Aron Steinke: Hi, my name is Aron Nels Steinke, and I'm the author of the Mr. Wolf's Class graphic novel series. I became a teacher about 10 years ago, and when I was teaching, I noticed that little funny things would happen during the day, very unique things that only would happen in a classroom full of kids. And I decided that I would start documenting those experiences by writing stories the way I know how to write them best and that's by making comics about them. So these were funny little things, like one of my favorite memories is showing the hypocrisy of being a teacher. There's a comic strip I drew where I'm so hungry because teaching is so hard and I'm starving. So I pull out my sandwich while my students are working on their writing and I start eating my sandwich during class, and I have a couple of bites taken out of my sandwich. And one of the students looks at me and says, "Hey, it's not snack time yet." Because, you know, I expected my students to wait until snack time, and there I was breaking that rule.

So that was a comic strip I made, and then I started making a book series called Mr. Wolf's Class, where I started making things up a bit more and I started fictionalizing things. So it was no longer really, like, a 100% true story, but it was still based on my experiences as a teacher. My newest book, Field Trip, is about the students going on an overnight camping field trip in an old growth forest. About 11 years ago, I was student teaching a group of fifth graders, and we spent a night camping in the Opal Creek wilderness area in Oregon. And because of that experience, I decided, you know, that would be a great setting for a book where the classroom gets out of the classroom and they go on a field trip and they go into nature, and I could finally have a chance to draw lots of trees. I love drawing nature.

I'm looking at a page right now, page 34, in Mr. Wolf's Class book four, Field Trip, and they've left the bus and they're walking on a pathway, they go underneath a waterfall, or behind a waterfall where there's kind of a cave. They continue across a bridge. The character Aziza, who looks like a duck, is walking across the bridge and she feels a little nauseous. She has vertigo, and a frog character, Samson's mom, she helps Aziza across the bridge and on the next page, she gets some water to drink and then she's feeling good and ready to go. And I have a chance to draw the forest and there's a great drawing of a big douglas fir tree that's maybe several, several hundred years old.