About Ruth

The Rest of the Story

I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. My mother, a school librarian, taught me to love stories and poems. My father, an editor at The New York Times, taught me to value clear and accurate writing. My three older siblings taught me to grab attention by whatever means necessary. All these lessons set me up nicely for being a writer.

When I was in the first grade, my teacher invited me to stay at school for lunch and record a Christmas story I’d made up. I don’t remember the story, but I can still taste the chicken sandwich my mother packed for me. Later that winter, my father went to work for the Times’ International Edition, and we moved to Paris. After a rocky start, I got pretty good at French – so good that I recently found a poem I wrote while we were there, and I couldn’t understand much of it beyond the title, “La Petite Etoile” (“The Little Star”).

We came back to the States after two and a half years, and I kept writing. My friend Sandy and I put out a newspaper for our fourth-grade class, The Weekly 103 (I wrote the stories and she drew pictures of Snoopy). My neighbor Laurie and I wrote stories starring her many cats (I wrote Westerns and she wrote space adventures). In junior high, my best friend Roma and I collaborated on The Story, a fantasy set on a desert island (we both wrote and illustrated, but her pictures were way better).

At Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, I took lots of creative writing classes, including an independent study with John Irving. I had my heart set on publishing short stories in The New Yorker (the closest I came was a handful of encouraging rejection letters).

After college, I went to library school and moved to Los Angeles, where my then boyfriend (now husband) was studying philosophy. I worked in the children’s department at the Inglewood Public Library, and as the librarian at Notre Dame Academy for Girls in L.A. In my spare time, I kept writing. I tried more short stories and a novel, but nothing sold until I wrote a picture book, Mommy’s Lap, inspired by our daughter Sophie.

When David (finally) finished his degree, he took a job at the University of Vermont, and we moved to Burlington. Our son Sam was born, and I stayed home with the kids, squeezing in writing during naps. It was a surprisingly productive time! I published a couple of short stories, and sold four more kid’s books.

Eventually, I started writing for my local alternative weekly newspaper, Seven Days. Astonishingly, I could actually get paid to learn ballroom dancing, play bingo, visit vernal pools, and sample soft-serve ice cream, as long as I wrote about it afterwards. Later, I became an editor at Seven Days. I loved working in an office with other people, helping writers produce their best work. And I still wrote my own stories (my feature about Jewish Montreal won a prize from the Vermont Press Association).

I loved working as a journalist and a librarian. But ever since I was a little kid listening to my mother read aloud, I had dreamed of being a full-time writer. I finally got the chance to do that when I was fifty, and David took a job a Brown University.

We moved to Rhode Island in 2007. Since then, I have written (and re-written) a novel for adults (which is still looking for a home). And after more than a decade away from writing for children, I returned to picture books. Our kids have grown, but our three grandsons are a new source of endless entertainment and inspiration.