One day when my younger daughter was in third grade, she had  two teeth pulled. I took her out for a milkshake, and she put two straws where her teeth used to be. She reminded me of a walrus, and I  wrote a poem about it.

A few months later, I visited her classroom to lead the kids in some poetry. We all wrote poems that compared ourselves to animals. Those poems stayed in my head, and I thought a whole collection of them would be fun.

       

Soon, tons of poems comparing kids to animals were thundering through my brain, and five years later, I have a book.

And that's how the Stampede! began.