Born in Montreal in 1930, Priscilla Galloway settled in Toronto in 1953. Before becoming an author of more than twenty books, she moonlighted as a garbage collector, cucumber farmer, trailer park operator, cosmetic saleswoman and scuba diver, as well as a professor and educational consultant. She attended the University of Toronto for both her B.A. in English and her Ph.D. in educational theory. Her retellings of ancient stories for children and young adults have earned her an abiding place and several recommendations by the ALA. Her most recent novel is The Courtesan's Daughter.

I’ve always been a writer, sometimes for publication, sometimes not. As a teenager, I intended to be a journalist. However, for various reasons, I became a teacher; my published writing was mostly academic. In my fifties, I began to publish fiction, nonfiction and poetry; gradually I built some reputation as a writer for young adults. Three new books published within the past year (The Courtesan’s Daughter, 2002 & 2003; Archers, Alchemists and Ninety-eight Other Medieval Jobs You Might Have Loved or Loathed, 2003; and Lisa, Book One: Overland to Cariboo, 2003) bring my total published books to twenty-two, including Too Young to Fight: Memories from our Youth During World War II, winner of the International Bologna Ragazzi Award, Nonfiction for Young Adults.

As a writer-to-be, I was lucky in my choice of parents. Dad and mother both came from families where literature was valued. Dad’s father, a carpenter and small builder, had the whole of Burns’s Tam O’Shanter by heart, and The Cotter’s Saturday Night, and he was much in demand for recitations on Burns’ Night in New Westminster in the early 1900s. Dad did a fine recitation himself of Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William,” as well as W.H. Drummond’s “The Wreck of the Julie Plante,” and he introduced me to “The Lady of Shalott,” and “The Highwayman,” both of which I memorized.

Mother had won book prizes at school in New Zealand, including a large, illustrated volume of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. She introduced me to “Goblin Market,” and then turned me loose with the book. Mother was a fine pianist, and I sang “They’re Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace,” and other A.A. Milne poems, to her accompaniment.

My parents fed my literary passion and then did not get much in the way of it, though Mother had the usual parental misgivings about my lack of friends, and Dad, who was thought to have strained his eyes through reading and study, was heavy-handed about the importance of a good light over the left shoulder. My parents’ books were available to me, as much as my own, and we often talked about what we were reading. My mother took only one book away from me, Boccaccio’s Decameron. I was about nine at the time, and much in those stories was a mystery to me, though the scary parts were exciting. I did not put up a fuss. The book Mother confiscated was a coffee-table gift with a bright cover and coloured illustrations, but I knew there was an older copy of the Decameron on another bookshelf, and I persisted, perhaps more than if Mother had never said a word, though she never again saw me reading it.

Books were my friends, feeding my imagination and fantasy life, echoed in my youthful poems, stories and plays. It was always torture to be dragged away to eat or talk or, heaven forbid, go outside to play. Reading addicts like me find their own solution to the lights-out problem. I bought a flashlight and used it under the covers, but soon discovered a better trick. There was no attic in my parents’ home in Victoria. My bedroom closet sloped down almost to the eaves. At one end of the long, low cupboard, a hatchway led into total darkness. My flashlight revealed two boards, each about six inches wide, lying loose on the rafters. I could creep along them on hands and knees, though the wood was splintery, or walk in a low crouch, though this was hard on my back. I could sit down anywhere and lean against a joist, flashlight in my left hand and the book balanced on my bent knees. It was not comfortable, but I never sat there for more than a minute or two before becoming, perhaps, Odysseus, bound to the mast, listening to the sirens’ song—or Nancy Drew—or the hero of Westward Ho!

A few years ago, I was challenged to write about a childhood favourite, a book that stirred my soul or changed my life. For a confirmed book junky, it was an irresistible invitation. There was only one problem. How could I single out one book? Others rose reproachfully and would not be denied. These, then, are some of the books that shaped my writing self.

In 1940 my father brought Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe back from a business trip to New York City, a second-hand copy, published in 1918 by Rand McNally, with splendid coloured illustrations. Here is Ivanhoe in armour; Front-de-boeuf, suitably bull-headed and stiff-necked; Rowena, a vapid blond; and Rebecca, the dark-haired Jewess, who sacrificed herself to save the man she loved, and, for his sake, the woman he loved. That image, the woman sacrificing herself, angers me now, but Ivanhoe was magic when I was a child. I read it and reread it, daydreamed over the pictures, fantasized. I was Ivanhoe, and not such a fool as to love Rowena rather than Rebecca. I was Rebecca. I was also me, angry with that idiot Ivanhoe, who couldn’t see the true value of the dark-haired heroine.

