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THE BIG BURN brought my writing home to the Northwest, where forest fires sometimes shape land and lives and where young people like my son may spend their summers on fire crews. MOUNTAIN SOLO joins two places I love--New York, where (along with spending a good bit of time in Texas) I grew up, and Montana, where I live. It also brings together both the violin that I learned to play in school and the Montana wilderness that's been a joy of most of my adult life. And HITCH brings one of my most-beloved Texas characters, Moss Trawnley, to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in central Montana. The great changes I learned about when working on PICTURES, 1918, also led me to write "Moving On," which you can read in TIME CAPSULE: SHORT STORIES ABOUT TEENAGERS THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, edited by Donald R. Gallo. It includes great, original stories from several of my favorite writers, including Richard Peck, Jackie French Koller, Graham Salisbury, Chris Crutcher, Bruce Brooks, and Chris Lynch. Other favorite YA writers of mine include Han Nolan, Kathi Appelt, Kimberly Willis Holt, Will Hobbs, Ben Mikaelsen, Mary Casanova, Joan Bauer, and Elaine Marie Alphin. And while I'm talking about my favorite writers, I should mention Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville. They are the teachers who have helped me find my way into writing fiction and into stretching what I can do. As have the wonderful friends who make up my writer's group--Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Sneed Collard III, Wendy Norgaard, Hanneke Ippisch, and Peggy Christian. And as does my husband, Kurt. We met at the University of Delaware, and over the years we've lived in lots of places, moving from Delaware to Kansas to Texas, to Montana, to Washington State, and finally back to Montana, where our daughter and son grew up. That's where our home is now, by the edge of mountain woods where we hike and bike. I keep a garden--sometimes successful and sometimes not--and take lots of pictures and go exploring whenever I can. And put what I find into my books.
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I'm a writer for the same reason that I'm a reader.
Books let me step into other people's lives and explore whatever I want or need
to know about. Finding the details of Mandy's world in THE
WINDOW taught me about blindness. I learned about the World War I home
front from PICTURES, 1918, a story that's woven
around mysterious old photos. AIRFIELD
took me to a small Texas airport of 1933 and to the romantic, sometimes
terrifying early days of commercial aviation.