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PrintSnapshot: Margi Preus
Margi Preus is a children’s book author and playwright. Her first novel for young people, Heart of a Samurai, is a 2011 Newbery Honor Book and a recipient of the 2011 Asian Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature, among other honors. Her picture books include the recently released Celebritrees; Historic and Famous Trees of the World. Margi served as the artistic director of Colder by the Lake Comedy Theatre for 25 years and with current Colder director and playwriting collaborator, Jean Sramek, has written hundreds of comedy sketches, a couple of comic operas, and dozens of plays, including the most recent UMD Voyageurs Music and Theatre in the Schools productions, Pirates of the Carrot Bean and Little BIGfoot and the BULLies. When she isn’t writing, she teaches an occasional course at CSS or UMD. She likes to ski, hike, paddle or sit quietly with a book in her lap.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Other than being able to touch my elbows behind my back, do you mean?
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I would like to claim responsibility for my two exceptional children.
When and where were you happiest?
I’m pretty happy right now: on the screen porch of our cabin, sun setting, the lake still, loons yodeling and a phenomenal mayfly hatch happening before my very eyes.
What is your greatest regret?
If “regret is illumination come too late,” as Joseph Campbell suggested, it’s painful to think how much illumination I’ve missed out on.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Although I generally prefer being out of doors, right now I am happy that I am separated from these mayflies by screens.
What is your most treasured possession?
Solitude.
Where would you most like to live?
I’m living there.
What is your greatest fear?
Helicopters and rattle snakes. Fortunately, I am rarely near either one.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
This is a painful questionnaire.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Un-thinkingness. Which is not the same thing as unthoughtfulness. There’s probably a real word for it that I’m not thinking of.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Patience. But that’s the only virtue I can think of at the moment.
What is your greatest extravagance?
Travel, probably.
What’s on your iPod?
Audio books. I don’t remember which ones because I forgot where my iPod is.
What is your favorite journey?
The one I take every day out to my little writing house.
What is it that you most dislike?
Unnecessary noise. I mean that in the broadest possible terms.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
I like something whirring around in the cranial cavity.
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
I like a woman to have the same size feet as me so I can borrow her shoes.
What do you most value in your friends?
That they are willing to be my friends.
If you were to come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
After experiencing this hatch of mayflies, I think the odds for all of us are pretty heavily weighted toward some kind of insect.
How would you like to die?
I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to be there when it happens. (sentiment courtesy Woody Allen)
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