Her highly touted Western for girls, The Misadventures of Maude March, coming from Random House this September, lets fly with a life-changing volley of bullets in paragraph four. A lit match, an unheralded shootout: this is a writer who knows how to grab your attention.

Audrey Couloumbis outside her California-style bungalow in South Fallsburg.

And keep it. Couloumbis's other books for young readers include the acclaimed Say Yes (2002) and 2000 Newbery Honor medalist Getting Near to Baby, which details the day the book's unflappable narrator, Willa Jo, climbs onto her Aunt Patty's roof with her mute little sister and stays there from sunrise to dusk. All four novels are narrated in first person by preteen girls. Their voices are as distinctive as their different eras and settings, but they share a remarkable matter-of-factness and a talent for fielding life's curveballs.

Couloumbis says her narrative voice comes with the character, almost intact. Casey, in Say Yes, has an abrupt, staccato rhythm, "as though she's unwilling to talk to you, but since she's here and that's the job, she'll talk." Willa Jo is dreamier, with quirky turns of phrase that banish sentimentality. Grace, the draftdodger's sister in Summer's End, bristles with tough questions and undisguised irritation at her brother for hijacking her birthday plans. And Sallie, kid sister of outlaw-by-accident Maude March, is dry as sagebrush: a feisty, do-anything tomboy addicted to Western dime novels.

Couloumbis's own voice is high and flutey, with a scratchy hint of Midwestern grit. Small, lithe, and strawberry blonde, she has an ageless, Peter Pan quality, as if she's never lost the intensity of youth. She gives the impression of holding nothing back, and indeed, much of her character was forged by encounters with strangers.

Couloumbis's parents divorced when she was two. Although she lived most of the time with her mother in Illinois, Audrey started to travel between parents (accompanied only by airline personnel) at age three. Since her father was an electrician for shows such as Holiday on Ice and the Kalanag Magicians, she spent much of her childhood shuttling to see him in such exotic locations as Paris, Brazil, Switzerland, and Hawaii.

Young Audrey was left by her stewardess escorts in executive lounges, which she called "the pillow rooms" because the walls always seemed to be padded. When she learned to tell time, and realized no one would retrieve her until about ten minutes before the next plane took off, she went out to explore. "Magazine stands were a big draw, and riding on baggage carousels. I always had money, I could buy myself things and just hang out with people." Ever testing boundaries, at 10 she went up to a bar and ordered a beer "for my uncle," just to see if she could get away with it. She did.

These largely unsupervised journeys gave Audrey "a certain kind of confidence. I was a very Sallie kind of kid," she says. Though she acknowledges that the '50s and '60s were different times, Couloumbis never felt she was in danger. In an interview for Preview online, she says, "I was lucky enough to have the kind of family whose benign neglect fostered independence and left me plenty of free time to find my own way in the world." But there was a darker reason for her self-reliance: "I'd seen enough adults getting into trouble to recognize the indicators and signs: Past this point is swampland."

Much of the swamp was a result of her stepfather's mental illness. Couloumbis describes him with wary compassion, as a "strange but very good father" who rode his bike through the snow to take her to Brownies, and spent hours patiently explaining how things worked. "He was either very good, or very horrible and really scary. A lesson in extremes."

She vividly recalls visiting her stepfather at a mental health facility in central Illinois. Children weren't allowed to see patients who'd recently undergone shock treatments, so while her mother went in, Audrey stayed in the yard, conversing with residents. ("Women with makeup were healthy.") The third time she was banned from visiting, she decided to hitchhike to the hospital on her own, a distance of some 30 miles. She was 11 years old.

Audrey arrived at night to find that the hospital's iron gates were locked. She spent "one of the worst nights of my life" shivering outside the gates, faced with the knowledge that she had nobody to help her ("It gave me tons of information for Maude and Sallie's night spent alone in the snow," she says.) Dawn finally came, and Audrey discovered that there were no visiting hours that day. She got back on the road and stuck out her thumb, only to be picked up by cops and thrown into jail. "At least they gave me a ride home," she says dryly.

A note-covered bookcase in Couloumbis's writing room.

Two years later, Couloumbis staged a bold runaway scheme and was caught and returned again. "I was very determined," she says. "That kind of backbone is there in my characters." So are fragments of her family life. Her stepfather's violent temper allowed her to limn a psychotic outlaw in just a few strokes in Maude March. Summer's End's giant farm family, with its no-kids-allowed indoor bathroom and "little'ns" too numerous to name, is based on her cousins. A coal miner neighbor who dug his home into the side of a hill, because all he could afford to build was the front of the house, shows up in Getting Near to Baby; Willa Jo's day on the roof echoes a grief-stricken aunt who climbed up onto a covered bridge and refused to come down.

Along with such quasi-autobiographical details, Couloumbis has an acute sense of the ways in which families can fray. People disappear. Parents leave children behind and others step forward to take up the slack, sometimes unexpectedly well and sometimes disastrously. Her strong-minded characters learn that their inner resources are what they can count on.

Couloumbis's turf is what's known in the trade as "Y.A." or Young Adult, books geared for the finicky group of tweener and teen readers. "I guess every writer would say you revisit the time of your life that was most interesting to you. That time of your life is a stone you keep turning over and over, and it does in a lovely way become a diamond." Couloumbis pauses. "Writers are very fortunate, because we get to go back and turn it over. Most people who have difficult experiences in life don't have a chance to hang them out on the line and air them out this way, make some repairs."

Couloumbis and her husband, actor-director Akila Couloumbis, have lived part-time in Sullivan County for three decades, first in Woodbourne and now in South Fallsburg. She calls the multiethnic town "a very unique community, just a lovely place to be," enthusiastically describing the June influx of black-dressed Hasidim checking out at Wal-Mart with a summer's worth of goods.

Couloumbis likes to write in flannel pajama pants and a sweatshirt. Her work routine involves gardening, furniture rearranging, and long walks with her dog, Phoebe ("sort of a freaky, unsociable dog in most people's presence, but sweet once she trusts you"), all of which stimulate the storytelling brain.

The Misadventures of Maude March had its genesis in Florida, where the Couloumbises winter. Audrey took Phoebe for walks in a nearby cemetery, often stopping to admire a headstone with the name Maude March. "It had lovely plantings—a dogwood, a rich, really velvety red rose. Finally I asked myself, If I was going to use the name Maude March for a character, what story would come? And I heard Sallie's voice really clearly." She grabbed the notebook she always carries in her pocket and wrote down the lines, then hurried home to turn on the computer and see what would follow.

Couloumbis thinks of such moments as "mini-epiphanies, when you hear or see something clearly and know exactly what it is. I have a feeling that happens to everyone, but if you're a writer, you know what to do with it." If you're Audrey Couloumbis, you take the bit between your teeth and go, barely pausing for breath. She typically writes a first draft in two to three months.

Maude March fairly gallops. The action is nonstop, with a delightful cast of characters, including a prematurely balding outlaw named Marion. Random House is positioning it as one of its big books for fall, along with Eldest, Christopher Paolini's sequel to the best-seller Eragon. Couloumbis has already drafted her own sequel, titled Maude March Rides Again.

It's no surprise that Couloumbis's favorite books as a child included the girl-power classics Eloise and Harriet the Spy. She speaks of their heroines with unfettered admiration, cataloguing their attributes: independent, unsentimental, spirited, sure of themselves. "That's the kind of character we want for girls, isn't it?"