Bio

I was born in a small town in Massachusetts. Then I was raised and went to school in a few other small towns in Massachusetts. Right now, I’m living in another small town in Massachusetts...which has got me thinking...hmmmm....

Back to being born. By all accounts I was a serious little girl right from the beginning, a bit of a worrier, but I had occasional moments of adorableness.

Here is proof.

I loved reading, gardening, going to the beach, getting presents, riding horses, and cake. (I still do.)

Any adorableness was over as soon as I got to school, though. Here are some pictures to prove that. There are lots more, I’m afraid, but this is enough.

Stop laughing.

My problem was that I was shy and I was always the tallest person in whatever class I was in, which made me even shyer. Plus, as you can see from the pictures, I spent most of my school years wearing the worst clothes and hairdos humanly possible.

But when I was a kid, I loved books and I loved art. Books and art didn’t care that I was shy. Books and art didn’t care that I was really tall. So I read and made up stories, and I drew and painted and did mosaics and carved things (there were a couple of years when I spent my entire allowance on bars of Ivory soap for carving) and I read and made up stories. In school, I used to do all my work as fast as I could so I could get extra time for free reading or to work on art projects. Even as a grown-up, I am still happiest reading, writing, and making art.

Back to when I was young: I had one obsession – baseball!

All through my childhood, my dream was to play baseball for a major league. Well, my dream was more specific than that – I wanted to play short stop for the Boston Red Sox. I wanted to be Rico Petrocelli.

I actually haven’t given up that dream. You never know.

But as a grown-up, I got to work with the two other things that I loved – books and art. First, I became a watercolor painter and had a gallery. Then, when I had my two children…

They’re grown now, but here they are when they were young. They were nutballs!

…I fell in love with children’s books and I decided that’s what I wanted to do most of all. Since the 1990’s, I’ve been making books for kids and I know it’s what I will do for the rest of my life. Because I love it that much.

Even more, I think, than I would have loved playing shortstop for the Boston Red Sox.