My friends would tell you I'm quirky, slightly obsessive, and rather irreverent.
I majored in linguistics, minored in Russian, and was the undisputed fingerspelling
champ in my ASL classes. I can also read Braille - very, VERY slowly.
A few of the things I like best: Anne Frank, opera, the Romanovs, cameras, daffodils, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ferrero Rocher chocolates, I Love Lucy, Jeopardy, the Titanic, Bette Davis movies, and goofy socks.
Oh yeah, and books. I'm here now in large part because I had the good fortune to work for six years at Halfway Down the Stairs, an award-winning independent children's book store, where I was constantly up to my elbows in new and upcoming children's lit.
I'm happiest when I manage to read three to five books a week. Okay, I really like it best when I can read five to seven books a week, but that doesn't happen so much anymore. I'm a historical fiction junkie, though there isn't much I won't read. (Well, except for epic fantasies full of made-up talking critters with names that look like a cross between Welsh and Croatian. Those make me cranky, and fast.) I've also got a soft spot for retellings of fairy tales. Anything that takes a familiar element – story, setting, character - and gives it a new twist appeals a lot to me.
But what you really want to know is how I became a writer, right? I'll tell you. It was a surprisingly gradual process that I should have seen coming all along, yet somehow, I didn't. Yes, I more or less always knew this is what I wanted to do, and I always secretly thought I could do it, but it took a while for me to realize things could really work out just the way I wanted them to.
For starters, here's an oddball fact: I didn't own a copy of Goodnight
Moon until I was 22 years old. I don't think I'd even read Goodnight
Moon before it turned up on the required reading list for my children's
lit course in college.
However, I've always lived in a house with a great green room. In a photo from my christening day, my great-grandma sits in a rocking chair holding me - "a little old lady whispering hush" against a background of green wallpaper. Not only that, but her sister, my great-great-aunt, is feeding Grandma a spoonful of what looks suspiciously like mush.
Okay, fine, it's probably cake, but you get the idea.
Apparently, I'm a book girl from way back. My mother tells a story of my other great-grandma coming to visit for my first birthday. It seems I drove Grandma Albers slightly nuts, toddling around just out of her reach and paying her no attention at all until Mom told her, "Get a book." So Grandma did, and voila, I sat. I've been that way ever since.
I distinctly remember writing my first story, bent over a family friend's coffee table while my parents helped fix dinner in the next room. I must have been four or five, judging by the size of the print, the number of words I had to call into the kitchen for help with ("blew" and "blue" were especially puzzling), and especially the rather creative bottom-to-top arrangement of the first sentence.
It was the night that three suns
And two martians
And wind
and shapes
appeared
and the north
wind decided
to give
a party
and cats started
to get on fences
and meowed
and the wind blew
and blew
the raindrops
decided to drop
and the lightening
said, I'll light your
way. And together they
made a storm and had
a good time
Even now, I can't shake the feeling that this first story was a happy little exercise in plagarism. Sci-fi just isn't my style, for one thing. I also remember feeling like I was recreating something, not making it up fresh out of my head, but my parents and their friends were impressed enough with my creation that I didn't bother to correct them. I'm suspicious that I probably snitched a big chunk of that story from a library book or a Sesame Street segment, but who knows? I've never been able to track it down.
In first grade, I hit the big time. I became a published author when Mrs.
Sanborn picked my poem entitled "I want to ride a unicorn" to
appear in the Romeo Observer's annual Young Authors section.
I was very jealous in third grade when Mrs. Illner chose Sarah Wingert's
poem instead of mine, but I made Young Authors again in fifth, ninth,
and tenth grade.
By fifth grade, I'd decided to write a book - a fantasy chock-full of unicorns, fairies, and all the other frilly sort of mythology I couldn't get enough of. But I didn't tell anyone about it for a while. Once I confessed and let people start looking it over, the whole thing sort of fizzled, even though everyone said they liked my story very much. In the end, that book would take 12 years and two major overhauls to finish. Henceforth, I've rarely shared much of what I'm working on. (See more of my early scribblings.)
Clearly, I was never one of those kids with a pencil always in her hand. Essay questions and research papers sure didn't scare me, but I don't have reams of my early writing squirreled away. I never managed to keep a diary for more than a few months. I do, however, have two big stacks of blank books under my bed. I wanted to be a writer, and I understood quite clearly from my English grades and the encouragement I got from my family and friends that I could write, but the whole idea seemed like more of a fantasy than an actual possibility. If my English teacher assigned a certain number of pages, I wrote them, and that was pretty much it. I didn't even attempt another unassigned story of my own until I was 16.
In the meantime, I read. I grew up just half a block from the library, and I used it. One of my particular favorites was Harriet the Spy, and my own spy notebook accompanied me through the better part of fifth and sixth grade. I just about always had a book stashed in my desk to read when I finished my schoolwork, or hidden in my lap under the desk to peek at during class. I never really stopped that - as a senior in college, I read The Giver right under my linguistic professor's nose.
