Book Look

My latest Book Look column for the Prairie Wind is online. I wrote about The Pout-Pout Fish, by Deborah Diesen, and if you haven't read that book yet, I suggest you head to the bookstore today.

Here's a little preview...
I’m sure you’ve all heard the advice not to write a picture book in verse. Yet you can probably name at least a dozen rhyming picture books that you or your kids or grandkids adore. So what’s the deal? Why do editors tell novice writers to stay away from verse?

The answer is they don’t believe you can do it well. And maybe that’s true. (I’m pretty sure I can’t do it!) But if you have poetry and song and rhythm and rhyme in your soul, and if you understand story structure and the format of a picture book, and if you have an idea that is both fun and meaningful and not at all preachy, there is no reason you can’t master this form. Deborah Diesen did it with her first picture book, The Pout-Pout Fish. And we all can learn something from this well-crafted tale.

In other news...
I've hit my word quota for three days in a row. I'm on a roll!!