Jane Cowen-Fletcher found a special pleasure in working on Farmer Will, an endearing picture book inspired by her own son. “When my son was a toddler, he had four little plastic farm animals that he loved,” she explains. “He held them close to his heart and would not let me put them on the windowsill at night (because they ‘would get cold’). He would sit next to the barn that came with the set and put the fence around himself and his ‘guys,’ and he would play. I thought it would be fun to try to imagine what was going on in his enchanted world, and the result was Farmer Will.”

While Farmer Will follows a little boy through a typical day of play, “we see everything through a toddler’s eyes, and so the animals are neither small nor plastic—they are so big and so very alive!” the author-illustrator notes. “Watching my toddler son lost in conversation with his toy farm animals, being far more eloquent than his language skills allowed him to be with grown-ups at the time, took me right back to my own childhood. We all gave our toys life, many lives, and they shared our adventures—what a heady time! I guess this book rose from the desire to celebrate the creative force of a child’s imagination. Or,” she admits, “maybe I just wanted to share in one of my son’s romps.”

The creator of the best-selling Baby Angels and the illustrator of I Love You Baby, From Head To Toe!, Jane Cowen-Fletcher lives in South Berwick, Maine, with her husband and two children. When she’s not writing and illustrating children’s books, she like to “read, read, read—especially children’s books (big surprise!),” hang out in libraries, draw, and entertain. “I also absolutely love to ice cookies, elaborately,” she notes. “It’s an oddly satisfying obsession that makes me popular at my children’s school during the holidays.”