Adrienne Maria Vrettos -- REAL, LIVE WRITER!


	I live in Brooklyn, New York, in a charming but temperamental apartment that slants ever so slightly to the left. I live with my husband, who is also charming and left-leaning, but he has a much better temperament than our apartment.
The fact that our apartment is slanty means that if you sit in a rolly chair in the kitchen you get a free ride into the office. The office is where I write.

I haven’t always lived in New York. For a long time, I ping-ponged my way across the country, moving back and forth between Massachusetts and California a whole bunch of times, first with my mom and dad and brother, and then on my own.

Before I lived here in Brooklyn, I lived in a big house with friends in Northampton, MA. I liked that house. It seemed like there was always a band practicing in the basement, a vegan potluck in the den, and friends sleeping on our couch. We swam in rivers and did art projects. And before I lived in that good house, I lived in a tiny studio apartment in Los Angeles, where I moved after college. My bed was in the closet, and I colored my front steps with crayons and hung a framed print of Van Gough’s sunflowers outside the door.

	And before that I was in college in Massachusetts, which at first involved full-moon drum circles in the woods, hand-made dresses over corduroy pants, Dead Shows, and Rainbow Gatherings. Then later it involved tattoos and shaving my head and milk-crates full of records.
But before college there was high school in Massachusetts, which involved backyard bonfires and meeting my friends on a hill when the weather was warm to watch the sunset.
And before that there was Junior High, which was lots of Girl Scout meetings, slumber parties, and loving River Phoenix. And before junior high in Massachusetts, there was being a little girl on a mountain in California, where there were lizards and only four inches between the treetops and the clear blue top of the world. And before being a little girl in California, I was an even littler girl in Massachusetts, where I was born.

I always loved telling stories, even before I could write them down. I would act out these adventure stories with my dolls and stuffed animals, sending them over waterfalls on the stairs, or climbing up cliffs on the stones that surrounded our fireplace. I loved the feeling of sinking into a story. It was always so shocking to be called to dinner and realize that I wasn’t really dangling from a cliff with my Strawberry Shortcake, or swimming through underwater caves with my Smurfs.
Once I realized I could get that same feeling from writing my stories down, I was hooked. Growing up, writing became the one thing I was sure of, the one thing that was mine. It provided a happy shelter when things got tough. Writing stories is still one of my favorite things in the whole wide world, and it makes me so happy that SKIN, a story that started out as a whisper in my imagination, has turned into a real, live book.