About Elizabeth Winthrop

I grew up in a writing family. Some nineteenth century ancestor of mine, a firm federalist named Richard Alsop was a member of "the Hartford Wits." Besides serving as President of the United States, my great great uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, was the author of thirty-eight books, including a definitive study of the War of 1812. His sister, my great grandmother, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, was a published poet. My aunt, Susan Mary Alsop is the author of numerous magazine articles and well received books (TO MARIETTA FROM PARIS about her correspondence with her best friend, Marietta Tree, THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA and a biography of Vita Sackville-West among others). Joseph and Stewart Alsop, my uncle and father, wrote a syndicated column together for years entitled "Matter of Fact." In 1958, my father left the partnership to become the Washington Editor of the Saturday Evening Post. When he died in 1974, he was a columnist for Newsweek Magazine as well as the author of a number of books about political Washington. My uncle Joe continued writing until his death in 1989. My brother, Stewart, writes a regular column for Fortune Magazine.

I am, however, the only fiction writer in the family. My "habit" makes the family nervous. In his best selling memoir STAY OF EXECUTION (c. 1973), my father commented on my propensity for using the people I knew in my novels. "In fact, Elizabeth has real talent, as well as an awesome determination to become a serious writer. The combination can hardly fail to pay off in the end. But as I've told her, sometimes I worry that she'll run out of family and friends before her talent comes to full flower." I don't know if after more than forty books for children and short stories and novels for adults, my talent has come to full flower, but I do know that I have yet to run out of family and friends. No wonder my uncle John Alsop has been heard to say that "every time Elizabeth writes a book it's like dodging a bullet."

When people ask me why I write books for children, I'm always tempted to answer, "because I haven't grown up yet." . When I do a school visit (and I've been to hundreds of schools in the last ten years), I always tells the kids that by the time you are twelve years old, you'll have all the memories you need to write a hundred books.

My first picture book BUNK BEDS is a memory piece about the imaginative adventures two of my brothers and I shared in the nursery room of the little house in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. My mother was English and thought children should be in bed by seven p.m., so we lay there listening to the noise of the other kids playing outside in the long summer twilight time. Because we couldn't be outside, we turned our bunk beds into the props in imaginary games. I know that I moved from that house when I was six years old because our family was growing too rapidly and my new younger brother was sleeping in a bassinette in the bathtub. Eighteen years after I played in that nursery room, I wrote the memory into a book. One student once put up his hand during the question and answer period to ask me a profound question. "How," he asked, "do you hold on to the right memories?" "You don't try to hold on to them," I replied. "When you need them, they will come back to you." And so far, for me, that has always been true.

I grew up in Washington, D.C., the only girl surrounded by five brothers. My father worked at home, and one of my earliest memories is the pop-pop of typewriter keys hitting the round rubber carriage of his old Underwood. I grew up believing that writing was an honorable profession and that you could actually make a living at it.

Many of my books come from experiences I had before the age of twelve. BELINDA'S HURRICANE tells the story of the time I lived through the hurricane of 1954 with my grandmother on a little island off the coast of Connecticut. She refused to evacuate, which in retrospect was an unwise decision, but then she was a stubborn lady who had, by that time, adopted many of her Yankee husband's ways. One of these was standing firm in the face of people or weather who were trying to get her to move. Hurricane Carol hit at high tide which meant the water came up over the seawall, up over the front porch and into the living room. Grandmother looked at the water seeping in under the porch door and announced that it was time to retreat to the second floor. By that time the house was completely surrounded by water, so evacuation was out of the question. When the eye of the storm passed over the house, I looked out and in the sudden calm, I saw a golden retriever clinging to a makeshift raft. "Grandmother," I cried. "Please can't we go and rescue that dog?" "My dear," she said, always one to tell the full truth no matter how tough it was to take," we can't even go down in the living room." The wind and the rain came back and the dog was swept out to sea. I never saw it again but I never forgot it either and thirty years later I let my character, Belinda, rescue the dog. I always tell audiences that I prefer to write fiction than non-fiction because you can change the ending to suit yourself as long as it is consistent with the story you have created.

In the early seventies, at the very beginning of my career, I worked in the children's book department at Harper and Row. I finished my editorial work at five p.m. and when everybody else was streaming out of the office, I turned to my novel, WALKING AWAY, the story of a girl and her grandfather on a Virginia farm. I learned that with some self discipline and a quiet place, you can actually get a considerable amount of writing done in only an hour a day. That's why I believe in the old adage: writing is ten percent talent and ninety percent perseverance.

