About the Author

On stage at the Mountain Playhouse

And then—who knows why?—I switched from theater arts to art education and ended up as an art teacher in Los Angeles. Produced and sold my own line of silk-screened greeting cards. Worked as a counselor, program director, and finally business manager of a summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains. Did a walk-on in Walt Disney's original The Parent Trap. Decided I was not meant to be an art teacher, and set out to discover Life No. 3. 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…

My family had moved to Kittanning, Pennsylvania at the beginning of my fifth-grade year, and it was in the school library that year that I happened upon a book with the tempting title of The Enchanted Castle. It was amazing. Intoxicating. Exhilarating. All that. I dreamed the story over and over, especially the bit about the moving statues. Unfortunately, shortly afterward we moved again, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. My new school’s library had no enchanted castle, and in my excitement with the book I had never noticed the author's name. How was I to find other books by the same writer? For some silly reason—perhaps I was too shy—it never occurred to me to ask our librarian's help. I thought I had lost the book forever.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).

That set me to searching through the University of California monographs and journals in the British Museum Library. The new stories I found were a success, and the Guides suggested that I should make a book from them. For children. It had never, in all my writing, occurred to me to write for children, but I took their advice, approached a British publisher with DOWN FROM THE LONELY MOUNTAIN, a collection of the Indian tales from California and—to my surprise—it was immediately accepted. The British publisher found me an American publisher and an editor--Margaret McElderry--who has now, bless her, seen me through thirty-seven books.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...