At age 11, Audrey Niffenegger drew, wrote and created handmade books, including a 70-page account of her illustrated fantasy tour with the Beatles.

Now an accomplished artist and author of "The Time Traveler's Wife" and "Her Fearful Symmetry," the Chicago writer is still creatively inclined and apt to urge audience members to do something.

Some writers, "tend to assume that the audience is kind of passive. I've spent so much time teaching, I tend to assume that the audience wants to be creative, not just sitting there like lumps," Ms. Niffenegger said in a telephone interview.

At one appearance, "I exhorted everyone to go home and make chocolate chip cookies," the author recalled. Each spring, she teaches a writing course to graduate students at Columbia College in Chicago.

Ms. Niffenegger speaks tonight at 7:30 in Oakland's Carnegie Music Hall as part of the Drue Heinz Lecture Series.

This fall, Harry N. Abrams will publish her graphic novel, "The Night Bookmobile," the story of Alex, a young woman who wanders into an industrial Chicago neighborhood, where she spies a camper that's really a bookmobile. Serialized in 2008 in The Guardian, a British newspaper, it's still available at that publication's website.

"What's nice about having it published as a book is that it will be the correct size. The Guardian gave it a half page. On the Web, it's a bit tiny," Ms. Niffenegger said.

"This gentleman beckons to her, and she is shown by him that this camper is really a bookmobile. She decides to go in and discovers that what's in there is every book she has ever read, including cereal boxes, Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlets, every bit of text she has ever looked at. It's kind of her life. She promises the librarian she will be back and belatedly discovers the bookmobile isn't available whenever you want it."

"The Night Bookmobile" was inspired by the H.G. Wells short story called "The Door in the Wall," which is about the elusiveness of happiness.

"Both of the stories end rather grimly," Ms. Niffenegger said.

That's not surprising as she retains an enduring fascination with death and the supernatural. "Her Fearful Symmetry," a novel set in London, includes scenes in that city's historic Highgate Cemetery.

An atheist, the author stopped attending Mass at age 15.

"The Catholic aesthetic is certainly a fairly morbid one. I'm glad to have had a religious upbringing of some sort. It's a good basis for participating in Western culture. Fortunately, the cats are also atheists."

While growing up in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, she read her uncle's old MAD magazines and comic books, including "The Hulk."

The work that captivated and inspired Ms. Niffenegger was "Maus: A Survivor's Tale," by Art Spiegelman, which won a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1992. Portions of the story, an account of how Mr. Spiegelman's father survived the Holocaust, appeared in RAW, a graphic arts journal the artist founded in 1980 with his wife, Francoise Mouly.

"They were producing the most astonishing stuff. They sparked a lot of excitement and made a lot of artists suddenly jump into the comics field," Ms. Niffenegger said.

Ms. Niffenegger does not own a television and stopped watching it when she moved out of her parents' home after finishing college at age 21.

"I was irritated with all the noise and bother and laugh tracks and silliness of it," she said, allowing that recently, "There's been some relatively decent stuff on TV," such as the British sci-fi series "Doctor Who," which she watches on her computer.

While success has required her to master what she calls "an extreme travel schedule," it also allowed her to buy a home on Chicago's northwest side.

"It has certainly given me control over my time, which I think is the thing all artists desire," said Ms. Niffenegger, who has often been an artist in residence at Illinois' Ragdale Foundation and at Yaddo, the colony in upstate New York.

"The delight of being at these residencies was that you would get up in the morning and you owned your day. You could do whatever you wanted with your day," Ms. Niffenegger said.

This summer, instead of staying at an artists colony, "I have to get busy and make a lot of drawings," the author said, in preparation for a September show at Printworks, a Chicago gallery where she has long been affiliated.

"I've been on the road consistently since September. The travel itself is entertaining, but getting on a plane just fills me with dread. It's become so cumbersome to travel by air. I've been on the road so much that it seems revolutionary to stay home."

But instead of time traveling, the author would prefer to teleport, rather like Elizabeth Montgomery in the television show "Bewitched."

"I haven't mastered the nose twitching," she said.

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