Many of my books have also grown out of the memories, sayings and feelings of my two children, Eliza and Andrew. They are now twenty-three and twenty so they no longer serve as a source for my children's books, but when they were young, I shamelessly wrote down everything they said or did. There came a time when I overheard one saying to the other, "don't tell Mom that, she'll put it in a book."

I watched my children struggle with issues of friendship and wrote LIZZIE AND HAROLD, THE BEST FRIENDS CLUB and LUKE'S BULLY. Peer pressure in kindergarten inspired SLOPPY KISSES and TOUGH EDDIE. I THINK HE LIKES ME chronicles Eliza's reactions to her younger brother when I brought him home from the hospital. Fears about separation and babysitters helped me create BEAR AND MRS. DUCK. BEAR'S CHRISTMAS SURPRISE grew out of Andrew's shame and horror when he had to tell me that he had "peeked" in the Christmas closet. KATHARINE'S DOLL tells the story of the time Eliza loved her best friend's doll better than her best friend. Eventually, when my children did grow beyond picture book age, I began to talk to other children about their secret fears and their imaginative games and with their insights. One day I was babysitting my best friend's daughter, Maggie. She was about four years old at the time and very informative about her feelings as well as her daily adventures.

"How are you today?" I asked.

"Fine," she announced. "There are no more monsters in my room."

"You had monsters in your room?"

"Yes. They were coming in, they were going out, they were driving me crazy."

"What did you do?" I asked, in amazement.

"Last night, I got up on my bed and I said, EVERYBODY OUT. And they all left."

Well, of course, there were the seeds of a story. When Maggie went home, I sat down and began the story MAGGIE AND THE MONSTER. It's been published in Danish, in Japanese and a toy company made a monster doll to sell with the book. Maggie told me her story and the tale traveled around the world. On days like that one, writing feels like a dream job.

One year I went out to Salt Lake City to give a speech and I stayed with my cousin who has four daughters. The youngest two, Julia and Annabelle, and their basset hound, Miss Marple, gave me the ideas for ASLEEP IN A HEAP and I'M THE BOSS.

Families who have adopted children from China have told me they love BEAR AND ROLY-POLY, the third in my series about Bear and Nora and Mrs. Duck. When Bear, the little brown koala bear sees his new baby sister, Roly-Poly, he is shocked to discover that she is a big black and white panda bear.

"She's not a baby," cried Bear. "She's almost as big as Mrs. Duck. And she's not brown like me."

"Babies come in all colors and sizes," said Nora.

My most popular books are THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC and THE BATTLE FOR THE CASTLE, two novels for middle grade readers. When students in school ask me which is my favorite book, I tell them CASTLE, albeit reluctantly, because no author likes to choose one book over the others. It's as if you're being asked who is your favorite child. CASTLE is the first novel that I wrote without an outline. Always before, I very solemnly figured out an entire novel on paper before I started the writing and then I tried to force my characters to adhere to decisions I had made about them before I even knew them. This made for some stilted writing and some rebellious characters. When I came to write the story of William and Mrs. Phillips and the Silver Knight, I tried to do it differently. In one page I simply wrote down where I wanted the story to go and what I thought William would learn about himself. Then I started writing on page one without knowing any more about the book than that. I let go and allowed the characters to wander through their own tale, the way we people wander through our lives. We go down paths and get lost, we have to retrace our steps, we have to go back and start again. The same thing happened to William, and by the end of the first draft, he and I had gotten to know each other. This kind of writing process necessitates much more revision than the other more organized way of writing fiction, but at the same time, it makes for a more spontaneous book. I get wonderful letters from readers who tell me that they have read THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC over and over again, and I believe that's because they truly feel they are living William's adventure as he goes through it. So every time they re-read the book, they re-live the adventure, just as I did when I was writing it. Recently I was asked to narrate both CASTLE books for an audiocassette version (with Listening Library) and I was delighted to have the chance to re-live William's adventure myself.

For years after I published CASTLE, fans begged me to write a sequel and for years, I resisted. I was scared I would write the same book again. I felt as if I had said all I had to say about William. But when I began to think about William as a twelve year old, (in CASTLE he is ten), I realized he would have a whole new set of challenges to face and I wanted to take him back across the drawbridge to find out how he handled them. He did well. THE BATTLE FOR THE CASTLE was published in 1993. Another sequel? I have ideas floating around, but this time around I'm making no promises either way.

