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"I was born in 1948, the second of four children of Robert Leslie Conly and Sally McCaslin Conly. Most of my childhood was spent on a small farm adjacent to the Potomac River near Leesburg, Virginia. We children had a cow, several horses, a sheep and chickens to care for as well as dogs and cats. We worked in my mother's large garden and also cut wood. Our chores had to be done, but otherwise we were almost completely unsupervised by today's standards. I especially enjoyed fishing in the river and nearby ponds.
"Both my parents were writers and editors, and I wrote stories from first grade on. My father (who wrote the 1972 Newbery Medal-winning Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH under the pen name Robert C. O'Brien) taught me to try to give my writing the cadence of spoken conversation, and to eliminate unnecessary description. (I am still working on this.) My mother taught me that good characters are the most important element in fiction.
"My family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1962. I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1966, from Smith College in 1971, and from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars Program in 1974. That same year I finished my father's young adult novel, Z for Zachariah. (He had asked me to finish it when he realized he was going to die from heart failure.) My mother edited this book, and it was published in 1975.
"I have lived in Baltimore since 1973. I am married to Peter Dwyer, a public-interest attorney and musician, and we have two children, Eliza and Will. Besides writing, I have worked as the director of a community center, as a camp director, and as a counselor for people trying to buy their first home or who are facing foreclosure, Since the birth of Will in 1985 most of my "free" time has been spent writing. There are some aspects of writing that I really enjoy, and some that I don't like. However, I've noticed that if I don't write a certain amount each week, I lose my overall sense of contentment.
"I also spend time gardening, cooking, reading, fishing, and working on a dilapidated log cabin that we own on Muddy Creek in southern Pennsylvania."
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