Patricia A. Leslie

Through Eighth Grade, my family moved at least once a year. I never settled into a school or a neighbourhood. So I have a lot of experience at being an outsider, seen as different or strange, not having quite the same background or shared experiences as the general crowd. So that probably has influenced the way I portray a lot of my leading characters, who also tend to be outsiders, or going against the cultural flow in how they choose to live. And for two years we lived in a house which had a resident poltergeist, which certainly contributed to my interest in the paranormal ... and my conviction that there are other Realms alongside ours, whether or not science has yet discovered an accurate way to identify their existence. We also often lived in semi-rural areas, where even though there were other houses around, there always seemed to be a wild area adjacent to our home ... a forested hillside, a river bank, or a grassy hillside with a spring running down it. I spent most of my childhood playing in those natural environments, and Nature has always seemed magical to me.

I probably started writing actual stories when I was about ten or eleven, mostly for school assignments. Although I was making up stories in my head long before that. I had a large collection of stuffed toy animals - the realistic Steiff ones, mostly - and also sets of plastic model dinosaurs. They all had names and relationships with one another, and I would create environments for them in my room, where I had them play out long epic stories that sometimes went on for days.