Gregory Maguire: Hello there. My name is Gregory Maguire and I'm the author of a book called Cress Watercress, illustrated by David Litchfield. It's a story about a rabbit family, a mother and her two children, the older, a girl named Cress, which is short for Cressida and the younger, a baby named Kip. Now this family happens to be rabbits, so they start out in the book in a rabbit warren that they have to abandon, because that they can no longer manage to live there alone. The father has gone off and not come back. The family needs to move to an apartment tree where there will be more society and more security for a mother trying to raise two children on her own.

Well, I want to tell you a little bit about how Cress Watercress came to be written. I should start out by saying I have three children. They're now mostly grown. They're in that lukewarm bath water of childhood, which is somewhere in between the end of high school and the end of college, which means they look grown up and they sound grown up and sometimes they are grown up but sometimes they're not. So one day I was driving down the highway and I was thinking about a little contretemps that one of them had. And I thought if this person were younger, what would I find on my bookshelf to be able to read aloud to say something about the struggles that all people have? And I don't just mean children, I mean, grownups too, the struggles we have about how strong feelings are and how unplannable and unchartable and how recurrent they are.

I thought there are lots of books about kids and teenagers with anger or with grief or with loss or with frustration or insecurity or fear. But what ever says anything to readers about the fact that when you govern or conquer an emotional crisis of one sort or another, you haven't done it for good for the rest of your life, it's going to recur. It's an endless pattern and cycle of feelings, that growing up is not just a matter of getting there and then being done, it's a matter of learning to do with the recurrence of strong feeling. So that's what gave me the idea of writing Cress Watercress.

I'm going to read a section from the early part of the book where the young rabbit named Cress Watercress and her mother and baby brother are traipsing through the woods on their way to their new apartment. They're a little lost and they meet somebody in the woods who's a bit alarming.

A figure crossed their path in the moonlight, striping the horizon with black and white.

"Oh, my pearls and pistols. What do we have here? Humble country folk out for an evening stroll?" asked a lady skunk, peering through a lorgnette. "And far from home, by the look of your shabby luggage."

"Good evening, madame."

"The little ones are out late," said the skunk. "I disapprove."

"Oh, do you?" asked Mama blandly. "Well, it can't be helped tonight."

"Not how I'd raise children, if I had any," replied the skunk. "But don't let me keep you. I'm off to the opera. Notice my lorgnette. Notice my chinchilla."

Wrapped around the skunk's neck, the chinchilla shyly lifted her head and murmured, "Howdy-doo."

"Lady Agatha Cabbage is my name," said the skunk. She squinted through her eyepiece at Cress. "My, what a charming little girl you are. Little frou-frou, little bunnykins, would you like to become my lady's maid? My last maid ran off. Useless. It's so hard to keep good help. Do come, child. I need help"