Glass Salamander profile picture

Glass Salamander

I am here for Friends and Networking

About Me


Author of fantasy books* for ages eight to infinity. Born in Virginia, grew up in Southeast Asia, back to NoVa for high school, college in Western Mass. Have lived outside Boston since 1987.*The Spellkey, The Glass Salamander, The Books of the Keepers, Hatching Magic, The Dragon of Never-Was (see my pics for copies of the jackets, and go to anndowner.com for more than you want to know about my writing)

My Interests

Books, books, books. Book truffling in used book stores. Collage, assemblage (Joseph Cornell), photography. Films and animation. Graphic novels. Cooking and writing about cooking (MKF Fisher, John Thorne), slow food, Scotland, life sciences, history of science, natural history, zoos, museums, antiquing (esp. Victorian jewelry), gravestone rubbing, Invented instruments, kinetic sculpture. In college, long, long ago, worked in the rare book room and at a local letterpress.

I'd like to meet:

Other writers balancing day jobs, writing, and kids. Film nuts. Animators (esp in Flash). Comic authors. Collage artists. Other parents of Lego-crazy kids. People interested in science literacy.

Music:

World (Spanish, Celtic, Hindi), newgrass, dub reggae, grounation, salsa, tango, oud, tropicalismo, Americana, Alison Kraus, Sam Phillips, Rufus Wainwright, Van Morrison, Stax, Elvis Costello, Dutch free jazz, Tom Herrell, Fred Hersch, bebop.

Movies:

Harryhausen, Miyazaki, anything with Joel McRae or Barbara Stanwyck, Hope Davis, Emma Thompson, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffmann.

Television:

Numb3rs, Avatar the Last Airbender, The Daily Show, MythBusters, but mostly movies on Netflix these days.

Books:

In stacks two feet deep all over the house. Nowadays, love some Australian authors: Peter Carey, Randolph Stow. And Canadians: Robertson Davies, Marian Engel. Collect the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and MFK Fisher.

Heroes:

Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle, the unsung people who do the thankless work for the powerless all around the world. Here's to the teachers, the pediatricians. And the Vintage Eggs (you know who you are!).

My Blog

The Natural History and Evolutionary Biology of Dragons

OK, this is my new guilty pleasure: An Animal Planet show from 2005 called Dragon's World: Fantasy Made Real. We got it from Netflix, and I honestly think I enjoyed it as much as or more than the Budz...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:24:00 PST

A Puppy Come in from the Storm

This is what it looks like to win the Newbery Award. This sweet lady is Laura Amy Schlitz, Baltimore school librarian and author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, which to...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:25:00 PST

An H.A. and Margaret Rey Kind of Day

On December 31 the Budza and I took the subway in to Houghton Mifflin, where my husband works. It was so cold outside we had soup from the company cafeteria rather that go out to find pizza somewhere....
Posted by Glass Salamander on Sun, 06 Jan 2008 06:17:00 PST

LibriVox

OK, no luck so far downloading files from the LibriVox site proper. Apparently there are ongoing technical difficulties with their archive site. But over at Project Gutenberg, I successfully downloade...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:54:00 PST

The Books in the Attic, Part 1

I'm really enjoying rereading the Little House books to the Budza. My grown-up self is blown away by how well written they are: how powerful the simple language is, how skillfully drawn and three-dime...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:52:00 PST

A Lovely, Light, Luscious, Delectable Cake

The Budza is eight today. I got up and made him the Big Apple Pancake recipe from Epicurious. It was way yummy. In fact, it was so lovely, light, luscious and downright delectable that it put me in mi...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:48:00 PST

Bookstore Nirvana

I really think I need to relocate to the old 01063 zip code of my college days, when I worked in a library, a rare book room, and interned at Barry Moser's Hampshire Typothetae letterpress.The New Yor...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:08:00 PST

Reading the Little House books to my son

First, a confession. When my husband and I found out in the summer of 1999 we were having a boy, one of the many thoughts that went through my mind was that he wasn't going to attend my alma mater and...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:16:00 PST

Moomin and Miyazaki

For years, as a young library patron, then as a teen-aged library page, and now as a mom haunting the children's room for books for the Budza, I had always passed by the Finn Family Moomintroll books....
Posted by Glass Salamander on Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:13:00 PST

Golden Compass Boycott and God in the Dust

Last Sunday there was this great editorial by theologian Donna Freitas in the Boston Globe about the campaign by some ultra-orthodox Catholics to boycott the forthcoming movie based on Philip Pullman'...
Posted by Glass Salamander on Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:18:00 PST