Sy Montgomery: Hi, my name is Sy Montgomery. I'm the author of Becoming a Good Creature, which is a picture book for young readers based largely on my memoir for adult readers, How to Be a Good Creature.

I'd rather write about animals than about myself, but Kate insisted, as did my editor for The Good, Good Pig, that by putting myself in these stories, I was the setting of the jewel that was the animals' stories, that would make them shine more brightly against the backdrop of my life, to show their powers, to change me, to inspire me, to save me in some cases. That's how How to Be a Good Creature came about.

When I was writing the kind of children's version, there was a lot in How to Be a Good Creature that would not be appropriate for children. While some of the issues that adults face are sophisticated and complicated and quite dire, children face serious challenges too. So in writing Becoming a Good Creature, the picture book for little kids, I didn't shy away from talking about the very serious learning challenges that children face. They too have to face figuring out what really is family. They have to learn that a family is made out of love, and it is not just made out of a marriage certificate. It does not always have to be just two opposite sex, same race, same species people and their biological offspring.

They have to learn that school is not the only place to find a teacher, for example, but that there's teachers all around us. We just have to learn to recognize them. Sometimes they have two legs and they're in front of the classroom, and other times they have eight arms and they're living in the sea, or they could be the cricket living in your woodpile, or they could be the kittens sleeping on your lap. So one of the lessons that I wanted to urge children to be alert to, is how to find good teachers, how to recognize good teachers.

I have more animals, more different individual animals and more different species in Becoming a Good Creature than I did in How to Be a Good Creature. We have Cassowary, a bird as tall as a man who looks just like a dinosaur. That's the animal who really illustrates the important lesson of how to wait patiently and wonderful things will come to you.

Children, just like adults, have to learn forgiveness, for example. I talk about how a white weasel, the white winter-coated version of a little weasel taught me how to forgive. They need to learn how to find common ground with those who are unlike us. And who could be more unlike us than an octopus? Eight legs and three hearts and blue blood and beak like a parrot and venom like a snake, and they can pour their boneless body through a tiny opening. And yet something like that can be your friend. You can find common ground.

There's a lot of pretty sophisticated lessons that children have to learn. I think it's not just comforting, but also thrilling and exciting for kids to realize that teachers are out there to help them with this important job. We just have to learn to recognize and learn to listen for their truth.