Interview

Lynne Rae Perkins, author and illustrator of many novels for younger readers, including Criss Cross and As Easy as Falling Off The Face of the Earth, talks about her life and work.

I grew up in a small town not far from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We lived on the raw frontier of a new subdivision, where eighteen small ranch houses sat bravely on eighteen lots with tiny sticks of trees and unpaved driveways. To a child, it was a paradise of uninterrupted backyards with unlimited playmates and extra mothers and fathers available if you should happen to need one. Not to mention woods and a creek right nearby.

I thought we must be the luckiest people on earth. I remember even liking my age and feeling a little sorry for those born in a year other than 1956.

As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that there was a larger world, where there were other opinions and ideas, other ways of doing things. Some of them even seemed better than ours. To my perplexity, my parents were less impressed with this news than I was.

I was also baffled by some other mysteries: Why didn't football players like smart girls? And how could I pick one career and do it every day for forty years? I received little guidance on the first question, but my guidance counselor suggested that architecture would be ...