I’ve been work­ing a lot with my part­ner, Eric Rohmann, late­ly. A few years ago, we came out with our first col­lab­o­ra­tion, Oh, No! Truth be told, we were a lit­tle wor­ried about work­ing togeth­er at first. Would we squab­ble? Try to impose our artis­tic vision?

As it turned out, it wasn’t ter­ri­bly dif­fer­ent from my usu­al process of work­ing with an illus­tra­tor. I wrote a sto­ry, and he cre­at­ed illus­tra­tions for it. The best part was watch­ing that mag­i­cal process. Every day I’d head up to his stu­dio to check on his progress. It’s amaz­ing the way illus­tra­tors can make char­ac­ters come to life. I did help decide on page breaks, and I cut a few sen­tences when I real­ized Eric’s work made them redun­dant. But for the most part, we stayed with­in our usu­al spheres.

Not so with our next col­lab­o­ra­tion Bulldozer’s Big Day that will be pub­lished this May by Atheneum/ Simon and Schus­ter. From the very begin­ning we worked close­ly, com­ing up with a con­cept and dum­my­ing it out. I gave input on illus­tra­tion, offer­ing sug­ges­tions about char­ac­ter expres­sion and page turns. Eric, in turn, made text sug­ges­tions – cut­ting words and find­ing bet­ters ones. Bull­doz­er real­ly was born of two brains. And I think you can see that in the fin­ished project. It feels seam­less – the love­ly mar­riage of art and text. Best of all, Simon & Schus­ter has asked for a sequel. Once again we’re brain­storm­ing, bat­ting around ideas and play­ing off each other’s strengths.