I’m Lynne Rae Perkins and I write and illustrate books, picture books and also longer books.
As a child, I never thought at all about being a writer. I grew up on a street that was built by one man, all the houses had the same floor plan so you could go into anybody else’s house and know exactly where things were. And everybody moved in within a couple of years of each other, so there were I think 40 kinds on my street.
Which as a child was a really great thing, there was always somebody to play with and we did kind of run wild and since it was a fairly new development, on the other side of our street there were woods and there was this big open field called the Boney Dump which is where the steel processing, it was near Pittsburgh, so where the steel processing places dumped their, it’s called boney, and it’s a byproduct of steel making.
But anyways, it was this big field, it was kind of full of cinder, and we played there a lot too. But we would be gone all day and we would come home when it was dinner time, so there was really a lot of freedom and there was a lot of, you know our parents didn’t do anything in particular to entertain us, they would just say get out of the house and then we would be on our own, making up things to do. So I think that was a really great thing.
In terms of storytelling there was a lot of sitting on porches at night, you know in warm weather of course and my mother is something of a storyteller and it was always interesting to me that I think I became aware fairly early on that you could edit a story to make it communicate what you wanted to communicate and to make your side of the story be the good side.
And I would hear stories about myself, about something that had happened to me that maybe to me seemed like a disaster but in my mother’s story I was the hero of the story so that was an interesting thing to learn about. I did read a lot. Me, mostly, there are so many books that are considered classics now that I never encountered until I was an adult. I read grocery store children’s books, you know I read Little Golden Books and Tab Book Club books.
And then bookmobile books, and we did have a library and it had a big series, I think it was a landmark series of biographies which I read all of those. And so I did read a lot and my parents were not readers, and they read the newspaper but they didn’t read books and I think they thought it was a really great thing that I was a reader and they never really censored what I read because I don’t think it dawned on them that I would, that reading could be a bad thing.
Although I did, it did start me on some ways that led me away from my childhood, neighborhood, whatever ethos or something you know which was fairly conservative and some other things. But that gave me a lot of freedom that they were just so supportive of me reading and writing for me, I mean I wrote in school but writing happened much later.
