Jane Louise Curry, Children's Books Author
About the Author  On stage at the Mountain Playhouse Or so I thought. After finishing an English major at UCLA, I attended summer school at the University of London, and went on to Stanford University as a graduate student in English to work for my Ph.D. I never once suspected where I really was headed, and had been ever since fifth grade…  Nineteen years later, as I was browsing my way through Foyle's Book Shop In London’s Charing Cross Road, there it was: The Enchanted Castle, by E. Nesbit. Short of cash and in a state of excitement that astonished me, I ran all the way to the British Museum Reading Room, found a desk, put in a request for the book and, when it came, read it straight through. It was like being ten again. Wonderful. Eerie. I was also at that time spending one evening a week working with a company of Girl Guides (the British equivalent of Girl Scouts), and almost every week I ended up telling them Californian Indian tales around an indoor campfire improvised with candles on a pie plate. After a few weeks my repertoire of stories learned while I was a counselor at a Girl Scout summer camp at Big Bear Lake ran out, and I needed more.  Riding in the Old Miners' Days parade at Big Bear Lake (Scouts in the background). Between E. Nesbit and the California Indians, I was seriously hooked. Anything I was interested in could grow into a story—my medieval Arthurian studies into THE SLEEPERS, the strip mines around the family farm in Pennsylvania into BENEATH THE HILL, or a visit to North Wales into THE CHANGE-CHILD. The list skips from CalTech and earthquakes to pre-Columbian America to farm life, antiques, coal mining, Time, the East Liverpool potteries, the Johnstown Flood, holography, lasers, and on and on. In 2003, it was Egyptian magic, last year a true adventure set in ancient Rome, and this year it has been an adventure set in London in the year 1601. Now I have begun work on another mystery with magic in it, and can feel the shadowy shape of the story after that looming up behind me, too, but it’s much too soon--and not safe--to turn around and look. Chances are that I would be tempted to begin work on that one, too. That has happened more than once, and is not a very comfortable way to work! Still... Books by Jane Louise Curry Down From the Lonely Mountain Beneath the Hill The Sleepers The Change Child The Daybreakers Mindy's Mysterious Miniature Over the Sea's Edge The Ice Ghosts Mystery The Lost Farm Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Time The Watchers The Magical Cupboard Poor Tom's Ghost The Birdstones The Bassumtyte Treasure Ghost Lane The Wolves of Aam Shadow Dancers The Great Flood Mystery The Lotus Cup Back in the Beforetime Me, Myself and I Little Little Sister The Big Smith Snatch What the Dickens! The Christmas Knight The Great Smith House Hustle Robin Hood and His Merry Men Robin Hood in the Greenwood Moon Window Dark Shade Turtle Island A Stolen Life The Wonderful Sky Boat The Egyptian Box Hold Up the Sky Brave Cloelia The Black Canary  With my best friend from grade school, Barbara Vodrey, at a book signing at Best Books First in East Liverpool |
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