One of my favorite toys when I was young was the dollhouse my twin sister and I played in. For dolls, we used toy mice.
The dollhouse was in Connecticut, where we lived during the school year. Summer meant Maine—swimming at high tide and digging for clams at low tide.
When I wasn’t exploring tide pools or managing the lives of toy mice, I was reading. Favorite books included the Little House series, Little Women, and Stuart Little.
I grew up and headed to Sarah Lawrence College and then Brown University for a Master’s in writing, then married and had two daughters. It turned out the big boon of having babies was getting to read children’s books again. In the next few years I read hundreds. I began to focus on writing for children, and was fortunate to land the job of continuing the story Marcus Pfister began in Rainbow Fish with the Rainbow Fish & Friends picture books.
Now I write novels about kids in elementary school. Creating their world and moving them around in it is as much fun as moving mice around the rooms of that old dollhouse. I take them outside, too, to muck around in tide pools and ponds.
I live in Maine with my husband and our two daughters, a dog, and a cat.
