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| me at age six |
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I was born in Boston and overprotected in the nearby suburb of Newton. I loved sneaking upstairs to a tiny room in our attic, where I whiled away the hours drawing pictures of dinosaurs. I thought I’d be an artist when I grew up, but the summer I turned seventeen, I fell in love with making animated films. The following year, I enrolled in Hampshire College and began teaching animation to children all across the country, while I earned my degree—a B.A. in filmmaking and photography.
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me at age seventeen |
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When I graduated, I was hired to teach film at Harvard University, which was pretty astonishing because I was only a few years older than my students and I definitely couldn't have gotten into Harvard if I had applied! Then, I moved to Hollywood to work for a famous movie director as his personal assistant. But I was fired after a month, because I wasn't very good (okay, I was very bad) at bringing coffee to people.
I decided to stay in Hollywood anyhow, and found work as an animator, a production assistant on a Woody Allen movie, and a still photographer and script supervisor on Ron Howard's first film. Eventually, I became a film editor. My three favorite editing jobs were cutting the trailer for a John Travolta movie called Urban Cowboy, cutting an episode of L.A. Law, and co-editing the cult classic, River’s Edge, starring Keanu Reeves and Dennis Hopper.
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| my hand-painted baby clothes |
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In the midst of all this, I fell in love with a funny screenwriter named Bennett Tramer, got married, and gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Ava. Since Bennett was the head writer on Saved by the Bell, I had the luxury of being able to quit editing, so that I could spend lots of time with Ava. I ended up starting a hand-painted baby clothes company instead—selling my wares to Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom’s, and Macy's. This was perfect, because I could paint the clothes while Ava took her naps.
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Ava and Jeremy |
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But after awhile, I got tired of trying to come up with one more cute little dinosaur design, and one more sweet little bunny ... I needed to find something new to satisfy my creative urges. By then I had a wonderful son, too, named Jeremy. And since my favorite time of day was when I read to my children, I decided to try my hand at writing books for kids.
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| Myra Cohn Livingston |
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My first attempt was a rhymed picture book called Smitty the Hollywood Kitty. The illustrations were pretty good, but the words were not. In fact, the words were awful. Though it took me a while to grasp that fact. But when I finally realized I had a lot to learn, I enrolled in a poetry class at UCLA taught by the brilliant Myra Cohn Livingston. It was Myra who set me on the path to writing my first book, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy.
When I'm not writing, speaking about writing, or teaching poetry writing workshops, I ride my bicycle, dance, read, take photos, and hunt for buried treasure in vintage clothing stores. I live with my husband near the beach in Southern California. |
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