They Danced On

Carre Armstrong Gardner was raised in the Adirondack Mountains of New York with her nose stuck in the pages of a book. She says, "I grew up in the most beautiful of all possible settings, and spent countless hours rambling through woods and besides streams, making up stories in my head, usually with myself as the heroine. In fact, I was well into adulthood before I realized that not everyone in the world sat at traffic lights or passed the time in doctors' waiting rooms creating plots and characters in their heads. It was that realization that first gave me permission to think of myself as a writer."

Carre's favorite stories have always been those about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. She believes every life is a fascinating drama; every person is the hero of his or her own story. "If I can tell those kinds of stories in a way that makes readers love my characters," she says, "I will have done what I set out to do."

As a teenager, she was a pianist and a teacher encouraged her to attend conservatory as a performance major. "In a fit of altruism," she says, "I decided to become a nurse instead. I saw it as a career that had the double benefit of assuring me a paycheck while allowing me to pursue music and writing in my spare time."

From 2007 to 2010, Carre lived and worked in Russia with her husband and children. Now, she lives in Portland, Maine, where she works as a nurse at a local hospital. She has three teenagers and two rescue dogs, which is far too many. (Dogs, not teenagers.)