EARLY LIFE AND WRITING
I was born in Peoria, the third of seven children. My dad was a newspaper writer, my mom a former research biologist. I grew up out in the boondocks and spent all my spare time reading. When I was eight years old, I wrote my first essay, entitled "My Bad Day." It only made my parents laugh. I read "Heidi," by Johanna Spyri, and bawled at the ending, then tried to write an adaptation for my friends to act out at recess, but they weren't interested. In high school I wrote a sad story about a dog that got its head stuck in a mayonnaise jar, and in college I wrote a bad story about a Greyhound bus trip. That was it for my creative writing until I was in my forties.

EDUCATION AND TEACHING CAREER
I was an English and Theology major in college (Marquette University) and since I couldn't become a priest, I went to graduate school and got a Ph.D. in literature (Indiana University.) My dissertation on English Renaissance poetry was published as a book that now gathers dust in university libraries. Then for eight years I was an assistant professor of English at The Ohio State University, where I taught a lot of Shakespeare and did research on the writings and domestic culture of Renaissance women. I published articles on poetry, Queen Elizabeth, and women's needleworks, and received an NEH grant for this research. Oh, and I gave birth to two sons. Then I broke my leg and was denied tenure in the same year. The broken leg was a bummer, but the job loss was a blessing in disguise.

MY RETURN TO WRITING
Just after that I was asked to write a history of my church (Trinity Episcopal Church on Capitol Square in Columbus). I welcomed the opportunity to research and write about a subject that had never been done before and ended up producing a full-length, fully illustrated book. While writing it, I discovered a passion for history and storytelling. At the same time, because I was reading lots of children's books with my sons, I offered to help organize a local conference, "Writing for Children" and ended up directing it for three years. This gave me the confidence to try my own hand at writing, and "Ophelia" was a story then taking shape in me, so it became my first novel. It was so much fun to write I kept going with "Two Girls of Gettysburg." I have several more ideas percolating. Now I sometimes kick myself for taking so long to do what I've always wanted to do--write books.

I live in Columbus, Ohio, with my husband, who is a financial planner, and our two teenage sons.

CONTACT ME
Go to the page For Readers and click on the Feedback Form. Or just e-mail me at lisamklein@columbus.rr.com

MORE ABOUT ME FROM THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The Columbus Dispatch ( Ohio )

October 12, 2008 Sunday
Home Final Edition

BOOKS;
"Author retells familiar stories from female viewpoint"

When Clintonville resident Lisa Klein published her first young-adult novel, Ophelia, her teenage and preteen sons weren't ready for the reaction.

"I was getting e-mails from 11-year-old girls who just loved the book," Klein recalled, "and David and Adam just couldn't believe that their mother, who was so uncool, actually had fans. Now, they just roll their eyes."

Klein might not be the second coming of the Jonas Brothers, but she has forged a career for herself by taking well-known stories -- Shakespeare's Hamlet and, more recently, the battle of Gettysburg -- and recasting them from a female point of view: Ophelia was published in 2006 and Two Girls of Gettysburg will be released Tuesday.

She describes Two Girls as "Gone With the Wind meets The Killer Angels," while admitting to having read the Margaret Mitchell saga "several times when I was in high school."

Two Girls tells the story of cousins and best friends Lizzie, from Pennsylvania , and Rosanna, from Virginia , whose allegiance to each other is tested when they are swept up by the war.

As the librarian at Bishop Watterson High School , Penny Forker oversees four book clubs consisting of more than 80 students, all of whom read Ophelia last year. At the top of this year's lists is Two Girls, Forker said.

"Hamlet is a guy-centered story and the Civil War is a guy-centered subject," Forker said, "and Lisa has taken both of them and turned them into 21st-century stories that both boys and girls can relate to."

Klein embarked on her writing career after being denied tenure as an assistant professor in English literature at Ohio State University .

"I'd describe how I feel now as more liberated than vindicated," she said of the turmoil at the end of her time at OSU. But her background in Elizabethan literature did provide her with the impetus for Ophelia.

"I taught Shakespeare a lot, and my students generally were dissatisfied by the characterizations of Ophelia and Gertrude," she recalled.

Sarah Ressler-Wright teaches English at Rutherford B. Hayes High School in Delaware . Her students, she said, "hands down, called Ophelia the best book we had read the year it came out."

For her part, Ressler-Wright enjoyed the meticulousness with which Klein approached her subject.

"I had read criticism of Hamlet concerning the double meanings in the flowers Ophelia gives out right before her death and always felt that there was more going on in her head," she said.

"Not only did Lisa Klein present the flower scene with all of the ideas I had hoped, but all the speculation was explained: Was Ophelia pregnant when she died? Did she know what was going on \ with Hamlet?

"Plus, she used so many of the lines directly from Hamlet while sticking exactly to Shakespeare's story line. She basically wrote the story I had always longed to hear."

That sort of compliment is just what Klein likes to hear.

"I wrote Ophelia with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary at my side because I didn't want to use words that weren't contemporary to Shakespeare."

Similarly, Klein walked the battlefield site several times before writing Two Girls of Gettysburg and read detailed accounts of the battle to make sure everything in her book "at least could have happened the way I describe it.

"At one point, I wrote about Lizzie watching the battle from a farmhouse, but when I was standing on the battlefield I realized there was a hill in the way and she couldn't have. So I had her walk to the top of the hill."

Surely her readers wouldn't have noticed the anomaly?

"But I would have known. I suppose getting it right, to the best of my ability, matters to me because of the reverence I have for history," she said.

Klein is already deep into her next book, which begins with another literary conceit: That Lady Macbeth had a daughter, slightly deformed, who was disowned by her parents.

"I love writing teen fiction," Klein said. "As for writing something more lighthearted . . . I wouldn't mind, but I don't know if I have it in me."

beichenberger@dispatch.com