D. Hopkinson: Hello, my name is Deborah Hopkinson and I'm the author of Butterflies Belong Here: A Story of One Idea, Thirty Kids, and a World of Butterflies, illustrated by Meilo So.

Butterflies Belong Here grew out of my own interest in gardening, and also a book that I did before with Philippe Cousteau and the same illustrator, the wonderful Meilo So, called Follow the Moon Home, about sea turtles. And as I shared that book around the country with schools and children and young readers and families, I'm so impressed by young activists. And because I live in Oregon and I garden, I wanted to have a book that was about activism, but maybe something that more schools and communities and families could take part in.

Butterflies Belong Here has a young girl who's come to the United States and English is a second language and she's not named in the book. But one of the things that always impresses me about going to schools is the amazing work that school librarians do and teachers to encourage individual child's interests and reading. And this particular, our narrator gets interested in a book on butterflies. I think as we go through and we see her the theme of transformation, which is so incredible as we watch caterpillars become butterflies, and our young narrator's transformation from sort of being shy in the background to really taking advantage of her love and her passion for butterflies and how that motivates her entire class to get involved.

So in this case, the school does a Monarch waystation, which is just a garden that will attract butterflies. Although the story is fictional and I'm always careful to make sure that you know what parts are true and what parts are made up, the information about monarchs is factual. And in fact, we are losing both habitat and also seeing a decline in monarchs, especially Western monarchs. So there is information in the back so that families and schools can actually start their own monarch gardens.

I think that gardening seems like it's something we don't know and can be very challenging. And one of the things I tried to do in the back of this book with the resources is to have both facts and books for young environmental activists, and also places that you can go. One of the things that it's important for people to know is that just going to a nursery and buying milkweed doesn't work, unless you know what kinds of native milkweed are right for your area. So we do talk about that. I've been to schools that have wonderful community gardens, and I hope that everyone will try to garden a little bit and think about gardening for pollinators, such as butterflies and bees and birds.