Lissa Rovetch
author of Ook the Book

I am At,
At the cat.
Do you see Pat?
He is my rat.
I sat on Pat,
So he is flat.

That's my favorite rhyme in Ook the Book because kids who read it and look at Shannon McNeil's funny illustration of the fat cat and the sat on rat always laugh really hard.

I wrote these poems out of a love of making kids laugh and the desire that reading be fun, easy, and un-frustrating.

It all started with Inky Pinky.

Playing Inky Pinky squished between my two big sisters in the back of my Dad's old Willie's jeepster. Playing Inky Pinky in my Mom's overflowing garden at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder Colorado. Nothing beat the feeling of being the one to guess an unguessable Inky Pinky. And, in our family, being able to come up with a brand new Inkety Pinkety—one nobody had ever thought of before, was the ultimate badge of honor.

Here's how it works. You've got your Ink Pinks, your Inky Pinkys, and your Inkety Pinketys. That's one, two, and three syllable rhymes. I give you a clue for both words, you tell me the two words that rhyme.

Clue: This is an Ink Pink. It's a chubby Kitty.

Answer: A Fat Cat.

Advanced Clue: This is an Inkety Inkety Pinkety. It's a more frightening, more furry, breed of dog.

Answer: A scarier, harrier terrier.

I guess I was so into rhyming growing up, it just kind of became part of my programming. That's why writing Ook the Book was so fun.

My two incredibly great kids, Kia and Niko, helped me think of zillions of rhymes. They'd come home from school with a new one, or wake up with a better word for an old one. They're 12 and 9 now, but when they were first learning to read, they got so frustrated when they couldn't figure out the words. Even their favorite books like Hop on Pop started to feel impossible when words like mouse and brown reared their ugly heads. That's when we switched to homemade books with super short, phonics-based story rhymes. They loved to read because they knew they could make it through a whole "story." Plus, there was always the pay-off of getting a good laugh at the end.

I went to art school in New York and Paris. After that I came to San Francisco where I freelanced as a photographer, did paintings that became airplane interiors, and made picture box assemblages out of bugs and things for magazines and annual reports. After that, I wrote a children's picture book, and I've been writing ever since. I like to write all kinds of kid's stuff including stories and games for CD ROMS. I recently wrote my 100th episode of Kate 'n Toady—the opening story in a monthly children's literary magazine called Spider. Kate and Toady are a big sister and a little brother who fight a lot, so I don't have to go very far from home to get new story ideas.

Aside from being an author and artist, my favorite things are friends, deserts, flowers, animals, songs, and swimming.

Lissa—June, 2001