Marla Frazee: Hello, my name is Marla Frazee and I'm the author and illustrator of The Farmer and the Circus, a wordless picture book. The Farmer and the Circus is the second book in the Farmer Books Trilogy. The first is The Farmer and the Clown. The second is The Farmer and the Monkey and the third, the finale, is The Farmer and the Circus.

These books all together have taken me more than six years to make. I think of them as a love story in three parts. The characters -- the seemingly stern farmer, the lost and then found baby clown, the circus monkey, and the rest of the clown troop have allowed me to tell a story about staying open-hearted. The farmer in the first book takes care of the baby clown who accidentally falls off the circus train until he can be reunited with his family. In the second book, the farmer opens his door to a circus monkey who secretly followed him home and has to deal with a whole new set of circumstances because it turns out it's not that easy to have a circus monkey on a farm. In the third book, The Farmer and the Circus, we see that all of this has allowed the farmer to open his life to a lot more love than he ever expected to find.

There are echoes of my own life in these books and making them has helped me through some difficult transitions. I hope they do that for others too, because we all go through transitions of one kind or another. Readers have shared many of their own stories with me too, of their own goodbyes and feelings of being lost and then surprisingly found. I hope these books resonate with adopted, foster, and stepchildren in all kinds of families and also celebrate how families come together in all sorts of unexpected ways. And I hope these books show how seemingly random connections can have profound implications.