Katherine Sturtevant

The 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!

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.

I 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.

I wrote my first short story in the second grade, but my career didn't really take off until Miss Barnett's third grade class, where we were required to write a short story every week using as many of our spelling words as possible. The next year I began writing historical dramas about California history, which despite their awfulness were staged by my fourth grade class. In fifth grade I wrote another historical drama, the informative "Cabot's First Voyage." I served as Director of that production, in addition to being a playwright. I hereby apologize to every one of the actors I worked with then. No doubt there are fifth-graders who can handle that much power, but I wasn't one of them!

In sixth grade I had my first, and so far my worst, run-in with an editor. My four-page write-up of our class's week at nature camp was ruthlessly reduced to half its length by the adult who edited the school magazine, and my paragraph-long description of the brilliant constellations became the sentence: "The stars made pretty patterns in the sky." I never got over it.

During my seventh and eighth grade years I concentrated on the short story. A children's writer named Iris Noble was a friend of my aunt; I had enjoyed many of the fictionalized biographies she wrote but especially loved her historical novel set in Canada, Megan. For awhile we corresponded, and she read some of my stories and gave me gentle suggestions for improvement. The pinnacle of these years was a short story titled "MacDonald and Me," based on my mercifully brief time as the Acting President of the History Club. Any political aspirations I might have harbored died forever through that experience, but I was happy to trade them for my most developed short story ever. It ran a full fifteen pages.

It seemed as though I was ready to do some serious writing, but on the very first day of high school I came down with a case of paralyzing writer's block which lasted the next four years. There are times in our life when we write, and times in our life when we live through the harrowing experiences that will give us our material for years to come.

THE CHAPPARAL

The chapparal
A vast expanse of sun and sand
Spreading
O'er the land

The sun beats down
Upon the scanty shrubs and brush
The chapparal
Has strength no man can touch.

THE SEA

The boat is worn down by the sea
As the man-made pier can be
Eternal force had these decayed
The sea by God alone was made.