I was ten when Dad brought me Ivanhoe, and thirteen when he gave me The Count of Monte Cristo for Christmas in 1943. The cold stones of the Chateau d’If quickly became my reality. As the count, I tapped my messages to the abbé. When I traded places with his dead body, I felt the enveloping shroud; I experienced the living burial in the sea; I became the instrument of vengeance, and passed beyond it finally to rejoice in the prospect of love. Whatever a book hero felt, I felt as well, even while sentimental tears dripped down my cheeks.

My high school library had a set of twenty-five novels by Dumas. I read them all. The family copy of The Three Musketeers found its home on my bookshelves. I liked D’Artagnan and Athos best. Aramis was too much of a dandy, and Porthos too boastful, but I identified with those two men more than with either of the women, the wicked Countess de Winter or the little bourgeoise whom D’Artagnan loved—I don’t even remember her name. I took novels by Dickens, Scott and Fenimore Cooper to summer camp, knowing I’d persevere with the most demanding work if there was nothing else to read, and finding such perseverance reasonably rewarded.

Heroes and memorable characters in my reading tended to be male rather than female. When I came much later to write a proposal for a doctoral dissertation involving sexism in high school English literature, I saw myself as Odysseus! Who else, when there’s a quest? Odysseus, or Percival, perhaps. There’s nary a woman to be found. In my own writing, I’ve explored Penelope’s adventures in Ithaca during the twenty years that her husband was away, and mighty satisfying it was (Aleta and the Queen, 1995). A few of my childhood books featured admirable females, such as Lorna Doone, The Girl of the Limberlost, The Princess and the Goblin, The Little Princess, Little Women, or Anne of Green Gables, and of course Lassie was a bitch.

Although I grew up in Canada, L.M. Montgomery was the only Canadian author I loved as a child. My Sunday school teacher lent me all the Anne books, week by week, initially as a reward for memorizing Scripture, but afterwards for friendship. Dad gave The Blue Castle to my younger sister. It is still my favourite Montgomery title, though Emily of New Moon is a close second. I read Captain Marryat’s Children of the New Forest, but didn’t love it. Ernest Thompson Seton’s animal stories captured me briefly, though Two Little Savages (about pioneer boys in the woods) did not specially appeal. Later, I read Kirby’s The Golden Dog, set in Frontenac and Talbot’s days in Québec City, and was amazed to discover that a novel could deal with my own country’s history.

When I was a child, much of the treasure trove of Canadian literature did not exist. Two Solitudes was published in 1945. I bought and read it then, where it vied with Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven. Both books wrung my heart and stirred my social consciousness.

Emily Carr’s Klee Wyck was a significant book gift from my parents about the same time; it fueled my aspiration to become a journalist. Carr’s example showed that if I hoped for a career in the arts, it would be useful to find one which paid a living wage. I don’t starve gladly, and have never wished to run a boarding house.

World War II and its aftermath dominated my life and my imagination in those teenage years, a war in which Germany sought to give primacy to one so-called race and to exterminate another. The family library included a translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I read parts of it, and Dad read parts and talked about it with me. He had spent several months in Europe, mainly Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia, during 1938. He had seen the Nazi poison at work. Back home, he was deeply disturbed by Canada’s treatment of Japanese Canadians. Life as well as books gave me cause to ponder over the society that I lived in and the world around me.

My reading life was not all high seriousness. Rafael Sabatini, Jeffery Farnol, G.A. Henty, John Buchan and Baroness Orczy provided glorious adventure, as, of course, did Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Humorists were not ignored. I had my Stephen Leacock period, but overdosed. Ogden Nash wore better. His “Genealogical Reflection,” “No MacTavish/ Was ever lavish” maligns my Celtic ancestry; and his “Biological Reflection” “The turtle lives ‘tween armored decks/ Which [effectively?] conceal its sex./ I often wonder how the turtle/ In such a fix can be so fertile” probably maligns turtles, but both pithy rhymes amuse me still. Murder mysteries were a genre favourite. The used bookstore sold pocket books for ten cents, and allowed five cents when I sold them back, which I did reluctantly, driven by budget constraints.

