Emma Bland Smith, "Mr. McCloskey's Marvelous Mallards: The Making of 'Make Way for Ducklings'" (Calkins Creek Books, 2022)

Emma Bland Smith is the award-winning author of Journey: Based on the True Story of OR7, the Most Famous Wolf in the West, as well as many other fiction and nonfiction books for children. In our interview we talk about her life and writing career and celebrate her recent book, Mr. McCloskey's Marvelous Mallards: The Making of Make Way for Ducklings (Calkins Creek, 2022).

While writing and illustrating the beloved picture book Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McCloskey brings a flock of ducklings into his tiny New York City apartment. But an artist + a bunch of ducklings in his apartment = chaos! There are ducklings in the bathtub and ducklings in the kitchen, quacking at dawn and sitting on his desk. Can he learn to draw them just right before they grow too big?

This glimpse into the creation of a much-loved story for kids is a must-read for fans of children's books, or for anyone who is interested in the creative process and the importance of persistence.

Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is co-founder of Ourboox, a web platform with some 240,000 ebooks that allows anyone to create and share flipbooks comprising text, pictures and videos.

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