the skinny on WHY I am a writer
Ever since my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Baughman, read Matilda and Bridge to Terabithia, I’ve wanted to give someone else the magic I felt as I listened and read those stories. Since that delicious year, I have continued to live a life that is both glorious and heartbreaking, wonderful and terrifying. And all of those experiences as well as the ones to come are the bits and pieces of magic inside of me that flow from my heart, through my fingertips, and onto a blank page that’s always waiting. It is my wishing-well hope that somehow those bits and pieces will come together to make characters as delightful as Matilda Wormwood, worlds as wondrous as Terabithia, and magic as glorious as I feel whenever I pick up a book.
books I think every person on the planet should read
Picture Books:
anything by Mo Willems
anything by Cynthia Rylant
anything by Kevin Henkes
Middle Grade:
Anything by Shannon Hale
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Anything by Kate Dicamillo though specifically The Tale of Desperaux
A Long Way From Chicago by Richard Peck
Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis
Ida B. by Katherine Hannigan
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
I’m also a huge fan of classics…especially if I can borrow one of my dad’s leather bound copies (see About Page where I discuss my love of leather bound books)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
There are such wonderful books alive and breathing in the world right now! So many places to visit and people to meet and memories to be had…happy reading!
