I made a picture book about a young star (a “ luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity,” not someone famous) and its adventures in the universe. It occurred to me that books come into existence because people wrote them, and I was a person, so I could write one. JSC: When did you know you wanted to write, and when did you discover that you were good at it?ĭCL: I started writing for fun when I was in second grade, I think? This precocious British girl in my international school told me she’d already written a novel. Disney later redid the translation to be more faithful to Howard Ashman’s English lyrics, which are ingenious but faithful translations aren’t always good ones, and I’ve never developed a liking for the new version. Scott Coatsworth: Tell me one thing hardly anyone knows about you.ĭale Cameron Lowry: I do not like the Disney movie The Little Mermaid because of the sexist plot, but I love the 1989 German soundtrack. Today, Dale Cameron Lowry – Dale Cameron Lowry’s number one goal in life is getting the cat to stop eating dish towels number two is to write things that bring people joy. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
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A large cast of characters disappear, reappear, and evolve over the course of 400 pages-most notably Piper’s sister, Marli, who Cagan intimates has more deep-seated mental issues than we first know. While it ostensibly covers well-trod ground in YA fiction (a young artist struggling to become her own person), Cagan tells Piper’s story with amazing authenticity, eschewing a more straightforward story structure in favor of a tale with starts and stops, ebbs and flows. Taking the form of Piper’s diary during the final semester of high school and the arduous summer after, this debut features hand-drawn spot art that brings Piper’s passions to life. Unfortunately, she must juggle news of her acceptance with getting dumped by one best friend, managing the jealousy of another, trying not to get in the way of her perpetually angry, pregnant sister, and the financial implications of her school’s cost on her parents. Piper Perish longs to escape her life in Houston for the excitement of college in New York City, and her ticket out is her amazing visual art. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. I also completed two novels fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel.ĭuring this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland.Īt around this time I began to write the poems which formed my first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and to publish these in magazines. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Poetry was very important to me from childhood. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints. In a large family you hear a great many stories. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. |