Back to Featured Interviews >>

MEET CAROLINE ARNOLD
Leo Politi Golden Author Award 2008
by Ann Stalcup

As a child, who were your favorite children's book authors? How have they influenced your writing?

Caroline Arnold

I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and when I was in elementary school I had many favorite authors including Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Maude Hart Lovelace. The books I loved the most were usually set in other times or far off places. One of my favorite books was Family Sabbatical by Carol Ryie Brink. Like the children in that story I dreamed that one day I might travel to Paris, learn to speak French, and climb the Eiffel Tower. Today I often travel to do research for my books and that's one of the things I like best about being a writer.

What inspired you to write children's books?

I loved books as a child but never imagined that I would be a writer when I grew up. I studied art in school and planned to be an artist and an art teacher. After I got married and had my own children I read stories to them. I realized that perhaps I could use my training in art to be a children's book illustrator. I started to write stories so that I could illustrate them and soon discovered that I enjoyed writing very much. I ended up being mostly a writer, although recently I have started doing more illustration. I am now working on a series of animal books illustrated with cut-paper collage.

When did you develop your passion for animals?

I've always loved animals. I got my first kitten when I was three--I named her Snoozy after a character in one of my favorite books--and have always had pets. During the summers our family spent in northern Wisconsin when I was a child, I learned the thrill of spotting birds, deer, and porcupines and other wild animals in the forest. In 1971 I spent four months in East Africa with my husband and young daughter. We lived in a national park side by side with lions, giraffes, zebras and other animals whose home is the African plains. A few of the photos we took on that trip are in my book African Animals. Birds have always been a favorite topic in my books. When I was a child I went on early morning bird walks with my father, who was an amateur birdwatcher, and now my husband, Art, studies birds in his research at UCLA. My recent book, Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines, focuses on how each part of a bird's body helps to make it an expert flyer. For my book, Hawk Highway in the Sky: Watching Raptor Migration, I spent a week in the Goshute Mountains of eastern Nevada watching and helping scientists trap and band migrating hawks, eagles and falcons. Nothing is more exciting than getting close to these magnificent birds and my close involvement with the process helped me to learn the details that I needed to write my book.

How do you decide what animals to write about?

There are so many different kinds of animals that I could spend the rest of my life writing about them and never run out of ideas. When I choose an animal for a book I often pick endangered species such as pandas or cheetahs. The more we know about these animals, the more we will care about saving them from extinction. I usually spend up to a year doing background reading on the subject of a book. I also go to the zoo to make my own observations of animals and also to help the photographer decide what pictures to take. If I can, I also try to observe the subjects of my books in the wild. In my future work I hope to continue writing about animals and the places they live as well as other topics. And even though I have become well known mostly for my nonfiction writing, I also like to write fiction. Perhaps I will try more of that in the future as well.