Reading the Greek myths as a child, Clemence McLaren always wondered how the characters felt about what was happening. Did Helen really enjoy having the world’s most beautiful face? Wasn’t the mighty Achilles embarrassed when his mother dressed him as a girl and hid him in the women’s quarters to escape the Trojan War? And why did Circe keep changing men into pigs? She began retelling these stories to answer her own questions and later shared them with her students. She wanted them to hear the voices of women and slaves, voices so often absent in these ancient stories. Her students encouraged her to write them down.

Her first YA novel, Inside the Walls of Troy (ALA, Bank Street College, New York Public Library Best Books) was followed by Waiting for Odysseus (ABA Kids’ Pick of the Lists) and Aphrodite’s Blessings (New York Public Library Best Books and IRA Young People’s Choices ‘04). Another novel, Dance for the ‘Aina (IRA Best Books for a Multicultural Century) is set in Hawaii where the author lives now.

McLaren remembers what Greece smells like and knows the colors of the incredible light. For years, she and her husband worked as teachers abroad. In the course of their travels, they were adopted by a tiny Greek village named Mylos, where she studied the language, hiked the ancient goat trails, rode ferries across the same wine-dark seas that carried the Greeks to Troy. Their neighbors were named Nestor and Achilles.

She’s now happily settled on O’ahu, another mythical island, where she and her husband live in an old two-family house with their daughter’s family upstairs-- what Zorba called “the full catastrophe.” She works in a school for native Hawaiian children. She’s still studying the indigenous language and telling stories to her students, helping them to listen more deeply for the silenced voices.