You know it’s interesting how you become a storyteller because I think I was born as a storyteller, when I was a child my parents called it lying. And I was punished for lying all the time and I would try to explain to them that it wasn’t really a lie, it was the way I saw it. But it was really never the truth. So every story that I told was embellished. As a matter of fact, the story they tell about me in my family was when I was two years old, when I had just learned to talk, I would walk up and down the block and knock on people’s doors and say hi, it’s Linda, my real name is Linda.
Do you want to know what happened in our house last night? And then I would continue to reveal the family secrets. My parents had had a fight, my mother made soup out of a can, my father sleeps in his underpants, and it was a, to my parents I was out of control. But to me I was reporting, I was telling the stories of our family. So I think it was always clear that I was going to be a writer or a storyteller of some kind.
And then when I started school, I started winning prizes, in the first grade we had a poetry contest. And my poem won the first prize and was put on the bulletin board and I still remember it in fact, it was called My Father and it goes like this: My father goes out and works all day so the family can go and spend his pay. My father treats us very good, especially when we do what we should. And apparently they thought that was genius for a first grader.
So it was put on the bulletin board and that was really my first publication, so I got very interested in the idea that you could create something yourself and then other people would see it and I think from that day on my fate was sealed, that I knew that I was going to write for other, so that other people could read what I had to say. And then I continued, so then all through middle school and high school I was a journalist, I was editor of our high school newspaper.
And I wrote a weekly column called Oliver’s Editorial Twist. And then I won a contest as, which was a journalism prize, and the prize was you got to work at the local newspaper for a summer as a cub reporter and that, I just fell in love with that. I mean I was reporting on traffic accidents, fender benders, but I just felt, you know I had a press pass and I felt like I was…
And then all through college I wrote for the college newspaper at Berkeley and I also produced a radio show for public radio that was for children. So I started to become interested in the combination of journalism writing and writing for children so that was really how that originated. And then when I came, when I left Berkeley which is where I went to the University and came back to Los Angeles if you want to be a writer in Los Angeles primarily you work in film and television.
So that’s what happened, I became a comedy writer and I wrote for situation comedies and, and I didn’t like that but it was very good training in terms of producing writing, producing writing products. And that was when I became interested in children’s book. So I wrote and produced television series primarily for children.
So it was a combination of producing, and of writing, and of writing for children and families. Which brings me almost up to the present.
