May 2006: What Stories Do

I should have anticipated the question. After all, I’ve been asked it so many times before. But it caught me—as it always does—by surprise.

“What,” the reporter asked (it was his very first question in the interview), “do you want children to learn from reading A Bear Named Trouble?”

I flinched. I knew it wasn’t meant to be a trick question. The reporter was interviewing me because two of my books, the novel, A Bear Named Trouble, and the picture book, If Frogs Made Weather, had been nominated for Minnesota Book Awards. I was honored by the nominations and grateful that my books were getting the special attention of a newspaper article. But he might as well have been asking me if I had written the novel so that kids could learn how to spell words like bear.