Cate Tiernan

I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 24th, 1961. New Orleans was a great place to grow up in then—still family-friendly but with a ready acceptance of eccentricity and the darker side of life. We lived in a little house on a little street, but our yard seemed huge, and my brother and I were given a big chunk of it in the back, where we could dig holes or do whatever we wanted. So we built little huts and roofed them with huge banana tree leaves, and when it rained we stood under elephant ears so big that two kids could stand under one and not get wet. We dug enormous holes and filled them with water and jumped into them. We climbed trees and jumped off the roof of our garage.

My high school was a public school called Ben Franklin, and back then it was housed in an old former courthouse not far from the Mississippi River. The high school that Morgan Rowlands (in Sweep) goes to is based on that building. I also went to a performing arts high school half a day for three years; two years for visual art and one year for writing. There was no air conditioning, only big fans and open windows, and the heat was stifling sometimes. It was almost impossible to stay awake after lunch on hot days.

I enjoyed college because I could choose what I wanted to study, and the classes were at different times on different days. It felt more flexible and catered to how I wanted to learn. I went to New York University and studied writing and Russian language and literature. I had some terrific teachers, but I just never really got what they were talking about, the whole “how to write” thing. And I was never able to write anything longer than three pages. But one of my teachers wrote on one of my papers that I had a genuine stylistic gift (despite all my other shortcomings as a writer), and I still think of those words with pleasure.

I finally graduated from Loyola University, in New Orleans, with a degree in Russian. In my mid-twenties I moved back to New York and got a job as an assistant at Random House. I worked for the head of the Juvenile Audio and Video department, and was surrounded by children’s books and editors and people who read as much as I did. I learned so much, and decided I could write a children’s book too. So I locked the door of my office (somehow I had an actual office, which was unusual) every day for an hour at lunch, for ten days, and I wrote a book.

And I sold it and it got published.

I was crushed when Sweep ended, but by then I was already developing Balefire, and that was a whole new seductive universe. I set it in New Orleans so I could describe the beauty and otherworldliness of the city, and I put in my old hangouts and had the characters do some of the things I’d done as a teenager. Katrina hit while I was in the middle of writing the fourth book of Balefire, and I watched the news on TV and knew that my hometown would never be the same. The fourth book described the city as it was before the flood, and I sat there and cried for days as I wrote about things that no longer existed.

Now there’s Immortal Beloved, which will come out in fall of 2010, from Little, Brown. In some ways it’s a combination of all my favorite things about Sweep and Balefire—the notion of love that lasts for hundreds of years, a world filled with magick and possibilities. It’s been my biggest challenge, but I believe I did Nastasya’s story justice. I hope you think so too.

Nowadays I live in North Carolina with my daughters and husband and stepsons. Our house is surrounded by land and woods and it feels like we’re in the country. We have dogs and cats and lots of stuff going on all the time. It’s a good life.