I grew up in a small town not unlike the fictional town in my
middle grade novel, The Victory Garden. My dad raised tomatoes, and just
about everything else that grows in gardens. He had a curious technique with his
tomatoes--something he got from his farmer father, I suppose. They never would
have guessed that years later it would plant the seed for my book, set during
the second world war.
My mother, an avid reader and a poet, planted other seeds. She
gave me a
life-long love of books and of writing. My favorite school work always involved writing, from the time my first grade teacher showed me how to separate the two cursive "n's" in my middle name,
Anne, and I fell in love with the soft scratch of the pencil, and discovered I
could put not just words, but thoughts, on paper.
I have stories in Lynx Eye and Chicken Soup
for the Christian Women's Soul. I've always been an unapologetic school-o-holic
(blame or credit that
first grade teacher) and I love research, so most of my writing was for some
acad
emic
purpose UNTIL I met some astounding children's authors and began to delve
into children's literature. I relived being read to as a toddler. That's where my love of fiction began, although I didn't decide to write it until much later.
I think the first book read to me was the one with a kitten who kept repeating,
"Purr-severance wins!" You know, the cat was right. I tell myself that, every
time I get stuck in the middle of a chapter.
How The Victory Garden Grew.
Most fiction springs from some grain of truth. For this book, that grain was
Dad's tomato technique. The town and characters are fictional. What is real, I
believe, are the tenor of the times and the pervasiveness of the war
in the everyday lives of Americans.
In my research, I learned that victory gardens were of far more importance to the war that I had ever known. Children played a large part in the effort. That seemed like a good place to begin to tell children today about the war and how life was for American children then. I took a grain of truth, watered it with some imagination and research, and raised my fictional victory garden. I hope you will enjoy it.