Ellen Cooney

I grew up in a small New England river-town founded and based on mills and factories, and I’m the type of writer who never actually became one, but started writing very young, as naturally as anything. I never distinguished books or letters of the alphabet from basic requirements, like food and sleep. I was a child poet and playwright, and the only writer I knew, so I had a lot of freedom imagining what my grown-up writing life would be like. When I turned sixty last year–a novelist with eight books and a ninth in the works, with many stories published, and a long career in teaching creative workshops–I found myself looking back and laughing loudly and tenderly at my baby-writer self for thinking,“I’m lucky because what I do is so easy!” So what I actually became is a writer who gets it that it’s very, very hard work, plus this:if it looks on the page it was hard-worked,it was struggled with,it was sweated over,it was always in danger of falling apart...well,that would mean I’d done something wrong. And this:if I knew as a little girl I’d grow up to write a novel in which quite a few troubled, highly expressive dogs are main characters,I would have laughed my head off at how improbable that seemed, for I didn’t have dogs of my own,or even know any closely,until I was grown and in my own writer’s life.