Speaker 1: Hi this Doreen Cronin and I am the author of "Diary of a Worm". I'm going to tell you a bit about where that story came from, and then I'm going to read a little bit of it to you.

Now, I grew up in a family with four kids. So there was me, my sister, and two brothers. If you have a brother or a sister, you may sometimes think that they are a little bit, hmm, shall I say annoying. Well, I sure thought they were annoying, especially my brothers.

So I sat down to write a story about a girl whose little brother was really bothering her. Just really really getting on her nerves and he was trying to get on her nerves. Every time the little brother annoyed her, she would call him a pest, like a worm or a spider or a fly.

Then the little brother would get information about that pest, and he'd come back, and he'd say, "Oh yeah, well, I'd love to be a worm, because worms are good for the earth," and so on and so on. What happens an awful lot when I write is that a story will completely change as I'm writing it and that's what happened here, I had the little brother go to his room and write in his journal, but as the pest that his sister had described him as. So he sits down in his room and writes, "My sister called me a worm today, but I love worms because ..." and then before I knew it the story of the brother and sister had simply become "The diary of a worm". Let's find out what's in that diary.

March 20th. Mom says there are three things I should always remember. Number 1: The Earth gives us everything we need. Number 2: When we dig tunnels, we help take care of the Earth. And Number 3: Never bother Daddy when he's eating the Newspaper.

March 29th. Today, I tried to teach Spider how to dig. First, all of his legs got stuck. Then he swallowed a bunch of dirt.

"I give up," I said. Tomorrow, he's going to teach me to walk upside down.

March 30th. We see Worm hanging from a spider web on the edge of a cliff. He writes. "Worms cannot walk upside down."