Matt McElligott

I've been a working, published writer for about fifteen years now, but I've been drawing and making up stories for as long as I can remember. I grew up outside of Albany, NY and I live not far from there today. I went to college at Alfred University, then graduate school in Buffalo. I have a studio in my home which I share with my wife, Christy (a dynamite web designer), my son, and several animals, including two horses, about a dozen chickens, a rabbit, some cats, some fish, and a dog.

When I'm not working on illustration and children's books, I spend my time teaching as a professor at the Sage College of Albany in Albany, NY. I'm a past president of the Albany chapter of the Graphic Artists Guild, an organization which has been a tremendous help to me through my career. Below are some common questions I get about my work and my books.

Where do you get your ideas?

That's a tough question. Often, an idea will come to me from something I read, or maybe a movie I saw. It could be from a conversation I had with someone, or from someplace I visited on a trip. (In other words, the ideas can come from just about anywhere.) But most of my ideas seem to have one thing in common: at first they don't work. Usually, I'll be very excited about a new idea, and I can't wait to get started on it. About halfway through something will happen-I'll lose interest, or maybe confidence-and I'll put the whole project aside. If the idea was any good, it will reemerge somewhere down the road, maybe in a few weeks, maybe in a few years. Somehow, the truly good ideas always float to the surface eventually