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A Read-Aloud with Lynn Plourde: Pigs in the Mud in the Middle of Rud

| 20th Anniversary

This post is part of a series of videos by Maine-based children’s book authors and illustrators reading aloud. This week, we’re featuring Lynn Plourde, author of Pigs in the Mud in the Middle of the Rud. This title was featured in the 2015 Raising Readers Anthology: A Medley of Maine Children’s Stories.

We were lucky enough to chat with Lynn about how this well-loved book came to be.

Pigs in the Mud in the Middle of the Rud came to be a book because I really did have pigs in my rud, er…road. I was living in Madison, Maine, and I looked out my window and I saw pigs running down my road, but we didn’t have any farms in the area with pigs. To this day I have no idea where they came from. But I’m grateful for them—they gave me my first published picture book after 13 years of rejections. All I had to do was add a little imagination to the story . . . What if the pigs got stuck in the rud? What if hens sheep, and bulls got stuck in the rud too? What if my grandma was out there yelling? The more I added, the more I giggled. I love adding some imagination to things that really happen to me so that I can create a story. Have fun adding imagination to things that happen to you to create fun stories!

Without further ado, here’s the story:

More Activities

Teaching Ideas for Pigs in the Mud in the Middle of the Rud

10 Ways to Explore this Book (Click this link or the image below to download) 

Other Books by Lynn Plourde