Sarah L. Thomson: Creating Worlds to Explore

About:

“One does not write for children. One writes so that children can understand. Which means writing as clearly, vividly, and truthfully as possible.” - Leon Garfield

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and Madison, Wisconsin…but only partly. Sometime around the age of six or seven, I plunged into a book and never really came up for air. Oh, I went to school, walked my dog, loved my family...but I grew up as much in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain, Charlotte Bronte's stormy moors and Jane Austen's elegant drawing rooms, as I did in the Midwest suburbs.

I went off to college in Oberlin, Ohio, where I read as much medieval literature as they would let me. I also spent my junior year at Oxford, learned to read Old English, and was allowed to touch a twelfth century manuscript with my (GULP!) bare hands. After I graduated, I headed for New York and a job in publishing.

I spent ten years there, finally becoming a senior editor at HarperCollins Children's Books. A little while after my first book, The Dragon's Son, was published, I made the painful decision to leave editing, which I loved, to concentrate full time on writing. And I left New York as well, to settle in Portland, Maine.

I'm still living as much in books as in the real world. The only difference now is that some of the imaginary worlds I get to spend time in are my own. This is my entirely unearned good fortune, and I only hope it will last the rest of my life.