Today I moved to a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water. I'm not the only kid who lives here. There's my sister, Natalie, except she doesn't count. And there are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads work as guards or cook's or doctors or electricians for the prison, like my dad does. Plus, there are a ton of murderers, rapists, hit men, con men, stickup men, embezzlers, connivers, burglars, kidnappers and maybe even an innocent man or two, though I doubt it. The convicts we have are the kind other prisons don't want. I never knew prisons could be picky, but I guess they can. You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you're me. I came here because my mother said I had to.
How did a girl named Snot-Nose end up publishing children's books?
Here are the facts as I know them . . .
I am the youngest of four kids, all of whom have big mouths. We were so loud, that once a lady asked my brother if our mother was deaf.
She was not.
The only sibling who did not have the trademark Johnson big mouth was my sister, Gina, who had Autism. My parents worked very hard to try to figure out how to help Gina, but being the parent of a child with severe Autism is like riding a unicycle in an earthquake.
Since I was the youngest, I spent a lot of time by myself making up words, stories, songs and jokes (known as Gennifer Jokes) none of which made a lot of sense. Luckily, I kept most of these strange imaginings to myself.
After graduating from Brandeis University with a degree in English, I went to work writing advertising. I spent my days trying to convince people to take out a second mortgage or upgrade their printer or buy death and dismemberment insurance. I wrote copy for seven years until all of my words began to sound like the work of a big mouth twelve year old. At which point I went to Art School. With a second degree from Rhode Island School of Design I was supposed to get my portfolio together, but instead I wrote my first novel. (I do my best work when I'm supposed to be doing something else.) And that was the beginning. I have been a twelve year old for twenty years now. I have no plans to turn thirteen.
