About MC Helldorfer

I was born in 1954 and grew up with my two sisters in a row house neighborhood just over the Baltimore City line. Many authors begin writing stories and poems in elementary school, but I simply daydreamed a lot, which wasn't perceived as a talent. I had a collection of characters in my head whom I imagined doing different things and, of course, other dreams in which I was the star. In the latter, I was usually a princess or a center fielder for the Orioles--given my skills, two unlikely career ambitions. But a life centered on books would have seemed just as unlikely then. While I read all the Nancy Drew mysteries I could get my hands on, I had to be conned into trying something else.

In middle school I changed career plans (now I wanted to be a scientist and marry an astronaut), but kept up my old habit of daydreaming. My characters and their adventures--still in my head--became increasingly complex. I'd make up little poems (keeping them in my head) just to entertain myself. Finally, in tenth grade, a wonderful English teacher encouraged me to write down all those images, events, and characters. Once I got started, I couldn't stop. Once I began to put words on paper, I wanted to see how other people did it, and my literary horizons expanded.

I graduated with an English degree from Loyola College in Baltimore. I wrote both poetry and children's fiction. More than anything now I wanted to be a writer and decided that to launch myself I had to go to graduate school in creative writing. Over a two year period I sent out ten applications and writing portfolios; ten rejections came back. The rejections felt like the end of the world, a clear message that I didn't have even the potential to be a writer. During those years I taught high school, which I truly enjoyed, but writing still held my heart, characters and images still perked in my head. Knowing that to write well I needed to read--read with intensity--I applied to the literature program at the University of Rochester.

As a graduate student I taught college, squeezing in time to write at meals. Now the plan was to be "a professor who writes." However, after earning my doctorate, I abandoned the only reasonable career goal I ever had and left for New York City. I needed to be around the people who were actually making books. Living at a Salvation Army residence and working as an editorial assistant at a publishing house, then as a secretary to a doctor (he paid twice as well as the publisher and I had a student loan to pay off), I learned the writing trade from some excellent teaching editors and earned my first two book contracts.

Now I write full time. I live in Baltimore with my husband, Bob, who is a teacher, and our cat, Puck. (That's Puck working hard at my desk in the photo above.) I have published fifteen picture books and two middle grade novels under my own name and ten young adult novels under the pen name of Elizabeth Chandler. I very much enjoy making author visits to schools--they are my way of continuing to teach. I know how blessed I am to be able to do work that I love.