When James Segelstein’s third grade teacher told the class that her writer husband sometimes spent an entire day working on a single sentence, James decided that was the career for him.

During the long career he had as a network news producer, he wrote a great deal. But news scripts demanded rigorous accuracy, so in his free time he wrote fiction to exercise his quirky humor and his somewhat offbeat imagination.

James met his wife while working on the Foreign Desk at CBS News. After they were married, they moved from New York City to rural Connecticut and, once there, James quickly shed his ‘city boy’ notion that ‘wildlife’ primarily meant pigeons and squirrels. He was thrilled to watch bears, bobcats, porcupines and woodchucks frequently sauntering across their lawn and ‘real’ wildlife began to infiltrate his writing.

James and his wife had two children, and as they grew, he was inspired by the way the rules of reality were jettisoned in the books he read to them and the television shows he watched with them. Soon he was writing “Springtime Miracles and Mud” in which stinkbugs could talk, mourning doves could sing and woodchucks could revel in life’s more mundane moments.