I don't know that our childhoods are necessarily more painful than most.

We return, again and again, usually under the cover of made-up characters, to work things through. Most children's writers, I suspect, are fixers.

Of course, the ghosts of childhood still inhabit them, but they deal with them in other forms-problems with parental authority turn into problems with bosses, for instance-and don't keep reaching back to the original source to try to fix it, to make everything come out differently than it did the first time. Most people, when they enter adulthood, leave childhood behind, by which I mean that they forget most of what they know about themselves as children. Because I get my creative energy in examining young lives, young issues. That was also when my last excuse for not taking the time to sit down to do the writing I'd so long wanted to do started first grade.Ī. So though I did all kinds of writing through my teen and early adult years-letters, journals, essays, poetry-I didn't begin to gather the craft I needed to write stories until I was in my early thirties. But while the stories I wove occupied my mind in a very satisfying way, they were so complex that I never thought of trying to write them down. I sometimes got a notation on my report card that said, 'Marion dreams.' It was not a compliment. For almost as far back as I can remember, I used most of my unoccupied moments-even in school when I was supposed to be doing other 'more important' things-to make up stories in my head. I seem to have been born with my head full of stories. What brought you to a career as a writer?Ī. Paul, Minnesota, with her partner and a cavalier King Charles spaniel, Dawn. She has six grandchildren and lives in St. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen different languages. Her writing guide, the American Library Association Notable WHAT'S YOUR STORY? A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO WRITING FICTION, is used by writers of all ages. Marion was one of the founding faculty and the first Faculty Chair for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also the editor of and a contributor to the ground-breaking collection of gay and lesbian short stories, Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence. She has won numerous awards, including several Minnesota Book Awards, a Jane Addams Peace Association Award for RAIN OF FIRE, an American Library Association Newbery Honor Award for ON MY HONOR, a number of state children's choice awards and the Kerlan Award from the University of Minnesota for the body of her work. Marion Dane Bauer is the author of more than one hundred books for young people, ranging from novelty and picture books through early readers, both fiction and nonfiction, books on writing, and middle-grade and young-adult novels.

The blue ghost by marion dane bauer