Marguerite W. Davol

Answers to Frequent Questions:
My ideas come from everywhere, but especially from storytellers.
Most of my books started out as stories I told.
I write on my couch, using a pencil, then type the story on my computer, print it out, and revise from the printed copy.
I revise and revise and revise.

During the winter I live in Massachusetts with my husband, Bob Greenberg. Our apartment is in a converted paper mill. We look out our windows to a tree-lined brook and a thirty-foot wide waterfall. As you can imagine, the sound of water is a soothing background for reading, for writing, for whatever I’m doing.

The rest of the year, I spend time in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, also a soothing background for writing. Of course the moose, bears, deer, and coyotes wandering past the house are distractions. The animals and the birds, too, like sampling the blueberries in our fields at the foot of the mountains.

I grew up in a very different world, a small northern Illinois town during the Depression years. Like many families, we were poor, sometimes hungry. When I was five, my only Christmas presents were one orange and an ugly homemade rag doll. My brother and big sister were much older and had part time jobs. My little sister and I played in our sandbox, and cut up catalogs to make paper dolls. Roller-skating and riding my hand-me-down rickety bike were fun, but best of all was visiting the town’s library and exploring its bookshelves. In the summer, my favorite place to read was in one of our fruit trees. How wonderful to perch on a branch in a cherry tree in June, an apple tree in August, holding a book in one hand and eating ripe fruit with the other!

I traveled to Colorado for college, and lived in Kansas and Rochester, NY before coming to South Hadley, Massachusetts where my children, Susan, Jonathan, and Sarah, grew up. Today they have families of their own; I have four grandchildren. My first husband, Stephen Davol, was a professor at Mount Holyoke College. I taught young children in the College’s laboratory school for a number of years, the perfect place for learning about children’s books. After my husband died in 1982, I decided to try writing books myself. Many classes, conferences, critique groups, and how-to books later, Heart of the Wood was published in 1992.

Since then, I have had nine books published, retired from teaching, remarried, and have traveled many places. Can you imagine riding a camel in India, staring into a polar bear’s eyes in the Arctic, walking among blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos Islands or zillions of penguins in Antarctica? I’ve traveled on the Yangtze River like Ping, hiked on a Swiss glacier, viewed prehistoric cave paintings in France and Spain, and even lived in England for two different years.

Have my travels appeared in my books? Not directly. At least, not yet! Of course every experience feeds our imagination and triggers ideas and words. But for me, I write mostly from an imagined world of myth and legend, folk tale and tall tale. My ideas and inspiration come from storytellers and the tales they tell. In fact, most of my books were first created as stories to tell the children I taught or to share with other storytellers. It was only after many tellings that I reshaped the stories to become books. For each of my books, the editor has chosen the perfect illustrator to bring the book to life.

Today I work on my latest writing project, talk at conferences, and visit schools as Author/Storyteller. I love talking with the children about words and ideas, books and writing!And I always tell each group a story I’ve created.