About Me

As a child

I was raised in a small, farm town in Ohio. It was a funny kind of place where farmers came every Saturday morning to sit on the town green and chew tobacco while their wives did the weekly shopping. It is also the home of the first concrete street in America. When I was about ten, the town celebrated its centennial with a beauty pageant. The winner was crowned “Miss Concrete Street”. The neighbouring town elected “Miss Gourd”! Even as a child, I thought that was funny. (I’ve recently read that Ohio and Iowa still elect a Miss Pork. Hooray!

As an adult

I have worked as a singer in Mexico, an English teacher in Libya, a cucumber-washer in Greece, and a popsicle-stick-maker in Israel. I wanted to be an opera singer, too – one of those huge ones who make the chandeliers shake and windows rattle – so I studied classical voice at a conservatory. There was only one teeny problem: I wasn’t very good. Well, that’s how it goes. The good news is that I now write for kids. I am very happily married, and live with my wife and son in the New Hampshire countryside with a cantankerous Maine coon cat and a three-footed dog.

As an artist

I didn’t set out to write for kids, but whenever I sat down to work, my hero or heroine always turned out to be nine or ten years old. Now, I couldn’t be happier. I feel humble about writing for young people. I take it very seriously, which is an odd thing since almost all my books are funny. But, to me, humour is a serious business. I also believe in the power of the imagination to transport and change us. In a way, I guess, most of my books are about those two things, humour and the imagination.