Authors & Illustrators
Photo: Collin Griffiths. When I was a child, reality was a thing to escape from. I had an imaginary friend. I constructed elaborate soap opera plots featuring my Barbie dolls. I read books and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. In the worlds I created, bullies were humiliated and defeated. Handsome,...
Newsrooms are strange places at night. Silent, mossy hollows of noise. Muted and soft and then, deeper in, a knockout punch of sound. A cacophony of all the bad, everywhere in the world. Beneath the spaceship-white lights, you are alone. Or nearly alone. Most of the local reporters have long...
How does reality shape the sci-fi I create? My writer’s heart is always drawn to writing the bizarre and fantastical. I’d written a lot of short stories and was always worried my ideas would be too strange for a reader to suspend disbelief. When I decided to write my first...
“Let’s make a fantasy world,” I tell a classroom full of middle schoolers. I’ve been invited to teach a fantasy world-building class. “Name a person, place, or thing. Anything! Go.” “Frogs,” a kid blurts out. “Great!” I say. “You’ve just named what the people of this fantasy realm value most...
Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here. Sponsored by With The Library of Unruly Treasures, Jeanne Birdsall steps away from her much-loved Penderwicks novels to try something new to her pen but beloved in her reading memory: fantasy,...
For as long as I can remember, I’ve made up stories to help me explain the world. That’s not unique to me. People have been creating stories to explain reality for the entirety of human history. Even history itself is basically reality fanfiction that we mostly agree to pretend is...
When I approach fantasy writing, I think of the fantastical as a tool for adding dimension to my commentaries on the real world. I was trained as a historian, and in the history profession we discuss the way that history is impossible to recount objectively — any historical narrative, regardless...
The only reason there was a typewriter on my desk in the first place was because I had a cast on my arm. That makes it sound like the cast was for fun. It wasn’t. The real story lives between the lines, and as in my books, I will leave...
“Ooh, you could use that in one of your books!” Well-intentioned friends tell me this from time to time. Funnily enough, they are nearly always wrong. They are usually pointing out something like a mossy graveyard or a murky, old antique shop. Such things feel story-ish because they have already...
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