The first time I saw the dry riverbed in Ruscio, a small village in Umbria, Italy, was in the summer of 2008, not long after I married my husband.

I have always loved water, so my first thought was very simple:

If only there were water here.

I imagined a shallow stream running between the stones, fish beneath the surface, and children stepping into the cool water barefoot. In summer, the mountains around us can feel very dry. To reach a real river, such as the Nera, we once had to drive for about an hour.

The riverbed stayed in my memory for almost twenty years.

This year, it finally found its way into a story.

When my son was little, I read him many picture books in Britain. I loved books such as Room on the Broom and The Highway Rat, but their characters and story worlds felt very Western to me. I often wondered whether I could find a modern children’s story that naturally carried something from the Chinese culture I had grown up with.

I never quite found the book I had imagined.

So years later, I began writing one myself.

For Little Mouse Big River, I borrowed inspiration from the ancient Chinese story of Yu the Great controlling the floods. What interests me most is not simply the heroism. It is the idea of looking at a problem differently.

When one solution does not work, could there be another?

It is something I noticed in my own son when he was young. If one plan failed, he rarely became stuck on it. His response was often: Maybe we could…

That became part of Little Mouse too.

In the story, building walls does not solve the problem. Little Mouse begins to wonder whether the old river course could be restored instead. Even then, the idea meets resistance from the villagers.

That matters to me. Real change is rarely simple. Good ideas can meet doubt, disagreement and obstacles before anyone sees their value.

This summer, I returned to Ruscio, Umbria, Italy, already looking at the village through Little Mouse’s eyes. I studied old wooden beams and floor tiles, simple country churches, copper vessels, local food and the way people once carried water home.

They are small details, but together they make an imaginary world feel real.

Nearly twenty years ago, I looked at an empty riverbed in Ruscio and wished there were water in it.

Now, at least in Little Mouse’s world, there finally is.

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