The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and Famous Five opened up new worlds to me – worlds I could actually be part of, and exist in, at the same time as the physical one I knew. At 14, I was burning through books accessible to me like wildfire, much to the disadvantage of my academic studies. Nothing liberated me more than experiencing these many different worlds inside white and my favorite yellow pages. My school’s library was where I first thought of what my daemon would be if I made it into Northern Lights as a real breathing person. It was also where I got addicted to Animorphs, fell in love with Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and just couldn’t have enough of Harry Potter. Soon, I began writing my own fantasies, very gingerly kept hidden inside notebooks.

The ability to create and to be able to breathe life into that creation, so that it stirs a reader in many different ways – maybe takes them into a past, enables them to make meaning or interpret some present, or even to throw them into a future in such a way that their minds are opened to the many possibilities, for me, is truly a kind of magic I never want to lose.

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