In-depth Written Interview

Jenni and Matt Holm, interviewed from their California and Washington homes on May 6, 2014

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are the author-illustrator team behind the bestselling Baby Mouse and Squish graphic novel series, and you're also siblings. Take us back to the Holm household when you were growing up.

MATT HOLM: We grew up in Pennsylvania, and I was the youngest of five kids. We were all boys except Jenni, who was smack in the middle. Although somehow, maybe because she was the only girl, she managed to act as if she was the oldest of us all and was always in charge.

JENNI HOLM: Yes, as the only girl of five children, I grew up in a house that smelled strongly of boys. So you should feel a little bit sorry for me. I pretty much did whatever they were doing, running around the woods and playing kickball and softball, reading comics. All these activities definitely inspired a lot of my writing, especially in Squish and Babymouse.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Comic books played a large role in shaping and inspiring your creative sensibilities growing up. How were you introduced to comics?

MATT HOLM: As the youngest, I had a lot of hand-me-down stuff. Our eldest brother is 18 years older than I am, so there's a big range in terms of the different things I gathered from my siblings over the years, including books. Everything that everyone had been reading during their childhoods was left to me, among them a lot of Dr. Seuss stories and old comic books and collections, especially Peanuts.

JENNI HOLM: The whole comic book habit in our household was actually started by the biggest boy in the house: our dad. He was a huge comic strip fan and comic reader in general, and he loved Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon. So I read those, too, and whatever my brothers were reading: Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, and the superhero comics.

Even back then in the 1970s and 1980s, I was struck by the fact that there weren't a lot of ladies in comics. Of course there was Wonder Woman, but I found her hard to connect to. I think that had something to do with my being a normal girl in fourth grade, wearing clothes, as opposed to being in my underwear. So on a very basic level, I did not connect to Wonder Woman.

TEACHINGBOOKS: In addition to comics, what other books do you credit with helping to inform the author and illustrator you became?

MATT HOLM: Besides comic books, I read a ton of books about outer space, especially concerning the space program. Given the age spread between my siblings and me, I got an interesting perspective on a lot of the space program before and after the moon landing. Many of the books I inherited from them were about the Mercury and Gemini programs. When the Apollo mission happened, my dad bought a couple of encyclopedia sets that included all of the supplementary annual editions that had special full-color spreads on the moon landings.

I specifically remember a National Geographic book called Our Universe that explained not only basic information about the solar system, but also had a lot of pretty cool speculative art about what human colonies might look like in the future, and what aliens might look like if they lived in the skies of Jupiter or something.

JENNI HOLM: Matt likes to say we grew up in a house that had a hand-me-down library, and it's true, so I had pretty wide reading habits. I especially loved fantasy. My favorite author was Lloyd Alexander, by far. I guess he was the author who turned me on to reading.

Our parents encouraged us to read by reading a lot themselves. And they pretty much gave us free rein to read whatever we wanted. They didn't pay a lot of attention to our specific reading habits, probably because there just wasn't time. Our dad was a pediatrician working crazy hours, and our mom was a nurse. I have no doubt things were overwhelming with five kids. So just making sure that we made it through the day alive was the priority.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Matt, please talk about your drawing. Was it something you enjoyed as a kid?

MATT HOLM: I always liked drawing, and telling stories with my drawings has appealed to me for a long time. My wife and I moved recently and we were going through tons of my childhood papers, and we came across some of my very early drawings. At that point I was making up stories about this stuffed animal dog who was some sort of superhero spy with cool vehicles and a secret lair.

There was a point in the late '80s, I think, when there seemed to be this last little golden age in newspaper comic strips. You still had things like Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side, and Garfield coming in, and they were really reinvigorating the comic strip page. Around then, I remember seeing a TV special where Jim Davis showed his studio, and what the process of creating Garfield was like—how he sketched things out and what kinds of paper and pens and inks he used.

I started trying to mimic that professional approach and I applied it to my interest in outer space. My first comic strip was about a boy who happened to be a space alien; his body was normal but his head had two big eyes on top of a stalk. I gave him a sidekick who was basically two eyeballs in a giant puff of hair. The strip was about this kid and his life, except, as an alien, he could do things like steal the family flying saucer instead of the family car.

