I submitted Rat Fair directly to small publishers and I had a long wait (over a year!) between submitting my story and hearing back from the editor at POW! Kids Books.

The path to publication once I had that manuscript was actually very short. I’d say the road to arriving at a publishable manuscript was somewhere in the middle it took about four years of learning about picture book writing, improving my craft, and the helpful eyes of my critique group and the larger kidlit community. Was your road to publication long and winding, short and sweet, or something in between? Once I had rearranged it in my head into rat fair, I found I wasn’t able to stop thinking about it (Would a rat fair be a carnival for rats? An art fair for rats? Something else?) until I wrote it down. Now, I live in a nearby town and one day as I was passing one of the ubiquitous Art Fair signs, I got to playing with the words. It was something I looked forward to every year as a child. Thank you! I grew up in a city with a giant art fair that takes over the downtown for a week every summer. I regularly embarrass my middle schooler at pick-up time by insisting on stopping to watch the frogs in the puddles by the parking lot and I don’t think it’s a big leap (pun intended) from there to finding joy in writing stories that engage young children.Ĭongrats on your debut picture book, Rat Fair! Tell us about the story and what inspired you. My degree is in biology and I’ll always be excited about learning new things, observing the natural world at work, and wanting to tell everyone all about it. I think I gravitate towards writing for children because I’ve spent many years working with them both in and out of the classroom and also because I’ve never lost my own sense of curiosity and wonder. It’s not the only thing I’ve been doing for the past several years, of course, but this is the first time in my life I’ve made the time to prioritize it. When I stopped teaching seven years ago I took about half a year to decompress and when I came out the other end I realized what I really wanted to be spending my time on was writing. Tell us about yourself and how you came to write for children.

Rat Fair by Leah Rose Kessler