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The
past few years, I've been talking a lot about myself and my books, at the many
schools and libraries I've been visiting.
More than 40 years ago, in elementary school, I never thought my name would be on the cover of a published book. I remember classmates who wanted to be published authors. I didn't. I thought it would be great to be a hockey player, but I wasn't very good. Maybe I could be a magician, it was a hobby I really loved. Maybe I could study to be a scientist. I loved the woods, and the ocean... |
| I grew up in Long Island, New York, not too far from the sea, but I really grew to love the ocean at my grandparents' home on the coast of Maine. Behind the house I had miles of woodlands to explore. Out the front door was a small vegetable garden, a little road to cross, and a short path to the sea. |  |
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I took this photo of a bloodstar and sponge in a small Maine tidepool. |
Later
on, I studied biology at New York University and marine biology at Long
Island University. In school and afterwards, I had lots of different
jobs. I learned from all of them. I was a science teacher, a
construction worker, a nature counselor. I worked in a sardine
cannery, a bubble gum factory and an optician's office. For a long
time I performed as a magician and for a short time I worked at a marine
laboratory.
Eventually I discovered environmental education. |
| As an environmental educator, an
outdoor teacher, I had the chance to share many of the things I loved. I
could take groups of people into the woods with me, and to the ocean, to
discover the incredible beauty and the amazing adventures all around
us.
Very often we sat on a mountain top or beside a tide pool and wrote a group poem about our feelings at that moment, or about the animals and plants we had discovered. I very much enjoyed those poems. For me, they were better than pictures. |
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When
I wrote my first picture book, Does Anyone Know Where A Hermit Crab
Goes?, I didn't know if I could do it. I was persistent though, and a
few years later it was published. It's still amazing to me that I've had
the good fortune to share one of my stories with hundreds of thousands of
readers.
Another of my picture books, Driftwood, was well-received by many readers, but is now out-of-print. Since then, I've been writing mostly nonfiction, including a very popular book & science kit, The Nature of the Seashore. My latest project is a science web site for curious kids, and I'm really enjoying it. |
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It's impossible for me to design a web page about me without including pictures of my family, so here they are. Josh is finishing his degree in library science (and looking for a library), Ben is majoring in jazz & education, and Leila works for Nature's Classroom, where we both met years ago. |
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