Amanda Baehr Fuller’s debut picture book, Bunny Made Tea, had several catalysts. “When my daughter was younger, she and her friend were playing outside and found a hollow fence post with some rainwater in it,” she recalls. “They started collecting little bits of grass and weeds to make ‘tea’ and had this whole pretend session. I never forgot that.” In fact, the girls’ nature tea party was such a strong mental image for Fuller, she initially planned to call her book Grass Tea.
The second inspirational nudge came courtesy of a continuing education class in children’s bookmaking that Fuller took at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she lives. “I had a wonderful teacher, Elizabeth Sayles, who was a beautiful illustrator in her own right,” Fuller says. “One day she laid out a bunch of tiny toys and trinkets on the table and told us to ‘pick two and make a four-panel story about them.’ I randomly chose a bunny and a teapot, and that’s how the first early sketches of the story came to be.”
And the third element that led Fuller further down the Bunny trail was “my weird neighbor who used to come into my apartment without knocking,” she says. “I adore her. She’s the sweetest, most lovely woman. But I often found myself feeling like Bunny; I was taken aback when she would just appear.”
Fuller wove those three threads into the spare text and retro illustrations that tell the tale of white, tall-eared Bunny, whose attempts to enjoy a cozy cuppa in their burrow are repeatedly interrupted when nosy neighbor Opossum, along with their babies, pops in unannounced.
Publishing a picture book was not something Fuller had aspired to early on, but she now sees it as a natural progression in her art-centric life and career. She grew up on Long Island, the daughter of a writer mother and artist father, and graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a BA in art and art history. Her father steered her toward exploring SVA, where she honed her drawing skills and focused on animation. “I loved the community,” she says.
Fuller then spent many years in animation at such companies as Sesame Workshop and Nickelodeon and fondly recalls her first gig in the field, which included working on shows with author-illustrator-animator Mo Willems. Though it was gratifying and fun work, Fuller says, “in animation, you’re drawing what someone else tells you to and the way they tell you to do it. But I always wanted to tell my own stories and be my own creator.”
By the late 2010s, she was ready to make a shift. After tweaking her dummy for years, buoyed by encouragement from Sayles, Fuller secured an agent in 2020. “Bunny went on submission right as the pandemic hit, and my agent ended up leaving the business before we got any offers, so I was back at square one,” she says. A second agent turned out not to be a good fit, so Fuller decided to send the project out on her own. Ella Russell at Owlkids acquired the book in spring 2023.
“The nice thing was that there were very few changes,” Fuller says of the editing process. “I think that’s because I had revised my dummy so many times and did so many versions. You really have to go down a million wrong roads to find the right one.”
Since Bunny Made Tea hit shelves in February, Fuller has been enjoying the positive response in her community. She visits local bookstores and libraries and signs any copies they have on hand. And she says the nonprofit iDig2Learn, which connects New York City kids and their families with nature through growing gardens, planting trees, and hosting events, has purchased numerous copies of the book to share with participants.
Looking ahead, she says, “I have so many more ideas. I’m completing another dummy right now about Turtle, and I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to finish it and see how it lands.” And whether Turtle takes the same path as Bunny or not, Fuller is already very happy about where she has landed. “It took me a long, long time to arrive at this destination in my career, but I know now that this is where I was meant to end up.”
