Sharon Creech
I was born in South Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and grew up there with my noisy and rowdy family: my parents (Ann and Arvel), my sister (Sandy), and my three brothers (Dennis, Doug and Tom).
For a fictional view of what it was like growing up in my family, see Absolutely Normal Chaos. (In that book, the brothers even have the same names as my own brothers.) Our house was not only full of us Creeches, but also full of friends and visiting relatives.
In the summer, we usually took a trip, all of us piled in a car and heading out to Wisconsin or Michigan or, once, to Idaho. We must have been a very noisy bunch, and I'm not sure how our parents put up with being cooped up with us in the car for those trips. The five-day trip out to Idaho when I was twelve had a powerful effect on me: what a huge and amazing country! I had no idea then that thirty-some years later, I would recreate that trip in a book called Walk Two Moons.
One other place we often visited was Quincy, Kentucky, where my cousins lived (and still live) on a beautiful farm, with hills and trees and swimming hole and barn and hayloft. We were outside running in those hills all day long, and at night we'd gather on the porch where more stories would be told. I loved Quincy so much that it has found its way into many of my books—transformed into Bybanks, Kentucky. Bybanks appears in Walk Two Moons, Chasing Redbird, and Bloomability. Bybanks also makes a brief appearance (by reference, but not by name) in The Wanderer.
When I was young, I wanted to be many things when I grew up: a painter, an ice skater, a singer, a teacher, and a reporter. It soon became apparent that I had little drawing talent, very limited tolerance for falling on ice, and absolutely no ability to stay on key while singing. I also soon learned that I would make a terrible reporter because when I didn't like the facts, I changed them. It was in college, when I took literature and writing courses, that I became intrigued by story-telling. Later, I was a teacher (high school English and writing) in England and in Switzerland. While teaching great literature, I learned so much about writing: about what makes a story interesting and about techniques of plot and characterization and point of view. I started out writing novels for adults (published as Sharon Rigg): The Recital and Nickel Malley were both written and published while I was living in England (these books were published in England only and are now out of print.) But the next book was Absolutely Normal Chaos, and ever since that book I have written mainly about young people. Walk Two Moons was the first of my books to be published in America. When it received the Newbery Medal, no one was more surprised than I was. I'm still a little bit in shock.
After Walk Two Moons came Chasing Redbird, Pleasing the Ghost, Bloomability, The Wanderer, and Fishing in the Air. I hope to be writing stories for a long, long time.
I am married to Lyle Rigg, who is the headmaster of The Pennington School in Pennington, New Jersey, and have two grown children, Rob and Karin. Being with my family is what I enjoy most. The next-best thing is writing stories.
© Sharon Creech
“I wondered about Mrs. Winterbottom and what she meant about living a tiny life. If she didn't like all that baking and cleaning and jumping up to get bottles of nail polish remover and sewing hems, why did she do it? Why didn't she tell them to do some of the things themselves? Maybe she was afraid there would be nothing left for her to do. There would be no need for her and she would become invisible and no one would notice.”
“I could tell you an extensively strange story, I warned.Oh, good! Gram said. Delicious!”
“The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.”
“I was full of struggles! And that made me so happy: If I was full of struggles, maybe I was interesting!”
“It was as if I were carrying around all the places I'd ever lived, and nothing I was seeing was just what it was - it was all of the places, all smooshed together. My bubble was fairly bursting by the time I got home, what with all that stuff crammed in there.”
“Joe, my guardian and a man of few words, once said about Lizzie, “That girl could talk the ears off a cornfield.”
“You never know the worth of water until the well is dry.”
“I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.”
“Mrs. Mudkin closed her eyes. "We should pray.""I ain't praying," Crazy Cora said. Mrs. Mudkin said, "Lord, please bless---""I ain't praying.""--this land and the people who--""I ain't praying.""--have toiled on this earth--""Stop that praying.""I can pray if I want to.""Then be quiet about it.”
“A driver had been sent to meet us. He was gray-haired, short, and nimble and introduced himself. "I am Patrick and so is every fourth man in Ireland, and the ones in between are named Sean or Mick or Finn, and I'll be driving you.”
“Lizzie said that if you imagined you were standing on the moon, looking down on the earth, you wouldn't be able to see the itty-bitty people racing around worrying you wouldn't see the barn falling in or the cow stuck in the pond; you wouldn't see the mean Granger kids squirting mustard on your white dress. You would see the most beautiful blue oceans and green lands, and the whole earth would look like a giant blue-and-green marble floating in the sky. Your worries would seem so small, maybe invisible.”
“Am I supposed to do something important? It doesn't seem enough to merely take up space on this planet in this country in this state in this town in this family.”
“And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never happened? Will none of the things you saw or thought or dreamed matter?”
“Something I am wondering:if you cannot heardo you have no soundsin your head?Do you seea silent movie”
“I was wishing I was invisible. Outside, the leaves were falling to the ground, and I was infinitely sad, sad down to my bones. I was sad for Phoebe and her parents and Prudence and Mike, sad for the leaves that were dying, and sad for myself, for something I had lost.”
“You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”
“A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.”
“Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.”
“That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything.”
“It can't be dead. It was alive just a minute ago.”
“I don't care if the whole town comes, as long as you come, Bailey boy.”
“I pretended he was my brother, only he was better than a brother because I chose him and he chose me. —Rosie”
“My granny Torrelli says when you are angry with someone, so angry you are thinking hateful things, so angry maybe you want to punch them, then you should think of the good things about them, and the nice things they've said, and why you liked them in the first place.”
“I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted to find.”
“Do the other angels know what they are doing? Am I the only confused one? Maybe I am unfinished, an unfinished angel.”
“when i reached the bottom, i finally understood what Guthrie meant when he shouted, "LIBERO!" It was a celebration of being alive”
“By the time I got to the bottom, I understood what Guthrie ment when he shouted LIBERO! It was a celebration of being alive.”
“It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.”
“Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.”
“What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones. ”
“On that night after Phoebe had given her Pandora report, I thought about the Hope in Pandora's box. Maybe when everything seemed sad and miserable, Phoebe and I could both hope that something might start to go right.”
“Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.”
“Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.”
“Sometimeswhen you are trying not to think about somethingit keeps popping back in your headyou can't help ityou think about itand think about itand think about ituntil your brainfeels likea squashed pea.”
“I tried.Can't do it.Brain's empty.”
“how can you love a little catso muchin such ashortshorttime?”
“I don't want tobecause boysdon't write poetry.Girls do.”
“So much dependsupona blue carsplattered with mudspeeding down the road.”
“In a course of a lifetime, what does it matter?”
“Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?”
“...but it doesn't feel crazy to us.It feels like what we do.”
“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”
“Don’t be in too much of a rush to be published. There is enormous value in listening and reading and writing—and then putting your words away for weeks or months–and then returning to your work to polish it some more.”
“Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”