Q. Do you have any kids?

A. My two fine sons (har—a little pun!) are grown and married, so I have two wonderful daughters-in-law (not daughter-in-laws) and four dear grands (from new to three). They live nearby, so we see each other often. The grandchildren love to plant seeds, water, bake, read, and watch Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. That’s good, because I do, too.

Q. Do you write every day?
A. Some writers do. I write almost every day. My brain tends to get rolling in the evening, so I often stay up late. Sometimes I feel as though I live in a different time zone from my friends and family. Don’t ask me to be alert in the early morning!

Q. Where do you get your ideas?
A. The swimming pool! (I’m not kidding. I often work out a plot problem while doing water exercises and laps.) Thank goodness for my waterproof pen!

Q. What’s in your writing pipeline?
A. Cricket at the Manger, a picture book from Boyds Mills Press, comes out in 2005. I'm working on a novel and another biography.

A ton of other ideas are waiting for me to catch up to them.

Q. How did you get the idea for the Greek/Latin book?
A. For years I’ve worked with elementary school children on learning Greek and Latin word chunks. The kids jumped right in—they loved the decoding aspect of learning the inside story of word. For instance, pachy is Greek for “thick” and derm is Greek for “skin.” We’d talk about pachyderms, those thick-skinned mammals: rhino, hippos, and elephants. But other words came up: dermatology, hypodermic (hypo is under), epidermis (your epidermis is showing!) and others. One boy showed a dino book with a marvelous picture of a pachycephalosaurus. Cephal is “head,” so the kids saw that this was a dino with a thick head—it had a dome on its forehead that got thicker with age.

I’d written two books for Ten Speed Press with Judith P. Josephson, so I sent this idea to their children’s imprint, Tricycle Press (tri = 3 and cycle = wheel, circle!). This book features five friends who go on wild adventures, picking up Greek and Latin word chunks along the way. Cryptomania! will be out in September, 2004.

What else would you like to know? Send me a message.