From the beginning, she was an avid reader. In first grade young Karen read all of her books for the entire year the very same day that she got them. Then she cried because she knew she would to keep have those same books for the whole year. Cushman, who attended Catholic school as a girl, felt her education was "more controlled than inspired," as she told J. Sydney Jones in
Something about the Author (
SATA). So she looked elsewhere for creative stimulation. "Once I discovered the library, I discovered books," Cushman recalled. "Fiction was my favorite, but I would get these wild passions and read all there was on the Civil War, for instance, or on the physiology of the brain. I guess that kind of curiosity explains my later fascination with the Middle Ages."
Cushman's love of books and a realization that her classmates and teachers delighted in the stories, poems, plays and scripts (even plots for Elvis Presley movies) that she was constantly writing fueled her literary ambitions. "I used to hold plays with my neighborhood friends," she told SATA.
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