JENNI HOLM: I missed a lot of Matt's childhood because he's six years younger than I am. By the time he was becoming a real human being in middle school and high school, I was already gone. But one way we connected was through his comic strips, which he started doing from a young age. I was always a big fan, and after I left, I used to beg him to send his comics to me. He would, as presents, which was the perfect thing for a kid to do. I was recently cleaning up my desk and I found a card that he must have sent me while I was in college. It was full of these little characters that he used to draw that I loved, including that little alien boy and his alien like sidekick.

MATT HOLM: When I used to draw these strips, I'd post them on my door, as a sort of way to stake out my territory in the house. When Jenni was still home, I think she was tickled when she would open her bedroom door in the morning and see some kooky new comic waiting for her.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Jenni, as the author of your collaborations with Matt — and many other award-winning books, as well—when did it strike you that you wanted to pursue a career in writing?

JENNI HOLM: I didn't know what I wanted to be when I was growing up, and I didn't easily fit into a category in high school. In the fall I was a twirler in the marching band, and in the spring I played lacrosse. In the winter I was in the debate club, which I started with a friend.

The person who ended up sponsoring the debate club was this wonderful English teacher who was known for his fantasy science fiction course. One of the first things he explained to us about debate was that we should be able to debate either side of an issue. I think that learning that from him, and practicing debating both sides with different topics, helped me to understand how to craft a story in my mind. I learned from him how to look at a story from different points of view.

Even so, I was an international studies major in college and I kind of thought I was going to head off into the diplomatic corps. I think I'd have liked to have majored in English, but it was too intimidating. In the end, the corps didn't work out, and I moved to New York City after college. I fell into advertising and became a broadcast producer for television commercials. It was while I was working in television production that I finally started writing my first novel.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Jenni, you are now the author of many novels, including three Newbery Honor-winners that are deeply rooted in your family history: Our Only May Amelia, Penny from Heaven, and Turtle in Paradise. Please talk about the histories that influenced these and any other of your books.

JENNI HOLM: Our Only May Amelia was my first novel, and I wrote it after my dad began having a series health issues and I started going home quite a lot to help out. The hospital is a pretty boring place for anyone to hang out, for patients and visitors alike, but my dad is a real storyteller, and he'd pass time by telling me all about what it was like growing up in the Finnish American community in Washington State. All of a sudden, what I couldn't be bothered to listen to when I was little, I found incredibly fascinating. I was finally at an age that I wanted to pay attention and write these things down. Our Only May Amelia was inspired by his childhood and his family growing up.

One thing I discovered after writing Our Only May Amelia was that if you write a book about your dad's family, you probably should have written a book about your mom's family first. So the next book I wrote that was family-based was Penny from Heaven, which was inspired by my mom and her childhood as the daughter of Italian American immigrants. Her dad died before she was born, and that devastating loss was a big part of what informed the book, too.

Turtle in Paradise emerged from Penny from Heaven. Penny's grandmother was from Key West, just like my great-grandmother. During that era, Key West was not at all how it is today. It had gone bankrupt during the Great Depression, and prior to the 1970s it was a very poor place and very undeveloped.

I knew about this other Key West because my mother told stories about it. She spent summers there as a kid, visiting family, and at the time she thought it was terribly hot and humid, with no opportunity to get a decent breakfast. She wasn't used to the idea of Cuban bread with avocado smeared on it in the mornings. I started remembering all these stories, and Turtle in Paradise grew from there.

My latest novel, The Fourteenth Goldfish, was very much inspired by my dad. As a pediatrician, he was a very science-oriented guy. He even kept these Petri dishes, these blood agar plates, in our refrigerator to culture bacteria when we were growing up—so of course, I thought everyone's dad kept Petri dishes in their fridge next to their cottage cheese.

My dad was a doctor during the post-war era in medicine, when the medical community was starting to see antibiotics as a kind of magic bullet. The Fourteenth Goldfish is really inspired by my dad's experience; it poses a lot of questions about the limits of science, and how far we should go.

TEACHINGBOOKS: New York City was the place where you both began your professional careers, and where you ultimately conceived of the Babymouse series. How did your work together there begin?

