Life & Faith

YA novelist Claire Zorn on surviving high school, why she didn’t expect to be a writer, and mental illness. --- “I suppose I always had these preconceived ideas of the sort of person a writer was, and I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in my ability to write … I think I thought that a writer was a very serious, intellectual, well-read sort of person. I do read a lot, but I thought it was someone who read the classics and loved James Joyce … I just thought it was someone very different from the sort of person I was.” Claire Zorn is the multi-award-winning writer of YA novels The Sky So Heavy, The Protected, and One Would Think the Deep. She’s as surprised as anyone, though, to find herself in this position – she never really thought of herself as a writer, despite growing up with a mental world teeming with characters and stories. Having what she describes as a “busy brain” has been a two-edged thing for her. “I have a pretty high dose of anxiety, and my specialty is catastrophising. My mind will generall