Kaya McLaren (edit name/settings)

I've been an archaeologist, a massage therapist, and a teacher. I still teach elementary school in a tiny community on a mountain pass here in Washington. I've also worked in a monkey lab, taught beginning belly dance lessons, was a wrangler on a dude ranch, and performed three outdoor weddings as a non-denominational legally ordained minister (thanks to an ad in the back of a magazine). I've modeled with the top agency in Seattle, farmed at a wholesale garden nursery, and I've worked at natural foods stores.

I was kind of a weird kid who loved to write. I had 30 international pen pals when I was fourteen, and in retrospect, this is when I became a writer. As I wrote the same stories long hand to all those different people, I learned something about distilling a story down to its very best parts. It was my way of escaping the small logging and dairy town where I grew up and exploring the world. I still keep in touch with a few of those pen pals. Isn't that sweet?

I think if my books were music, they'd be folk songs, but with something unexpected thrown in that you'd never expect to hear together like an accordion and a cello. 

I'll be at the Bookmarks Book Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, Sept.13, 2008. It starts at 9:30 a.m. and goes until 5 in historic Bethabara Park. It's free!