JENNI HOLM: I was living in New York City in this little studio apartment when Matt graduated from college. When he got an internship at Hearst, like many other little brothers before him, he came and crashed on my Ikea couch—for three months. It's kind of hard to live with somebody in a one-room apartment, but it was actually super easy to live with him. He's very easygoing.

So that's where we started to really get to know each other again, and it was so nice. New York is a big city, and it was good to have an instant friend who knew my background. We both ended up staying in New York for about 10 years.

MATT HOLM: When I was in college I decided to major in English nonfiction writing. So I was really training to be a magazine writer, while also taking practically every elective I could, including art classes, and also doing a lot of political cartoons for the school newspaper. That was a great education in and of itself, learning how to meet a deadline and keep up with things, how to work in a really small space, and how to work in black and white and with fairly low resolution reproduction. Newsprint isn't very forgiving in terms of how small your lines can be and how much detail you can put in. I really had to make my images clear and make people understand what I was drawing.

When I got out of school, and I got an internship at Country Living magazine in New York, and that's when I crashed on Jenni's couch while I looked for a place to live. We started hanging out, which was great because even though New York is huge, it can be somewhat difficult to meet people. For the first time, we connected as adults.

JENNI HOLM: Matt ended up being an editor and writer at Country Living. As I started writing more novels, I asked him to copyedit some of my books for me. After a while I started working on a book project called Middle School is Worse than Meatloaf, which is very visual. You learn about the main character and her life by snooping on her. You see what's going on by looking at pictures of her locker, pictures on her refrigerator, or what e-mail she's sending.

It's fictional, but one of the elements in this book is that the main character has a brother who likes to leave comics on her door—which Matt used to do on his own door when he was a kid. I asked my editor if Matt could draw those comics, and told her how talented he is, and she agreed.

MATT HOLM: When Jenni had me drawing the cartoons for Middle School is Worse than Meatloaf, it turned out to be a really smooth process. She just sort of art-directed me, and it worked well.

JENNI HOLM: Matt knocked out the comics for Middle School is Worse than Meatloaf in about two weeks. The process was amazing, and the drawings were amazing. That just got me thinking, Woo-woo! What else can we work on together? And the "what else" turned into Babymouse.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Babymouse is a bestselling middle-grade series about a smart and endearing mouse who slips in and out of imaginative fantasies while also navigating and negotiating the real world of home and school life. How did the concept for the Babymouse books originate?

JENNI HOLM: The concept arose from a few places. Part of it came from my always being a bit irritated by the lack of females in comics. Even though I love to read comics and was such a huge comic reader as a kid, I didn't see myself reflected in comics.

There was also influence from a sort of random and unique background in animation that I received through my second job in New York, when I was hired as a secretary at an animation company. When I started, their bread and butter was producing animated commercials in the traditional sense—by which I mean before computers, when animators would do pencil sketches and paint on cels. It was sixty cels for a second of animation, which is a lot of art.

One of the tools of an animator and animation director is the storyboard, which is basically a four-panel comic strip with three tiers. The director would knock out a rough story on the boards, which would describe the action and break out the dialogue. Essentially, it was a general roadmap for the entire animation team. I found the storyboard very useful as I continued my advertising career, and my knowledge of storyboarding and advertising animation definitely helped in the creation of Babymouse, and later, Babymouse's production.

The actual creation of Babymouse started after I'd had a challenging day at work. Even though I'd had books published at that point, I still kept my day job for many years, and when I came home that particular day my husband said, "Oh . . . you look so cranky and irritated." Suddenly this mouse image of myself popped into my head—I had a disgruntled look on my face, and these crazy whiskers and my hair sticking out all over the place, and my hands on my hips. I drew it, and the next time I saw Matt I said, "You know what? Let's do something with this." And we worked up our Babymouse pitch.

MATT HOLM: When we developed the pitch, we plotted out a day in the life of Babymouse together. We figured out what kind of problems she had, what she was interested in, and we decided she would have these daydreams that would get her out of her mundane life.

Jenni drew upon her own childhood experiences a lot, like dealing with mean girls and reading a ton herself. Growing up, we were sort of notorious for reading constantly, and there's even one famous family story about a neighbor who one day spotted Jenni trying to rake leaves one-handed while she held a book in the other.

Our original pitch was much more of a hybrid-sort of comic book and storybook, where it was just one drawing to a page, or one little bit of a scene to a page, with some narration and maybe a panel or two, and maybe a speech bubble from Babymouse that allowed her to talk about what was going on in her life.

