We make magic bigger by demystifying the creator. It's a funny thing. When a regular real-life person replies to a tweet or a photo or a handwritten letter, the regular real-lifeness of that interaction turns into possibility. 'You could do this, too!'

I've been chosen for TD Canadian Children's Book Week 2017, a national effort that brings Maritime authors and illustrators to the Yukon, Manitobans to Newfoundland, and Albertans to Nunavut for a dizzying week of workshops.

Every night there were spoons, a fiddle, a snare drum, guitars, everyone piled and sprawled and feeling fat and thrilled and rich, looking at each other bleary-eyed and spinning, all of us teetering on the edge of sickness. Keep going.

I come home to here via planes that took off from Robson Street, the Distillery District, the Outer Banks. Now, Makkovik. Flight is still a miracle. That this house feels like it's got a wagging tail when I walk through the door is another. 

“The book became itself, and the people in it became real to me. I didn't know if it would end up getting published, but I felt like I owed the characters a chance to exist by finishing it. Otherwise, they just stagger off like untethered spirits…”

I wrote about a pirate ship and a secret clubhouse for spies, but I look grown-up. Except the babyface that got me kicked out of restricted movies until I was 26 now has the effect, a decade later, of people thinking sometimes I'm 26.

Roald Dahl says you're a fool to become a writer, your only compensation being absolute freedom. He had more in the way of compensation than absolute freedom. He's got a point, though, even if his own point no longer applied to him.

Some books are written to be read aloud and The Dread Crew definitely fits. A rollicking, rowdy hoot of a book ... there are identifiable characters for both boys and girls, and humor akin to Roald Dahl at his most satirically anti-establishment.

I went to tear out a sheet for a grocery list and found the birth of a Dread Crew scene, written while curled up on the high side of a starboard tack because for a while, I had to write everywhere. So I did. In waiting rooms, on long drives, on the boat.

“It's a world filled with secret documents, maps, and mysterious totems. Kate has made a world where there is still adventure in the woods... the pirates of the backwoods will not disappoint even the most unruly jackanape under your roof."

"The Dread Crew is a children's book, but like all the best children's books, that means that adults can ostensibly buy it for someone else and read it themselves on the sly. The book as a whole was.. I find it hard to pinpoint the correct word. 'Entrancing' is closest.”

Cast them as far as I could. Had no idea one of them would end up in Tasmania, but it did, didn't it? And Queens, New York. And London and Wisconsin and Paris and Palo Alto and on from there. Be good, words. Earn that hard-won Canadian pulp.

“Do you think pirates get a bad press? Have you ever made someone walk the plank? Do you like Gretchen? Do you know the rhyme Solomon Grundy? Do your maggots have names? How do you pickle a herring? If you are such a good strategist, do you play chess?”

“What is it like to be a pirate? I have so many questions to ask you about being a pirate. What is your favourite hobby? Do you go to school ever? Do you have children? Are you guys crazy?  How is your life being a pirate?“

The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods is my book and Sydney is polishing the illustrations right now and then it hits the presses and it'll be shipping in mid-October and here's the cover and check out the maggots wriggling in Vince's beard.

Hey Eric, I whispered. Not so loud. We don’t want them to hear us, because, you know, we’d be totally crushed. His breath escaped in a cloud that hung in the air around his face. Who? And I said the pirates.