After years of doubt and mistakenly thinking a job in academia would give me time to write, I'm working on YA fiction and getting ready to send some queries out. (Why are queries harder to write than the novel itself?) I teach writing and lit at Western New England College and am mentoring a few students in their own quests for publishing.
Cheesy as it sounds, I started writing when I was about ten and ran out of books to read and couldn't get to the library myself. I like creating worlds and exploring lives and the way a writer can always have one foot in an imaginary realm as they go about their mundane business. I like hearing the voices of characters in my head sometimes more than the actual voices around me. And I like the way those characters will surprise me by what they do sometimes, seemingly beyond my control.
My YA heroes are Libba Bray, Phillip Pullman, Sara Zarr, Sherman Alexie, and E. Lockhart right now. All-time favorites include Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Christa Wolf, Julia Alvarez, Oscar Wilde and the PreRaphaelites, Toni Morrison, scripts of _Big Love_ and _The Sopranos_ . . .
No one has written on Stephanie Wardrop's wall.
No one has written on Stephanie Wardrop's wall.