Home | Anika Weiss

anika weiss

writer. translator. tree hugger.

what I write

You have one year to go into Lookbryn. The year that
you’re eleven.

The Pinholes

(middle grade)

THE PINHOLES is a quartet of middle grade

novels about how the Tibbit kids from Brooklyn slip into a small parallel world whose boundaries are fraying.

Can Otto, Nate and Zizzy keep Lookbryn

from dissolving into here and now where its dwellers
are not safe?

why I write

Kids knew my first name from Pippi Longstocking. That was fine by me since I did consider Pippi a fictional friend. I had a nonfictional horseback-riding friend, too, on the farm down the road. She’s still my friend. So is Pippi. So is Charlotte the spider. So is Anne Frank. So is Karana from the Island of the Blue Dolphins. So is Pecola Breedlove.

Friends go through the hard stuff with you. And friends can be trees or animals, people or characters in a book. I like to make more friends—with readers and for readers—by writing stories.

I make pottery

I miss mama

I bike

I translate

I research

I compost

I read

when I don’t write

contact

anikaweiss@hotmail.com

I was born in Germany and grew up in a house covered with ivy and surrounded by trees. So besides books I poked through leaves a lot.

Since coming to New York, I’ve also kept close to the city’s green parts. Initially it was Central Park I crisscrossed while writing my first novel at Columbia’s MFA program. Then we settled down near Prospect Park, so our city kids could be around birds and trees, too.

One misty night I was riding my bike through the park when its inscrutable air put this idea in my head: It was a story about another world—but for skeptics.