So yeah, I wrote a book called The Skunk, and every book comes from a different place, but The Skunk came – I’ve never had a book come from this. Because I do a lot of school visits, and so I was visiting some schools near Philadelphia, and they had kind of like a 1980s laminated poster with writing prompts on the wall.
And I was just reading it in between kids coming in, and one of them said, you know, imagine that you’re on space – on another planet in space. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah. And another one was like, imagine that you’re three inches tall. And I was like, yeah, okay.
And then the third one, it said, imagine a skunk won’t stop following you. I was like, oh, man. Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that, and it sort of inspired for me this sort of – it felt very existential. I wanted to write, I think, kind of a dark, paranoid thing that also had a lot of Looney Tunes in it.
And it was like Orson Welles and Looney Tunes combined in my mind, and that’s where that prompt came from. But then once I was done with the manuscript, I sent it off to the publisher. We talked about who would be a good illustrator. We both agreed Patrick McDonnell would be fantastic.
And I didn’t talk to Patrick at all during the process, which is the way it’s supposed to go. The author and the illustrator are not supposed to talk to each other, and I had never met Patrick before. We didn’t speak. So it was a surprise to me, a pleasant one, when I got his illustrations.
But a lot of the time I’m working with illustrators I know pretty well, so John Klassen or Adam Rex, Christian Robinson – they’re all good friends of mine, and we’ll talk while we’re making the books, sometimes behind the editor’s back. Sometimes the editor knows. This is – my editor – my editor, I hope, is not watching this program.
Never behind my editor’s back. That has never happened. Never happened.
