 |
|
|
When I think of home I see myself as a small child digging clams at dawn, alone at low tide on a California beach. We were poor, I'd had polio, and my father edited The Dune Forum magazine for a literary commune in the sand dunes. When my parents separated and my father went east to found The Utopian Society, I was sent in to town to live with a country doctor's family. Later I returned to live with my father, then my mother, then an uncle who was a painter, part of an affectionate extended family but always missing the last family and the dog I'd had to leave behind with them. We drifted up the coast following the Pacific Ocean, more at home with the seals and the surge of the surf than with our new neighbors.
Getting tuberculosis as a teen-ager and having little to do but read and dream eighteen hours a day for three years probably turned me into a writer. I discovered that what I liked to read were adventure stories that grew out of conflicts between people who could surprise me, would spring to life and lodge in my memory forever. I loved reading Carson McCullers and Anton Chekhov and I would have married Scott Fitzgerald if he hadn't already died.
I put off writing to marry and have three sons and then to move across the world to Argentina. There I began to write about people I loved and was lonely for: my mother, my little brother. When we came home to Berkeley, I longed for Argentina and wrote about saving horses during a drought on the ranch where we'd spent summers, basing my hero and his friend on two of our sons. I found that growing up in five households had given me a treasure chest of characters who could be called up for any story I wanted to tell. However, any character worth the two years I work on a book soon takes over. One day I'm writing about a boy named Luis, based on my son, when suddenly this boy begins to talk and act and think magically differently than any son of mine. I'm hearing him speak as I type and it's getting hard to keep up. That's what makes a story, and what makes writing fascinating, almost addicting.
Novels
SWIMMING WITH THE WHALES, Henry Holt 1995
HUGO AND THE PRINCESS NENA, Atheneum 1983
SLEEPWALKER'S MOON, Atheneum 1980
HALLELUJAH, Atheneum 1976
WHERE THE ROAD ENDS, Atheneum 1974
CELEBRATE THE MORNING, Atheneum 1972
RIPTIDE, Atheneum 1969
ROAM THE WILD COUNTRY, Atheneum 1967
Six novels have been American Library Honor books of the year. CELEBRATE THE MORNING was a Junior Literary Guild book of the month selection and went through seven other printings. ROAM THE WILD COUNTRY made Time Magazine's ten best juveniles of the year and went through ten printings before going into paperback and a Danish edition. RIPTIDE also went through several printings and then into paperback. HUGO AND THE PRINCESS NENA has a Danish edition. SWIMMING WITH THE WHALES is in Fawcet-Juniper paperback with a teacher guide. ROAM, RIPTIDE, CELEBRATE, and SLEEPWALKER'S MOON were optioned for movies.
Teaching
U.C.Berkely Extension lecturer in longer fiction 1987-94
Univ.Women Studies, Buenos Aires. Lecturer, Novel 81-85
San Francisco State Univ. lecturer,Creative Writing 1974-80
U.C.Berkeley Extension Instructor, Creative Writing 1972-77
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
