Anne Spollen
I was born in Staten Island, New York and grew up by the Atlantic Ocean. In the first grade, I turned over a book and saw that a human had created it. I asked my teacher how people got to write books. She said, "They read all the time." I took this very, very seriously.
I went away to New Paltz College and after graduating, I got a teaching job there and stayed. Teaching adverbial clauses and meeting with state auditors to discuss literacy scores was soul crushing so when my first son was born, I stayed home and returned to writing poetry while he napped. I eventually wrote faster (he napped less and soon had a new brother) and began writing short stories. Even better, editors began buying them. Eventually, my first novel, The Shape of Water, was published.
Right after that, I moved from New Paltz, back to a town near the Atlantic Ocean, but south of Staten Island. In February, 2010, my second novel, "Light Beneath Ferns," will be released. They are both young adult.
I finished a third that is still in the nether world, and I am working on a fourth. In the meantime, I teach English and Spanish part time and stalk my two teenage boys while raising their younger sister.
“I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same.”
“You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life.... These people no longer made progress.”
“I heard silence, silence infinite as the bottom of the ocean, a silence that sealed.”
“I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.”
“Ma, Kyle has the personality of a light switch. I don't have a crush on him. -Now, what exactly is that sentence supposed to mean? - I mean, he has two moods, and the presence of something that was created to go unnoticed throughout life. Like a light switch: on, off, there when you need it, forgettable when you don't.”
“I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”
“The room had the impersonal, disconnected feel of a waiting room on Jupiter.”
“I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean's heavy, fishy aroma; it was a whiff of salt and mint, just as I approached the water on a dive, that warned me that a more powerful scent would soon enter my nose. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.”
“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”