{"id":2,"date":"2009-12-13T23:07:06","date_gmt":"2009-12-14T04:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2025-08-15T08:15:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T12:15:07","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"About Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Me<\/a>Short version: I’ve written more than a dozen picture books and novels for kids of all ages. I live with my family in Northern Virginia, where I also work for an affordable housing nonprofit.<\/p>\n

Long version: If you ask any of my older relatives, the ones who call me “Maddie,” they’ll tell you they always knew I’d become a children’s writer. “Remember when you wrote that story about the raccoon and the mask?<\/a>” they say.\u00a0Of course<\/em> I remembered the raccoon story. I wrote it for Mrs. Sinha’s fifth grade class and frankly, there have been a number of times when I’ve worried that it was the height of my writing career.<\/p>\n

I went to high school and then to college and I didn’t become a children’s book writer. I became a journalist. (“I always knew you’d become a journalist,” a high school friend told me at a reunion, “because you were the puzzle page editor in Mrs. Sinha’s fifth grade class.” You see? Fifth grade was clearly a pinnacle year.)<\/p>\n

\"Me<\/a>I wrote for newspapers for a long time, mainly for The Roanoke Times<\/a> in Blacksburg, Virginia, where I grew up.\u00a0 In 2000 my husband wrenched me away from Southwest Virginia, which has redbud in the spring, snow in the winter, and bluegrass all year round. We moved to Boston, Mass., where it got dark by 4 o’clock and the snow stuck around until April. I didn’t want to go and I wrote a poem<\/a> about it. Despite my feelings at the time, I ended up loving Boston. Still do, for reasons way beyond The Red Sox.<\/p>\n

While I was there, I took a writing class, and then followed up with\u00a0grad school<\/a> in creative writing at Boston University. I joined SCBWI<\/a> and a critique group, and did the same in subsequent moves to North Carolina and Northern Virginia. Wash, rinse, repeat. When I finally sold my fist book, the advance helped pay for our new furnace.<\/p>\n

These days, I continue to work on stories for children<\/a> and adults, as well as essays and articles. I also work full time for an affordable housing nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, we still need to repair our fireplace (more than a decade later) and we sneed a new liner for the chimney. Which is all a long way of answering the question: Why do you write? I write because it’s pretty much the only thing I can do. I play the guitar badly. I’m not terribly organized and my math skills need improvement.\u00a0 I write because it keeps me sane. I write because I love telling other people’s stories as well as my own. And I write for heat.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Short version: I’ve written more than a dozen picture books and novels for kids of all ages. I live with my family in Northern Virginia, where I also work for an affordable housing nonprofit. Long version: If you ask any … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4697,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/4697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}