Chris Carpenter: My name is Chris carpenter. My love for children's literature started in an odd place, which is the game of chess. My first interest as a kid was chess. My father taught me chess at an early age, -- I was maybe five or six years old -- started taking me to chess tournaments. And he also had on his shelves a collection of classic literature, which included Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass. And, leafing through it, I was delighted to find some chess board diagram in Through the Looking Glass where Alice, throughout the story, she's like a pawn advancing across the chess board to ultimately be promoted to queen as in the game of chess, and so I absolutely had to read the story.

But if you're going to read your first book, I recommend not reading a sequel. So I was very confused. And there's also a poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter. My last name is Carpenter, so I was interested in that as well. And in that poem, some very dark things happen. The walrus and the carpenter eat the oysters that they start the poem being very friendly with. That really caught my attention as well. And you can be a little bit more fun in this genre than See Jack Run, and for me, there was no turning back.