Ted Scheu (“That Poetry Guy”) is a 3rd-4th grader at heart. Ted's work has appeared in about a dozen anthologies in the US and UK. He is a former teacher living in Vermont, who works full-time visiting schools and writing hilarious poetry.

Ted says, " I have the best of both worlds. I get to 'field test' my poems with elementary school kids all over the world, but, most satisfying of all, I get to work in K-6 classrooms in workshop settings, helping young writers find their own voices through the magic of poetry."

Rose DesRochers: Mr. Scheu, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview with me.

Ted Scheu: My pleasure.

What first got you interested in poetry?

I got a wonderfully healthy dose of A.A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dr. Seuss as a kid, mostly from my mom, who first immersed me in the music of words. Next, I was captivated by the rhythms and the witty word play (not to mention the bouncy melodies) in musical theater. I have early memories of visits to Broadway with my family and being absolutely glued to my seat.

I continued to dabble in light verse throughout a roller-coaster professional life, including writing retirement poems for Navy, banking, and advertising colleagues, and I even turned the Bank of Boston on its ear one fall when I took the songs and 'book' of the musical My Fair Lady and rewrote new lyrics to help sell bank services. We cast the musical with the few theatrically-talented and enthusiastic bankers we could dig up and took the show on the road to conferences of staid banker types.

I got seriously into writing verse for children when, as an elementary teacher in Vermont, I was reintroduced to the current kid-poetry stars - including Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, who hadn't been around in my youth. I started writing during my summers, and the voice that bounced out of me was, not surprisingly, the voice of me as a kid.

Now Ted, I read you were a teacher. What made you give up your teaching career?

I was literally too exhausted after each school year, and too busy with summer courses, to get my creative juices fully flowing in the summer break, before I had to start getting focused on starting back to school. So in 1998, I talked my saintly wife Robin into letting me take an unpaid leave of absence from my teaching for one year to get the writing bug out of my system.

I was expecting to write a kid's novel, but as I wrote, the words rolled out as poems instead. The questioning, slightly irreverent voice I wished I'd had as a kid came roaring out in verse. I immediately knew a year wasn't going to be enough, so I luckily found a local friend and well-known children's author — Peter Lourie — who helped me develop a school program that combined my love of writing with my love of teaching.