We shopped the idea around for a few years, and it wasn't until late 2003 or early 2004 that we finally got a publisher interested in the book.

JENNI HOLM: At first we couldn't sell it to save our lives. But you know, sometimes I think rejection is a good thing because it just fires you up to get back out there and try a little harder. Sometimes it's just a question of timing.

MATT HOLM: Once we got a deal with our publisher to actually make the books, we realized we should make the series more of a coherent story, but with each book on a different topic, with a different thing going on for Babymouse. That's when we started to develop the ancillary characters a little more, like the mean, popular girl named Felicia Furrypaws, and Babymouse's best friend Wilson the weasel—so we could have Babymouse develop in reaction or opposition to them. It became clear that Babymouse is very enthusiastic, but she's a daydreamer who thinks she can do anything—especially if she read about it in a book. She often thinks reading will be enough, and that she doesn't actually need any practice or experience to succeed, which becomes problematic when she decides to tackle something like surfing or snowboarding.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How does the technical process behind your collaboration on the Babymouse books work?

MATT HOLM: We've collaborated long-distance basically from the beginning, because Jenni moved out of state right after we sold Babymouse and I was already living in upstate New York at the time.

The process we developed is based on Jenni's background in TV commercial production and animation, especially her familiarity with the storyboarding method of planning shots. Traditionally what would happen in that industry is a storyboard artist would sketch out a quick view of what you're going to be seeing through the camera before you go through all the trouble in terms of shooting it. Underneath the sketch would be notes for stage direction, sound effects, dialogue or voiceover narration.

Jenny realized that she could use this storyboarding technique to make our comics as well. Basically, all she does is skip the drawing part of what you see through the camera, and she does all the other writing: the stage directions, the dialogue, and so on.

JENNI HOLM: Once I beat out the story using the storyboard, I'll give the whole thing to Matt, and he'll take a crack at it and rewrite.

MATT HOLM: I edit and revise and help her out if she gets stuck in a corner somewhere in the story, and then it goes to our editors. We go through a bunch of drafts with them.

JENNI HOLM: Once everybody is happy with the story, Matt goes to pencil sketches. He does what we call thumbnail sketches, which are lots of quick little sketches of what he sees in his mind. Sometimes he'll give me a lot of options, because again, we approach the art and layout the way you would approach editing a film. He supplies me with art the way a director would supply an editor with shots. He might give me a wide shot, a tight shot, a medium shot, or a different perspective altogether. Maybe Babymouse is walking down the hall and sees something happening, or maybe she only overhears it instead.

MATT HOLM: When I do these sketches I'm not worrying yet about layout, or how things are going to look on the comic book page. All I'm doing is generating lots of little disconnected sketches for each cartoon panel.

JENNI HOLM: Matt does these thumbnails for the whole story, and then he scans all the art and emails it to me.

MATT HOLM: Once Jenni has the art, she prints it out and picks and chooses among all of my raw sketches and says, "All right, I'll use this one here, and I like this angle better than that angle..." Then she'll start piecing everything together. She cuts out all of my pictures and pastes them down to sheets of paper to make a layout for the book.

She works in two-page spreads—a left-hand page and a right-hand page—and makes sure that the story fits. She'll make sure it's not too long or too short, she'll make sure that it has the dramatic page turns in the right places, and she'll decide if I need to draw some additional material—if something might be funnier or more dramatic in a different way. And then she sends it back to me, and then I'll redraw everything.

In the early days I would redraw it in marker and send that to our editors before it went to final drawings, but nowadays we usually skip the marker stage sketching because our editors have a pretty good sense of what the book is going to look like. My final artwork is done digitally on my computer.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Are there specific advantages or disadvantages that come with collaborating so closely?

JENNI HOLM: I prefer the collaborative process that I have with Matt to working alone. I've found that creating the Babymouse and Squish graphic novels with him is a much easier experience than when I write a novel. For me, novel writing is much more stressful because I'm in my own head all the time. When it comes to the books I do with Matt, there are two heads involved, so it's a little easier. Actually, it's much easier. I guess the disadvantage, though, is that we're always talking shop at, like, Thanksgiving. We can't get away from work on holidays!

