Q: Well, that answers my other question about what you're reading now. What influenced you when you were young?

A: Is that a comment on my age? [laughs] I know, you meant my childhood. I loved things like the Encylopedia Brown books and the first one that really grabbed me as a girl was Harriet The Spy. I'll tell you a story. When I was in Kindergarten, I was reading Dick and Jane. See, there's confirmation of age! My teacher was talking with a parent and I was standing there reading this little book. My teacher asked what I was doing. Reading, I said. "Oh how cute. She thinks she's reading," she said to the parent. I was really reading. She pointed to some of the words, and I said them, and then she says to me, "Well, you're not supposed to be reading in Kindergarten" and then she did something with the parent. I remember being crushed, thinking I had somehow done something wrong. Next thing I know, I have to go into a small room with a different adult to be "tested". I was horrified. Then in fifth grade, I was reading Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series. I forget which book it was, but I didn't know what mitochondia were, so I asked my teacher what that word was. She said, "look it up." I said I tried but that word wasn't in the dictionary. She looked in her teacher's version, didn't see it, and then said something to the effect that I shouldn't be reading books with big words in them. But that didn't stop me. A year or two later I was thumbing through the index of a book my dad bought from some Time-Life series. There it was: mitochonria! I was amazed. I finally had an answer. I learned very quickly that adults don't have all the answers and adults aren't always right. I try to teach that in all of my classes.