Jennifer Thermes- About me

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Jennifer Thermes	My parents claim that I was inseparable from a small jar of red paint at three years of age. I grew up in Port Washington, New York, (maiden name: Jennifer Burrows), where I spent hours galloping around the backyard pretending to be a horse. In school I drew nothing but horses. I was fortunate to have a very patient art teacher. During high school my head was in the clouds, or my nose was in a book, or I was in the art room– experimenting with everything from pencils to printmaking to the latest weird hairstyles (after all, it was the early ‘80’s). Soon I was off to the big city and Parsons School of Design. I graduated in 1988 with a BFA in Communication Design, and began my career in magazine publishing. I hired lots of nice illustrators and secretly wanted to be one, but I was terrified of quitting my full time job. In time I decided to follow my dream. I jumped into the world of illustration. The sense of possibility was addicting: the next big assignment, a new idea– I was hooked. I learned that life (as with hair) could always change. Eventually I started writing and illustrating my own stories. I love the colonial time period. Since my family’s house was built around the year 1720, my husband and I spent a lot of time talking with our children about how different life must have been for the people who first lived in our home. How did they survive without electricity? How did they take a bath? This led to the idea for my first book, When I Was Built (Henry Holt, 2001). It is the story of an old house remembering how people lived when it was first built, compared to life for the people who live there today. One day while my husband was installing a chandelier in the dining room, he reached into a hole in the ceiling and pulled out a boot. Why was it there? Some time later we found a shoe under the floorboards. It was so old we could still see the wooden pegs that held it together. We were fascinated! With research, we learned about a little known custom of hiding worn out shoes in a home for luck and protection, called “concealments.” I started writing about a boy growing up on a farm in colonial times who learns about the tradition of hiding old shoes from his father, and who eventually passes it on to his own child. This story became my second book, Sam Bennett’s New Shoes (Carolrhoda Books, 2006). I live in our old house with my husband and children, three cats, one Dalmatian dog and countless mice. We will be fixing up our home for at least the next 20 years, but still find time to run around the backyard, catch frogs in the pond, and putter in the garden. The poet and editor Louis Untermeyer owned our house for over 40 years, and we are convinced his spirit still infuses the place with a love of stories and ideas.	Life in the big city.
The early years.		Art school hair.
		What was I thinking?