Beginnings

For eight consecutive summers, not so long ago, I had the privilege of hanging out with young writers. Sometimes they came to my house. Sometimes we met in a garden. Sometimes we sat on someone else's porch. We'd read some of my favorite writers out loud, or imagine a room built of shadows, or work together to create a neighborhood of unforgettable characters. We'd write villanelles and pastorals and advertising lines. We'd imagine ourselves to be kites caught in trees. We'd listen to music and write to its mood.

Wherever the writers were, there was light. There was laughter. There was something that I held onto for a very long time.

When I was creating the heroine of my first novel, UNDERCOVER, I was thinking a lot about the young writers I'd met and what they'd taught me. I was thinking, too, about who I had been as a child—how much I'd loved words, and how much I also loved to ice skate. For me, language and movement will always be bound. I think of writing as an act of choreography, just as I think of ice skating as a form of storytelling.

UNDERCOVER has elements of my own life in it, therefore. But it is also inspired by the young writers working today.