From Takoma to Terabithia

In order to write and produce the new film adaptation “Bridge to Terabithia,” hometown boy David Paterson only had to cross back over into his own Takoma Park childhood. His mother, the famous source novel’s author Katherine Paterson, had already memorialized his early years in her Newbury Award-winning children’s classic. Now he would put his stamp on a story based on the effect a special friend, youthful pluck and a random tragedy had on his life as a Takoma Park Elementary School third-grader in 1975.

“What happened to the character Josh in the book is what happened to me, but all of my mom’s characters come out of her own emotions,” Paterson explains. “Writing the book was self-therapy for her to make sense of a senseless act.”