About

Jennifer has worked as a:

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• Ice Cream Scooper (Sticky!!)

• Toy Store Salesperson (Fun!)

• Newspaper Delivery Person (Blech! I do not love early mornings.)

• Legal Assistant (Fascinating, but Repetitive!)

• Elementary School Teacher (Exhausting!!!)

• Mom (Best Job Ever!)

• Writer (Fun! Fascinating! Sometimes Sticky!)

 

The way I see it, no job is as great as being a mom, but being a writer is a close second. It combines all of my favorite things: playing with words, building worlds, creating life, and reading books about fascinating things and calling it “research” (sometimes it really is). And now and then, people pay you for this work that seems like play.

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 There are as many reasons to write as there are writers. I write for the unhappy seven-year-old girl in the picture. That’s me if you didn’t guess.

 

I grew up in a poor, chaotic family, splitting time between my mom’s house, my dad’s apartment, and my grandma’s warm kitchen. But even though there was never enough money, there were books in all the homes I lived in. Fantasy and SciFi at Mom’s. Spy thrillers and history at Dad’s. Comic books and classics at Grandma’s.

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Books let me escape to places different from my disorderly life; to little houses on prairies, lands accessed through closets, restaurants at the far reaches of the universe, and cozy homes built into hills where second breakfast was waiting. Books not only helped me tune out the discord, but they broadened my world and gave me hope that there was more to it than my narrow experience.

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That is my motivation for writing. So that readers – whether they are seven or fifty-seven – can escape from their everyday life into a different possibility, a new world, if only for a moment.