About Author
Biography of Robyn Oakes
My third grade teacher was wonderful. Mrs. Schaefer let me share news articles about the Clobbermutts (my imaginary aliens who lived on the sunken continent of Atlantis). Everyone else’s news articles had been cut out of newspapers. Mine were on printer paper, handwritten in newspaper format, and carefully illustrated. By the end of the school year, most of my class thought the Clobbermutts were real.
Writing my master’s thesis twenty-five years later (comparing the world creations of Narnia, Middle-earth, and Genesis), I dreamed up the Shimmertree.
What if the creator in Genesis created other worlds besides ours?
Every planet would probably follow the same pattern:
▪ A garden with a man and a woman deciding whether or not to eat the fruit
▪ If they ate the fruit, they’d be evicted from the garden
▪ An angel would be instructed to guard the Tree of Life
Many planets, all with angels holding swords, guarding trees…Guardians.
The Guardians would shimmer with power, so the trees they guarded would too…Shimmertrees.
What if these Shimmertrees connected the planets?
People could travel between worlds, and Guardians could gather things from other worlds.
If the creator were omnipresent, the corridors of time would open.
Guardians could use Shimmertrees to travel in time as well as space.
The idea bubbled and ripened for a decade, until my children left home and I couldn’t call myself a stay-at-home mom any longer.
And so, I became a writer.
Robyn was born in the Rocky Mountains, but grew up in southern California. She received the top academic scholarship from Brigham Young University and attended BYU before serving an 18-month mission in Sweden for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
After her mission, Robyn graduated magna cum laude from San Diego State University with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Business. She married shortly thereafter and gave birth to two sons and a daughter before returning to SDSU and earning a master’s degree in English in 1996. She currently lives with her husband in Riverton, Utah.