Deborah Savage was born December 15, 1955, in Northampton, Massachusetts. At an early age, she moved with her family to north-central Pennsylvania, where she spent her childhood and adolescence on a two-hundred acre farm. Encouraged by her father, a college English professor and writer, and her mother, an art teacher, to pursue "individual and rather solitary interests," Savage early learned to write and illustrate stories, first about animals and later about young people and their relationships. Early in her childhood, she writes, she was conscious of "being an artist."

Admitting she "hated school," Savage left home at seventeen to travel in Great Britain and the United States.

She eventually entered the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she earned a degree in writing and illustration. During the late 1970s, she combined teaching creative writing with efforts to publish poetry and short stories, but had little success...