I was born in Brooklyn, where my father was a professor of studio art at Pratt institute. When I was three and a half my parents separated, and my mother moved my brother and me to Manhattan. She died only three weeks later. It would be eight more years before anyone told us the truth about what had happened.
But back to Brooklyn we went to live with our dad, his new wife, and now a little baby sister.
Although I went to kindergarten and first grade at P.S. 8 in Brooklyn, I consider myself strictly a country girl. The woods are where I am most comfortable. We moved to New Paltz when I was seven, and after my dad and step-mother divorced, we lived with her, first in Woodstock, then Phoenicia, and then Shandaken, New York. Not the best years of my life.
Another story for another time.
My brother and I returned to New Paltz to live with our dad (another wife and another baby sister!) and I started sixth grade having moved eleven times and having gone to five different schools by that point. I was not a happy, nor particularly well-adjusted little girl. The perfect time to decide I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, right?
Right.
Fortunately, things settled down after that and I graduated from New Paltz High school (Go Hugies!) having written for the school newspaper (Deja Vu), been in the drama club, played varsity basketball (bench was my most favored position), became captain of the girls’ track team, and member of the National Honor Society. My senior year I was voted Most Dramatic (no surprise) but most importantly — and truly to my surprise — I won the Harriet Belcher Cunningham award for Creative Writing.
It was a $25 check but it was, oh, so much more than that. It was validation.
Maybe I can do this crazy thing. Maybe I can be a writer.
I majored in literature at S.U.N.Y Purchase. There was no creative writing degree there at the time, and although I took as many writing classes as I could, screenwriting, art criticism, writing workshops, I will be eternally grateful I was a literature major. It meant instead of obsessing about my own work, and whether it was good enough, or better than anyone else’s, I had to read. And read.
And read.
There is no better writing teacher than books. Ones you love and strive to emulate. Ones you hate. You learn from both.
I began sending my own work out for consideration when my children were still babies, stealing time to write and stuff envelopes while they napped, then when they went to preschool, then little league practices, then middle school. . .so maybe you get the idea. It took me nine years of rejections before I found my voice. I stopped trying to get published and worked really hard at being a writer.
And found the story I wanted to tell.
That novel, What Every Girl (except me) Knows was published in May, 2001. It is about a twelve-year old girl, named Gabby Weiss whose mother committed suicide years before, and yes, it is semi-autobiographical. Since then I’ve published fourteen novels for young readers, and contributed to many short story collections. I’ve had personal narrative essays published in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Writer Magazine, NCTE Voices from the Middle, and many others. A few of my books have won some very prestigious awards, which allows me to keep publishing. And yes, feels pretty damn good.
The chance to write, to have others care enough to read my words, and to have a career where reading (and reading!) is part of my job, is a gift I appreciate every single day of my life.