I am very happy that those children, now grown up with children of their own, know about the book. A teacher I once met at a meeting in Virginia told me that when she read Bridge to Terabithia to her class, one of the girls told her that her mother had been in that Lovettsville sixth grade. On the way to becoming a missionary, I spent a year teaching in a rural school in northern Virginia, where almost all my children were like Jesse Aarons. My dream of becoming a movie star never came true, but I did a lot of acting all through school, and the first writing for which I got any applause consisted of plays I wrote for my sixth-grade friends to act out. I spent four years at King College in Bristol, Tennessee, doing what I loved best-reading English and American literature-and avoiding math whenever possible. During World War II, we lived in Virginia and North Carolina, and when our family's return to China was indefinitely postponed, we moved to various towns in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, before my parents settled in Winchester, Virginia.īy that time, I was ready to begin college. The following year, we had to refugee a second time because war between Japan and the United States seemed inevitable. I missed him very much, and in telling him so, I managed a piece of writing I am not ashamed of to this day.Ī lot has happened to me since I wrote that letter. We were living in Shanghai, and my father was working in our old home territory, which at the time was across various battle lines.

I say fortunately, because the samples that did manage to survive are terrible, with the single exception of a rather nice letter I wrote to my father when I was seven.

Fortunately, very few samples of my early writing survived the eighteen moves I made before I was eighteen years old. I must have tried writing soon afterward. I know I began reading when I was four or five, because I couldn't stand not being able to. When I was twenty, I wanted to get married and have lots of children.Īnother question I can't answer is, 'When did you begin writing?' I can't remember. But when I was ten, I wanted to be either a movie star or a missionary. One is, 'When did you first know that you wanted to become a writer?' The fact is that I never wanted to be a writer, at least not when I was a child, or even a young woman. People are always asking me questions I don't have answers for.

For jacob have i loved