Background
Britain grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where she started her first novel — an undersea fantasy featuring herself and her friends — at the age of nine. She published her first book, a cartoon collection called Horses and Horsepeople, at the age of thirteen.
After completing her degree in film production, with a minor in writing, at Ithaca College in 1987, she went to work for the National Park Service in 1988 after a conversation with a park ranger during a visit to Women's Rights National Historical Park. She got her first seasonal ranger job at Clara Barton National Historic Site site in Maryland. At the time of the publication of her first novel, Green Rider, she was working full-time as a park ranger at Acadia National Park, and she drew much of the inspiration for the landscape of Sacoridia from the park. Her many years as a park ranger enabled her to work in a variety of natural and historical settings, from 300 feet below the surface of the Earth to 13,000 feet above sea level on the Continental Divide; and from the textile mills of the American Industrial Revolution to the homes of Americans who changed the course of history.
Currently she lives in a log cabin on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine where she writes full time and pursues interests in reading, guitar playing, canoeing, and cartoon illustration, supervised by two cats and a dog.
Read more about this topic: Kristen Britain
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)