She also teaches short story writing to children through the Gifted and Talented Program of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Southern Westchester. I really set out to write a fantasy story having no idea what I was going to write about. I was walking around the lake in Crestwood, the Bronx River Parkway Lake, and saw a huge turtle. It was huge, and it was on a branch that had fallen into the water. The fact that it was balanced there was pretty amazing.
Turtles have quite an amazing sense of balance.
I became more and more interested and began to frequent other lakes, and I went to the Bronx Zoo. They have a wonderful library that they let authors use, and I went to the reptile house a million times. Every time a new development goes up, we see creatures crushed on the side of the roads, running for their lives, looking for other habitats. I wanted this story to be realistic. I took this from the point of view of a turtle.