Matthew Burgess: Hello. My name is Matthew Burgess and I'm the author of The Bear And The Moon.

Some stories, for me, begin with a character or an image or a hunch or some feeling about an adventure. In this case, for The Bear And The Moon, this story kind of arrived. I mean, it was that opening line that I heard and started writing down. And so this story, for me, unlike others, felt like a gift. It really just came to me and I started writing it down. Now that's not where it ends. Once I wrote it, then there was a process of revising and revisiting and figuring out how it would flow in the picture book form. But this one was special in that it just kind of floated down from the sky.

As a poet, I realized that the texts of picture books are like poems in that poems are about describing something or creating an experience for the reader with a certain concision or economy of language. I think my training as a poet taught me about how each word matters and taught me something about getting down to the essence, distilling the poem down to its essence in the same way that in a picture book, you try to get down to what really needs to be there. And then also, the words are working with the pictures. In a picture book, you don't want the words and the pictures to be doing the same thing, that the pictures should be taking you in another direction or saying something that the words aren't saying. So for me, part of what I've been learning through this process of making picture books and collaborating with Catia specifically, is that really interesting relationship between the words and the pictures.

For example, with The Bear And The Moon, when I wrote it, I kept picturing a grown-up bear. That in my mind as I wrote the story, I was seeing a full-grown bear and like my height. So in a way I was imagining myself, I think, as the bear in some way. And then when Catia read the manuscript, she had the impulse or the intuition or the insight to turn the character into a little bear, a baby bear, or a young bear. And that was such a great decision and choice that I hadn't thought about. Just one small example of how the story that we end up reading in the picture book is this real collaboration between the author and the illustrator.

At the beginning of the book, the bear wakes up and sees this red round thing floating down. Eventually they spend the day together and they become friends. And so the excerpt that I'll read from is after the first night where they watched the stars together, and then I'm going to start reading the next morning:

The next morning, the bear gave it a tour of his whereabouts. "Here is the tree I can climb to find honey. Here is where I curl into a ball and roll down the hill. And this is the spot where I sit on the pot." All the while, the floating red thing smiled back at him like a friend. It dipped and breezed and bumped against the bear's cheek. What a nice thing! What a wonderful thing! What a squishable, huggable thing!

And across that page turn, you can imagine what happens when this little bear, overcome with tenderness and affection for his new friend, can't resist giving it a squeeze.