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MEET DANA REINHARDT
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Dana Reinhardt

I liked to set up entire cities with infrastructure and businesses and houses and schools with my vast collection of stuffed animals. Typically the elephant or the dragon held the plum job.
I liked to avoid my brother’s taunting.
I liked bossing my friends around.
I liked avoiding cleaning up after myself.
Eventually I started really liking books and then I tried to write one. I wrote eleven pages before losing interest and killing all my characters off in a massive earthquake.

When you went to college, were you already pursuing a writing career?

When I went to college I didn’t spend much time thinking about a career or what might happen to me when that four-year ride came to an abrupt halt. It may have been the only time in my life that I was able to truly enjoy
the moment. I did take every opportunity offered to write creatively. I enrolled in workshops where my fellow students and I tore each other’s writing to shreds. I suppose I fantasized about what it might be like to
become a professional writer, but I was far too practical. I assumed I needed a real job, so I did what many college graduates with no idea what to do with their lives wind up doing: I went to law school.

Do you focus on fiction or nonfiction? Which do you prefer? Do you find  one easier than the other?

I spent my years after law school working in documentary film production. (You can see what great use I put that not inexpensive law degree to.) When I started writing, I found it wonderfully liberating to make
everything up—to not have to get any set of facts right.

What gave you the idea for THE THINGS A BROTHER KNOWS?

I used to live in Los Angeles. So naturally, I spent a lot of time in my car. As I see it, there’s really only one positive
byproduct of spending a lot of time in your car, and that’s the opportunity to listen to a lot of NPR. I started to find over all these hours of listening that I kept hearing the same story. I’d hear mother after mother after mother tell tale of a son who went off to war and came home different, absent some essential piece of his former self. Sometimes I’d hear from fathers, but mostly I’d hear the mothers. And then I started to wonder about the son who didn’t go. The younger brother. The one who maybe thought what his brother had gone and done was
a big mistake, and who had, in his own way, been paying for that choice ever since. This is where I found Levi, in the moments when I’d turn off the radio after one of those stories and imagine who else lived in that house. Who
else had been waiting for the return of that changed son. That different brother.

 How did your life change when you got married? and had children? Did it make it easier or harder to find time to write?

Having young children motivates me more than anything else to sit down in the chair and get my words on the page.  Not because I want to give them something to read— one thing I know is that you can’t force anything on
your kids, let alone something written by their own mother. But I know that if I don’t get my writing done then I might have to go out and find a job in an office that keeps me away from home for too many hours a day.
I love being here when they come home from school each day, it’s a great gift, and writing allows me to do that.

When you do school visits, what question do children ask you most?

I can tell you my favorite question I’ve ever been asked:  once a girl raised her hand, she looked about three years younger than her classmates, and she said in a quiet voice, “I was wondering if you have any pets, and if you do, have you been inspired by them?” I just thought that was so incredibly sweet.

What are you working on now?

I have a book coming out in 2011 called THE SUMMER I LEARNED TO FLY. It's about a girl who hangs out at her mom's cheese store and the boy who collects the day-old bread from the alley. It's about what happens when
they find each other. It's about taking risks, embracing life, and searching for miracles. I’m really excited about it.