Author
Throughout my life, I have done many unusual jobs, ranging from filling gumball machines to photographing ancient Bible manuscripts. When I was very young, I secretly sold all my toys to neighbors and then hid the proceeds, a jar of nickels and dimes, behind a tree. That job wasn’t a secret for long. When I was four, I had the job of posing for a famous
sculptor, who created “Lisa and the Goose.” I was paid handsomely with a bag of candy. A year later, I branched out and went into business with my little sister, selling things we found at the beach. A broken fishing pole was an especially valuable item.
Since our mother was an art teacher, we soon found that the best jobs required the most creativity. We both began drawing, painting, and sculpting. At the same time, we loved books, especially books with pictures. Jeni was illustrating books by the time she was 16, but I was still working at other kinds of jobs. Once, I was hired to make a huge sombrero for a car dealership (the sombrero was worn by a car). Another job involved painting ducks on hundreds of skirts. These jobs were not my favorites and got me thinking about what I loved to do the most. I realized I wanted to read and write stories and think about the pictures that go with them.
I went to Rollins College and wrote my honors thesis about Alice in Wonderland. I revised my thesis, and it was published as a biography of Alice in Wonderland’s author: Very Truly Yours, Charles L. Dodgson, Alias Lewis Carroll (see below). Next I went to the University of Texas at Austin and continued working on Alice in Wonderland for my Master’s thesis. I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on fairies and the illustrations for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All of my jobs since then have been loads of fun, and I have discovered, through all this trial and error, that no other job compares to writing stories.
Books Written by Lisa