People often ask me how it is possible for me to write books for adults and for children too. Each book I write exercises a different writing "muscle." Picture books for young children focus my attention on poetry and language, chapter books for middle grade readers keep my mind on the plot and novels for all ages are driven by character. And I write for so many different audiences because frankly it keeps me writing.

Every writer has a deep fear of drying up. We all work out our own peculiar systems for protecting that underground stream, that source of the stories. Mine is to write for different ages. For example, my picture books are what a friend calls my "tweenies." They come in the middle of or between longer books. I am never just working on picture books. Often I put a novel aside for a week because a picture book idea has bubbled to the surface and the first line has come to me and no writer can wander around for too long haunted by a first line. Or I put one book aside because I need to think it through on a deeper level. IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, (Doubleday, 1988) had gone through two revisions, but I still wasn't clear about what I was trying to say. When I took time out to write THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC, I was able to write the entrapment story out of my system so that I could make room for another. THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC was about holding on to someone you love for the wrong reason. IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE was really about a river of women, about the ways that seepage upstream pollutes the waters below. Writing the novel for children taught me what the novel for adults was really all about.

The summer after I finished IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, I vowed to take time off and for once, I left my computer behind when I went up to our rental house on an island off the New England coast. But while there, a friend invited me for dinner and afterwards, he taught me how to tie a fishing fly called a golden darter. That moment under his watchful eye took me back to times with my father, an avid flyfisherman, and by the end of the month, on a yellow legal pad, I had scribbled out a short story called "The Golden Darters." So even when I think I have taken the writer in me on vacation, she is soaking up stories.

Writing for all ages helps me to stay limber, to keep the lines of communication open not only between me and my readers but also between Elizabeth Winthrop, the person and Elizabeth Winthrop, the writer. But most of all, writing for all ages helps me to keep writing. For me, that's the real magic in it.

I currently have several books under contract with various publishers. Be sure to visit my News and Events page to learn more about them.

So my plate is full and I continue to enjoy doing what I believe I do best --writing stories that pull readers away from their own lives and into the funny, sad, scary and hopeful lives of my characters. In these troubled times, we have to remember that, as Francois Camoin wrote, "civilizations have existed which didn't practice agriculture or brain surgery, but none that haven't told stories." As long as we remain witnesses of our own lives, the memories that matter and the stories embedded in those memories will come back when we need them.

