Henry and the Chalk Dragon is my absolute favorite of your books, but it is unusual, and something I personally would never have thought of. What gave you the ideas for it?
—Bridget, age 13
I'm so glad you liked the book, Bridget! Believe it or not, way back I first started writing this story, Henry Penwhistle wasn't an artist yet. He was the Knight of the Purple Pajamas, going on a quest in his own home, chasing a sneaky dragon who kept disguising itself as a sofa, a can opener, a sculpture, a pair of rain boots, a pile of dirty laundry, a rug, etc. And Henry outsmarted it by showing that he also could be many things—a knight, a spy, an explorer, an astronaut, a janitor with a dragon-sucking vacuum cleaner. The earliest seeds of the story had to do with all the shapes a kid can be, all the shapes his imagination can take, and all the ways in which his imagination can transform the world around him. With a little imagination, a cardboard box can be anything in the world! That's the way I played when I was a little girl—as I told stories in my head, I turned a box into a pirate ship, a bed into a mountain, a bathtub into an ocean.
So when he first popped into my brain, Henry was already named Henry, he was a knight on a quest, and he saw the world double, so to speak—the literal world, and the imaginative one. As the story developed, it seemed only natural that Henry would love to draw, and the fantasy of every kid who has ever drawn a picture is that his or art would come to life! When Henry became an artist, he became more and more like me—because like Henry, I can be shy and fearful about my art. It can be a very vulnerable thing to let your imagination run loose in the world for others to see. People might laugh. People might misunderstand. People might shrug their shoulders and not even care. You might, when your art is out there, think that it’s all wrong, that it’s not good or beautiful or worth seeing. It might be twisted to mean something it doesn’t mean. It might hurt someone. So I’ve had to learn to be brave, like Henry, even when making art and letting it out there into the world felt like an impossibly scary thing to do.
And that's why I published the book. Because I needed to open my door and let my art run free, and I hope you will too.