Me, Me, & Me
I grew up in a household full of family stories. My father, a college dean, entertained my sisters, brother, and me with accounts of his rough-and-tumble childhood in a Hungarian community in Wisconsin. To
Not to be outdone, my mother, a school psychologist, kept us up to date with her genealogical research as she traced her English ancestors back to a lion tamer, a country doctor who accepted live chickens for payment, and twelve passengers on the Mayflower.
keep us humble, he’d tell us about the only birthday he ever celebrated where he and his three siblings split one piece of cake and a raspberry soda. He never forgot the taste of that soda.
The stories that stayed with me through the years had one thing in common – they were dramatic. One of Mom’s stories – about Dorothy May Bradford’s tragic fall from the Mayflower – became the basis for my middle grade novel, The Ghost in Allie’s Pool.
Now in Connecticut, I continue to write plays and children's books. Recently I co-produced and was a writer for the show Momoirs: The Umbilical Cord Stops Here.
My search for the dramatic also led to writing plays, which had productions in New York City. When my husband’s job took us to London, I wrote comedy sketches for several BBC Radio shows. There I competed with a writing room full of clever British lads who could recite Monty Python sketches verbatim.
I’ve tried to keep up the story telling tradition in my own home, where I live with my husband, Eric Montgomery, and our two children. But alas, I’m competing with the lure of electronics. Perhaps my only solution will be to create a video game about my childhood. But then in order for my son and daughter to be interested, I’d have to have been born a Mario brother or a princess named Zelda.