 |
More About Marc TalbertFrom a very early age, I craved time to read and write. I didn't get much encouragement from teachers, but I am a stubborn person -- my love of reading and writing grew steadily. My last year of high school was spent with my family in Europe -- Geneva, Switzerland, and Stockholm, Sweden. I went to an international school outside of Stockholm, where I had a real English English teacher and a real Communist world history teacher from India. I learned a lot of things I would never have learned back in Iowa. The world had suddenly become a very big and exotic place. After high school, I went to Grinnell College for two years and then transferred to Iowa State University, where I graduated with a degree in Elementary Education and a minor in Journalism. During college, I worked summers as a waterfront director for a camp for diabetics outside of Cleveland, Ohio -- which is where I fell in love with teaching children. During the school year I studied and wrote editorial-page columns for several newspapers: The Iowa State Daily, the Ames Daily Tribune, and the Cedar Valley Times (Vinton, Iowa). Meanwhile, on a trip to New Mexico, I met the woman who is now my wife. We met while running up a canyon near where she grew up. I couldn't talk her into moving to Iowa so I moved to Santa Fe... So? Instead of teaching, I became a technical writer/editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory. After a couple of years of writing and editing, I was asked to be the speech writer for the Director of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. It was during our year there that I wrote my first novel, DEAD BIRDS SINGING.
I am working on my fifteenth book (scheduled to come out in the spring of 2003 with HarperCollins). All of my published books are realistic fiction (three of them historical). Several of them have been published in various foreign countries -- Japan, Britain, Germany, Norway, Spain, Columbia, and France. I love the fact that the two main interests in my life -- writing and children -- are now combined in such a satisfying way. If there is anything about my life that you want to know more about, let me know. And then watch to see if it ends up in my web site. More About Marc 1 | 2
|
After
graduating, I taught a combined fifth/sixth grade class in Marshalltown,
Iowa right next to a slaughterhouse. The next year I returned
to Ames to teach fifth grade under the principal I had in one
of the elementary schools I attended as a child. I loved it. That
is also when I fell in love with long-distance running. I trained
for marathons and ran quite a few of them. My fastest times were
in Winnepeg, Manitoba, and Lincoln, Nebraska, where I ran both
26.4-mile courses in 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Back
in New Mexico, I continued working at Los Alamos, going more and
more part-time. I now write children's books full-time. And still
run when I can, from my adobe house in the village of Tesuque,
just north of Santa Fe.
 |