Happy 80th, Janet Lunn! ("The Root Cellar," 1983)

She spent most of her childhood in Norwich, Vermont and Rye, New York,
attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, became a
Canadian citizen in 1963, and now lives in Ottawa.

"Quite a few of my books are historical novels. I get asked by kids
all the time if I write about long-ago times because I remember them.
I'll admit I'm old --but I'm not that old! I write about people who
lived one hundred, sometimes two hundred, years before I was born
because I long to go back into the past and know some of those people.
So I do it by dreaming my way into their stories and writing about
them."

About "The Root Cellar":
"It looked like an ordinary root cellar—And if twelve-year-old Rose
hadn't been so unhappy in her new home, where she'd been sent to live
with unknown relatives, she probably would never have fled down the
stairs to the root cellar in the first place. And if she hadn't, she
never would have climbed up into another century, the world of the
1860s, and the chaos of Civil War…"

http://www.johnlunn.com/janetlunn/bio.html
(autobiography)

http://www.johnlunn.com/janetlunn/faq.html
(interview)
Q. Where do you get your ideas?
A. Ideas for stories come from everywhere. As a child I lived in the
village where Phoebe Olcott lived at the beginning of The Hollow Tree.
I used to live in the old farm house that is the setting for The Root
Cellar. I could see the point of land where Mary Urquhart had her
cabin from my kitchen window Shadow in Hawthorn Bay. The bay behind my
former house also figured in the Christmas story, One Hundred Shining
Candles. As for Amos's Sweater, I once knew a sheep named Amos who was
old and cross and The Umbrella Party is a party I would have loved for
myself when I was small because I love umbrellas.

http://www.johnlunn.com/janetlunn/video.html
(two videos)

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=janet%20lunn&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
(photos, covers)

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=janet%20lunn&um=1&ie=UTF-8...=N&tab=
(more videos)


Lenona.