Robert Munsch

I was born on June 11, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where I grew up in a family of nine kids. I almost flunked first grade and also the second, third, fourth, and fifth. I did, however, all through elementary school, write poetry-funny poems, silly poems, all sorts of poems. Nobody thought that was very important, including me. When I went to high school, I didn’t get along with anybody, read lots of books and decided to be a Catholic Priest. I studied for seven years to be a Jesuit priest, only to find that I was lousy priest material.

After a working in an orphanage and a daycare centre (where I discovered I was very good at telling the children stories), my wife and I moved to Ontario where we both found jobs at a lab preschool at the University of Guelph. My wife’s boss, a children’s librarian, heard me telling my stories and with the help of my boss, convinced me to take time off to write. During that time I wrote down 10 stories and sent them off to 10 different publishers. Nine said "No," and one (Annick Press) said, "Yes" to a story called "Mud Puddle". So I became a writer.

"Mud Puddle" sold 3000 copies the first year, a modest beginning, but Annick Press kept putting out my books and they continued to sell. ["Mud Puddle" had its best year 10 years after it was published!]. Finally I quit my job at the University and started just writing and telling stories. It was about this time that I became a Canadian citizen and lost my American citizenship.

The storytelling got very big when I was discovered by children’s festivals and entertainment promoters. At times I was telling stories to 3,000 kids at once-that is a lot different than a daycare nap time. But I still kept doing schools and daycares because I liked doing them.

I also started to travel all over Canada telling stories and staying with different families. I first started staying with families because I did not have money for a hotel, but I soon found out that families were a great place to look for stories when a book called "Moira’s Birthday" grew out of staying with Moira’s family in Hay River, NWT.

Along the way I became Canada’s best selling author, but I was not as successful in the US. Then "Love You Forever" came out as a Canadian book in 1986. I had written it as a memorial for two stillborn babies we had in 1979 and 1980. The story actually started out as a song.

I was really worried that it would not sell but it turned out to be the bestselling kids book in Canada in 1986 (30,000), in 1987 (70,000) and was the bestselling Canadian kids book in 1988 when it sold one million. The strange thing was that it was also the bestselling kids book in the USA, only nobody knew it, including me.

Then in 1994, The New York Times updated their list of bestselling children’s books. They found "Love You Forever" at the top of the list with eight million sold (it was at 18 million as of 1999). The Times thought this was very strange as they had never reviewed it and didn’t know it existed. In fact, somebody from the Times called me up and asked, "Who are you?”

So I have kept on writing about two books a year and now I have 42 books published. The latest is "Smelly Sox", which I first told it in 1984, on the same day that I first told "Moira’s Birthday", which also became a book.