Amy Timberlake's work...

... has received a Newbery Honor, an Edgar, and a Golden Kite Award. She’s had books on the Indie Books Bestseller list, one book was Tattered Covers’ Book of the Year, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Christian Science Monitor, People Magazine,The Sydney Morning Herald, and also on various radio programs and podcasts. It delights Amy that the Skunk and Badger stories are being translated into seventeen languages.

Other fun news? Skunks i Borsuk has been adapted for the stage by Teatr Soho and Teatr Lalek Guliwer in Warsaw and Skunk and Badger by Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. Lifeline Theatre has also adapted One Came Home and The Dirty Cowboy.

Amy has received residency fellowships from Hedgebrook, and The Anderson Center. Amy’s work is represented by Steven Malk at Writers House.

(For a complete list of awards & recognition, click here.)

Amy grew up in Hudson, Wisconsin. She attended Mount Holyoke College and majored in History. She also holds an M.A. in English/Creative Writing. Most of the time, she can be found in Chicago, where she lives with her husband. But on especially good days she can be found walking on a long, long trail. One of her favorites? This one in England.

A final word: Amy is especially grateful to the many booksellers, librarians, educators, parents, friends, family, and readers who have told others about her books. Thank you!

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What’s your writing process like?

When I wrote Skunk and Badger, I kept a schedule. I tried to write as many days in a row as I could, so I wouldn’t lose the threads of my story. Each day, I tried to write a certain number of hours. I took one day off every week. I journaled in a notebook and I wrote on the computer. I wrote a lot of drafts — and when I say a lot I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if there were over twenty beginning-to-ending drafts, and many drafts of each chapter inside those twenty drafts.

Once a draft was finished, I would go through it looking for the parts that worked. At a certain point – perhaps draft 10 through 20? – I read every finished draft out loud. (You’ll catch all sorts of things if you read your work out loud.) Overall, I was ruthless about cutting out anything that I didn’t think worked. Often my drafts would be cut in half by these cuts, and there would be vast sections I’d have to re-think, re-plot, and then, re-write. Also, a change made early in the draft often meant that everything afterwards had to change as well.

If you looked at print outs of early drafts, what you’d see is a printed page with nothing written on it except for a bracket next to the two or three paragraphs that worked. I would remove those bracketed, ‘good’ paragraphs, and use them to try to re-write the chapter. A 20 page chapter was chopped down to 3 pages frequently. And the process worked — eventually, the chapters got longer and were filled with better material.

It took me two years (at least) to write the draft of ‘Skunk and Badger’ that I sent off to my agent.

Writing Skunk and Badger was a balancing act. Sometimes it felt as if I was writing meringue on top of a lemon pie. The dialogue needed to be just so, and there was only so much the story could support. One too many characters? The meringue toppled. One more thread of story? A cave-in! I had to pick and choose, and then cut some more. I suppose this sounds like a lot of work. It was. But — and I mean this — Skunk and Badger was also a lot of fun. I laughed a lot. I was often amused. I read sections to my husband over dinner. I loved working on Skunk and Badger.

Photos from my desk:

Artifacts from the writing life: