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Frances O’Roark Dowell was born May 30, 1964, in Berlin, Germany. “My
dad was in the U.S. Army at the time, and I was born on a military
post, so I’ve always been an American citizen.” She lives in Durham,
North Carolina with her husband and two sons.
Dowell started writing poetry when she was in the first or second grade but she didn’t always know that she wanted to be a writer. “My career choices included cartoonist, painter (I can’t paint, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be an artist), and radio disc jockey. In fact, I went to college thinking I would go into radio (I love music, but don’t have much musical talent), but fell under the influence of poetry and ended up majoring in English. It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I decided I wanted to write children’s books.”
Dowell can attest to the importance of rewriting and revising. “Caitlyn (Dowell’s Editor) read Dovey Coe and rejected it. She wrote me a nice letter saying she liked Dovey, the character, a lot, but that the rest of the book needed work. She gave me some good advice for revising, and told me that if I did revise the book I should send the revision to her. Which I did, a year later. By then, Caitlyn was an editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a division of Simon & Schuster. She liked the revision and agreed to publish it. She still made me do a bunch more revisions, though! (She always does.)”
Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award, Where I’d Like to Be, the bestselling The Secret Language of Girls, and its sequel The Kind of Friends We Used to Be, Chicken Boy, Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Medal, the Phineas L. MacGuire series, and most recently Falling In and the teen novel Ten Miles Past Normal. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham, North Carolina.
Dowell’s inspirations for her books:
Dovey Coe
I wanted to write a book set in the mountains of North Carolina, way back in the day, because I love everything about the mountains–the music, the folklore, and the arts and crafts. I started with a vague idea of writing a story about a girl and her brother, and then one day this voice came into my head and said, “My name is Dovey Coe, and I reckon it don’t matter if you like me or not.” The rest is history.
Chicken Boy
I started writing Chicken Boy when I lived in the suburbs of Raleigh, NC. North Raleigh is one of those places that just won’t stop growing, but driving around you’ll see little pockets of leftover rural communities tucked in between the subdivisions. I was interested in what it would like to be a country kid who goes to the school with kids who have no idea that people who say “yes ma’am” and “y’all” still exist. So the character of Tobin McCauley was born, and his story grew out of that triggering idea.
Shooting the Moon
This was actually my husband’s idea. I was looking around for something to write about, and he suggested I write about a girl who was an Army Brat—that is, a kid whose mom or dad served in the U.S. Army. He figured that since I’d been an Army Brat myself, I’d know a thing or two about the subject. At first I didn’t think this was the greatest idea in the world, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.
It was fun to write about the way I’d grown up—like answer the phone “Col. O’Roark’s quarters, Missy speaking” (Missy was my childhood nickname) and some of the places I’d lived, like Fort Hood, Texas. Although what happens to Jamie and her family didn’t happen to mine (my older brother was much too young to serve in Vietnam—he wasn’t even a teenager at the time), I took a lot of my Army Brat experience and made it Jamie’s.
Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts!
My son Jack really likes to read, but since he’s only seven, he’s too young to read most of the books I’ve written. So I decided to write one I thought he and his friends would like, and since he’s pretty interested in scientific matters, I decided to write a book about a kid who’s a serious scientist. It was fun for me and Jack to try out the experiments that Mac (aka Phineas L. MacGuire) does in the book. Look for more Phineas L. MacGuire books to come!
To visit Frances O'Roark Dowell's webpage and learn more, click here.
Dowell started writing poetry when she was in the first or second grade but she didn’t always know that she wanted to be a writer. “My career choices included cartoonist, painter (I can’t paint, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be an artist), and radio disc jockey. In fact, I went to college thinking I would go into radio (I love music, but don’t have much musical talent), but fell under the influence of poetry and ended up majoring in English. It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I decided I wanted to write children’s books.”
Dowell can attest to the importance of rewriting and revising. “Caitlyn (Dowell’s Editor) read Dovey Coe and rejected it. She wrote me a nice letter saying she liked Dovey, the character, a lot, but that the rest of the book needed work. She gave me some good advice for revising, and told me that if I did revise the book I should send the revision to her. Which I did, a year later. By then, Caitlyn was an editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a division of Simon & Schuster. She liked the revision and agreed to publish it. She still made me do a bunch more revisions, though! (She always does.)”
Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award, Where I’d Like to Be, the bestselling The Secret Language of Girls, and its sequel The Kind of Friends We Used to Be, Chicken Boy, Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Medal, the Phineas L. MacGuire series, and most recently Falling In and the teen novel Ten Miles Past Normal. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham, North Carolina.
Dowell’s inspirations for her books:
Dovey Coe
I wanted to write a book set in the mountains of North Carolina, way back in the day, because I love everything about the mountains–the music, the folklore, and the arts and crafts. I started with a vague idea of writing a story about a girl and her brother, and then one day this voice came into my head and said, “My name is Dovey Coe, and I reckon it don’t matter if you like me or not.” The rest is history.
Chicken Boy
I started writing Chicken Boy when I lived in the suburbs of Raleigh, NC. North Raleigh is one of those places that just won’t stop growing, but driving around you’ll see little pockets of leftover rural communities tucked in between the subdivisions. I was interested in what it would like to be a country kid who goes to the school with kids who have no idea that people who say “yes ma’am” and “y’all” still exist. So the character of Tobin McCauley was born, and his story grew out of that triggering idea.
Shooting the Moon
This was actually my husband’s idea. I was looking around for something to write about, and he suggested I write about a girl who was an Army Brat—that is, a kid whose mom or dad served in the U.S. Army. He figured that since I’d been an Army Brat myself, I’d know a thing or two about the subject. At first I didn’t think this was the greatest idea in the world, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.
It was fun to write about the way I’d grown up—like answer the phone “Col. O’Roark’s quarters, Missy speaking” (Missy was my childhood nickname) and some of the places I’d lived, like Fort Hood, Texas. Although what happens to Jamie and her family didn’t happen to mine (my older brother was much too young to serve in Vietnam—he wasn’t even a teenager at the time), I took a lot of my Army Brat experience and made it Jamie’s.
Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts!
My son Jack really likes to read, but since he’s only seven, he’s too young to read most of the books I’ve written. So I decided to write one I thought he and his friends would like, and since he’s pretty interested in scientific matters, I decided to write a book about a kid who’s a serious scientist. It was fun for me and Jack to try out the experiments that Mac (aka Phineas L. MacGuire) does in the book. Look for more Phineas L. MacGuire books to come!
To visit Frances O'Roark Dowell's webpage and learn more, click here.
