Tamara Ellis Smith grew up in a bunch of different states – New York, California, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Vermont – and is the oldest of four kids. She spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid. When she was about 8 years old, she and her best friend invented a religion that was all about nature. They wrote a prayer about the sacredness of animals and trees and held services in the woods between our houses. She remembers two things about those services: dressing up and throwing pennies for the animals. Did the trees really care if we looked fancy? What did the squirrels and snakes and sparrows need money for? Your guesses are as good as her's.
Ellis Smith also spent a lot of time reading in the woods. The smell of a book and the smell of a tree are very intertwined in her sensory memory, and sometimes she can’t tell them apart. And then, often, she would act out scenes from the books she read. She was Jo from Little Women for many months out in those woods. Do you think the trees and animals liked her acting more than the pennies?
She was a creative kid. She wrote in journals, wrote poems, wrote plays, made clothes, cooked. But she was not patient. In fact, she was almost allergic to patience. Truly. If something took more than a minute to do, then she got all itchy and breathed heavy like a dog on a hot day. If she couldn’t figure something out quickly, then she believed it wasn’t worth doing.
Boy was she wrong.
Tamara had to work a long time to become a writer. She did a lot of other kinds of jobs, especially teaching. She became a mom, went to Vermont College of Fine Arts, and read a lot of books. And wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
Now she lives in Vermont again. With her own family – four kids and her husband. Her favorite things to do are running on the trails by her house with her friends and dogs, making soup and chocolate desserts, writing stories for kids, and – still – reading.
Oh, and practicing patience.