Clare Austin

have always been a dreamer. As a child I tripped the fine line between reality and fantasy with ease. Books were magical vehicles put together out of paper, ink, and paste with the sole purpose of transporting me to worlds afar. I became a frequent flyer. I crept through haunted mansions and solved mysteries with Nancy Drew, lived in the Little House in the Big Woods with Laura Ingalls and galloped with the wind in my hair with Black Beauty. We had an old set of tomes called The Book of Knowledge in our house. I think there might have been twelve volumes. I read them all, over and over, gleaning details of the natural world, literature and history. When I was eight years old, I submitted my first story to a well known New York Publishing