I write young adult and middle grade fiction
Amy Tipton @ Signature Literary is my super cool agent.
About Me
I spent the first nineteen years of my life wanting to be someone else: Laura Ingalls, Elton John, Nancy Spungen, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath. It's hard to get a job as any of those people, so I worked in a bank. Then I went to college. That was hard, too, because I had to pick a major. I was interested in a lot of things—psychology, sociology, history—but I didn't want to make a career out of any of them. I was going nowhere, taking random classes, until I was asked to write a short story for English.
That's when I figured out what I wanted to do with my life.
I finished my BA in English, moved to the Midwest, and got an MFA in Creative Writing. I wrote short stories for a while. When a professor told me my storytelling style might be better suited for novels, I gave it a shot. I wrote one, and then I wrote another, and then another. I like writing novels because I get to live with the characters longer, I get to be that person for a year or more. Just like when I was a kid, writing lets me be whomever I want: the perfect child, the rock star, the lost girl, the crazy artist, the goddess, the doomed poet.
Now I live in the Catskill Mountains with my awesome husband, Dave Kopecek, and a strange little cat named Shirley. I watch a lot of movies and read a lot of books and eat cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. I live a pretty sweet life. But who wants to read about that? I don't! I like to read gritty, edgy fiction with dark endings. So that's what I write. I also like horror—the supernatural kind. My dreams usually involve searching for somebody, so I write about that, too.
About Not Me
There are lots of Barbara Stewarts out there. Here are a few things I am not:
- A politician living in New Zealand. That's Barbara Stewart.
- A Realtor, Insurance Agent or Diabetes Sales Specialist. That's Barbara Stewart (Realtor) Barbara Stewart (Insurance) and Barbara Stewart (Diabetes).
- A composer known for her work on the kazoo. That's Barbara Stewart.
- A writer for the New York Times. That's Barbara Stewart.
- An actress who appeared in Simon Birch. That's Barbara Stewart.
- A Canadian writer. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are Canadian) That's Barbara I. Stewart.