About
I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I can still remember the first story that I wrote, at age five, something about a bear that ate so much honey that he had to roll home in a barrel. I thought it was brilliant, although even then I had a niggling doubt about how that barrel came to be on top of a hill.
I married, started my family, and moved to Atlanta in my early twenties. Until twenty-nine, I was consumed by raising three children born within a four and a half year span. When my oldest daughter started kindergarten, I volunteered in the school library, and became reacquainted with children’s books. My favorites were by Penelope Lively—the penultimate of which was THE GHOST OF THOMAS KEMPE. Here was a book that combined history, a swiftly moving story, and finely drawn characterization—I wanted to do that!
I immediately took a writing class at Georgia State University, where my instructor, Thomas McHaney, warned his students that it usually took a writer at least seven years to publish even a short story after they became serious about writing. Indeeed, it would take nearly seven years before my first novel for children, THE BACKYARD GHOST, appeared. I didn’t beat Professor McHaney’s curve, but I was elated.
By 1999, I’d written seven middle-grade novels and my first picture book, THE MIGHTIEST HEART. I arranged to meet the illustrator, Laurel Long, who told me that her work was inspired by an early sixteenth century Flemish painter. I had no background whatsoever in art, but I had found a new obsession. I pored over the subject of Northern Renaissance art until at last my studies led me to Rembrandt. And there I stopped. Who was this man whose art was so impossibly beautiful while he himself was, well, simply impossible? Four trips to Amsterdam and eight years later, during which time four more picture books appeared, my first young adult novel, I AM REMBRANDT’S DAUGHTER, was published.
Meanwhile, my research on Rembrandt led me to a Spanish painter from the same time period, Diego Velazquez. Then I became interested in a Spanish king from the Golden Age, Philip (Felipe) II. Philip was always depicted as cruel, rigid, and insane, but by now, I had read enough history to understand that it is not always factual. It’s very much shaped by the recorder. With someone as maligned as Philip I, I was interested to know how much truth there was behind the nasty stories.
I was several chapters into the first draft when I revisited a painting—“Lady in a Fur Wrap”–that a biographer of Philip had attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola, my first acquaintance with the painter. When I read up on Sofonisba Anguissola, I was intrigued to find that she was a famous portraitist—the first woman to ever reach this stature—as well as a student of Michelangelo and a lady-in-waiting to Philip’s second wife, Elisabeth de Valois. As my story developed into an exploration of Philip’s marriage to his teenage wife—and his teenage wife’s attraction to his charismatic illegitimate brother–I realized that Sofonisba might make an interesting narrator. With each new draft, the story became more Sofonisba’s and less Philip’s, though I hoped never to lose sight of my original points—that the spoken word can ruin a reputation, that just because history is written, that does not necessarily make it the truth, and that we can never truly understand the workings of another person’s heart.
