Lesa Cline-Ransome: Hi, my name is Lesa Cline-Ransome, and I wrote the dual picture book biography Of Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Tudor, and the Pond Between which is illustrated by Ashley Benham Yazdani. I grew up in Massachusetts, which is home to many literary heroes like poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Phyllis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote The House of Seven Gables, and Little Women author Louisa May Alcott. But it was just 10 miles from my home at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts that I discovered the story of how the world of poet Henry David Thoreau intersected with a debt ridden failed entrepreneur named Frederic Tudor during the winter of 1846.

Frederic Tudor and his 100 men began harvesting ice from the waters of Walden Pond, they shipped all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to sell in India. That's right. He was sure that this venture would surely finally make him rich. Yet nearly everyone else thought this idea was crazy. Even the Boston Gazette called Tudor's idea, "a slippery speculation." Except Tudor and Thoreau didn't think the idea was crazy at all. As Thoreau watched from his tiny cabin in the woods, he wrote in his diary, "Thus, it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well." Thoreau's writings and Tudor's innovations in insolation would forever change the course of history. And this is where my story, Of Walden Pond, begins.

Winter. Henry David Thoreau fled the city of Concord for the woods, leaving behind family, church, and work for the company of sparrows and squirrels, chickadees and woodchucks, a journal, his pencil, and the poetry of Walden Pond. Frederic Tudor failed at one venture after another. A laughingstock to his neighbors, he left behind family, Boston, debts and headed for the woods with tools and 100 men, sleds and horses, a journal, his pencil and the riches of Walden Pond. Oddball, tax dodger, nature lover, dreamer, that's what they called Thoreau. Bankrupt, disgrace, good for nothing, dreamer, that's what they called Tudor.