AuthorFest hosts Mark Peter Hughes’s visit with Greenwood’s third and fourth graders on Friday, March 22
Mark was born in Liverpool, England in the Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, the same hospital as John Lennon. His family moved to the US when he was a year old and most of his childhood was spent in Barrington, Rhode Island.
Growing up, Mark worked in many different jobs including gas station attendant, fast food zombie, beach sticker enforcer, dishwasher (he was fired after only two days), clam factory worker (this was the smelliest of jobs–his sisters avoided him all summer), and movie theater usher, among others. After college, he played guitar and sang for an off-kilter rock band called Exhibit A in the Boston area. About becoming a writer, he says, “I’ve been making up stories for about as long as I could hold a pencil. Even before then I loved to tell them. Today, I spend hours every day sipping coffee and typing into a keyboard. “
Mark Peter Hughes’s first novel, I Am the Wallpaper, is a story about a girl who feels unnoticed and ends up being an unwitting online sensation. Soon after its publication he began work on Lemonade Mouth, a story that taps into his experiences playing in oddball rock bands and trying to change the world. In a style loosely based on the interviews of the fab four in The Beatles Anthology, the five oddball members of the band called “Lemonade Mouth” tell the band’s chaotic story and their own individual stories in their own voices. The Disney Channel adapted Lemonade Mouth into the number one cable movie of 2011.
Mark’s third novel, A Crack in The Sky, is a futuristic adventure of a boy and a mongoose on an overheated Earth at the end of the world. In addition to his presentation, Mark will lead in-classroom workshops on fiction writing – first scenes, first pages, first sentences. Referencing his book, A Crack in The Sky, Mark will demonstrate how great story beginnings demand a reader’s attention. He will discuss how a story weaves a spell, and will ‘give away’ the secret tools that good storytellers use in making up great beginnings—tools such descriptive words, details and “show don’t tell.” Then, using a number of easy exercises that spark the imagination, help students strengthen their own stories with gripping beginnings that will keep those pages turning.
Mark is working on the follow-up to A Crack in The Sky, which will be called The Keepers of Tomorrow. For more information about Mark Peter Hughes and his books, visit markpeterhughes.com