Biography of Elizabeth Winthrop
home the author bookshelf reviews and honors teachers page school visit guide advice for young writers guestbook news & events	I grew up in a writing family. Some nineteenth century ancestor of mine, a firm federalist named Richard Alsop was a member of "the Hartford Wits." Besides serving as President of the United States, my great great uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, was the author of thirty-eight books, including a definitive study of the War of 1812. His sister, my great grandmother, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, was a published poet. My aunt, Susan Mary Alsop is the author of numerous magazine articles and well received books (TO MARIETTA FROM PARIS about her correspondence with her best friend, Marietta Tree, THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA and a biography of Vita Sackville-West among others). Joseph and Stewart Alsop, my uncle and father, wrote a syndicated column together for years entitled "Matter of Fact." In 1958, my father left the partnership to become the Washington Editor of the Saturday Evening Post. When he died in 1974, he was a columnist for Newsweek Magazine as well as the author of a number of books about political Washington. My uncle Joe continued writing until his death in 1989. My brother, Stewart, writes a regular column for Fortune Magazine. I am, however, the only fiction writer in the family. My "habit" makes the family nervous. In his best selling memoir STAY OF EXECUTION (c. 1973), my father commented on my propensity for using the people I knew in my novels. "In fact, Elizabeth has real talent, as well as an awesome determination to become a serious writer. The combination can hardly fail to pay off in the end. But as I've told her, sometimes I worry that she'll run out of family and friends before her talent comes to full flower." I don't know if after more than forty books for children and short stories and novels for adults, my talent has come to full flower, but I do know that I have yet to run out of family and friends. No wonder my uncle John Alsop has been heard to say that "every time Elizabeth writes a book it's like dodging a bullet." When people ask me why I write books for children, I'm always tempted to answer, "because I haven't grown up yet." . When I do a school visit (and I've been to hundreds of schools in the last ten years), I always tells the kids that by the time you are twelve years old, you'll have all the memories you need to write a hundred books. My first picture book BUNK BEDS is a memory piece about the imaginative adventures two of my brothers and I shared in the nursery room of the little house in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. My mother was English and thought children should be in bed by seven p.m., so we lay there listening to the noise of the other kids playing outside in the long summer twilight time. Because we couldn't be outside, we turned our bunk beds into the props in imaginary games. I know that I moved from that house when I was six years old because our family was growing too rapidly and my new younger brother was sleeping in a bassinette in the bathtub. Eighteen years after I played in that nursery room, I wrote the memory into a book. One student once put up his hand during the question and answer period to ask me a profound question. "How," he asked, "do you hold on to the right memories?" "You don't try to hold on to them," I replied. "When you need them, they will come back to you." And so far, for me, that has always been true. I grew up in Washington, D.C., the only girl surrounded by five brothers. My father worked at home, and one of my earliest memories is the pop-pop of typewriter keys hitting the round rubber carriage of his old Underwood. I grew up believing that writing was an honorable profession and that you could actually make a living at it. Many of my books come from experiences I had before the age of twelve. BELINDA'S HURRICANE tells the story of the time I lived through the hurricane of 1954 with my grandmother on a little island off the coast of Connecticut. She refused to evacuate, which in retrospect was an unwise decision, but then she was a stubborn lady who had, by that time, adopted many of her Yankee husband's ways. One of these was standing firm in the face of people or weather who were trying to get her to move. Hurricane Carol hit at high tide which meant the water came up over the seawall, up over the front porch and into the living room. Grandmother looked at the water seeping in under the porch door and announced that it was time to retreat to the second floor. By that time the house was completely surrounded by water, so evacuation was out of the question. When the eye of the storm passed over the house, I looked out and in the sudden calm, I saw a golden retriever clinging to a makeshift raft. "Grandmother," I cried. "Please can't we go and rescue that dog?" "My dear," she said, always one to tell the full truth no matter how tough it was to take," we can't even go down in the living room." The wind and the rain came back and the dog was swept out to sea. I never saw it again but I never forgot it either and thirty years later I let my character, Belinda, rescue the dog. I always tell audiences that I prefer to write fiction than non-fiction because you can change the ending to suit yourself as long as it is consistent with the story you have created. In the early seventies, at the very beginning of my career, I worked in the children's book department at Harper and Row. I finished my editorial work at five p.m. and when everybody else was streaming out of the office, I turned to my novel, WALKING AWAY, the story of a girl and her grandfather on a Virginia farm. I learned that with some self discipline and a quiet place, you can actually get a considerable amount of writing done in only an hour a day. That's why I believe in the old adage: writing is ten percent talent and ninety percent perseverance. Many of my books have also grown out of the memories, sayings and feelings of my two children, Eliza and Andrew. They are now twenty-three and twenty so they no longer serve as a source for my children's books, but when they were young, I shamelessly wrote down everything they said or did. There came a time when I overheard one saying to the other, "don't tell Mom that, she'll put it in a book." I watched my children struggle with issues of friendship and wrote LIZZIE AND HAROLD, THE BEST FRIENDS CLUB and LUKE'S BULLY. Peer pressure in kindergarten inspired SLOPPY KISSES and TOUGH EDDIE. I THINK HE LIKES ME chronicles Eliza's reactions to her younger brother when I brought him home from the hospital. Fears about separation and babysitters helped me create BEAR AND MRS. DUCK. BEAR'S CHRISTMAS SURPRISE grew out of Andrew's shame and horror when he had to tell me that he had "peeked" in the Christmas closet. KATHARINE'S DOLL tells the story of the time Eliza loved her best friend's doll better than her best friend. Eventually, when my children did grow beyond picture book age, I began to talk to other children about their secret fears and their imaginative games and with their insights. One day I was babysitting my best friend's daughter, Maggie. She was about four years old at the time and very informative about her feelings as well as her daily adventures. "How