ELISABETH FALK

 

I grew up in upstate New York near beautiful Owasco Lake. My summers were filled with swimming, skiing, and sailing. But on rainy days or on all those snowy winter days, there was only one thing I wanted to do: read.

 

I read when I was supposed to be setting the table when I was supposed to be cleaning my room, and I even got in trouble for reading at school! There’s something really wrong with that one! At bedtime, I was allowed just ten minutes to read so I got really good at reading under the covers by flashlight. As crimes go, it wasn’t a very big one.

If I wasn’t reading, I was writing. Lists, poems, letters, stories, and pages and pages in my diary. When I became a teacher I read to the students in my classroom. They loved listening to me read because I use lots of different voices for the different characters. When I became a mom I had the sheer joy of reading to my three babies – everything from Pat the Bunny to all of Roald Dahl’s books. For me, a day without at least a little bit of reading and writing is just not a very good day.