Maria Faulconer

A San Francisco native, I love foggy days and cable cars. Rainy afternoons remind me of time spent with my Austrian parents--snuggling on my mom's lap sipping tea while she read me Grimm's Fairy Tales and sitting at my father's knee, listening to endless stories about his childhood in Vienna.

Some kids' favorite possessions were their bikes or dolls. Mine was my library card. I still have it--a tattered orange rectangle with the numbers 3234 printed on the front. It opened wondrous worlds, like those of Madeleine and Nancy Drew. When I grew up, I wanted a snappy red roadster, just like Nancy's.

Crisp fall days remind me of walking on the quad at Stanford where I studied English and French. After a graduate year at San Francisco State, I taught high school English in Menlo Park. I still loved books and reading and wrote poems and stories, but I wasn't ready to call myself a writer.

I married and moved to the Rocky Mountains where I received a Masters in Guidance and Counseling at the University of Colorado. I cared more about kids than English and went on to counsel teens at a residential treatment facility.

But something was missing.

It wasn't until fifteen years ago that I came back to writing. It was like coming home.

My insatiable curiosity to learn people's stories, fostered at my parents' knees, finds its voice in my magazine and newspaper articles. I've interviewed homeless men and heads of corporations. Dogs and priests. Kids and gorillas. I've traveled from a bombsite in Omagh, Northern Ireland to a cross-filled hilltop overlooking Columbine High School.

All in the name of a story.

An incident from my childhood found a home in my picture book, Arianna and the Strawberry Tea, but I didn't realize it until I was doing a school visit.

"Is my book fiction or non-fiction?" I asked a class of second graders.
"Fiction," said a little boy, "because it's made up."

But it wasn't.

Arianna was really about my adventures at the Hotel Del Coronado in a grown-up world where children were the exception, not the rule.

Promoted on the Live! with Regis Show, Arianna connects with children and parents all over the world.

Now that my kids are grown--a son in law school, a daughter with an environmental science degree--I love nothing more than prowling coffee houses and bookstores and roaming the world--from the moors of Yorkshire and the hedgerows of Ireland to the crooked streets of San Francisco--always looking for more stories.