According to Mr. Wallace, one afternoon after he picked up his nephew Jamaal from the daycare back in 1997 he remembers looking up toward the sky and saying, "Those are some small clouds in the sky today." Then Jamaal said, "Uh-uh, my teacher said those aren't clouds, those are marshmallows." About three days later he wrote the story Marshmallow in the Sky as a poem, and then in 2005 he added pictures to the poem and completed his first story.