What drew you to the story of Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, Theo? I was on a trip to Amsterdam and visited the Van Gogh Museum because I’ve always loved his art. While there, I read a small note about Theo supporting Vincent, and I knew that someday I would write about these brothers. When I presented the idea …
Interview with Scott Westerfeld and Alex Puvilland
How did the creative process work for the two of you in putting the book together? Was there a lot of back-and-forth, or did you do your parts independently? SW: My strip was pretty detailed, but Alex was always keen to suggest new pages, mostly in sequences set in the Zone. Thanks to him, we spend more time exploring that …
Interview with Renée Watson
What inspired Jade’s story? I wanted to tell a story that explored the intersections of race, class, and gender. Jade is a little bit of me, a little bit of the girls I met when I worked as a mentor, and a lot of my imagination. I also wanted to set her in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. The …
Interview with Suzanne Selfors
How did you come up with the idea of a superhero dog and an evil genius guinea pig? This book came about in a different way than any of my other books. I’d been working with an editor at Harper Collins named Melissa Miller on an IP project and she shared an idea with me. She’d come up with these …
Interview with Alan Gratz
Was Refugee always set up as three person narrative? Were their stories always connected? Refugee began for me with the story of the MS St. Louis. For those who haven’t read Refugee yet, the St. Louis was a passenger ship that left Nazi Germany in 1939 with more than 900 Jewish refugees on board, bound for Cuba. The St. Louis didn’t end up …
Interview with Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Thompson
This book is all about solid researching techniques. Where did you start digging once you had the idea for the book? Or did plans for a series come partway through the research phase? Joan: The idea for this book first sprang out of the abundance of exciting and unbelievable true stories that we saw around us in the news and …
Interview with Elisha Cooper
What sparked the idea for the book? Do you have cats? About five years ago we got our daughters two kittens. A year later, one of the cats died. My daughters were devastated. I was too, of course, but having grown up on a farm with lots of animals, I think I was more familiar with life and death. That …
Interview with Caroline Arnold
Do you have plans to keep chickens after learning about their care along with Room 6? A number of years ago, before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in the country with my family and we kept a flock of chickens. Watching the children in Room 6 care for their chickens reminded me of this experience. Now that I …
Interview with Julie Kim
What was the inspiration for Where’s Halmoni? My inspiration was mainly my children. I wanted to give them something that mirrored their experience of being part of two cultures, old and new, and both familiar and unfamiliar. In what ways does Where’s Halmoni reflect your own life? After I finished making this book, I realized that I had encapsulated my own experience of …
Interview with Stephanie Burgis
Dragons and chocolate seem like an odd combination. How did you come up with the idea? Dragons and chocolate are two of my very favorite things in the world, so I just loved the idea of mixing them together! And of course it gave me a fabulous excuse to make myself a rich, strong dark hot chocolate EVERY DAY for …