MATT HOLM: It's interesting. A lot of people are naturally concerned that it must be extremely difficult to work with your sibling. But I think it did help that Jenni and I were six years apart in age, and we didn't have a lot of the clashing interactions growing up that other siblings might have had. There was never really any competition between us.

But even though we don't have that sort of childhood baggage, we do have a lot of mutual experiences and knowledge of what our childhoods were like. So it's very easy for me, when Jenni describes something, to immediately recognize it as a scene from our shared childhood or childhood setting. I can immediately sense where she's going and what she wants, without her having to go into a lot of detail and explanation.

JENNI HOLM: We'll take little walks down memory lane together. For instance, for Beach Babe, which is all about Babymouse taking a vacation, we spent a lot of time recalling what would happen when we'd go to the Jersey Shore growing up—what the trips we like, what mishaps always seemed to happen, what else we remembered. I can just say to Matt, "Help me remember this or that." It's great.

MATT HOLM: I also think Jenni and I benefit from the fact that in our original professional careers, we were both heavily edited, so we were used to a lot of criticism already. Jenni was in advertising, which is notorious for tearing people's ideas up and spitting them out, and I worked in magazines. The magazine industry was much gentler, but still, I'd send a story out, and after being handled by a half a dozen people, there'd maybe be three words from my original work that hadn't been touched and the rest would have been changed.

In the end, we were both accustomed to the idea that the final product is what matters. As long as someone has a good idea to make something better, that's a positive thing, and you shouldn't get too caught up in the idea that your original concept was precious or perfect.

TEACHINGBOOKS: The Babymouse books are drawn primarily in black and white, with splashes of pink. How did you develop the aesthetic for Babymouse and her world?

MATT HOLM: Everything started with a sketch that Jenni drew of this cranky little mouse with her hands on her hips. Jenni scribbled it down on a napkin and gave it to me, and said that this was a character we should go for. So I started drawing some very rough sketches of Babymouse.

Early on, I spent a lot of time trying to get the proportions right, because originally her nose was extremely long, and her whiskers were messy—but they were four feet long and messy. I did a whole bunch of sketches as we developed our Babymouse pitch.

Because I had been working in black and white when I was doing my earlier comics, both for my college newspaper and a Web comic about another space alien later on, I was comfortable with that approach. We also figured black and white would be a reasonable way to work on these books, too, because if I was going to try to do full color art, it would take forever. If you look at a Marvel or DC Comic, it has a huge team of people behind it. The production credits look like a movie. There's a penciler, an inker, a colorist, a letterer, and so on.

Jenni and I were the only ones who would be producing this: Jenni as the writer and me as the artist. So we need to come up with a process that would enable me to get all the work done. Black and white was the safest option—except that initially, Jenni had drawn Babymouse with a little pink heart on her dress. She'd grabbed a pink pen and scribbled that in that tiny bit of color, and she said, "Wherever there's a heart, draw that in pink. That will be a tiny pop of color that we can add throughout the book."

As I drew the final art for the first book, I showed Babymouse's bedroom, and it's covered in hearts. The wallpaper is pink hearts, the bedspread is covered in pink hearts, there's a big pink heart on the rug, it's just everywhere. At that point I realized there was going to be a lot more pink in the book, and it became a natural sort of way to show not only Babymouse with this little pink heart on her dress, but also to show when we're slipping into her dream world where everything turns pink. We go from the boring black-and-white world of Babymouse to the vibrant pink world of her dreams.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've begun collaborating on a new line of books about a microbe named Squish. What inspired the series, and, aside from the obvious biological differences, what sets it apart from Babymouse?

MATT HOLM: After we had been working on Babymouse for a couple of years, we knew we wanted to do another book series. We weren't sure what it would be about, exactly, but we figured it would be another animal book, and we knew we wanted to have a boy be the main character since Babymouse has a girl main character.

JENNI HOLM: The Squish books are definitely different from Babymouse in the sense that the series is deeply colored by Matt's perspective of growing up. It has a lot to do with his experiences, and for me, that's a lot of fun. I'm used to the boy experience, having grown up with so many brothers. I'm familiar with the species.

