Ann Downer » About the Author

I was a bookworm from an early age. I vividly remember believing the ability to read was developmental, that I'd wake up one day and just be old enough to read.

Early Days, 1960-1967

Until I was six and a half years old, I lived in a little brick house on a tree-lined street in a suburb in northern Virginia. My dad traveled into Washington, DC, to a job that was mysterious to me. One day he came home and announced we were moving to the Philippines. My sister and I were excited, imagining a life in a little nipa hut on stilts, drinking milk straight from the coconut with a straw.

S. S. President Wilson

In 1968 my family boarded the S. S. President Wilson for the trip to Manila, and I began my other journey as a writer. If we had stayed in that little brick house, I would still have loved books, I would still have been a child with vivid imagination and a love of language, but there was something transformative about those weeks on the ship, taking our standard poodle, Beau, for walks on the deck and spotting flying fish off the ship's railing.

Manila, 1967-1972

Manila immersed us in a world at once comfortable and familiar, yet different enough to keep us off balance. Despite the American-styled school and subdivision, this wasn't like life "Stateside." We lived in a gated suburb of flat-roofed houses with gardens of guava trees and bougainvillea. My sister and I spent our allowances at the South Supermarket on troll dolls and champoy, sweet and salty dried plums that made our mouths pucker. And we spent a lot of time at the pool in the U.S. embassy compound on Manila Bay, padding into the tiny library still in our swimsuits and flip-flops, choosing armfuls of books: mine were Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames. My friend Eleanor and I played with trolls, creating a complex culture complete with its own geography and a royal genealogy. It was Eleanor who introduced me to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and gave me a copy of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time for my tenth birthday. In school, I wrote my first piece of creative writing, or at least the first one I remember: based heavily on Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins, it featured me and my sister and my Uncle Bud as ourselves, marooned on a desert island.

During the worst of the summer heat in Manila, we'd head to Camp John Hay in the mountains of Baguio, in northern Luzon. Late 1960s. I'm maybe eight, nine here.

Bangkok, 1972-1973

After four years in Manila, my family was posted to Bangkok, and the feeling of the comfortable and familiar was gone. In Thailand there was an honest-to-goodness king, a foreign language with its own exotic curly alphabet, gold-domed temples, Buddhist monks in saffron robes in the streets. While we were looking for a house, my family stayed in the Erawan Hotel, and my sister and I breakfasted on Sugar Pops beside the pool before we headed off to school. In the afternoons we went next door to another hotel that had a pet elephant you could feed sugar cubes. At last my parents found a house, one with a tiny, lush garden surrounded by high walls topped with shards of broken glass. Once I accompanied our cook on an errand to buy food for my pet rabbit, who had made the journey with us from Manila. We went by samlor (a kind of motorcycle taxi) to the outdoor market near the royal palace. There must have been vendors selling cloth and metalware and all kinds of produce, but what I remember most visibly is someone selling rhinoceros beetle on a stick.

For my twelfth birthday, my family traveled north to Changmai to see a traditional elephant roundup, with traditional music and dances and demonstrations of the elephants' skill pulling teak logs and running relay races. By now my senses were saturated with vivid colors, textures, smells, sounds, and tastes, and I was beginning to put my impressions down on paper. I was reading Agatha Christie mysteries and British boarding school stories (both of which have useful lessons to teach about plot), but I'd also begun to read fantasy, books by E. Nesbit and Lloyd Alexander.

Falls Church, VA 1973-1978

By 1974 we were back in Falls Church, Virginia, and my parents had split up. I had an afternoon job in the local library shelving books, but more often the director would find me sitting in the aisle of the children's department, my nose in a book. By now I was devouring books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Sylvia Louise Engdahl, and Madeleine L'Engle, but the book that really changed things for me was Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea. It was that book that inspired me to try and write a high fantasy and create a world as real to me as Earthsea. I began to fill a notebook with a story about two characters I called Felina and Matt. They eventually became Caitlin and the Badger, the main characters in the book that was eventually published, eleven years and many versions later, as The Spellkey.

1987 to Now

Since 1987, I’ve lived in the Boston area, first in Cambridge and then in Somerville. I met my husband, Ed, in 1992 and we spent our honeymoon in Scotland, the setting of The Dragon of Never-Was. We now live with our son in a small house bursting with books, jazz CDs, and Legos. At last count, our household also included a guinea pig named Fluffy and two as-yet unnamed millipedes. I work as a science editor during the day, and the scientists I meet through my work have been a huge inspiration, not only because their science is always seeping into my plots, but because their curiosity about the world around them is contagious. I find that writing is as much close observation, and a good ear for how people speak, as it is imagination. Locations around Cambridge and Boston abound in the Hatching Magic books, and I look forward to including new favorite spots in the next installment. It was a special honor to have the Boston Authors Club select The Dragon of Never-Was for an award in 2007. I felt that my adopted city had, at long last, adopted me.