Speaker 1: Hi, this is Susan Verdi and I'm the author of The Museum. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I cam to write this book and then I'll share some of the book with you.

The Museum actually started out as a poem that I had written when I was visiting a museum with my own children and one of my children collapsed on the floor in the middle of the museum and I said "what are you doing on the floor?" and he said, "Mom, I can't look at another painting of food I'm starving".

So, I grabbed a paper and pencil because I always carry something to write with and I started to write a poem about the art and how it made us feel and it got him up off the floor and it became this wonderful journey through the museum and that poem then became a story about a young girl's journey through a museum and how all the different pieces of art made her feel.

I'm going to read you a little part of it but I'm going to start kind of in the middle where the character actually encounters a blank canvas in the middle of the museum. So she's seen all this other art but then suddenly she sees this empty canvas and I love this part because this is really where she's affected by all the other art she's seen.

An empty canvas stares at me. Where's the color? What does it mean? It's the strangest art I've ever seen. Is this a joke? I shut my eyes and something happens to my surprise. I start to see things in my head. Yellow, blue then green and red. Circles, lines, all kinds of shape. Faces, flowers and landscapes. I opened my eyes and looked once more at the canvas that I saw before. It's mine to fill the way I choose. A purple dot, a pair of shoes, zigzag lines, the deep blue sea, a portrait of my Mom and me.