I grew up in the same town I live in now, Wheaton, Illinois. My parents were both musicians and college professors. My mom taught piano; my dad, voice. They showed me that art was important. It didn’t just have to be something you visited in a museum—though that was a great thing to do. Art could be something you lived.
Early on it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to live the life of a musician. I was a reader, though, like a lot of only children, and there was hope in that. I spent most of my Saturday afternoons in the library, drifting between the stacks, stocking up on next week’s supply of books. I wrote down my own stories, too, in orange notebooks a la Harriet the Spy.
When I was in fifth grade my mother got breast cancer. Three years later she died. During this time I
read to save my life.
In high school I became a girl who just wanted to have fun. Not being sad kept me quite busy. I did all the things girls typically do in order to end up on Homecoming Court. I was “most likely to wind up in the White House,” according to my senior yearbook. Luckily, I had a great English teacher. He introduced me to authors I might not searched out until much later—Flannery O’Conner, D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekov, Jean Rhys, and e.e. cummings, among others. Gary taught a mean Shakespeare seminar, too. His classes made me want to make sense of things with words.
I went to Wheaton College where I did every literary thing I could, discovered the wonders of thrift stores, foreign films, The Roches and Tom Waits, and made a lot of good friends. After I graduated, I took a fiction workshop with the author Larry Woiwode. Around that time, I claimed writing as a life-long journey.
I make this sound like a conversion experience, I know. I used to think it was. Writing this bio makes me wonder if I was a convert from day one. But I truly believe that I choose to be a writer every time I write—every time I sit down to wait for “the angel at the table,” as Flannery O’Conner says. Many days the angel doesn’t show up. Then I have a little (or big) crisis of faith. The next day, or the next month, I claim my writing life again.
But I’m flashing forward to now. It’s taken me a lot of years to make my peace with the angel. During this time, I worked at a little Jungian publishing house in Boston. I got my MA in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton and my doctorate in the same from the University of Illinois at Chicago. I taught writing and literature at both these schools, as well as at Wheaton College. I did my share of advertising copywriting, editing, and proofreading. All the while cranking out novel drafts and short stories. Some of these stories were published in literary journals. One was awarded a Pushcart Prize and an Illinois States Arts Council Grant. This sustained me.
So did my husband, the photographer Greg Halvorsen Schreck. We’ve been married for sixteen years now. We printed this Rumi poem on our wedding program, and it still pretty much sums things up:
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
Greg and I were a family of two for about seven years. Then we realized our lives wouldn’t be complete without kids. So we adopted our daughter, Magdalena. Four years later we adopted our son, Teo. Magdalena is eight now, and Teo is four. They are my heroes.
When Magdalena first came home, I wanted to write only for her. I wanted to write a book she might want or need to read some day. So I wrote Lucy’s Family Tree, which is about a girl who was adopted from Mexico, and is struggling with a family tree assignment. Writing that book made me want to write more books for kids.
With Dream Journal, I wrote the book I wanted and needed to read when I was a girl. It took me several years and many drafts to complete the manuscript. But every minute I spent waiting for the angel was worth it. Through Livy I did things I wish I could have done when my mother was ill and dying. I understood things I’d never understood before. I had always heard writing could be healing. Now I experienced this first-hand. When Hyperion agreed to publish the manuscript, I felt doubly blessed.
And now I’m writing more books. And more!
Of course I like to do other things, too, like gardening, camping, hiking, cross-country skiing, and yoga. Then there’s always watching movies and going to plays, concerts of all kinds, and galleries. Traveling whenever and wherever we can swing it. (This summer the Black Hills; last summer, Argentina.) Especially right now I love to play Sorry! with Greg and the kids. And as always I look for every opportunity to grab a book and read.
Karen Halvorsen Schreck
