'Run from ghosts or ride on dolphins'

 

“With my writing, I can still play inside an enchanted castle or live inside an old fort. I can run from ghosts or ride dolphins any day of the week.” – Mary Pope Osborne

 

Almost every young reader know Jack and Annie, the brother-and-sister protagonists created by Osborne, who was born at Ft. Sill, OK on this date in 1949.  The duo are the stars of Osborne’s award-winning Magic Tree House series, now translated into some 30 languages with over 130 million copies in print worldwide. 

 

The daughter of a career military man, Osborne lived in 13 houses around the globe before age 15.   "Moving was never traumatic for me, but staying in one place was. When my dad finally retired to a small town in North Carolina, I nearly went crazy with boredom."   That led her to try Community Theater to rekindle that sense of adventure that she was missing.

 

“I continued to visit imaginary places … whether I acted in a play or worked backstage, the world of Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare always seemed more real to me than the dreary life of high school,” Osborne said.

 

In her early 30s, “one day, out of the blue” she started writing a story that she had been thinking about.  “It just came to me,” she said.  The result was the semi-autobiographical Run, Run As Fast As You Can and she has never looked back.  The first of her Magic Tree House books, Dinosaurs Before Dark, followed.  In them Jack and Annie are transported to different areas and eras for a series of cliffhanging adventures thanks to their titular magic treehouse.

  

While the duo’s adventures are at the heart of each story, readers also are subliminally introduced to events, animals and people worldwide and from throughout history. “I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child,” Osborne said.  “ I could be somewhere different in every single book.”