"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be." ~Abraham Maslow

I grew up in a high rise in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. The first ten years of my life my family of six lived in a two bedroom apartment. My three siblings and I all slept in a small bedroom, in two bunk beds that folded down from the walls. We had no TV.     I started writing when I was old enough to hold a pencil, sad little poems about death and murder, and strange sci fi about alien abductions. My teachers were concerned about me. Every weekend, and every holiday and summer vacation, my family drove the 45 minutes or so south of the city to our house in the country. There we spent endless hours walking in the woods, gathering wild mushrooms, blueberries, raspberries, and gooseberries. This is where I found the privacy I didn’t have in the cramped quarters in the city. I would often go and sit on my favorite rock in the woods, or in my favorite tree, and watch nature around me. And write more dreadful little poems.

On my tenth birthday, we moved from the apartment building to a row house in a fancier neighborhood. And we bought a TV (Swedish TV at that time was mainly educational). During high school (which in Sweden is called gymnasium), I spent a year in Madison, Wisconsin, as an exchange student, and I fell in love with, not only my host family, but the wonderful state of Wisconsin, and the versatile English language. After high school, I went to Paris, France, as a nanny. When I got back to Sweden I worked as a nurse’s aid in a nursing home, to make money for college and travel.                 Next, I went to University of Uppsala, where I studied literature. I spent another year as an exchange student, this time at Gustavus Adophus College, in St Peter, Minnesota, studying literature and journalism. Since then I worked and traveled a number of different places, married a man from Missouri, moved to northern Wisconsin, had two children, acquired a house and a dog, and finally, abandoned all other work to write full time.

Even though I love to write books, children’s books in particular, I write all kinds of other things as well. I write short stories for children, for magazines, such as “Highlights for Children”, “Spider Magazine”, “Winner Magazine”, “Jack and Jill”, and “New Moon”. I also write articles for adults, for a large number of magazines and newspapers. I sometimes write things for the web, such as articles for the Wisconsin Department of Tourism’s web site. And I write short romance (in Swedish) for a Swedish women’s magazine. Being a working writer, while it is harder work than I could have imagined, is also just as much fun as I dreamed it would be. Most people who are interested in becoming a writer probably love solitude as much as I do, so sitting alone in front of the computer hour after hour doesn’t scare them. But I also discovered that writing involved so much more than actually… writing. There is research, for articles and for books, even for very short pieces. There is marketing, querying about articles or trying to sell your finished pieces. There is school visits, and other author talks, which need to be solicited, prepared and performed. Then there is the money piece, of having to keep track of the money you earn, sometimes having to bill newspapers or magazines, keeping track of your spendings for tax purposes and more. Sometimes children ask me what my favorite part of being a writer is. That’s not difficult to answer.  You, my readers, are my favorite part.  I want to tell you a story that might make you experience the world just a little differently, or make you see something you haven't seen before, or simply just give you a few minutes of enjoyment.

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