When I was young, I wanted to be many things when I grew up: a painter, an ice skater, a singer, a teacher, and a reporter. Bybanks also makes a brief appearance (by reference, but not by name) in The Wanderer. Bybanks appears in Walk Two Moons and Chasing Redbird and Bloomability. I loved Quincy so much that it has found its way into many of my books-transformed into Bybanks, Kentucky. We were outside running in those hills all day long, and at night we'd gather on the porch where more stories would be told. One other place we often visited was Quincy, Kentucky, where my cousins lived (and still live) on a beautiful farm, with hills and trees and swimming hole and barn and hayloft. The five-day trip out to Idaho when I was twelve had a powerful effect on me: what a huge and amazing country! I had no idea then that thirty-some years later, I would recreate that trip in a book called Walk Two Moons. We must have been a very noisy bunch, and I'm not sure how our parents put up with being cooped up with us in the car for those trips.

In the summer, we usually took a trip, all of us piled in a car and heading out to Wisconsin or Michigan or, once, to Idaho. (In that book, the brothers even have the same names as my own brothers.) Our house was not only full of us Creeches, but also full of friends and visiting relatives. I was born in South Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and grew up there with my noisy and rowdy family: my parents (Ann and Arvel), my sister (Sandy), and my three brothers (Dennis, Doug and Tom).įor a fictional view of what it was like growing up in my family, see Absolutely Normal Chaos.

Ruby holler