are you today?" I asked. "Fine," she announced. "There are no more monsters in my room." "You had monsters in your room?" "Yes. They were coming in, they were going out, they were driving me crazy." "What did you do?" I asked, in amazement. "Last night, I got up on my bed and I said, EVERYBODY OUT. And they all left." Well, of course, there were the seeds of a story. When Maggie went home, I sat down and began the story MAGGIE AND THE MONSTER. It's been published in Danish, in Japanese and a toy company made a monster doll to sell with the book. Maggie told me her story and the tale traveled around the world. On days like that one, writing feels like a dream job. One year I went out to Salt Lake City to give a speech and I stayed with my cousin who has four daughters. The youngest two, Julia and Annabelle, and their basset hound, Miss Marple, gave me the ideas for ASLEEP IN A HEAP and I'M THE BOSS. Families who have adopted children from China have told me they love BEAR AND ROLY-POLY, the third in my series about Bear and Nora and Mrs. Duck. When Bear, the little brown koala bear sees his new baby sister, Roly-Poly, he is shocked to discover that she is a big black and white panda bear. "She's not a baby," cried Bear. "She's almost as big as Mrs. Duck. And she's not brown like me." "Babies come in all colors and sizes," said Nora. My most popular books are THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC and THE BATTLE FOR THE CASTLE, two novels for middle grade readers. When students in school ask me which is my favorite book, I tell them CASTLE, albeit reluctantly, because no author likes to choose one book over the others. It's as if you're being asked who is your favorite child. CASTLE is the first novel that I wrote without an outline. Always before, I very solemnly figured out an entire novel on paper before I started the writing and then I tried to force my characters to adhere to decisions I had made about them before I even knew them. This made for some stilted writing and some rebellious characters. When I came to write the story of William and Mrs. Phillips and the Silver Knight, I tried to do it differently. In one page I simply wrote down where I wanted the story to go and what I thought William would learn about himself. Then I started writing on page one without knowing any more about the book than that. I let go and allowed the characters to wander through their own tale, the way we people wander through our lives. We go down paths and get lost, we have to retrace our steps, we have to go back and start again. The same thing happened to William, and by the end of the first draft, he and I had gotten to know each other. This kind of writing process necessitates much more revision than the other more organized way of writing fiction, but at the same time, it makes for a more spontaneous book. I get wonderful letters from readers who tell me that they have read THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC over and over again, and I believe that's because they truly feel they are living William's adventure as he goes through it. So every time they re-read the book, they re-live the adventure, just as I did when I was writing it. Recently I was asked to narrate both CASTLE books for an audiocassette version (with Listening Library) and I was delighted to have the chance to re-live William's adventure myself. For years after I published CASTLE, fans begged me to write a sequel and for years, I resisted. I was scared I would write the same book again. I felt as if I had said all I had to say about William. But when I began to think about William as a twelve year old, (in CASTLE he is ten), I realized he would have a whole new set of challenges to face and I wanted to take him back across the drawbridge to find out how he handled them. He did well. THE BATTLE FOR THE CASTLE was published in 1993. Another sequel? I have ideas floating around, but this time around I'm making no promises either way. People often ask me how it is possible for me to write books for adults and for children too. Each book I write exercises a different writing "muscle." Picture books for young children focus my attention on poetry and language, chapter books for middle grade readers keep my mind on the plot and novels for all ages are driven by character. And I write for so many different audiences because frankly it keeps me writing. Every writer has a deep fear of drying up. We all work out our own peculiar systems for protecting that underground stream, that source of the stories. Mine is to write for different ages. For example, my picture books are what a friend calls my "tweenies." They come in the middle of or between longer books. I am never just working on picture books. Often I put a novel aside for a week because a picture book idea has bubbled to the surface and the first line has come to me and no writer can wander around for too long haunted by a first line. Or I put one book aside because I need to think it through on a deeper level. IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, (Doubleday, 1988) had gone through two revisions, but I still wasn't clear about what I was trying to say. When I took time out to write THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC, I was able to write the entrapment story out of my system so that I could make room for another. THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC was about holding on to someone you love for the wrong reason. IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE was really about a river of women, about the ways that seepage upstream pollutes the waters below. Writing the novel for children taught me what the novel for adults was really all about. The summer after I finished IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, I vowed to take time off and for once, I left my computer behind when I went up to our rental house on an island off the New England coast. But while there, a friend invited me for dinner and afterwards, he taught me how to tie a fishing fly called a golden darter. That moment under his watchful eye took me back to times with my father, an avid flyfisherman, and by the end of the month, on a yellow legal pad, I had scribbled out a short story called "The Golden Darters." So even when I think I have taken the writer in me on vacation, she is soaking up stories. Writing for all ages helps me to stay limber, to keep the lines of communication open not only between me and my readers but also between Elizabeth Winthrop, the person and Elizabeth Winthrop, the writer. But most of all, writing for all ages helps me to keep writing. For me, that's the real magic in it. I currently have several books under contract with various publishers. Be sure to visit my News and Events page to learn more about them. So my plate is full and I continue to enjoy doing what I believe I do best --writing stories that pull readers away from their own lives and into the funny, sad, scary and hopeful lives of my characters. In these troubled times, we have to remember that, as Francois Camoin wrote, "civilizations have existed which didn't practice agriculture or brain surgery, but none that haven't told stories." As long as we remain witnesses of our own lives, the memories that matter and the stories embedded in those memories will come back when we need them.

Biography of Elizabeth Winthrop