Month: August 2012

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Creative Spaces

My creative space is an alcove of our living room, near windows with views of the sea. I work at a large Shaker desk littered with carved wooden owls (my muses), surrounded by photos, framed prints and drawings, a glass bottle of Sahara sand, small gargoyles and shelves of children’s books. There’s a cupboard door covered with notes to myself and a map of the desert. Gazing out over the salt marshes and boats, I can see sky and waves and shifting colors. It’s easy to imagine distant places and other worlds.

A quiet place, a comfortable chair and a computer, plus long stretches of time (and access to a refrigerator!): that’s the ideal creative space for me. Up until a few years ago, however, I’ve written on rickety tables, in cramped corners, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, trying to fit the writing around a full-time job. Only now do I have the luxury of my own space and time.

Working on my MacBook in Buenos Aires

When I’m in Argentina or Maine, I take my my MacBook Pro. (Here it is, on the left, in my apartment in Buenos Aires.) Sometimes when traveling I’ll write by hand using a writing tablet or moleskin notebook. With my liquid gel ink pen, I go into organizational mode: outlining, world-building, making timelines and/or sketching maps and characters for my next book.

Favorite time to write: early morning
Favorite snack: popcorn and iced tea
Favorite chair: Aeron ergonomic chair from Herman Miller
Favorite desk: my Shaker desk from Maple Corner Woodworks in Vermont

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Why I Write for Middle Grade

A few months ago I was emptying out an old file cabinet at the back of my closet when a folder caught my eye. “Early Stories” was printed across the top in neat letters. Curious, I opened it and papers tumbled out, looking timeworn and ancient, like ink-scrawled maps of my childhood. I recognized my childish looping left-hander’s script: they were stories I’d written between the ages of eight and twelve, with titles like “The Mystery of the Blood-Stained Emerald Sword,” “A Slip Back Into Time,” The Mummy’s Curse,” “Vampires and Death.” Even then it was obvious where I was heading. I wrote stories with my special fountain pen (considered cool in those days), and sometimes pencils, on the lined pages of big spiral notebooks. From the age of seven I wanted to be a writer. When I wasn’t writing, I was at the library, breathing in the musty odors of moldy books, losing myself inside tales of time travel, monsters and otherworldly enchantments. And then there were the scary sci-fi and Dracula films I watched on Friday nights with my next-door neighbor Jody at the local movie theater.

The books that stayed with me were The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Knight’s Castle and all of Edward Eager’s time travel books, Margot Benary-Isbert’s The Wicked Enchantment, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and stories by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allen Poe. Some of their tales terrified me, while others transported me to strange and fantastic worlds. I often imagined that if I turned a certain corner, climbed a twisting staircase, or discovered an ancient ring, anything might happen.

As an adult I wrote newspaper articles and stories for adults. It wasn’t until I had boys of my own that I began writing for children. Reading stories to Ian and Derek took me back to the world of children’s books and I decided to write the kinds of books I’d loved as a child. A story written for a children’s literature course in grad school became my first published novel, The Dreamkeepers. The hero was my ten-year-old son and I set the book in Wales, where my husband grew up. (His parents, thinly disguised, are in there, too.) Having always been a huge fan of monster (my favorite toys were dinosaurs and a cyclops), I found creatures sneaking into my books: Usk beetles (from The Dreamkeepers), plague wolves and the genetically-engineered skraeks in The Owl Keeper, and giant scorpions in The Scorpions of Zahir. I quickly discovered that, like myself at that age, many middle grade readers are monster-lovers too.

Illustration by Kelly Murphy

Writing for middle graders, I’ve come around full circle. Middle graders are caught somewhere between childhood and the traumatic teens. They have a child’s sense of wonder and often a teenager’s fierce sense of independence. Life is scary and heartbreaking and adventurous and boring and exhilarating and confusing and hilarious – a jumble of conflicting emotions, usually happening all at once. Often when I write, I find myself back in that scary magical time when I was that age. Writing is a way for me to time travel, and be my eleven-year-old self again: the heroine who bravely confronts the unknown and tangles with the monster. For me, writing is a journey to those fantastic places where anything might happen.