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I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.

I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I'd written, I don't want to leave that behind.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.