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MEET GINNY RORBY
by Bonnie O'Brian

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

Ginny Rorby

I was fascinated by all animals, and spent hours studying them. I had a rather large collection of pickled critters (who died of natural causes) and would search the woods near our house for owl pellets, (regurgitated fur and bones) pick them apart and try to reassemble the skeleton. When I wasn’t doing that, I was an Indian trying to scalp my sister.

What audience did you have in mind for your career as a writer - adult or children?

Adult. It took at least six rejections of DOLPHIN SKY, which I submitted as adult fiction, to convince me I’d written a novel for kids. Now, I’m thrilled to write for children. They are the hope for the future. Adults who read my books are the choir. I can impact a child’s world view. That is truly a gift. One of my favorite quotes is by Madeleine L’Engle: “If the book will be too difficult for grownups, then you write it for children.”

If you didn’t write as a child, then when did you start writing and what inspired you to start?

I never wrote a single inspired word until I was 38 years old. At the time, I was a Pan Am flight attendant, flying to London on weekends and going to school during the week, working on an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Miami. While away one weekend my best friend, Joanne Mansell, found a dog had sheltered itself in the doorway of the Catholic church in Coconut Grove. Joanne had been feeding it, trying to gain its trust enough to drug it sufficiently to pick it up and take it to a vet. After I returned, we scraped together all the drugs we could find between us, mostly Dramamine for air-sickness and a Valium or two, and blended them into her can of dog food.
I have never gotten the image of that dog out of my mind as she struggled to her feet and came down the sidewalk toward us, tail wagging. She was young, skin and bones, with no fur left on her body save for a single long patch down the back of her neck. Maggots lived in the open sores on her sides, her eyes were diseased and opaque, and her head and ears were bloody from her miserable digging at the fleas and the flies.
  We did the kindest thing for that dog. We took her to the vet and had her put to sleep, but the horror of her existence and how long it must have been since her people abandoned her ate me up. On the way home from putting her down, I wrote her owners an angry letter describing her end. Of course, I had no one to send it to, so it stayed folded in a pocket in my purse for over a year. 
  Let me say, being a writer was not a dream of mine; in fact it had never so much as crossed my mind. English was my worst subject in high school.
  In early August 1982, the Miami News, a now-defunct newspaper, was looking for pictures of the Everglade kite, an endangered South Florida hawk. I had some and took them to their offices. While waiting for the editor, I began cleaning out my purse and found the letter I’d written about the dog. I scrawled, We Found Your Dog, at the top of the page and gave it to the woman who came to review my pictures.   
  The next day, John Hopkins, an editor with the News, called me at home and left a message—a single sentence that would eventually change my life: “Tell her,” he said, “if she can write like that, we’ll publish anything she writes.”
  Because of that phone call, I signed up for creative writing class and eventually, with the encouragement of Evelyn Wilde Mayerson and Lester Goran, and a pat or two on the head by Isaac Bashevis Singer and James Michener, was soon working on a novel that eventually became DOLPHIN SKY. (Putnam, 1996.)

What are the topics are some of your books?

I believe animal abuse and child abuse are linked. If you can mistreat one you can potentially harm the other. My books draw a parallel between these issues.

What gave you the idea for THE OUTSIDE OF A HORSE?

In 2007, I’d known for nearly 30 years that people in other countries ate horses. I even knew that during World War II, we ate them in this country, but it wasn’t until I saw a Katie Couric segment on the CBS News on June 8th about the slaughter of racehorses, that it occurred to me to write about horses. The statistics were appalling. In 2006, 100,800 horses were slaughtered to satisfy the appetite for horsemeat, primarily in the countries of France, Japan and Belgium. At the time this program aired, the last U.S. slaughterhouse had just been ordered closed in DeKalb, Illinois, by the now famous Governor Rod Blagojevich.

I remember writing the statistics down, but I still didn’t have an idea of where to go with the information. I’d written two books since the publication of HURT GO HAPPY, but no one seemed interested in either of them, and I had two other false starts on a shelf in my closet. So on July 4th, I was idealess when Katie Couric did a story about the horses that pull the caissons at Arlington National Cemetery. When they are not transporting the caskets of our Iraq and Afghanistan war dead, they are used for physical therapy for soldiers who have lost limbs in the wars. After that program, I had all I needed for the plot of THE OUTSIDE OF A HORSE, which is about an Iraq war vet who comes home missing a leg, and his daughter’s fight to bring him back from the abyss through their shared love of horses.

Have any of your books won any awards?

HURT GO HAPPY has won many, including the ALA Schneider Family Book Award. Here’s the list:
AWARDS / HONORS

• Finalist for the Land of Enchantment Reading Award 2010 / 2011
• Finalist for the Young Hoosier Award 2009 / 2010
• Finalist for the Sunshine State Young Readers Award 2009'
• WINNER of the ALA Schneider Family Book Award Teen Division2008
• Finalist for the Missouri Association of School Libraries Truman Reading Award 2007 - 2008
• A Scholastic Book Fair selection 2006-2007
• William Allen White Children's Book Award nominee
• KLIATT Editor’s Choice: Best of the Year’s Hardcover YA Fiction titles for 2006
• An International Reading Association’s 2007 Teacher’s Choice selection
• 2006 Winner of the International Reading Association Teacher's Choice Winners
• 2007 Winner of the NY Public Library System’s 78th Annual Books for the Teen Age
• Junior Library Guild selection 2006
• A PETA book list selection 2006

 Have any of your fiction stories been about real people or events?

YES. The animals are based on real stories, the human characters are usually now. I lift most of the events in my books from my own experiences while researching, and from true life events related to the subjects of my books

What are you working on now?  When do you expect to start submitting it to publishers?

I have a second book coming out in January about two kids lost in the Everglades, which is based on the true story of my husband getting lost in Everglades, and I just submitted another to my agent, which is an experiment time travel—experiment for me in that I’m a very linear, literal writer.

When is your next book going to be in book stores?

May 13th, 2010. Thanks for asking.

What do you most want the students to get out of your school visits?

That they can be anything they want to be, even something they never thought of being.

Has anyone ever written you a fan letter that you’d like to share?

YES.