![]() Katherine's second grade picture THANK YOU, LOUISA MAYThe books you love when you are growing up are special to you forever. I'm deeply grateful to all the authors that spirited me into other worlds when I was young and portable. There is a story in my family that we are distantly related to Louisa May Alcott through my paternal grandfather's line, but no one has ever done the research necessary to find out whether it's true. When I was growing up we had a complete set of her children's books in matching bindings in our bookcase, and I don't know how many times I read Little Women, Little Men and Eight Cousins. The Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace were also favorites--after all, Betsy wants to be a writer when she grows up! Though none of these books were, strictly speaking, historical novels, because they were written so long ago they did offer a window into the past, and I found it fascinating. I also loved genuine historical novels such as Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain and (above all) The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. When I was in sixth grade I always went home for lunch, where I had a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich while I read or listened to a baseball game on the radio. I had a tendency to be tardy returning--until my sixth grade teacher decided to read aloud to us immediately following lunch. He chose Claire Huchet Bishop'sTwenty and Ten for his first title, and I suddenly became very prompt about getting to class on time! BUT WHAT HAVE YOU READ LATELY?Though a lot of my reading time gets eaten up by research, I still enjoy using novels as time machines. The authors I've enjoyed as an adult include Karen Cushman, Patricia Reilly Giff, Lois Lowry and Christopher Paul Curtis. A few other favorites: Summer Soldiers, a story about World War I written by Susan Hart Lindquist; The Sacrifice, by Diane Matchek, which is set among the Plains Indians in the mid-eighteenth century; Francie, by Karen English, which takes place in Alabama in the early 1950s; and Amy Butler's story of Jamestown, Virginia Bound. |
Where I Came FromI grew up in California's Santa Clara Valley. When we moved there I was five years old, and the valley was filled with fruit orchards. The house I lived in was a big, eccentric place, built in part by my father and his friends. It had a huge brick fireplace, a screened-in porch where we ate and sometimes slept in summer, a "secret" recess in one of the bedrooms where Easter nests were always hidden, and dozens of built-in bookshelves. The house sat on three acres of land dotted with fruit trees and outbuildings. I had a dozen favorite places to lie reading. I come from a book-loving family. My grandmother worked at the Library of Congress during the 1940s and later owned an antiquarian bookshop. My mother was a school librarian for many years and always brought home wonderfully written stories, many of them set in other eras. I was a writer from an early age. I wrote stories, poems, and plays; I wrote them for school and I wrote them on summer vacation. My grandmother gave me a portable typewriter for Christmas when I was twelve. After that, it traveled with me on every camping trip we took. I would sit at a picnic table, under evergreens, and turn our humdrum vacations into tales of heroic rescues or martyred pets. By the time I was in high school, the fruit orchards in the valley had given way to housing tracts and electronics plants. One night, when I was sixteen years old, our funny old house burned to the ground. A few days later we walked through the rubble to see what could be salvaged. Little remained: the remnants of the stove, the piano keys, and hundreds and hundreds of scorched books strewn among the ashes. So the place I grew up in is now gone. Of course, so are many of my favorite places, including colonial Connecticut, Spanish California, and Restoration London. But the books I read when I was growing up are still with me, and will be with me forever.
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