an afternoon. I always just go, grrr. I've probably started 50 books and I've finished maybe 12. And even though a picture book is extremely short, it's maybe under 500 words, it still is written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten just the way a novel is. I think it does take a lot less time. But it really has to have such a strong beginning, middle, and end. And it all has to fit in 32 pages and it has to have, at least by my standards, it has to have an ending that makes you gonna go, huh, you know, it has to be satisfying. And that's why I'm so drawn to cycle books because right away you have an automatic structure. And what you choose to place within that structure is up to you. But I really like my books to have a natural arc to them. I think all picture books should have such an arc, but I think about that all the time. And I'm working on a book right now that I wrote and it came to me very quickly, but I probably had been working on it since last September and the text, I think the text is done now. But now I'm working on the pictures and that'll take me until next November. So probably a whole year to create a book. I don't know if that's fast or slow. Ladies, fast? Fast, okay, yes. No, it was the first born son, is the little girl. What effect it has had on his masculinity? I think he's fine. He knows, certainly. I think he thinks it's funny. Whether it bothers him, I actually haven't asked him lately, but I will. I'll find out. Okay, honey. Well, there's therapy for that. I'll find out and let you know. Any other questions? No? Okay, well, I would very much like to thank Loretta and the Women's National Book Association for inviting me and very nice to meet you, Teresa. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Jill. I've considered this a huge honor and I'm thrilled to be here today. So, thanks very much.