I have been asked many times over the years what made me a writer, and my answer has always been the same: “I seem to have been born with my head full of stories.”  An incomplete answer, I know, but as far as I can tell, an accurate one.

When I was a child, I went to bed eagerly every night.  Not eager for sleep but eager to build stories in the quiet dark, stories I played out endlessly, always with a small Marion as the central character.  I lived my stories constantly but never shared them with a soul. 

Sometimes I sprouted angel wings.  Or I was three-inches tall and lived in my dollhouse, off by myself under the distant protection of my parents’ roof. 

Out for a drive, I settled into my corner of the backseat of our ’36 Ford or the ’48 Studebaker that replaced it, utterly content.  I don’t know how my parents or my brother occupied their minds when the drives were long, but I had no problem.  I simply galloped alongside the car on my fine palomino horse.

I never asked where my stories came from.  They actually did seem to have inhabited me from birth.  Or at least from as far back as memory could trace.  But out of those early imaginings, I came eventually to be a writer, someone inhabited by stories, stories that I dared, at last, to share.

There is more, though, to being a writer—at least to being this writer—than a love of stories.  There is also the need to know.  Anything.  Everything.  As a child, I understood that I was an empty vessel.  I knew nothing.  I didn’t even have any opinions.  About anything that mattered, anyway.  I wanted to have something to say and to have someone—someone important, an adult!—listen.

(Many years later, memory of that desire came back to me in an amused flash as I stood before a vast banquet hall.  Guess what? I said to myself, even as I went on with my speech. I’m here!)

Surely growing up with the father I had been given contributed to that longing.  He was a fiercely intelligent man, and he used his intelligence as a bludgeon.

The kitchen table, where our family gathered for meals, often turned into a verbal battleground, and in those skirmishes, young Marion always lost.  As I recall, my brother, two years older than I, was smart enough to stay on the sidelines, and our mother coped with this man she had married by simply refusing to engage.  But I tumbled into the fray every time and usually came out battered. 

(As wounded as I had been by my father’s verbal parrying, it took me many adult years to realize that vigorous debate isn’t everyone’s preferred mode of conversation.)

Through it all, I developed an unrelenting need to manage my world with words.  Words on the quiet of a page with no one across the kitchen table challenging, bating, ridiculing.

As I moved into adulthood, though, story came first.  Perhaps because it had been there from the beginning.  Story became, as I suspect it is for many who write for the young, a way of healing.  Through my stories I could even let myself feel what I had never been given permission to feel.  After all, this was fiction I was creating.  It wasn’t about me.

What I have always loved most about story is the way it makes meaning.  Story takes the randomness of life, the one-damned-thing-after-another of it, and creates order.  It selects so that every event, every word adds up to something.  When readers come to the end, they don’t need to be able to name a story’s theme.  The meaning inhabits their hearts.

So I set out to create meaning through story, through feeling.  And for many years that effort satisfied entirely.  Until feeling wasn’t enough for what I wanted to say.  And that was when I returned to that other need that had always been humming in the background.  The need to know.  Not to know better than, more than anyone around me.  Not even to win a very old argument across the kitchen table.  Simply to understand, to fill myself up with understanding.

Sometimes—often—I’ve researched to gather information for my stories.  But now learning began to draw me for its own sake.  I found myself turning toward topics I had barely touched in school, especially the sciences.  Physics, astronomy, geology, biology, botany.  The origins of our Universe.  The origins of Life!  I asked questions I had never known how to ask in all that early longing to be filled. 

And with those questions driving me, I turned to a different kind of writing, one in which I talk to my readers more directly.  The first of those books, The Stuff of Stars, is a picture book about the beginnings of our universe . . . and about the smaller but equally important beginnings of each of us. 

The next book, We, the Curious Ones, will come into the world on November 7th.  It is an exploration of the tension between science and story, of our changing perceptions about our place in the Universe.  The illustrations, backlit dioramas by the amazing husband-and-wife team Hari & Deepti, take my text to a whole new level.  Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, used the words “sweep and majesty” to describe the result of the collaboration.     

More picture books are coming, all from Candlewick.  One Small Acorn, the complex life cycle of a tree, of a forest.  Our Life-Giving Earth, climate change. 

And just off to my beloved agent, Rubin Pfeffer, Wonder of Wonders, a celebration of the world of animal senses.

My work finds new energy in the exploration.  I find new energy in all I learn.

Is it my father, that intelligent, cynical, wounded man, I must thank for the dance with words that has been my life? 

Or is it truly possible that I was born this way?

Whatever the answer, it has been—it is—a good life.  And this once-empty vessel is filled with gratitude.