All About Emilie

I was born in Van Wert, Ohio, and did most of my growing up just across the state line in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When I was three or so, I remember following my mom around the house telling her stories and not understanding when she said it was hard for her to tell me some in return. I read like crazy as a kid, letting myself get lost in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, Prince Edward Island, and medieval England, just to name a few of my favorites. I loved music too, taking eleven years of piano lessons (and usually enjoying my practice sessions) and playing flute and piccolo from middle school through college, but writing was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so I am.

To help me get there, I majored in creative writing at Purdue University and started my master’s degree six months later in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program, where I wrote a young adult historical novel as my thesis. I also had a summer study abroad trip to Ireland in there, which inspired my novel, but that is another story all its own. In my first semester at Seton Hill, I married my college sweetheart, Mike Bishop, and we moved from West Lafayette, Indiana, to the Seattle area. (These are two totally different worlds—I still think we should have stamps in our passports every time we visit our families.) After two years of loathing the shared walls of an apartment, we bought a 1950s fixer-upper house and adopted two grown cats, Gwen the skittish and Blue the ornery. I kept writing despite the cold, gray rainy seasons, and I’ve gotten a few short stories published so far. Mike and I have one son, a toddler who looks more like a little boy every day!

Nowadays, I’m working on my fourth YA novel. Instead of narration by the oh-so-British, oh-so-40s Evelyn Chester, I have contemporary Northwesterner Larissa Murray telling the story of her parents’ divorce and the way it leads her to uncover a story from her grandmother’s past that might be about to happen again. Intruiged? Me too–can’t wait to see how the final product turns out.