My gentle Irish father also loved to feed me his own tales of fairies, leprechauns, and banshees. Every summer, my two big brothers and I would visit my grandparents' farm in Ireland, where we whiled away the days with hay-rides, turf-rides, milking cows, shearing sheep, feeding pet lambs, and organizing frog races.

My passion for stories stemmed from listening to them: crouched in front of the radio for the BBC children's hour, or huddled before a turf fire in Ireland as the aunts and uncles talked in low, hushed voices, or walking hand in hand with my dad down a leafy lane, as he whispered secrets to me about mermaids and banshees. Before I could write words, or read them, I knew that they were magic, because of the music they made.

After I learned to read, I devoured all the fairy tales I could find. At school my favorite subjects were English and History and Drama. At Edinburgh University, I studied History. I was never very good at remembering all the dates, because that involved numbers, but I had no trouble remembering the people and the events, because that involved stories. As an elementary teacher, I loved teaching language and history and drama. In my classroom I always made plenty of time for reading stories aloud to my students, no matter what age they were.

After moving to the States in 1990 with my husband, an American, and my two daughters, one born in Scotland, the other in England, I was extremely homesick. Writing helped to soothe the hurt in my heart, and soon I was sending off my stories to publishers.

After many, many, years, and many, many rejections, I finally began to experience a few small successes, and in October 2003, my first children's picture book was published by Child and Family Press. Another two are on the way with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. For more on these works, go to My Books.

When I'm not writing my own stories, I enjoy telling stories to anyone who will listen. For the past eight years or so, I have been fortunate to have a wonderful audience in the children of Loyola school in Denver, where I visit twice a month and read folktales and fairytales from around the world to grades K-6. I also have the chance to read books on tape once a week at the Colorado Talking Book Library.