So I always try to learn something with each book, and I offer that something to my readers. But one thing I admired in Walter Farley’s work is that he always taught me something about horses – something new in every book. So I let myself write about all sorts of things, always trying new types of books. A few of us make some headway in one area or another, but we’re hardly ever true authorities on something.

It would be lovely to be ‘a master’ of something … but it’s also not something I aspire to because, really, I don’t believe in it. I chose not to become that kind of writer, however.

If you loved a book by him and picked up a second book by him, you’d love it too – because they were all ‘the same’ in the sense that they had a unified interest (horses) and a unified tone. Walter Farley, however, was a master of one kind of book.

I loved being with my father… so reading Walter Farley was like being with my father. My father was a gambler and he often took me on off hours to the race track to walk the track and to go through the stables. He wrote a famous series of books about horses. Even though I often write fantasies today, I always ground my stories in historical fact and psychological reality, perhaps because that was so much of what I appreciated about that one book.Īnd there’s one author I loved very much: Walter Farley. The poverty in that book rang true to me, and I delighted in being able to see someone I could identify with in the outline of my real life. There was one book I loved very much, though: Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And because I was a good student, I got a complete scholarship to college and, of course, that made my life very different from what it otherwise would have been. I’m quite sure I became a good student because I read so much. I didn’t know ‘the world.’ But in books I travelled all over, past and present and future. We’d get in the car perhaps for an hour, but rarely longer than that. Reading picks you up and takes you places. It was the very act of reading that influenced me enormously – though I have a few things to say about one book and one author. Books were my true friends – the ones I could count on. My family had all kinds of financial and other problems, so we moved a lot, and I never had friends for very long.

Tell me which authors, or what reading, you can see now were influential in your life and career?Īs a child, I read voraciously. Donna-Jo Napoli, linguistics professor and award-winning author of children’s fiction

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