I have a friend who is a dancer. I remember her talking about what it was like to go back to dancing after having a child. It felt completely different, she said. Being in her body felt different, physically and emotionally. I don’t know if there is any similarity between that and what I am experiencing now, but since writing my first novel my reading life has changed. I am finding myself trying to remember how I used to read. I birthed a book and now reading feels different.

A while ago I found a couple of plastic crates in my mother’s carport that were full of my old kids’ books. I took them away with me and sat down and went through them. Holding those books, I re-experienced the sense of awe and magic and absolute wonder they gave me as a kid. Books like The Humpback Whale, Blinky Bill and the Bull Ants, and Ten Apples up on Top, then Pippi Longstocking, and the Chronicles of Narnia. How incredible writers were! They could make worlds! They could take me to them! As a teenager I read fantasy, romance, and any book about horses and ponies. I gobbled International Velvet in one day, off from school sick, I was elated. School lead me to literature, to poetry, and that elation grew.