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MEET NANCY FARMER
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

I liked to explore. I was never an indoor person even though we lived in the Arizona desert where the temperature was 120 degrees every summer. When I was very small I had to make do with our yard and my grandmother's yard next door, but there is a lot to discover even in such a small area. If you put out water, all sorts of animals would come in from the desert to drink, including road runners and lynxes. I flooded tarantula holes to force them out for pets. I had six chickens and (I was only six at the time) copied their habit of swallowing pebbles. I thought I had a gizzard. There was very little I didn't try to eat, including some tasty lumps I found attached to pecan trees. They turned out to be scale insects. Once, I ate some oleander leaves and nearly killed myself. When I was older, I was able to travel much farther, exploring the roofs in the center of town – the bowling alley, movie theater, various bars -- and the banks of the Colorado River. I hated school and played hooky for most of the seventh and eighth grades because I was bored and couldn't stand being penned up.

Did you write stories when you were young?

I was dyslexic and found it very hard to write anything. Fortunately, I could read rapidly and enjoyed it. Once I learned to use a typewriter, things became a lot easier, but dyslexia was still a problem when I had to write things by hand in school. Also, my eyesight was bad and this wasn't discovered for a long time. This may have been one of the reasons I hated school. I told a lot of stories. My whole family did.

What did you do before becoming a writer?

I have worked at many jobs. I sold newspapers on the street and picked fruit when times were tough, but of course I wanted to be paid more for less effort. Eventually I became a free-lance scientist. This meant I was hired for short-term projects and had little job security. I didn't want security. To me, knowing exactly how I was going to spend the next thirty years was as good as being dead. I worked on making bubonic plague vaccine, on an oceanographic boat (that was rapidly put out of service by a captain we called Captain Crunch), on controlling insects that ate traffic islands and on water weeds in Central Africa. I loved every minute of it.

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

I read everything. I was a very isolated child and generally not allowed to have friends over to visit. Since we lived in a run-down hotel in the bad part of town, quite a few parents didn't want their children to visit me either. My parents had a large library of mostly very old books. I started out with my mother's childhood books, wonderful Victorian tales about children who were struck by lightning for doing bad things (such as going fishing) on the Sabbath. I worked my way through Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Maupassant, Rudyard Kipling, the complete works of Mark Twain and the poetry of Tennyson. And of course Sunday was given over to the Bible. I memorized a lot of Bible verses. But now and then a ray of light would appear in the library. My aunt sent me Oz books and Tarzan books. My brother supplied science fiction magazines with monsters carrying off lady astronauts. My father got men's magazines full of adventures.

All of these had a huge influence on me, especially memorizing Shakespeare and the Bible. You get those rhythms in your head and they never leave you. The books I remember liking most were Tarzan, The Jungle Books, Oz books and Mary Poppins. Also Elsie Dinsmore. Elsie Dinsmore was the most judgmental, narrow-minded, wonderfully warped series ever. She was always bursting into tears and praying over people.

What triggers your imagination?

Everything. I can be entertained watching a spider spin a web or watching people deciding who NOT to sit by on a bus. When I was in fifth grade my teacher, Mrs. Wolfe, lectured us about boredom. "How dare any of you little wretches be bored when life is so varied and fascinating?" she said. "If any of you dare to be bored when you grow up, I shall come back and haunt you."

Do you enjoy researching or do you work entirely from your imagination?

I pay a great deal of attention to accuracy. My books are intended as textbooks as well as entertainment. I do the research while I am writing, not before, and often include bibliographies at the end of a novel. This is probably a hold-over from when I was a scientist, because you have to get everything right in a scientific paper. It drives me crazy when a writer is sloppy about his or her facts. I remember a picture book about a mother caterpillar who tells her baby caterpillar that if she is good and eats her leaves, she will grow up to be a beautiful butterfly. Mother caterpillars ARE butterflies! And anyhow, caterpillars are just as pretty.

Do you do school visits, book signings, etc.?

I have always hated being in the public eye. Some writers live to go on stage. They get a huge ego boost from being cheered by an audience and they love to perform. I have a friend who puts on a chicken suit and dances. My soul shrinks up into a little ball at the thought of going on a book tour or of attending literary luncheons. I am no good at it. Everyone can tell I'm hunting for the exit. And why, I ask myself, do people want to see authors? It isn't as though we're interesting. Most of us sit in a little room with a computer all day. Besides, I'm horribly sensitive to criticism.