MATT HOLM: What I remember about being a boy in school is that there was a little less of the social drama that Babymouse goes through with Felicia Furrypaws, and a little bit more of the mentality that you should keep your head down, not embarrass yourself in class, and avoid getting beaten up by bullies.

Jenni had had her first child by the time we started thinking more about boys and what they're interested in, and we noted that her son was really interested in science. Also, because our own parents were in the medical field, we grew up on a steady diet of science, with lots of medical talk around the dinner table. I think all that churned together until we finally came up with the idea to feature microbes as our main characters.

JENNI HOLM: Also, we had to give microbes a voice in children's literature. There are plenty of dogs and cats and mice in books, but nobody has ever written a book about an amoeba or paramecium.

MATT HOLM: Once we had the idea that our main character was an amoeba, the big challenge was framing the story. For instance, where was he going to live? We thought he might live on the damp towel in someone's bathroom. But then we realized we'd be asked, "Who are these people who live in the house and have this bathroom? What do they do?" We'd also gotten sidetracked by the idea, thinking that maybe Squish befriends the human boy who owns the towel, and maybe Squish starts solving the boy's problems. The trouble with that was, the story then became more about the boy, and we didn't care about the boy and his house. We cared about Squish, and Squish's world.

Thankfully, Jenni came up with the brilliant idea to put Squish's world out in the world, in a pond. A pond is its own, self-contained world—perfect for us to focus on the microbes who live there and nothing else.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?

JENNI HOLM: I go for a bike ride. I also eat, which is probably the less healthy choice! Either way, I think sometimes it's best to just step away from the computer screen. For me, getting away from my desk and clearing my head is a good way for me to figure things out. And of course, I have Matt.

MATT HOLM: Yes, this is one of the great things about having a collaborator. When you get stuck, you have someone else you can turn to. Jenni and I can always turn to each other when we're running out of steam, and the other person can take a crack at the problem. Sometimes I'll help out if Jenni gets to a point where she can't figure out how to end a scene, or she feels like she's running out of jokes. She might give me the basic layout with asterisks that ask me to strike someone from the scene, or end it completely. She has confidence that even if I can't fix the problem, I might have an impression or an idea that will kick her off in a different direction and get things moving again.

We rarely speak to each other over the phone when it comes to work; we do the majority of it over email. But when we get really stuck on something or if it's a new project and we're both trying to hammer something out, we'll get on the phone and that will pretty quickly resolve whatever the issue is. We're able to think more quickly and bounce ideas back and forth faster.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell students when you speak to them?

MATT HOLM: I do a lot of school visits and it's a blast. It's exciting to go out and meet the people that actually read your books—you realize you're not creating in a vacuum.

When I speak to kids, I tell them how I got started in my career, and what got Jenni and me going. I also ask them if they're interested in becoming writers or illustrators themselves, and I say that the most important thing for them to do is to keep reading. For aspiring writers, of course it's important to write every day, but I think it's even more important to read constantly. I believe that the things that happen in books sort of seep into you, to the point that when you finally go to write something yourself, you know a lot already. You know how a story is structured, and how characters behave. You're familiar with the arc that a story can take. I think the same goes for comics. If you're interested in creating them, read a lot of them. Look at how they're drawn. Look at the format. If you do, it'll be a lot easier when you start drawing your own. You've been reading them your whole life, so you know the language, so to speak.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell educators?

JENNI HOLM: First, I like having the opportunity to thank teachers and librarians. We love you guys. And I also like talking to them about how comics are truly tools to literacy. They can really help kids become confident readers. Comics can teach kids the fundamentals—inference, tracking from left to right, learning how dialogue works. I want everyone to know what useful tools comics can be in helping and encouraging our kids to read.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What is a typical day like for you?

JENNI HOLM: I don't usually have a typical day. Generally speaking, I travel quite a bit, usually in month-long chunks in the spring and fall. But when I'm not traveling, I'm getting my kids out the door for school, and I have until they come home to work. That's my core writing time, although I also work on weekends. I have to say, I haven't met too many creative-types who lead balanced lives. Once you're on a creative roll, you kind of have to keep the momentum going.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Matt, is it true that you look like Squish?

MATT HOLM: Is it true that I look like Squish? I suppose a little bit. I do have that charming smile. Although I almost never wear ball caps like he does. That was inspiration from my baseball-playing years.

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