Poor Mojo's Newswire

Somehow an ARC of The Space Between Trees (Chronicle, June 2010) got into my hands. The cover sucked me in right away, and I vaguely remember a plane ride that went really fast because I never looked up after I read the first three pages of the book. Katie Williams's debut young adult novel examines the rich and frightening internal and external life of 16-year-old outsider Evie and how these dynamics become intertwined when a former childhood playmate is found murdered in the nearby woods. When I finished reading the story, I knew immediately that I wanted Amy Cheney, a juvenile corrections center librarian and SLJTeen contributor, to interview Williams. Her daily experiences and her own teen years make her uniquely qualified for the task.-Dodie Ownes How'd you come up with the story? When I was 11 years old, the daughter of a family friend was murdered by a serial killer. Even though I was only loosely connected to the girl, I was haunted by her death for years. I became convinced on a certain level that I was going to be killed by a serial killer, too. Years later, in a memoir class taught by the brilliant Laura Furman, I decided to write an essay about this murder and my irrational reaction to it. Laura thought my essay could become a novel. I'd been wedded to my short stories for quite a while, and that little nudge was what I needed to try something longer. I worked on the novel for about two years and then revised with Chronicle for another year after that.