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Jane Louise Curry
What is your connection to Ohio?
I was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, on what once had been my great-grandfather Andrew's farm, but which by then had streets and houses. When I was a child "The Hilltop," as we called it, was still a family compund, with my grandparents, great-aunt and uncle, uncle and aunt and assorted cousins in houses nearby, and another great-aunt's family up the road. When I was in fifth grade my parents and sister and baby brother and I moved to Pennsylvania, but many years later my parents moved back to East Liverpool. Later - long after I had moved to California and become a full-time writer - they kept a summer home there where, once they had headed south to Florida and warm weather, I spent several winters happily writing and taking long walks in the snow. That was back in the 1980s, but I still have an uncle and aunt in Ohio, and so try to return as often as I can.
What inspired you to become an author or illustrator?
Books. My parents read bedtime stories and poems to me when I was small, and so I fell in love with books long before I could read. I'm not in fact sure which came first - making up stories or learning to read. Our school library was skimpy, but both of my sets of grandparents had shelves and shelves of books in wonderful glass-fronted bookcases, so by fourth grade I was greedily reading everything from Huckleberry Finn to Little Dorrit to The Letters of the Presidents. Of the plays and stories I wrote at that time, one page is all that survived the opening scene of a play about an orphan girl - named Jane Eyre. (At least I picked a good book to steal ideas from.) In fifth grade, in my new school's library, I discovered E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle and decided that its combination of comedy, magic, romance, and spookiness made it the best of all possible books (but - alas! - never thought to find out whether she had written any others.)In junior high and high school I read as greedily as ever, and wrote comical stories and articles for the school paper. In college I finally began to think more seriously about becoming a writer and wrote short stories to try to sell to magazines. Not a one sold. The idea of writing stories for children never even entered my mind until the first year Î was a graduate student at the University of London. In that year I came across a copy of The Enchanted Castle in a bookshop, and re-read it that day with great excitement - and as much delight as I had felt in fifth grade. Soon after that, something happened that led me to put two and two together. . .
While in London, I was spending one evening a week as the lieutenant (the assistant leader) of a company of Girl Guides (the British name for Girl Scouts ), and because the English girls loved hearing what they called "Red Indian Stories," every week I told a tale from one of the California tribes. I soon ran out of stories, and had to look for more in the old books and periodicals in the great British Library. It was the girls who asked, Why don't you make a new book of them?" I did and it became my first book, Down from the Lonely Mountain.
After Down From the Lonely Mountain, remembering E. Nesbit's magical books, I decided that I would try my hand at a fantasy. I set it on a farm very like my parents' own farm, but the young cousins there for the summer discover neighbors my sister and cousins and I never did--a strange people who have lived for centuries in caverns under the mountain. Its title is Beneath the Hill, and aftermore than thirty years it is still in print! Since then I have written thirty-four more books: fantasies, mysteries, real-life stories, tales of time travel, and retold folk tales.
What advice do you have for a young author or illustrator?
Read, read, read! That's the way to get to know what makes a really good story. Then, when you write stories or draw pictures to go with stories, put in details--the more the better--that will help to make your story or picture come alive for your audience. And keep on writing and--or drawing. When I was in college and still writing (having begun in fourth grade) I read that a writer couldn't call him or herself a writer until she or he had collected thirty-three rejection slips. I suppose that it meant that if you could still keep writing after thirty-three different publishers had said, "No, thank you," and had worked hard to improve your work each time before you sent it out again, then you were truly serious about being a writer. If that sounds like a lot of work, remember that J. K. Rowling before her first book was accepted, had "No, thank you" letters from publishers who didn't want to take a chance on Harry Potter. Besides, if you're a writer, you won't be able to help keeping at it--because you love it. And, after thirty-six books, I still think it's fun.
What do you like to do for fun?
Writing, of course! And reading, reading, reading. But after all that, many things: walking hiking, gardening, drawing and painting, doing computer art, going to movies and plays, listening to classical music (and jazz and the Beatles), cooking, giving dinner parties, building stone walls in my garden, picnics, watching the deer that come to eat my roses, visiting family...I have to stop there, because the list could go on and on. This year I was in London, England for the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee, and went (along with a crowd of a million other people) to the big two-day party: rock concert, fire works display, light show, and a wonderful parade at Buckiongham Palace. Now, that was fun!
Some of your most popular books are:
- The Lotus cup (1986)
- What the Dickens! (1991)
- The big Smith snatch (1989)
- The Bassumtyte treasure (1978)
- The ice ghosts mystery (1972)
- A Stolen life (1999)
- Little little sister (1989)
- Back in the beforetime : tales of the California Indians (1987)
- Moon window (1996)
- The Christmas knight (1993)
