Hi everyone,
In the last two nights, Goose Lake has had visits from an owl (that hooted like a ghost in a tree across the water) and a peregrine falcon that landed briefly in a hackberry tree beside us and squeaked its own eerie cry. They’ll both go into the collection I’m working on now.
How will I treat them? They won’t talk of course. Anthropomorphic creatures don’t happen for me often. My most recent were A MONSTER IS COMING (Random House, 2022) and A PERFECT HOME FOR A FAMILY (Holiday House, 2013). There have been some famous talking animals though: Bugs Bunny, Pink Panther (after I gave him a vocabulary so he could talk for the first time), Wilbur the pig, Charlotte the spider, Piglet, Eeyore, and Winnie, the cast of Wind in the Willows, etc. One of these days I might take another look at a story or set of poems with talking animals, but these days I seem to be content bringing some of their key characteristics to life.
I wonder what causes some writers to put words in the mouths of their animal creations? Are they ventriloquists, broadcasting their own personalities? Was Charlotte the animal soul of E. B. White? I think the magic in master storytellers’ voices is that they become in a real sense the embodiment of characters that populate their imaginations. They are a rare breed.
A MONSTER IS COMING!,
and WHEN COWS COME HOME,
to help her students develop vocabulary and reading skills.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 