Although I have always been avid to possess the truly beloved paginated object, libraries have also fed my addiction to books. I read through much of the collection in the children’s section of the public library in Victoria and the Carnegie Library in Ottawa, though I was old enough by the time we moved to Ottawa to be frustrated when denied access to adult books. Luckily, the whole selection of myths and legends lay open, and I devoured it, spending an hour or two browsing and choosing books there every week after my violin lesson, before my father picked me up on his way home from work. That early love has paid rich dividends: in my further reading and study; in my teaching; and in my writing. My passion for myth has deepened with the years.

These musings began with a challenge: to write about a book that stirred my youthful soul or changed my life. Perhaps, after all, one title can be named. In the centre of the multitudes of books that have helped to form me, one towers above the rest: Dante’s Inferno.

My paternal grandfather’s copy of The Inferno, a great folio volume with engraved illustrations by Gustave Doré, came to our home when I was fourteen, after my grandmother’s death. Dante’s vision of hell and Doré’s engravings fascinated, then came to obsess me, although sometimes the obsession seemed perverse.

Why did Paradiso not appeal? It seemed to me that paradise ought to be more attractive than hell. The experience of paradise, if one may speak thus about a concept, must surely be preferable to the experience of hell. It is one of the paradoxes of literature, however, that hell is the best seller. There is a fascination about the anatomy of sin. The Inferno satisfied my adolescent appetite for gothic images, but on a far more profound level than Frankenstein or Dracula.

The Inferno also gave a focus to my adolescent angst. I had skipped two grades, so at sixteen was in my final year of high school. My teachers seemed to depend on me to distinguish myself and their school in the province-wide departmental examinations. My father was hospitalized, then home in bed for months after his first heart attack. The family’s future was uncertain, and it seemed suddenly extremely desirable that I should win a university scholarship. I forbade myself all diversions, including the diversion of personal reading—not always successfully, so to sin was added the burden of guilt. My life was full of descending circles. In Latin authors, I was studying Virgil, and here he was, Dante’s guide, and mine. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

The Inferno had its mysteries as well. Dante was saddened to find a teacher he had liked among the sodomites. He seemed a decent man: what was his sin? If I found the word in a dictionary—and I probably did—the definition left me no wiser than before. My world was full of such mysteries, connected to that great mystery of sex; and all my efforts to research that subject through print were doomed to fail.

Dante’s dark vision was profoundly satisfying, far more so than any pretty book with a fairytale ending. I had learned to distrust those. The circle of ice, the lowest circle, where traitors lay forever unmoving, trapped in their own inner cold, seemed more real to me. In Dante I encountered, whether or not I understood it at the time, the concept of life as a process whereby we humans create our own hell—or heaven—and locate our spiritual selves in one place or the other. It is a marvelous concept, but also an unforgiving one, purgatory notwithstanding. Dante does not deny the possibility of change, but he never underestimates its difficulty.

I made a diagram of Dante’s hell, drawing its circles with a compass, and noting the characteristics of each, and the sins which brought people to it, my equivalent of a modern teenager’s fascination with Stephen King. Later, I was ready to appreciate the whole of the Divine Comedy. The obsession may have had its unhealthy elements, but at university and throughout my life, familiarity with Dante has served me well.

Would I recommend the same books to a young writer today? No, though newer books of high fantasy would be on my “must-try” list. Among the books I have adored, the Inferno stands up superbly, but Ivanhoe, despite wonderful characters and a thrilling story, does not fare as well, quite aside from its stylistic challenges.

Others in my family do not share my addiction. This is not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes my eyes sting and water, my head aches, and my hands cramp. My first husband often had to go to bed without me, or to fall asleep while my bedside lamp still burned; my second is more of a night owl, but I frequently outlast him. This addiction, like others, has its downs.

Ah, but the up side! What people I have been; what places I’ve seen; what events I’ve experienced! The sad folk mesmerized by slot machines at a casino, or those other unfortunates with their white powder and drug needles, are searching for what I and other book junkies have found in inexhaustible supply, and what this writer needs, the riches of this world and all imagined worlds, riches beyond dreaming.