Girl on a Wire (27 page)

acknowledgments

My eternal gratitude is due to everyone at the inaugural Bat Cave Retreat in 2012 for reading parts of this book in first draft—shout-outs to Alan Gratz (organizer extraordinaire), Megan Miranda, Carrie Ryan, Megan Shepherd, Tiffany Trent, Kristin Tubb; to Wendi Gratz for providing sustenance and cheesecake; and most especially to the divine Beth Revis and Laurel Snyder for reading the whole messy thing and helping me figure out how to make it better. A tip of the top hat to writer friends who let me bend their ears along the way: Kelly, Karen, Gavin, Holly, Cassie, Josh, Delia, Sarah, Kim, and Chuck. And to Clint Hadden for serving as my man on the ground in Chicago, and finding me the perfect location for a special walk there. I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but I’ll make it up to you: promise. I also owe many thanks to Tim Ditlow for his excitement about the manuscript, and to the magnificent team at Skyscape for their support in making this book a reality, particularly Amy Hosford and my genius editors Courtney Miller and Kate Chynoweth. Many thanks to fabulous copyeditor Kyra Freestar too. Thanks are due, as always, to Jenn Laughran, my fabulous agent, whose enthusiasm when I showed her the first chunk of this kept me moving (and who
is
circus folk), and to my wonderful husband, Christopher Rowe, who is always there to hold a net for me.

As you might guess, I have long been obsessed with circuses and wire walkers. Some resources that turned out to be helpful when I discovered I was going to write a circus of my own were Bruce Feiler’s
Under the Big Top
; Taschen’s gorgeous, glorious
The Circus: 1870s–1950s
; the great Philippe Petit’s
On the High Wire
; and the PBS documentary series
Circus
. Like Thurston, I was not born circus, and so any errors or flights of fancy here are entirely my own.

And, last but never least, my biggest thanks go to you for reading.

about the author

PHOTO © BY SARAH JANE SANDERS

Gwenda Bond is the author of the young adult novels
The Woken Gods
and
Blackwood
,
and
she just might have escaped from a classic screwball movie. She has also written for
Publishers Weekly
, the
Los Angeles Times
,
Locus Magazine
, and the
Washington Post
, among others. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie. Visit her online at
www.gwendabond.com
or
@gwenda
on Twitter.